“You’re here!” Bree said from where she was seated against my door, as if me showing up at my own apartment was a pleasant and unexpected surprise. “Hi!”

My heart was still going. “What the hell are you doing at my home?” I paused, remembering the coffee. “Again!”

She stood up a little awkwardly from the floor. “My legs went to sleep,” she told me, because obviously that was the most appropriate answer. “You took ages. It’s nearly seven-thirty.”

I didn’t even know where to start. Where did you, with this girl? I tried to think of what Henry would do. “Bree. You promised you wouldn’t do this again if I went to dinner with you. I had dinner with you. What are you doing here?”

“Technically, I promised I wouldn’t wait for you outside work,” she casually pointed out. “And I didn’t want to break my promise, especially after I kind of put my foot in it with the whole…” she gestured at my work clothes with her free hand. She still didn’t look very impressed by them.

I just stared at her. Before I could even figure out what I should do or say, I lost my train of thought because she held up the bouquet. It dwarfed her. “Anyway, I had some money left from the taxi and since it’s your money I figured I should spend it on you, you know? So I bought you some flowers to thank you for forgiving me for being completely hopeless and to apologise to you for–”

 “Bree, wait just one–” I said, but it wasn’t any use, because she had already taken a step towards me and dumped the whole thing in my arms, “—second.”

I had been about to tell her that it was absolutely unacceptable for her to show up at my house like this, but then I saw the flowers and double-took. I had been expecting lilies, or roses, or some other generic pretty flowers, but that wasn’t what was wrapped up in the colourful tissue paper at all. Instead of a nice delicate arrangement, it was a native Australian bouquet and all the flowers were huge, twisted and really, really ugly. So ugly they were actually monstrous. I couldn’t look away. Who in their right fucking mind buys flowers that look like they want to eat you in order to apologise to someone? Stupid question, I supposed: this girl.

While I was staring in horror at them, she kept talking. “They reminded me of you.”

“These reminded you of me?” I said looking down at their furry leaves. They were fucking hideous. These were the sort of flowers you buy your much-hatred mother-in-law to deliver a very clear message.

“Not because they’re really hairy,” she said. “I mean, you’re Asian, so obviously not. But, you know, they were really different from all of the other flowers.”

Wow, and there it was. My stomach knotted at that. Now I had a bunch of ugly flowers to remind me that I didn’t fit in. And after my fantastic day at work, as well.

God, it was so awful, they were so awful, and yet the absurdity of the whole situation almost made me want to laugh. I was torn between feeling hurt by what she’d said, uncomfortable about her being here, angry that she’d shown up again and just, well, entertained by how spectacularly she was able to fuck up something as simple as giving someone flowers. I didn’t even know what to think.

Bree looked alarmed at my reaction, and put her hands on my arms. “Oh, no!” she said. “No! I didn’t mean it like that, obviously you are, like, surprisingly tall and then you wear heels for some reason on top of that, but I meant it more—”

God, she was still going? “Bree, really, I think you’ve said enough!”

“—special-different! I meant special-different, not anything else, no matter what it sounds like!” she finished. She looked actually upset, like she was about to launch into a really tragic story. “I just walked into the shop because I wanted to do something nice for you, and there were all these flowers and then these strange native ones here, and like, I thought to myself, ‘I could buy her all of those ones that look the same or I could buy these’ and then I picked them up and like, see?” She reached up and stroked the top of one of them gently with her fingertips. “It’s really soft but I bet everyone just ignores them because they’re not traditional. I bet they just sit there for days and days watching all the other pretty flowers get bought as they slowly wilt and die. Can you imagine what that would be like? It’s so sad. I had to buy them for you, I couldn’t just leave them there to rot.”

I… did not have the slightest idea how to respond to that. At all. Had this girl formed an emotional attachment to a bunch of flowers? I wasn’t sure if that was tragic or terrifying, and I couldn’t stand here gaping at her while I tried to figure that out. She was still affectionately stroking the monstrous furry flower.

“Bree, the flowers are a… nice gesture, but they don’t make up for the fact you showed up at my home,” I told her as calmly as I could.

And there were those big blue eyes again. “You don’t like them?”

There wasn’t enough air in my lungs for how much I wanted to sigh at that moment. “They’re…” Ugly, hideous, probably evil, and definitely a waste of my money, “interesting. What I don’t like is people just coming over uninvited. I don’t even like it when people I know really well do that.” She was still giving me those eyes, and for some reason I felt like I needed to keep justifying my feelings about her being here. “Look, Bree, I’ve had a really great day at work and I’d really like to relax and enjoy the rest of the evening.”

She stopped touching the scary flower and nodded somewhat forlornly. “I just thought it would be a really nice surprise to bring you some flowers…”

Why did I feel guilty about that? She shouldn’t even be here! “Don’t you see how this looks, though? You Google me and then show up at my house and work to give me things? If you want to meet people, you ask them and let them decide if they want to, as well.”

She was still looking at me. “Yeah, but what would happen if I asked?”

I opened my mouth to tell her the honest truth, but then couldn’t. The truth was that never in a million years would I have given anyone who asked on Deviant Art my home address or information about my work. And I wouldn’t have agreed to meet them, either, no matter how long we’d been talking. Actually, that reminded me that I needed to change my username to something less obvious.

I couldn’t think of a tactful way to answer her, either. I didn’t want to be cruel. She was just trying to be nice.

She knew what I was going to say, anyway, and swallowed. “See? That’s why I’m here.”

In a creepy, intrusive way – she kind of had a point. There weren’t many options for her because she’d idolised completely the wrong artist. God, I was being a grump again, wasn’t I?

She gave the flower one more cursory pat like she was saying goodbye to a kitten. “Make sure you put them in water. They’ve been out of it for hours now and they’re probably thirsty.”

“I will,” I said, with growing guilt about how dismissive of her I was being. She just looked so disappointed. Was I being unfair? Clearly she meant well, and she was right, if she’d just asked to meet me, I’d have said ‘no’. Seriously, I’d known Sarah for… three years? Four years? And I’d never met up outside work with her, regardless of how often she tried to insist I did.

Ugh, was I being anti-social and unreasonable about all of this? She did just buy me flowers. Weird, creepy flowers, but she could easily have taken off with my money and spent it on something for herself. Henry had found that coffee-thing charming, too, and he tended to be pretty level-headed. I doubted he would’ve been as angry as I was with her.

While I was second-guessing myself, Bree slung her schoolbag over her shoulder, looking like Christmas had been cancelled. “Well, I hope you like them anyway.”

“Thanks, they’re pretty.” I was actually just being polite because obviously they were hideous and not pretty at all, but she didn’t interpret it like that. She just looked up at me and smiled. It was the kind of expression a puppy might have as it realised someone had just decided to adopt it from the pound and it wasn’t going to die cold and alone after all.

The hope on her face was completely disarming. “Min, I’m sorry I made you angry,” she said, and she did actually sound sorry. “It’s just that while I was buying them I was imagining how you’d react, and I wanted to be here to see your face when I gave them to you. I waited because I didn’t want to miss it.”

She’d waited here for three hours, in fact, and this was how I was reacting. Probably not what she’d hoped for, after all; my chest clenched.

While I was standing there feeling terrible, she winced. “Um, so,” she began, “This is kind of embarrassing, but I’ve been here for three hours and it’s another hour home. Would you mind if I used your toilet? The guys on the reception desk said I can’t use the hotel ones unless I’m a guest, and I was worried if I left to look for some that I’d miss you.”

I wasn’t too keen on letting her in, but I was feeling bad already and, really, who would say no to that?

I exhaled, awkwardly trying to fish out my keycard with the games in one hand and the flowers clutched against me with the other. In the end Bree needed to take the bouquet back off me so I could open the door.

She dropped her bag at the door and I nearly fell over it as I was taking off my heels. I’d pushed it against the wall with an ankle, and when I looked up, Bree was already distracted on the way to the bathroom by one of my big paintings that I’d had printed and framed.

I liked that one, actually. Henry and I had gone up to Queensland a couple of years ago and had visited Green Island on the Great Barrier Reef and I’d only been in the water for about five minutes before I’d needed to go straight back to the hotel room and paint the reef. The colours and the light were so beautiful, it was like a different planet down there. The painting had turned out really well, and it was the first one I’d had framed when I moved up to Sydney. I put it on the wall that got the most sunlight so the colours were really bright.

“You don’t have this one on Deviant Art,” Bree said as she considered it.

It was the first time I really married up this crazy girl with the person online who I’d been discussing my art with. Multiple exclamation marks aside, we had talked a lot about it. I suddenly felt like a giant prick for completely dismissing her, even if she was way too full on.

I realised that her comment was also kind of a question. “I don’t put everything on there. People steal things from it and I don’t want this one stolen.”

She leaned right up close to it, really admiring the detail. That actually made me feel good; I’d put a serious amount of work into the picture and it was always nice to have her appreciate it. “It’s incredible,” she said eventually, standing back. “Like, this is better than most of the stuff in galleries. What do you do again?” She looked back at me. “At Frost?”

“Marketing.” My heart fluttered as I remembered my promotion. “Well, project management, now.”

Bree made a face, looking back at the painting. “I don’t really know what that is,” she said, and pointed at the painting. “But you should do this for a living.”

I laughed shortly. If only; I’d lost that fight with myself years ago. “Wouldn’t be much of a living. There’s no money in art. I’d be on the street instead of in here.” Now I sounded like my mother. “Painting is just a hobby. I enjoy it.”

Bree turned a little to cast her eyes around the apartment. “This place is nice,” she conceded. There was an unspoken ‘but’ as she looked back at the painting.

I suddenly realised who I was talking to. “Wait, weren’t you on your way to my bathroom?”

She looked at me for a moment, a little disoriented, and then back at the flowers in her hand. “Oh, yeah,” she said, and then made a face and put the flowers on the kitchen bench before disappearing through my bedroom.

I had to go past the painting to put the flowers in water, and I stopped to have another look at it, too. In the glass of the frame, I saw myself smiling at it. Yeah, I liked this one. The original file was so huge I’d even put individual scales on some of the fish, but this print wasn’t quite big enough to see that level of detail. I would have needed to get a wall-to-floor for that, and I wasn’t sure spending thousands on a quality printout was a wise investment. Looking at it all again made me feel like painting, though. Maybe I’d give the games a miss tonight and get the tablet out.

I’d put the evil flowers in a vase and was standing in the middle of the room trying to figure out where I could put them when Bree returned. “You have a lot of make-up,” she told me; which meant she’d opened the cupboards in my bathroom. “It’s weird. Not even my mum has that much.”

I wanted to comment on how inappropriate it was to snoop in people’s cupboards, but I had pads and stuff in there, too. I didn’t want to embarrass her in case that’s why she was looking.

Bree had already moved on from that thought, anyway, and was pointing to the kitchen bench. “You should put the flowers there,” she said, reminding me I was holding the monstrous flowers. “The leaves kind of match the stainless steel.”

She was right, and the flowers also would also be much closer to the stainless steel knives in the event that I’d need to defend myself against them. I was following her advice when she said behind me, “Oh! Should I have taken off my shoes?”

I set the flowers on the bench and was turning the vase to a good angle. “It’s up to you,” I told her, too distracted to realise what I was inadvertently saying. “It’s just a habit. I’m not really fussed if people do or don’t.” There were slippers somewhere, too, but I think I’d kicked them under the hall-stand.

It was only when Bree went to take off her shoes by the door that I realised I’d just given her tacit permission to remain in my apartment. While I was trying to figure out how I’d managed to do something so absent-minded, she bounced back into the living area in her knee-high school socks and I just didn’t have the heart to tell her to put her shoes back on again and leave. She didn’t give me the opportunity to comment on it, either, because she was already at another one of my paintings.

That one was Federation Square in Melbourne, and I’d done it at night. It had started off as practice with lighting and had ended up turning into a completed print. “That’s in Melbourne, yeah?” she asked, glancing back towards me to see me nod. “So you go to places and paint them? That’s actually a really cool idea. Way better than buying souvenirs.”

I thought so. “Well, yes. But I’m actually from Melbourne.”

She gave me a cheeky grin, and I knew she was going to drag out the old rivalry between Sydneysiders and Melbournites. “That explains a lot.”

“Whatever you’re going to say, I’ve heard it before,” I said, rolling my eyes as she moved on to the next one. It was actually not a location shot; I’d had this dream where I was a character in a computer game and it was set in this beautiful phosphorescent forest teaming with tiny little glowing dragons. The print was darker than I’d have liked, but it still looked great.

Bree spent a few minutes looking at it, and then turned back to me. “You are actually my hero,” she said. “I can’t believe you did this all out of your head. It’s like a superpower.”

I tried to keep a perfectly straight face. “What are you talking about?” I asked her. “That’s where I went the last time I took annual leave.” She spun around to take another look as I kept talking, obviously thinking she must have seen it wrong. “I’m pretty happy with how the glowing ferns turned out, but I’m not sure I captured the essence of those baby dragons.”

She turned to blink at me for a second, and then laughed. When she stopped laughing, she was gazing at me with what I could only describe as total adoration. I didn’t know what to do with it, but it was really confronting. Fortunately, I didn’t have to figure it out, because she toured the rest of my paintings and proceeded to give them a really gratifying level of appreciation. I was really proud of some of them, and I didn’t think anyone had ever paid so much attention to them before.

I’d been standing near the small glass dining table where I’d left my tablet, and since I’d been thinking of painting anyway, I’d picked it up. Unfortunately, when Bree was done admiring my walls, the first thing she did was spot it in my hand.

She looked really excited. “Oh, my god, are you going to do something now?” she asked, already knowing the answer. She rushed over to me. “Can I watch? Please say I can watch! I’ve always wondered how you do it and you never stream, so it would be kind of interesting to watch how you go about it–”

“It’s coming up to eight on a school night,” I pointed out, interrupting her because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get a word in otherwise. “You really need to go home. Your parents are probably wondering where the hell their daughter is every night.”

She made a face. “I told them I was at a friend’s house,” she said, and then looked hopefully up at me. “It’s kind of true, isn’t it?”

I closed my eyes for a second, remembering who I was dealing with again. She was relentless. “Bree, I don’t know how to answer that,” I told her, hoping honesty was the best call. “How would they feel if they knew you were at a twenty-five year old’s house? It’s probably inappropriate for you to hang around for much longer. I’m not sure what you want me to say.”

She scoffed. “Well, it’s not like you’re up here getting me pregnant,” she said. She didn’t give me a chance to respond to that before moving right along again. “What I want you to say is that you’ll be friends with me, so let’s just be friends? You let me in, so obviously you don’t hate me. There’s no rule that says you can only be friends with people your own age, and if we’re friends, it’s not weird that I’m in here.”

The way she put it, ‘let’s be friends’, made it seem like she was suggesting I click a button on Facebook or change my status to ‘friends with Bree’. I didn’t actually know what she thought about the way actual friendship worked, but I doubted it generally started with a marriage-like friendship proposal. Then again, Bree’s idea of things clearly differed a lot from other people’s. Those flowers, I thought.

“Is there actually any way for me to say ‘no’ to that?”

From how much her brow was wavering, I think there actually might have been. “I guess so,” she said, and then spoke with so much animation that her curls bounced. “But you can ask Courtney, I’m actually really nice. I always try and do nice things for people, and I’ll try really hard not to accidentally insult you or do anything that you really, really don’t want me to do. And if you’re really tired from work and you want to relax I won’t make you leave the house, we can just hang out up here. It could be awesome and I just really think you should try it first instead of just saying ‘no’ outright.”

I listened to her deliver her pitch with total and complete conviction, heart on sleeve. God, I could really hurt her right now, I thought, watching her. I could say ‘nope’ and crush that little heart of hers. Fuck, I thought, I think I’m giving in to those curls. Shit.

“You should work in sales,” I told her, and I was sure my resignation was audible. Before she could get too excited, though, I jabbed the air toward her with my stylus. “This is conditional on you never showing up or leaving anything anywhere again, okay?” She nodded mutely. “I’m serious about that. And I’m holding you to the ‘I won’t do things you don’t want me to’ clause, too.”

“Whatever you want!” she said in the top register of her voice. “Oh, my god!” She looked like she was about to throw her arms around my middle. Before she managed to, I ducked into the bedroom to grab the laptop, came back with it and began setting up.

Bree shuffled one of the kitchen chairs around beside me and she still looked really excited. “This is so awesome, you have no idea,” she said as I was trying to get comfortable. “I’ve wanted to do this for so long!”

I listened to her, trying to figure out how to position myself. It was a bit awkward, because normally I’d put a leg up and lean the tablet across my thigh. I was still wearing my work skirt, so that wasn’t going to happen. I did bend my leg up experimentally, though, but the skirt was too tight and the fabric wasn’t stretchy. Also, my stockings were slipping off the chair.

Bree noticed. “You need one like this,” she said, smoothing the pleated skirt of her school uniform. It might have been passable when she was standing up, but as soon as she sat down it was scandalously short. I would never in a million years show that much skin. I did not need a skirt like that; even ten times that amount of fabric wouldn’t be enough to make me comfortable. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter, just put trackies on or something. It’s not like you need to dress up so much to sit in your living room.”

I thought about that for a second; I supposed my black tracksuit pants wouldn’t look so out of place with my work blouse, and I did still have all my make-up on. I went into my bedroom, shut the door and put them on. Without the hoodie, they didn’t look too boyish and the colour of them was such that they looked a bit like work-pants anyway. My white socks didn’t match so well, but whatever. Fuck, this was way more comfortable. I did give my big hoodie a bit of a sad glance as I left the bedroom, though.

The trackies made everything so much easier, and I put the tablet across my knee and thought about what to draw. Bree was actually quiet for once, and I had been gazing forward trying to decide what do to when I noticed I was looking directly at those horrifying flowers. Bree sat straight up. “Yes!” she said. “It would be so poetic. I rescued them and then they went on to become famous!”

Hah, famous? “I don’t have that many followers,” I told her. “But okay.”

I decided not to bother with a background – that would have taken ages and Bree did actually need to get home at some sort of reasonable hour – and just started drawing shapes. She obviously did actually know a thing or two about art, as well, because a couple of times while she was commenting on what I was doing, she used the correct terminology for the tools and asked me questions about my brushes.

“You know a lot. Do you draw?” I asked, working on giving one of the flowers a deep, open mouth with many layers of shark-teeth. I didn’t remember seeing any pictures in her gallery on Deviant Art.

Bree laughed at what I was doing with the flower. “You want the truth?” I nodded as I kept painting. “Actually you kind of taught me all that stuff.”

I stopped for a second and looked at her. I did? I didn’t remember those conversations at all, they must have happened ages ago. “Really?”

She relaxed back in the chair again. “Yeah. And no, I can’t draw. I’ll just hang around and be kind of in awe of you and a bit depressed.” I shot her a strange look, she explained, “Well, it’s like you have this totally amazing gift and you’re not even using it.”

I clicked through the palette. “It’s not a gift,” I said, fixing a colour, “it’s six years of locking myself up in a graphics lab every recess and lunchtime.”

“Bit late for me, then, I guess,” Bree said. “Plus at Cloverfield we only get half an hour for lunch and that’s barely even enough to eat food. I think they just want to make sure we don’t have time to cross the road to the boys’ school. Are you this good at your job?”

There was that familiar whiplash again. “I think so,” I said, and the corrected myself. “I mean, yes. I just got promoted.”

Her face lit up again. “Oh, that’s great! Is that what you were happy about earlier?”

I was actually surprised she’d been listening. She certainly hadn’t acted like she was listening. I stopped for a second and looked at her again, and then went back to the tablet. I decided not to ask about it. “Yup.”

“Well, if you’re half as good at… project managing or whatever you call it as you are at art, I bet you’re awesome.”

There’s something to be said for being heavily praised. I got it all the time online, but it’s one thing to have disembodied text saying your art is amazing and another to have someone sitting next to you saying it. And Bree was just so damn genuine, I found it difficult to hang on to my reservations about having let her stay. This was actually okay. It wasn’t exactly video games with Henry, but it wasn’t ruining my evening. And she probably wouldn’t be here for that long, anyway, because I was nearly done with the picture.

I didn’t remember the last time I’d done anything grotesque, but the flowers definitely belonged in that category by the time I was finished. I’d really only suggested the vase and painted these exaggerated, monstrous flowers full of teeth and tentacles pouring out of it like something from a horror movie. It was different from what I normally did, but I was happy with how all the textures turned out. I sat back from the tablet and examined it.

Bree loved it. “That’s incredible. You did that in half an hour,” she gushed, leaning over the picture. Then, she reached out and tentatively touched the tablet where the furry flower was.

I just stared at her for a second. What was she expecting? It was a screen. She saw my expression and giggled. “Sorry, it just kind of looked really furry and I guess I just needed to remind myself that it’s a picture.”

“You can touch the real thing if you want,” I told her, and gestured at the actual flowers. “Just make sure you don’t go anywhere near them without a sharp sword.”

She laughed again. “It was actually really funny, because the florist asked me if I knew what to feed it, and I was like, ‘um, you need to feed bouquets?’ And I just had this weird image of, like, chopping up raw meat for it or something.”

“Raw meat?” I snorted. “Please. Those flowers clearly hunger for the souls of unborn children.”

Bree looked from my neutral expression to the flowers and then burst out laughing. I hadn’t thought it was that funny, but she kept laughing for a good several minutes, to the point at which she couldn’t breathe and her eyes were watering. She calmed down a little, and then she saw the flowers and started all over again. I watched her at first because it was entertaining, but after her skirt rode a bit high I spent the rest of her giggle fit uploading the picture to Deviant Art. I didn’t really think twice about the comment I put on the submission, but when Bree finally sobered up and bent forward to read it, she liked it.

“‘For Bree‘,” she read aloud, and then from how she looked at me you’d have thought I’d done a hell of a lot more than dedicate a thirty-minute speed-paint to her. “You don’t know what this means,” she said, basically articulating what I was thinking. Fortunately, she spelt it out for me. “Like, I’ve been a huge fan of yours for ages and now I’m here and you’re painting for me and you’re hilarious and just so nice.”

She was actually going to make me blush if I let her go on, so I didn’t. “Will you finally go home and leave me alone now?” I asked her, but I might have been smiling a little.

She grinned. “Yeah, okay,” she said. “I kind of got what I came for earlier anyway.”

“You mean I didn’t need to do all this?” I gestured at the screen.

Instead of answering, she sat forward tensely for a couple of seconds, looking like she wanted to say something. Then, she lifted the tablet off my knee, flipped to Photoshop and scribbled down an ’04’ number on one of the layers. When she finished it, though, she leaned back, made and noise and then Control-Zedded the last three digits and tried again.

I smirked. “That would have been a lot cooler if you knew your own phone number.”

“Well, it’s not like I call it all the time,” she said, and then jumped up and rushed off to her schoolbag. “You should just give me yours!”

Yeah, no. My work number was the same as my home number, and she definitely wasn’t getting it until I was sure I could trust her to not text me all day.

After she’d given me the right number, I shut the lid of my laptop. “Come on,” I said, bustling her towards the door. “Let’s get you home before your parents call the cops on me. Where do you live? If it’s not too far, I’ll come for the ride.”

She looked alarmed. “No, that’s okay, it’s actually really far,” she said. “I’ll just take the train.”

I looked pointedly towards the windows; it was getting dark outside. Bree was the last person in the world who should be allowed near strangers after dark. Especially in that skirt. “It’s fine, I need to buy something to eat, anyway. They haven’t changed the menus in this place for at least two years.”

“I can go by myself,” she said quickly. “I do it all the time, there’s still always people around in stations until much later. I’ll probably just go to Courtney’s anyway.”

I went to get my purse and take out another fifty. I didn’t feel fantastic about giving away more of my money to her, but I also didn’t relish the prospect of another night spent lying awake and wondering if she’d been kidnapped or murdered. “Okay, I won’t come with you, but no trains,” I said, making sure she took it.

When I’d put my skirt back on and Bree was on her way out the door, I cleared my throat and she stopped. I nodded towards the evil flowers. “You’re just going to leave without saying goodbye to them?”

She giggled and bounced over to the vase, pretending to tickle one them under its chin. “Wow, I really love these things. Don’t forget to feed them!” she told me, pretending to sound stern.

“Stockpiling human corpses as we speak.”

She was still laughing when we’d made it down to the bottom of the building. Being a hotel in central Sydney, there were already taxis waiting to collect people. It was merely a matter of walking up to the one at the head of the rank.

She stopped in front of me. I’d just slipped on some ballet flats because my feet were still hurting from yesterday, but even without heels on I was just so much taller than her. The combination of me being very tall and her being very short made her seem almost child-like, but from this angle I could see pretty deep into her unbuttoned school-shirt. She definitely wasn’t a child, that was for sure. I wished she’d do up that damn button, though. Being able to see inside made me uncomfortable and it was going to give people the wrong idea about her.

I didn’t say anything about it because Bree already looked like she was about to explode with something. It made me even more uncomfortable. “What?”

“I’m one of those people who always hugs everyone,” she said, sounding urgently worried about it.

I squinted at her. I was the opposite of one of those. “Please don’t.”

“I know I promised I wouldn’t do anything you didn’t like, but it’s hard because you’re really funny and I want to!”

“Then you’ll have to be really strong,” I told her, taking her shoulders, spinning her around and pushing her gently towards the taxi before she inevitably lost the fight with herself and pounced on me in front of everyone.

She let me usher her over to the taxi, hopping into it and winding down the window. I didn’t miss the taxi driver’s eyes dipping to that skirt and I made sure he saw me glaring at him.

“I had a great time!” she said out the window, oblivious to my exchange with the taxi driver. “And I’m sorry I just kind of showed up before,” she reconsidered, looking torn, “but also kind of not really because it worked.”

I just nodded and waved at her, watching the taxi drive up the street and then trudging back inside.

I had been wondering what I was going to do about dinner and waiting for the lift when a guy who was walking past the hotel ducked inside the lobby. I wasn’t really paying much attention to him until I saw him disappear into the toilets beside reception. No one on the desk batted an eyelid, they just went about their business as he finished and went out the door again.

I missed the lift, because I was just gaping: Bree had said the reception staff wouldn’t let her use the toilets, and that’s why she’d asked to use mine, and that’s why I’d let her in.

She wouldn’t just say that. Would she…?

I couldn’t leave it, I had to walk up and ask. “Excuse me,” I said to one of them, “if people ask to use the toilets in the lobby here, do you let them?”

They all looked at each other. “Strictly speaking they’re not public toilets,” one of the staff answered me. “But we generally let people, anyway.”

I sighed heavily; she hadn’t told me the truth. Bree, I thought, scrunching up my face. It wasn’t that not being allowed to use the toilets was a particularly serious lie, but I felt so stupid for not even picking up on it. I’d lived here for four years. Fucking hell, I was angry with her, but also really angry with myself because part of me was actually glad that I’d let her in.

I went back upstairs and spent a minute or two staring down at those monstrous flowers while I tried to figure out what I should do. Even without the lying, that girl had gone from stalking me to my apartment to somehow keeping me company in it. That had to be some sort of magic trick. Maybe she did have that creepy shrine in her bedroom after all. I groaned aloud and put my head in my hands. Goddamnit, what the hell was I going to do with her? How did this even happen?

I decided to consult Henry about it, and when I picked up my phone there was already a text from him. “I could use some of those semi-automatics you keep recommending right about now. I know I generally advocate peaceful resolutions to conflict but I’m halfway up the clocktower right now with Sean Frost.”

You’re halfway up a clocktower, I thought dryly. Speaking of clocks, I looked at the one on my wall, it read eight-fifteen. Plenty of time for a few rounds of the new expansion. Maybe Henry could bring up some food and we could eat, shoot each other and just pretend everything was great and that no one was driving us crazy. I texted him back and then went to have a quick shower before he rocked up.

I was running the water and trying to decide if I could be bothered washing my hair or not when I caught sight of something on the glass as I opened the door to the shower cubicle.

The door was all fogged up, except for where someone had drawn a big lopsided smiley face on the surface with their finger and written ‘made u look!!!!!‘.

             

It took me a hundred metres and couple of odd looks from strangers to forge through my self-pity and come to a decision: I shouldn’t have left her alone there.

I stopped on the other side of the footbridge, made a face and then spun and went to walk back to the restaurant. She’s just a schoolkid and it was, what, nine at night? I should at least wait for the taxi with her. Then, again, if her birthday was in two weeks and she was about to turn eighteen, was it really such a big deal?

I stopped in my tracks.

Okay, Min, think this through: going back in there with her means walking straight back into the situation you bailed out of, and you walked out for a reason. I scrunched up my face. Did I really have the energy to listen to more about Courtney, or Bree’s pregnant cousin, or about that one time Bree found a huge chunk of frozen broccoli in her pasta? God, she was nice but just so damn full on. I winced as I remembered that photo she’d taken of me. No, I couldn’t face any of that. Not right now, not with how crap I was feeling.

She’d be fine, I’d given her plenty of money for a taxi. If she could stalk me to my house before seven am she could probably manage a taxi by herself.

I took a deep breath, turned, and went to continue walking back home.

I only made it two paces when I remembered how tiny she was. It wouldn’t take a strong breeze to drag that girl into a car and drive off with her. Did I want to be responsible for something like that happening? Did I really?

I made a frustrated noise and then stopped again, turning sharply back towards the harbour and walking over to the railing so I could see across the water. Bree wasn’t outside the restaurant anymore. Maybe I was worrying for nothing, maybe she was safely inside. Maybe I should call the restaurant and ask them to make sure she got into a taxi and maybe I should get a goddamn grip, Min, she’s nearly eighteen, not five.

While I was standing in place and trying to figure out what it actually was that I wanted to do, an old couple who had been walking leisurely along the bridge made eye-contact with me. The woman had a pretty strange expression, and I realised how everything I’d just done had probably looked.

Great, now perfect strangers probably thought I was a crazy as the girl I was worrying about.

After they were gone, I looked down at my blouse and skirt, and beyond them, my heels. ‘It totally doesn’t suit you’; I could still hear how easily Bree had said it, as if it was no big deal to say that to someone. I would have been angry with her, but she clearly hadn’t meant to hurt me. In fact, she’d looked mortified when she realised that she had. But just because she hadn’t meant to be cruel didn’t mean what she’d said wasn’t true. Or… maybe I was being hypersensitive and she had meant it in an abstract sense?

That girl, I thought. Even just thinking about her was exhausting.

I pushed off the railing. I couldn’t stand here all night feeling bad about myself and wondering whether or not Bree was safe. She was, everything was going to be fine, and I needed to just go home and avoid getting robbed or murdered myself.

By the time I got back to my apartment, my feet were aching so much I was just about ready to chop them off at the ankles. I decided a bath was the best remedy, but I was so distracted when I ran myself one that I forgot about it and very nearly ended up with a bathroom-sized swimming pool.

It was actually embarrassing what I had been doing, and that was sitting at my laptop and checking my messages. She hadn’t sent me one – and that didn’t necessarily mean she’d been kidnapped, I reminded myself – but in the process of ‘just checking’ I accidentally got stuck reading some of the old ones. I was lucky I remembered the bath when I did.

Leaving my mobile in the living room so I couldn’t keep looking at it and stressing, I shed my clothes and climbed in to the water.

Since it was lovely and warm and I was exhausted in every way possible, I rested my head on the lip of the bathtub. With my chin on my collarbones, I stared down the tub at my body. I had a weird, philosophical moment where I reflected on how strange it was that people looked at that and thought it was me. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, I supposed. If I saw it on someone else I wouldn’t think bad things about them. It was just weird that it was me.

My body issues… They were exhausting, too, and apparently now I was also taking them out on other people. Was ‘that totally doesn’t suit you’ really hurtful enough to be worth walking out of dinner over? Would Bree have walked out if I’d told her that her uniform didn’t suit her? What about Sarah, would she have left dinner over it?

Regardless, I shouldn’t have left. What I should have done – and what Henry would have said I should have done – was just say something like, ‘I’m sorry you think that’, or, ‘Hah, I don’t really like dressing up either’, and just got on with dinner instead of storming out like I was the teenager. Bree hadn’t been telling me I looked terrible in general, in fact she’d said the opposite a number of times. So then why did I take it that way?

It was just all so depressing. I was trying. I’d been trying really fucking hard with all this stuff since high school and I still hated it and it still gave me a massive headache. Winter couldn’t come fast enough; I could just pile on all the layers and ignore my brain.

On that note, it was on the chilly side tonight so in the grand theme of hating my body and everything, after I’d got out and dried myself off I put on a big men’s hoodie. Like all the comfortable clothes I owned, it used to be Henry’s. He’d made the big mistake of leaving it at my house and the consequence was that it now worked for me.

I checked my phone on the way out to the balcony. I didn’t have any messages, which, again, wasn’t necessarily evidence Bree had been murdered in a laneway, but rather than put my mobile where I could see it and worry about it all night, I left it inside. Then, I set up my laptop on the balcony table and sat down to watch a few episodes of cartoons so I could just switch off.

After another couple of wines, I ended up watching the last episode on my side in bed and was finally relaxed enough to be peacefully dozing off when my phone buzzed under my hand. I didn’t even remember collecting it.

I opened my eyes and stared along the mattress at it. It was a Deviant Art note; that meant that Bree was okay. I exhaled and unlocked it. I could just get the reassurance everything was fine and then go to sleep.

“i hate myself so much right now 😦 😦 im so sorry min. i cant sleep. im really sorryyyy. i cant stop crying 😦 😦 “

I sat up a little, read it again, and then groaned and flopped back heavily on the mattress. I’d been so worried about being an irresponsible adult and leaving a minor in a potentially dangerous situation that I’d forgotten how the dinner had ended, and that was very badly.

And now she couldn’t stop crying? Did she mean that literally, or was she just trying to say how sorry she was?

I held the phone in front of my face and squinted at the bright screen. I couldn’t just leave this message for a day or two like I usually did, just in case she was actually upset. Even if I was probably a little too tipsy to be trusted with a phone right now.

“It’s okay,” I typed. “I’m glad you got home safely. Sleep well.” I read that a couple of times, and then sent it.

I had been debating whether or not I wanted to get out of the hoodie and into my pyjamas when the handset vibrated again. I checked it.

“pls dont be like this 😦 😦 ur really awesome. like really. i mean that its just sometiems when i say things they dont come out right…..it was just weird seeing ur this serious businesswoman cos online ur really funny and kind of smooth so i thought for like a year that u were a really cool guy with maybe some really cool job liek a real artist or something. i had this idea of how u looked from the messages and then u posted that painting and it was like exactly what i thought…”

My stomach knotted. That fucking painting. “I’m sorry I disappointed you, then,” I typed, and immediately regretted it even as I was clicking ‘send’.

I didn’t have long to wait for a reply. “are u kidding me im the disappointment. i wanted to meet u for ages and then i screwed everything up 😦 😦 u really are awesome though. And ur still pretty funny irl. im sorry 😦 😦 “

I stared at those frowny faces for a good five minutes. If I hadn’t been over the blood alcohol limit, I probably would have just said something nice and put my mobile on the bedside table and passed out. Unfortunately, I was over it, and all I could focus on was asking myself whether or not she’d been serious earlier. “Bree, are you actually crying?”

It felt like eternity before she replied, and it was only one word.

“yes 😦 “

I closed my eyes for a moment.

Fuck. Could I really not have swallowed all my personal dramas for another thirty minutes and ended that whole dinner amicably? Okay, so she was seriously intense, and showing up at my home and my work and then forcing me to pay for that extortionately expensive dinner was really fucking not okay… but, come on, she was seventeen. Did she actually deserve to be crying at midnight on someone’s spare bed?

I didn’t know what to reply to that. On one hand I wanted to apologise to her for leaving, on the other, she shouldn’t have dragged me there in the first place, so I didn’t know. I was sorry she was crying and I did feel responsible for it, despite the fact just about everything was her own damn fault.

Before I managed to figure out what I wanted to say, she sent me another note. “btw im not trying to guilt trip u or anything. im just really sorry 😦 😦 will u forgive me??“

I exhaled. She’d done so many crazy things that I didn’t actually know what she was asking me to forgive her for, but I suspected it was only for what happened at the very end of the dinner. Did it matter, though? Was I actually going to tell a seventeen year old who really admired me that I didn’t forgive her and wanted her to cry herself to sleep? I could probably double as Oscar the Grouch at times, but I was pretty sure there was actually a heart in here somewhere.

“Of course I forgive you” I typed, hoping I wouldn’t regret it. “Sleep well. I hope you feel better tomorrow.”

“thanks min goodnight and im sorry again xxxx”

I put my mobile on my bedside table and put a hand over my face. What a day, seriously. I couldn’t even really think properly about it because my brain was just so tired. There was no way I was getting out of bed to put my pyjamas on, so I just turned over and went to sleep in Henry’s big hoodie and my trackies. I didn’t even bother to take my hair-tie out.

I wasn’t exactly hungover the next day, but I still felt a bit off and the blisters on my feet were aching as I swung them out of bed. I stretched, watching myself in the big sliding mirrors of my wardrobe which were facing my bed.

With my hair back and this huge hoodie on I looked really boyish, especially with the sleeves pushed up so the fabric bunched up around my shoulders. Because of the shoulders, the rest of me looked really narrow when I stood up, too, and I couldn’t see my breasts. I was really glad Henry wasn’t here to see me like this.

Just the thought of work; I groaned. I so didn’t feel like getting into my work clothes – especially putting my blistered feet into those heels again – and I briefly fantasised about just showing up at work dressed like this. I didn’t even think people would recognise me if I did; they probably wouldn’t let me in the building. Maybe then I could just quit Frost and get a ‘really cool job’ or whatever Bree had said she’d pictured me with. Wow, when I imagined Mum’s reaction to me quitting my job, though… Yeah, not an option.

I had been looking forward to getting to work and sitting down at my desk all day, but unfortunately I got called into a team meeting for the Canada project and there weren’t any seats left in the tiny little meeting room. It wasn’t even my team, and I ended up being stuck standing up and hating the world while I listened to someone drone on about distribution contracts forever.

Not that I’ve ever made a particularly good damsel in distress, but when Henry stuck his head into the meeting and called me out I was pretty happy to be rescued.

I edged behind all the extra chairs and out of the room, shutting the door gently behind me. “Don’t tell me,” I said neutrally, “you were just so desperate to see my beautiful face you couldn’t wait another second.”

He smirked and motioned for me to follow him, looking excited. “Come with me.”

Henry didn’t do ‘cryptic’ very often, so he didn’t need to steal my handbag to get me to follow him.

When he opened the door to the stairwell, he still didn’t explain where we were going, he just grinned broadly as he made a ‘ladies first’ gesture and stood aside so I could walk past. He only ushered me down one flight, though, and that was to the level that HR was on.

I followed him all the way to the offices – a little stiffly because of my blisters – wondering what on earth he was doing.

He stopped short of his own office, and I couldn’t figure out what the point of that particular place was at first. Then I followed where he was looking: it was at his assistant manager’s out-tray. There was an A4-sized internal envelope marked L36 MARKETING: LEE, MIN’.

I picked it up and turned it over; there must have been a good fifteen or twenty pages in there. The envelope was closed and across the seal was stamped the words, ‘STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL’. I didn’t understand what the fuss was.

Henry was practically bursting, though. “I’m not supposed to have anything to do with this, so I didn’t lead you here,” he told me. “Because of our relationship I’m not allowed to sign off on anything for you. But hardcopy, sealed envelopes stamped ‘confidential’ in HR’s out tray only mean one thing,” he said, smiling from ear to ear as he put his hands on my shoulders, “Min, that’s an employment contract.”

I just stared at him. It took a few seconds to sink in.

Remembering my conversation with Diane last week, I looked from the envelope to Henry. “Are you serious?” I said, my voice shooting off into the stratosphere, and then began to tear into it on the spot.

He put a hand over mine to stop me, glancing around us to see if anyone was watching. “It’s marked ‘confidential’ for a reason,” he said, and then kissed my forehead. “I understand why you can’t talk about this stuff with me so I know why you didn’t tell me. But I want to let you know that I’m really, really happy for you,” he said and cupped my cheek with his hand for a moment. “Fuck, Min, this is great. Congratulations!”

I was at this terrible crossroads, because I didn’t want to dismiss him when he was so excited for me, but at the same time I really wanted to know what was in the envelope. My dilemma must have been evident because he just laughed. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said, and then kissed my forehead again. “I’ll let you go. You go open that, sign it, and then we’ll celebrate over lunch, okay?”

“Thanks, Henry,” I said, giving him a quick hug when I was certain no one was watching.

He showed me out so I could rush upstairs back to my workstation and get stuck into that envelope. While I was checking around me to make sure no one was looking as I tore it open, it occurred to me that Henry had acted like I should already know what was inside. I didn’t, really. Other than my brief chat with Diane last week about advancement opportunities, I didn’t really know why I’d be getting a contract without someone explaining to me what was in it.

He still ended up being right, though, it was an employment contract. I couldn’t scan it fast enough to figure out what was going on, and my eyes zeroed-in right on the words, ‘Project Manager’. I think my heart stopped.

I checked my name again. Yes, this was for me. Oh, my god. I read it further; it was actually only a four-week position, but it was substantially higher pay and, fuck, I’d get to call myself a Project Manager at Frost International! That would look fantastic on my resume, and I knew the experience would go towards a permanent management position.

I stopped reading and looked up, because I actually couldn’t believe it. Things like this just didn’t happen to me. I had one of those moments where I wondered if I was still asleep.

I sat back, taking a slow breath.

Wow, this was – I looked down and beamed at it – this was fantastic. Unexpected and fantastic. This was worth every goddamn second of overtime that I’d done in the last five years. Oh my god! This was why I wasn’t assigned to any teams. I was going to be running one of them!

There wasn’t much more information about the secret project Diane had mentioned to me in it, though, except the number of staff I’d have underneath me – only four, but it was a start, right? – and the name of the project which was ‘Pink’.

Wait a second, wasn’t that the project Sarah had said she was listed for? I nearly cheered. Fucking yes, I was working with her again? Yes! I couldn’t sign on that dotted line fast enough.

There was a hand-scribbled note down the bottom of the last page that said, “Please submit to Diane only in person asap”.

You bet, I thought, and basically flew across the floor all the way to her office. She was on the phone, but she apologised to whoever she was talking to and hung up. Just that little detail made me feel so important. It quickly faded, though, because this was Diane I was handing these contracts to. I was suddenly unsure of whether or not I’d completed it correct, and whether or not I would look incapable of managing a team if I hadn’t.

“Close the door and take a seat,” she instructed me, and I did what I was told, handing the contracts to her before I sat down. She flipped through them. “This all looks in order,” she said, and then put them aside and looked back at me.

Even though I was really excited, I began to sweat as soon as she looked directly at me. It was stupid, I obviously wasn’t in trouble. I also really, really wanted to thank her, but I didn’t feel like I could say anything at that moment.

She didn’t speak straight away, either. She considered me for a little while before finally breaking the silence. “Did you tell anyone?” I shook my head. “Not even your boyfriend? How close are you to him, anyway? You don’t live together, do you?”

I smothered my surprise. That was a strange question, but I suppose since we were dating under the auspice of Frost overlooking their policy for us, it wasn’t exactly inappropriate. It was still strange, though. “Henry guessed something was up because he saw the envelope in HR. But I didn’t say anything. I am close to him, but we don’t discuss everything. And no, we don’t live together.”

She nodded. “Good. Don’t tell him anything about this. That’s very important. He works for my brother.”

I didn’t contradict her because it was true, but it wasn’t like Henry was Sean Frost’s agent or anything. I didn’t think they had that much to do with each other, and Henry was capable of keeping his mouth shut if he needed to. He was HR Manager for chrissake. He would know extremely confidential and interesting stuff about everyone and he’d never breathed a word of it to me. Anyway, if she was so worried I’d tell Henry, why had she picked me in the first place?

In response to her instructions, though, I just said, “I understand.”

She nodded, opening her top drawer and taking out a USB that was wrapped in a curled post-it. She held it up. “The brief is on here, and the password is on this,” she indicated the post-it, “change it immediately. First thing you do. There’s only four weeks, so you’ll need to get started on the Marketing Requirements Document right now. All your team members are on here, too, and I’ve freed up ‘Oslo’ for your office.” She held it out to me, but before she put it in my palm, she added, “I’m taking a lot of extra security measures for this project.” I didn’t miss the gravity in her voice. “A lot. The computers in ‘Oslo’ aren’t even hooked up to the main network. Don’t save anything to anywhere that isn’t password protected and don’t leave your laptops here overnight or anywhere your boyfriend can get at them if you’re saving project files to them.”

I accepted the USB. This all seemed completely over the top, but that observation wasn’t exactly something I could say out loud to the co-CEO. My silence must have spoken volumes, though, because Diane was watching me. “My brother manages our IT,” she said. “If it’s on the network, he has access to it. I do not want him finding out details about the project. He thinks I’ve abandoned it and I want it to stay that way for at least four weeks. I had someone mention to him that all this extra security is because you’re on a politically sensitive pitch, he believes it, and that’s the way I want it to stay.”

The more pressing question was why Diane was so desperate to make sure her brother, the co-CEO of their billion dollar corporation, didn’t find out about one tiny little project. What could he really do if he did find out, anyway? Marketing was Diane’s department.

It was all very weird, but I obviously couldn’t say that. “I’ll make sure everyone understands your instructions,” was what I told her.

She smiled slightly. “Now that sounds like a manager talking,” she said. “Jason chose you a compliant team. You shouldn’t have any trouble telling any of them just once. If you have any questions, just Jason or myself, please, and for God’s sake throw people off the scent if they start asking questions. I’m sure you’re seeing a pattern here.”

I nodded, thanked her, and let myself be ushered out of the office. It was actually really strange standing next to her because, like most women, I dwarfed her. Weird feeling, towering over Diane Frost of Frost International.

The office that Diane mentioned she’d had put together for us, ‘Oslo’, was one of the smaller offices on the corner of the building and close to hers. It faced out towards the Western Suburbs so it wasn’t one of Sydney’s best views, but it was still better than a felt-covered partition with postcards of places I wanted to go one day pinned on it. There were five workstations in there, four in the centre and one against the wall. I supposed that one was mine. I sat down at it and spun my chair sideways to face the huge windows.

All of Sydney looked like it was down there. I could see all the way to the horizon, and I was smiling again.

Looking out over it all with that USB clutched in my hand, I felt amazing. I felt like I was a king surveying my kingdom. Just, wow. Five years and finally my career was going somewhere. Maybe I wasn’t the ‘really cool guy’ Bree had thought I was for a year, but at least now I was working on having a really cool job.

A voice interrupted me. “Here you are!”

I swivelled my chair around as Sarah stepped inside the office and came rushing over to me. “Jason told me you’d be in here – what’s this about you being Lead but it’s all hush-hush? Is it true or was he just messing with me again?” She only had to take one look at my expression to know the answer. “Oh my god?” she said as a question. “Min, are you serious?” She looked ecstatically happy for me. “Wow, I suddenly have faith in humanity again – you’ve been working like a slave for years! So, what, you’re my boss now?”

“Only for four weeks, and I only have four employees.”

She laughed, grabbing an office chair from one of the work stations and pulling it over to where my empty desk was. “Best boss ever,” she said. “They always start people off in small teams, though. Did you know the Head of Operations Australia used to be a marketing rep?”

I made a face. “Don’t say that and get my hopes up,” I told her. “I might screw the whole thing up and end up in admin.”

Sarah gracefully crossed her legs, leaning back in the chair. “Are you kidding me?” she asked. “When was the last time you screwed something up? Year seven?”

Last night, I thought.

“So what are we doing, anyway? Did Jason tell you?”

I put last night out of my head, and held up the USB. “Diane said it’s all on here.”

She sat upright in her chair and slapped her thighs. “Get out,” she said. “Diane told you? To your face?” She leant back in the chair again. “Min, if you’re not running the department in a year, something is seriously wrong.”

“Stop it,” I said, but I was smiling. I still couldn’t get over it. “You want a see what’s on this? I haven’t looked yet.”

We sat down, turned on one of the computers and went through the brief together; it was pretty straightforward. Frost was going to mine a pipe in the Kimberley, but in order to get finance for the project we needed to have already signed exclusive distribution contracts with strong projected end-consumer sales. Our job was to identify a good market to pitch this to, then to design the pitch and to provide a framework for Sales to deliver it. I sat back in my chair, exhaling at length. Diane wasn’t kidding when she said there was a lot of work in this: this was a huge project for five people in four weeks.

“Shit,” Sarah said as we both processed it. “I guess I won’t be seeing too much of my boyfriend, then. When’s the deadline?”

I checked. “April 29,” I said, and then thought for a second. “Isn’t that right after Easter?” Yet another fantastic reason I hadn’t gone to Seoul with Henry. “That’s more than four weeks, though. Do you think we’d be able to finish it before that long weekend?”

Sarah shrugged, and she was grinning. “Why are you asking me?” she said. “You’re the boss! You tell us when it will be done by.”

I mirrored her by leaning back in my chair and placed my fingers behind my head. “Wow, you’re right.” I laughed shortly. “This is just so awesome.”

“So, how are you planning to celebrate?”

Hah. How did I usually celebrate? Red wine and a selection of semi-automatic rifles. “You don’t want to know.”

She laughed. It was a pleasant sound. “You are such an enigma,” she said, and then stood up. “Come on, let’s go tell the tools we work with that they’re all serfs and you’re important now.”

I made a face, and that stopped her. “Didn’t Jason tell you? It’s confidential,” I said. “Diane was pretty specific about not saying anything to anybody about what we’re doing. We’re not even allowed to save to the network drives.”

Sarah gave me the strangest look. “Why?”

I shrugged. “Something to do with Sean Frost.”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course it is,” she said. “So you can’t even tell anyone that you’re a project lead?” At my head-shake she groaned. “Those two are going to end up killing each other,” she said. “We’ll have to celebrate quietly together then. Who are the other members…?” She leaned across me to laptop; her loose hair fell all over one of my shoulders. Scrolling and reading out the other team member’s names, she made a face. “I don’t really know those guys.”

I didn’t, either. “Guess we’ll know them pretty well in four weeks,” I said. “I’d better send them out an invite.”

“And I’d better leave you to it,” she said, “and move my twenty kilos of junk in here.”

“Make me a coffee while you’re at it,” I said with a half-grin as she opened the door. “Lots of milk and sugar. Oh, and if you could pick up my dry-cleaning…”

At first she thought I was serious, and she might actually have made me that coffee until I said the word, ‘dry-cleaning’ and then she burst out laughing. “You are hilarious,” she told me before she closed the door. “I swear to god I’m going to get you out of the office one of these days. My friends will love you.”

Somehow I sincerely doubted that, but I was glad she found me funny.

I did finally meet my employees, and aside from Sarah they were a quiet bunch who didn’t seem to have any particular problems with the fact I was their manager. One of them was fresh out of an internship and blushed fiercely whenever I spoke to him. Apparently he was one hell of an analyst, though, so I forgave him for how uncomfortable I felt speaking to him and watching his face slowly turn purple. The other two were just your garden variety marketing reps, and one of them had been working for Frost for fifteen years.

I ended up needing to cancel lunch with Henry so the five of us could figure out what on earth we were going to do with the brief. Eventually we’d all put our heads together and given each other tasks, and I drew up a project timeline, photocopied it and gave it to them. By the end of the day I felt productive, like I actually might not screw everything up, and that, actually, despite my personal issues, life was pretty fucking great.

Jason even said goodbye to me as I was leaving – he’d hardly acknowledged I existed before. God, could today get any better?

As it turned out it could, because EB Games was having a stocktake sale and was open later than usual. Not only did I get the two titles I wanted, but I got them for half-price and grabbed a third for free. The third one had co-op, too, so I figured maybe when Henry got off work he could swing past and play a few rounds with me in celebration before he went home.

On my way up to my apartment in the lift I was so busy reading the jackets and wondering which one of them I should play first that I didn’t notice what was outside the door of my apartment. In fact I’d almost made it there and was feeling around in my handbag for my keycard when movement on the floor caught my eye.

There was a person sitting cross-legged against my door, and the shock of that nearly gave me a heart attack. I took a step back and gasped embarrassingly loudly, putting a hand over my chest where I could feel my heart pounding.

No one would have given me prize for knowing immediately who it was going to be.

It was Bree, and she had a huge smile and an even bigger bouquet of flowers.

“That doesn’t look like a Red Bull,” Henry remarked as he leant over my partition, his eyes on the full coffee cup in the centre of my otherwise empty desk. I was frowning at it, too. “Are you trying to quit again?”

Hah. I’d long since surrendered to the fact I would be drinking myself to death on those things. Instead of saying as much, though, I just bent forward in my chair, picked up the cup and held it at eye-level for him so he could read the text.

He squinted at it. “’Is 7am too late for…’” His eyebrows lowered for a moment. “Am I missing something?”

I sighed and put the cup down on the desk in front of me, sitting back in my chair and staring at it again. “Those schoolgirls I told you about last night,” I explained. “One of them left this on my doorstep this morning.”

His frown disappeared. “Ah,” he said, and then spent a couple of seconds observing me rather than the coffee. “But you’re not going to drink it, are you?”

“Doctor Freud, you’ve cured me,” I said dryly. “Of course not. Who knows what could be in it?”

As usual, he didn’t even flinch. “You’re absolutely right. The milk might be low fat.” He gestured at it. “They’re schoolgirls, and by your account, big fans of yours. Do you actually think there’s going to be anything other than coffee in there?” I pressed my lips together rather than concede he was probably right. He would make that abundantly clear, anyway. “You didn’t throw it out, either, so I’m guessing you don’t actually think there’s anything wrong with the coffee, either.”

Of course I didn’t throw it out. I had been going to – but in the lift on the way down, the creepy lopsided smiley faces on the cup and I had been staring at each other and I just couldn’t do it. I’d paused by every rubbish bin between home and Frost International and not managed to toss it into any of them. When I’d made it to work, I’d even spent a couple of seconds staring into the bin under my own desk before just putting it beside my keyboard.

“Maybe I’m just keeping it as evidence to be tested in case I go missing,” I said half-heartedly. The creepiest thing here was how quickly Henry cut through everything. He was right, they were just schoolgirls. What was I expecting? Arsenic? Rohypnol? There was almost no chance it was anything but coffee. I sighed. “It was just weird, that’s all. If fans of yours ever went leaving coffee on your doorstep, you’d be freaked out, too.”

“If they were that proactive? I’d hire them, actually,” he said. “At the rate Diane goes through personal assistants, it would be good to have a standby waiting in the wings. And speaking of that,” he waved a stack of manila folders he’d had tucked under his arm up in the air. “As much as I love your company, I actually came up here to give these to that poor girl.”

They looked very similar to the piles and piles of folders that had been all over the assistant’s desk yesterday. “What are they for?”

Henry sighed. “Diane and Sean are at it again,” he said, making a frustrated gesture up towards the ceiling. It was common knowledge that the co-CEOs did not get along with each other, so that wasn’t a surprise. They were also twins; sometimes it felt like the premise of a B-grade movie. Between them they’d managed to draw battle lines along different departments so each of them was in charge of something they were better at than the other. There were frequently turf wars, though, and HR was always one of the contentious areas. Officially it was Sean’s, and Sean was Henry’s boss, but according to Henry that didn’t stop Diane from meddling in it. Or with him.

I laughed once. “What happened this time? Did he forget her birthday or something?”

Henry shook his head. “With them, who knows? I just do what I’m told.” He pointed at my coffee. “Are you really not going to drink that?”

I looked at him.

His eyes twinkled. He reached over the partition and plucked the little star-shaped shortbread from the lid of the cup, popping it in his mouth. Then, pretending to look shocked, he grabbed at his throat with his free hand and made exaggerated choking noises.

Since I hadn’t put my handbag away yet, I looked hurriedly around us to see if anyone else was watching and then thumped him with it. “Shut up! It’s creepy, okay? She must have followed me home.”

He stopped. “You’re in the Whitepages,” he pointed out. “It’s how your mother got your landline.” Well, that was true… “Anyway, let me solve your grievous dilemma about what to do with the coffee.” He lifted it off the table and drank deeply from it. Because it wasn’t hot anymore, he was able to just pour the whole lot down his throat. When he was done he very politely returned the empty cup.

I placed the cup back next to my keyboard so those lopsided smileys could stare at me. “Well, I hope you have me listed as a beneficiary on your life insurance at least. I need a holiday.”

He laughed, and then stopped being silly. “Sometimes people are actually just being nice, Min,” he said with a smile, and then went to deliver the folders.

I swivelled my chair so I could watch him leave.

He wasn’t really a big coffee drinker, which meant he’d only done that to make a point. I couldn’t figure out exactly what that point was, but whatever it was, a big component of it was, ‘I’m right’. I narrowed my eyes. The most frustrating thing was that he was usually right about people, and he was usually right about me, too. Usually. I was still yet to figure out how he’d never managed to notice how much I didn’t like sex.

I spun back towards my empty desk. I still hadn’t been assigned a team, and it was weird having nothing oh-my-god-urgent to do.

Being teamless actually continued for several days. I didn’t hear any more about this top secret project Diane was planning and when I crossed paths with Jason in the kitchen he didn’t mention anything, either. As a result, I had been having grand visions of leaving work on time and maybe getting to the game store before they closed, but, alas, it wasn’t to be. As soon as word got around that I wasn’t assigned yet, I suddenly became everyone’s best buddy and tragically it wasn’t because of my dazzling personality. It was because if they could get someone to work on their layouts and colour schemes, that was money they’d save in outsourcing design. The project leads didn’t alter their timelines for me just because I was volunteering my services, either. They kept me back late with everyone else.

Leaving the building after dark did drastically reduce the likelihood I’d run into those girls, though. It was stupid for me to be worried about it; they were just kids, at nine at night they’d probably already be in bed, right? Still, I loitered around the doorway and peered down the street just in case. The security guards were just about ready to have me committed by the end of the week, and still the girls didn’t turn up outside.

That blonde one just messaged me a few times on Deviant Art, instead. Each time I answered I must have spent at least half an hour trying to make sure every word in my one or two sentence replies was on message. They had to say: I am appreciative of your attention, but hopefully my dismissiveness is enough to put you off trying to meet up with me again.

By Monday I’d almost forgotten about the whole thing and when I walked straight out of the building, looking down at the screen of my phone, I nearly collided with her. The only reason I didn’t was because I stumbled at the last minute, nearly falling ungracefully onto the asphalt. I stood up straight again, staring down at those blonde curls and trying to steady myself. Who stands in the middle of the pavement right in front the door of an office building?

This girl, apparently. She smiled brightly up at me. “Min!” she said, and then her smile faded. For a moment I thought she might actually apologize for nearly giving me a heart attack. That moment passed quickly. “Or should I, like, call you Miss Lee?”

Yes, I’m far more likely to be offended if you call me by my first name than, say, if you were to use the internet to stalk me to my house. Or scare the hell out of me outside my work. “’Min’ is fine.”

As the shock faded and my senses returned, I remembered what had happened last time she had accosted me. Looking around us, I was grateful there were far less people on the street at this time of night than there had been last week. I checked my phone. “…It’s seven.”

The girl smiled. “I know,” she said, and then changed the subject. “You can call me ‘Bree’, too. No one can pronounce my surname anyway. Have you had dinner yet?”

I was still stuck on the part where she was waiting for me outside work at seven pm. “Aren’t your parents going to be wondering where you are?”

At the mention of her parents, she made a face and her nose crinkled. “No,” she said more firmly than I expected. “I said I’m at Courtney’s and Courtney owes me so she won’t say anything.”

I wasn’t that happy about a schoolkid lying to her parents about her whereabouts to lay in wait for me outside my work. Actually, that was way back up there with putting coffee on my doorstep in the small hours of the morning. Bree didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the fact she was lying to her parents, though. She didn’t even have anything more to say about it.

“Anyway, I’ve been here for ages and I’m really hungry,” she just said. “I was thinking we could go grab some dinner. There’s this great restaurant in Darling Harbour, you’ll love it.”

Hang on a second, what? “Slow down,” I told her, holding my hands up. “You’re in the city at seven at night by yourself, your parents don’t know where you are, and you think it’s a good idea to stay out even later? You need to go home right now.”

She didn’t look deterred at all. “I’m not by myself now,” she pointed out. “Trains run until midnight, anyway, so I can just get one later. One of your earrings is falling out.”

My eyebrows went up and automatically I reached up to my ears. She was right, so I fixed it.

As I was doing that, she slung her Cloverfield bag over her shoulder. “Come on,” she said, as if I’d never told her to go home. “The restaurant is like ten minutes this way and believe me the food is awesome.”

I didn’t budge. How the hell did she expect this was going to turn out? “Bree,” I said, feeling weird about using her name, but I wanted to get her attention. “What on earth are you doing, exactly?”

She turned back towards me with a blank expression. “Darling Harbour is this way and that’s where—”

“Waiting here, I mean,” I said, interrupting her. “The coffee, the messages. All of this – lying to your parents. Why are you doing all this? What’s the point?”

She looked so earnest. “I’m going to make friends with you,” she said. “I decided it last week. And it’s not like I can just hang out with you in school, is it? So here I am now.” She held her arms out to present herself.

I didn’t even know which part of that to be more alarmed by. “At seven pm on a school night.” Then the rest of what she’d said hit me. “Wait a minute, you’re going to? Just like that?”

She pointed a finger at me as if she was telling me off. “It’s not my fault you work long hours. I’ve been waiting here since four-thirty. You took so long even my iPod went flat. If you worked the same hours as a normal person I’d be home by now.”

I can only imagine the expression I had on my face. “So the fact you’re out late is my fault now?” I didn’t even know where to go with that. Was she completely insane? “And you’ve just decided that’s how it’s going to be? That we’re going to be friends and that’s that?”

She just nodded. She just nodded?

I didn’t even know where to start. I’d only just met this girl and already I wanted to wrap my hands around her neck and shake some sense into her. She drove me nuts. Who the hell stalks someone to their house just to leave coffee for them? And Henry had just drank it, too, like it was nothing. If he’d have known what sort of nutcase she was, he’d probably have left it. I second-guessed that. No, he’d have said very calmly that some people are difficult but that doesn’t mean they are crazy. He wouldn’t get angry, he’d just focus on rebutting what was said by focusing on key details.

But, fuck, I was no Henry. I tried anyway. “Bree,” I said, trying to be calm and not strangle her. “I’m twenty-five. I don’t know how old you are, but—”

“Eighteen,” she said, interrupting me. She paused for a second. “Okay, not really. But my birthday’s in a couple of weeks, so…”

I had been about to explain that the age gap was too big for a friendship ever to work, but then before I said anything I’d counted in my head and realized the age gap was seven years. Seven years, that was the same gap as between Henry and I, and we got along really well. Shit. I’d pinned her at maybe fourteen or fifteen and what I had been about to say had been based on that. Now I didn’t really know what I could say. If she was that close to being an adult, I also wondered if it was such a huge drama that she was out at seven on a school night, too.

Sensing a moment of weakness, she went in for the kill. “Come on,” she said, with a big grin on her face and big puppy-dog eyes aimed right at me. “It’s just dinner. What have you got to lose?”

I could feel myself wavering on that decision and I didn’t like it, not at all. This wasn’t going to happen. It couldn’t, it was stupid. She was a school kid. “What makes you so sure you want to be friends with me?”

She was leaning on one of her hips, and she was smiling at me like she already knew what was going to happen. “Uh, because you’re awesome?”

Nice try, I wasn’t ‘awesome’, that was for sure. I didn’t like the smug edge on her smile, either. “I don’t know why you think that, or why you think it’s going to work—”

“I don’t think it’s going to work,” she told me as if she was delivering a universal truth, “I know it’s going to work. My grandmother cured her cancer like that. It’s all in the mind.” She tapped her head and her curls bounced.

She was missing the point and I wasn’t sure how I felt about being compared to a terminal illness. “But I’m not ‘awesome’ and I don’t know who you think I am. A couple of weeks ago you thought I was a guy, so, no disrespect, but you have no idea about me. I’m not whatever you’ve decided I am.”

She actually laughed at me; it was a really unexpected reaction and for just a second I felt really humiliated. “Min, you are so uptight,” she said, walking up toward me. “Come on, let’s just go have dinner!”

I put my hands up to stop her from coming any closer. I just… did this girl have no boundaries? This was absolutely and completely ridiculous and it was not going any further. She wasn’t even listening to me. “Look, just stop.” I said. “I don’t want to see anyone, I don’t want to have dinner with anyone. After work I just want to go home, put on something comfortable and relax. I’m going home.”

“You can relax in this restaurant, it’s really comfy,” she said, again missing the point.

Yeah, no. “Bree,” I said firmly. “I’m going home.” I even went as far as to attempt to keep walking up the road past her, but one of those little arms shot out and grabbed mine.

I looked down at my trapped wrist, and then up at those rosy cheeks. Bree beamed at me. “Trust me, you’d rather be in this restaurant with me.”

That was the last place I would rather be and just as I opened my mouth to say as much, she released my wrist. Before I realized what she was doing and what was going on, she’d wrenched my handbag off my shoulder and ran a few paces away from me with it.

I couldn’t say anything, I just gaped at her. Did she really just do that?

She had a wide grin on her face. “Now you have to come,” she said, holding up my handbag under her chin, and then glancing back down at it. “Wow, is this Coach? It’s really nice.”

“Bree!” I said, listening to the ragged edge in my voice. “What the fuck are you doing? This is not okay, give that back!”

She was smiling so widely her teeth were showing. “Come and get it.”

I still had my phone, and I held it up. “I swear to god I will call the police if you don’t give it back.”

“Or,” she said mischievously, “you could just come have dinner with me.”

She waggled my handbag.

I had literally dialled triple-0 and had the phone to my ear, rehearsing what I was going to say in my head when I realized how stupid it sounded. How stupid it made me sound. I put my phone down again. She was tiny, what the hell were they going to say if they did come? I sighed.

Bree lit up. “You’re going to come? Really?” she asked, and the genuine excitement in her voice just gave me a stronger desire to beat her to death. It was cute, and that made it harder to focus on the part where she was a crazy fucking stalker-criminal.

“Give my bag back to me right now,” I said. “And I might consider it.”

Obediently, she trotted over and delivered my handbag. My original plan had been to get my bag back, lecture her on her appalling behaviour and then just storm off. But she was looking right up at me with those adoring eyes and, actually, I just felt bad. She wasn’t twenty-five, she was a teenager. She was just being young and stupid, and she just wanted to have dinner with her favourite artist at any cost. And what was her favourite artist doing? Being a grump.

Fuck.

“Okay,” I said, regretting it even as I was saying it. “Just dinner, and just once. But you have to promise not to ever do anything like this again.”

She stared at me for a second like she couldn’t believe it, and then jumped up and down. “Oh my god, really?” she said, practically squealing. “Really? Yes, okay! I promise!” And just in case there was any way in which I wasn’t extremely uncomfortable with everything that was happening, she reached across between us and took my hand to lead me. It was like being dragged along the footpath by the human version of a small fluffy terrier.

Bree talked the whole way. The whole way. By the time we were seated at the table on the balcony of an ugly modern restaurant that clearly took itself far too seriously, I think I knew everything about all of her classmates and could also draw some of their family trees. Slumped in my chair, I stared across the table at her as she babbled away. I had never met anyone who talked as much as she did; she filled every second of airspace. I actually wasn’t sure I’d said as many words in my life as she’d said in half an hour.

I looked around us to see who was listening. One of the waiters smiled at me, but it was a very professional smile. I wondered what he was really thinking about what was going on. A chatty schoolgirl eating dinner with, well, whatever I looked like. I’d had a long day at work so whatever it was, it was probably terrible. My hair was probably all over the place, and it probably looked even worse next to Bree’s. There was no chance we’d be mistaken for relatives, either. Maybe they’d think I was her teacher?

“My cousin had her wedding reception here,” Bree was saying, oblivious to my discomfort. “It was wild, there were like two hundred people and we were so loud someone called the police on us and it wasn’t even midnight. Are you vegetarian?”

I blinked. “Uh,” I said. “No.”

“Neither am I,” she said, playing with the swan-shaped folded serviette. She put the serviette ring on its head like a crown while she kept talking. “I tried for, like, two weeks once but then this friend of mine had her birthday had TGI’s and I was like, ‘I could just starve or I could enjoy myself’, you know? I only did it in the first place because there was this guy who was into me and he kept trying to make me eat at his family’s restaurant and I wanted to make him feel so bad he never asked me again. So I was, like, ‘Yeah, sorry, I can’t eat any of those sweet little baby lambs you’ve hacked up and shoved on a skewer’.”

While I was just shifting awkwardly in my seat and listening to her, the smiling waiter walked up to our table and placed menus in front of us. I was glad I had something else to do other than just sit there are try to look relaxed when I really wasn’t.

The first thing I noticed when I opened the gold-leafed menu was the price of the food here.

I’m pretty sure I made some awful, strangled sound. It wasn’t like I’d have trouble affording anything, but the presumptuousness of this girl was unbelievable. Two hundred dollars for a steak? Was the cow educated in Swiss finishing school and ritually blessed before being hand-carried to the restaurant by twelve virgins dressed in white? What the hell could make a steak be worth that much money?

I was going to need some serious assistance to deal with all this. I held the wine list up at the waiter and pointed at one of them. “In a glass, please, but fill it to the lip.” The waiter nodded and left us to select our meals.

Bree was giggling at me as I took a deep breath and braved the menu again. My opinion of the prices must have been obvious. “Now you know why I can’t come here by myself!” she said, and then flipped the pages of her own menu. “So how much do you get paid, anyway? You work at Frost, so it must be heaps.”

I looked up sharply at her. “Why?” I asked flatly. “Are you planning on robbing me? Because I hate to tell you, but you missed a golden opportunity to do that before.”

She looked delighted I was finally speaking in full sentences. “Yeah, totally! I’m going to steal all your money. That would go really well. I’m like half your size, you could just, like, breathe on me and I’d blow off into the distance.” She’d felt pretty strong when she was dragging me down the road. “You’re really tall, by the way. That must be so cool. I always wondered what it was like to be tall.”

Hah, ‘cool’, sure. I didn’t really want to talk about what it was like being my height. “Have you thought about what university you’re going to go to yet?”

She didn’t look surprised by the fact I’d changed the subject at all. “Nah,” she said, rolling with the topic change. “I don’t even know if I’m going to go to uni. My cousin went to uni and now she doesn’t have a job and she has an enormous HELP debt.” While she was talking, she’d stuck her knife into the prongs of her fork and was trying to balance them on the rim of her glass. “I guess it doesn’t matter now, since she’s pregnant. She’ll probably just stay at home. Do you have any kids?”

She was giving me whiplash. “No.”

“Do you want kids?”

Henry wanted kids. “Do you?”

Bree grinned. “Yeah,” she said. “I’d have heaps so that if any of them turn out like my brother I can just focus on the other ones. Would you be, like, really disappointed if I just ordered Fish and Chips? Even if it’s really boring? I just kind of want something extremely deep fried right now.”

Yeah, I didn’t know how I was going to cope with her ordering Fish and Chips because I’d pinned all my hopes on her ordering the Holy Steak. “Order whatever you like, I’m still going broke.”

She laughed and stood up in her chair. Before I could stop her, she was shouting out to the waiter inside across all the softly talking patrons on the balcony. “Hey! We’d like to order!”

When she sat back down again, I think I’d shrunk as low in my chair as I could without actually sliding under the table. “You’re supposed to wait your turn.”

She shrugged, not at all worried. “Yeah, but they might take ages and I’m really hungry,” she said. “What are you having?”

No idea, I thought, since you haven’t given me the opportunity decide. I’d probably just have a warm salad, anyway. I’d had a lot of bad food during the week, and as Mum said, I didn’t want to be fat as well as tall.

After we’d ordered, I looked over the balcony and realized the sun was setting. Where we were seated had an unobstructed view of Darling Harbour, and with the sun disappearing behind the buildings, it was colouring the water. The scene was very beautiful, especially with all the neon lights and torches along waterfront. It would make a good painting, actually, and this angle was just perfect.

While I was trying to figure out how I’d frame it, I heard a fake shutter click.

When I looked abruptly back at Bree, she had her mobile pointed at me. Tilting her head a little, she considered the picture. “That’s the first time I’ve seen you smile,” she said, glancing up at me over the screen and then raising her eyebrows when she saw my expression. “…And there it goes.” She held her phone out at me so I could see the photo. “Look? It’s nice.”

If I was in it, it wasn’t a nice photo. I did her the courtesy of looking at it anyway, but I just snorted. That was not a nice photo.

She made a face, snatching her phone back and examining it again. “Are you serious? It’s great!” She unpinched the screen and zoomed in. “Look! You have a dimple.”

I did not have anything of the sort. She was the one with dimples. I looked again, anyway, and saw how high my collar was sitting and wished I’d worn something else. Or just gone home and taken everything off. As I was scrutinizing myself, her phone locked automatically again. That painting I’d done was her lockscreen.

A glass of red landed in front of me on the table and I thanked the waiter, glancing at Bree and wincing. He gave me a secret smile back as he left. Bree was still looking at the photo, and I was worried if I just left it she might try to take more. “I don’t really like being photographed.”

“I’ll fix that,” she said immediately and with the same conviction she put behind everything she said. “Why, anyway? Do you have a thing about your nose or something?”

My hand shot up to the bridge of my nose. I’d never even thought about it. Was there something wrong with it? “My nose…?”

She looked surprised for a second and then laughed. “Oh, like, I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with your nose! It’s just some people have weird issues with random body parts and don’t want to be in photos, that’s all!” She paused, watching me feel the shape of it. “Oh, my god, do you really have a thing about your nose? That’s stupid. You’re gorgeous.”

Bree looked like the adult version of one of Bouguereau’s cherubs, so I didn’t think she’d understand what it was like to not resemble a classic masterpiece and therefore not want to be photographed. I certainly wasn’t going to try and explain it to her, either. Anyway, it wasn’t parts of me I had issues with, it was the whole thing. I took a sip of my wine as Bree took photos of her serviette swan with the serviette ring crown. Then again, was it actually the whole thing I hated? I’d really liked that painting I’d done of myself, and there weren’t many parts of me I’d changed dramatically for that. Just two, in fact. I looked down at them in my blouse.

No sooner had I done that, my heart pounded. I put my wine glass back down on the table so I didn’t spill it.

Dangerous fucking ground, Min, I told myself firmly as I closed my eyes for a moment. Just stop. You are who you are, learn to deal with it.

“Hey, can I have a sip of your wine?”

I opened my eyes again, still a bit spun. “You’re underage,” I reminded her, “that’s against the law.”

She scoffed. “We jay-walked on the way here and that’s against the law. It’s too late, you’re already a criminal. Just give me one little sip, okay?” Before I could stop her, she’d reached over and wrapped her fingers around the stem of the glass. If I tried to struggle with it, red wine would probably spill all over the table and all over me. I couldn’t do anything else, so I just let her take it.

She did not just have ‘one little sip’. “This is gross,” she said, wrinkling up her nose as she swallowed big gulps of it. “How can you even drink this?” Despite her assessment, she kept going and she’d drunk nearly half the glass before she gave it back to me. I stared at it while she said, “It’s probably best you don’t drink it all, anyway.” She giggled. “I don’t like my chances of being able to carry you home.”

Home sounded great right about now. God, I was just so damn tired all of a sudden. I just wanted to shut myself somewhere.

“Just you wait,” she said, leaning across the table to pat my hand. “You’re going to love the food! It’s completely awesome. You’re going to wish you could have dinner here every night.” She stopped to think for a second. “You probably could afford that anyway, right? Oh, my god. If I could afford it I’d eat every meal at this place. Maybe I’d start a food blog.”

I knew what I’d call it, too: Adventures in Bankruptcy: Culinary Edition. It was a great idea. I could go bankrupt and get fat, all in one. Then I could be tall, fat and broke. How attractive. Well, at least I’d be well-fed, I thought, as the waiter came bustling over and placed two very large plates in front of us.

Bree was actually right about the food. It was great. Although, given the fact the price rolled into three digits for each dish, I would have been pissed off if the food hadn’t been life-changing. It was so great that it even succeeded in distracting me from my pathetic self-loathing for at least a few minutes. I’d have to remember to thank the twelve virgins dressed in white before I left.

I had thought maybe the food would shut Bree up, but she just kept talking through every mouthful. “So the school dance is in April,” she was saying, “And Courtney wants to take my brother which is so fucked up I don’t even know where to start. She was like, ‘You can just take my brother’, but her brother is this hideous monster who talks about girls like ‘pussy’ this and ‘tits’ that, and I’m like, ‘why would you force me to spend time with that loser’?” Bree held her fork up towards the ceiling, examining a chip she’d speared with it, before putting it in her mouth. I supposed I should be happy she was at least using the knife and fork and not her fingers. “She just wants to feel like she’s not an awful person, I guess. Whatever, though. Would you date your best friend’s brother?”

“Uh…”

“Yeah, exactly,” Bree said, interpreting that as my answer. “It is so not right. I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. Maybe I just won’t go. I really don’t want to see them be all gross together. I hate it when people are like that. Do you have boyfriend? Hang on, didn’t you mention him in one of your messages? He works for Frost, too, right?” She didn’t even stop for a breath so I could answer. “Wow, it must have been really hard finding someone as tall as you. Is he as tall as you?”

Even though I knew she wasn’t trying to be mean, that comment stung me a little. I was already not feeling that great about myself. “Yeah,” I said dismissively. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

She shook her head, peeling the batter off her fish and eating it first. “I go to an all-girls school,” she said. “St. Anthony’s is our brother school, but all the boys there are idiots, and they only want one thing anyway, you know? They just stare straight at my boobs and, like, why would I choose to date that? So how long have you known your boyfriend? What’s his name?”

“Does that matter?”

She gave me a stern look and waved her fork at me. “Friends know friends’ boyfriends’ names.”

“It’s Henry,” I said, giving up.

“Henry,” Bree repeated, testing the name out. “That sounds so totally proper. Is he Asian, too? Or Aussie?” He’s both, I thought, but didn’t say so because she’d probably miss the point, anyway. Trying to follow all of this was really draining me. “Must be weird to work with him. Weird and cool. Actually, it would kind of be cool to work in an office. I always wanted to work in an office.”

I sighed at that, and she noticed. “Careful what you wish for.”

She stopped eating for a second to watch me. “I thought you loved your job?”

Loved? Hah. “I’ve got a good job, that’s true.”

She actually spent a few seconds considering me where she didn’t talk. “You’re this amazing artist, so I don’t really know why you do the whole Corporate Barbie thing, anyway,” she said, going for another mouthful. “It totally doesn’t suit you, you shouldn’t bother with it.”

Wow, I… felt like I’d had a knife shoved into my chest. Had she really just said that?

It knocked the wind out of me and I sat there reeling for a second. I knew it didn’t suit me, did she think I needed some crazy, hyperactive teenager reminding me of that? I knew no matter how much I curled my hair or bought expensive makeup or wore Jimmy Choos, it didn’t suit me. I still felt like an imposter. But I didn’t have any choice, so what the fuck was I supposed to do? Go to work dressed in a sheet?

Just, no. No. I was exhausted. I’d had enough, I couldn’t do this. I’d spent at least a couple of hours with this girl, I’d earned myself some space. I pushed back my chair and stood.

I just really wanted to go home and lock my fucking door and forget everything that had happened between seven and now.

Bree’s face fell. “Where are you going?” she asked, and I could hear the waver in her voice. “We haven’t even had dessert yet!”

I shook my head, I didn’t want to explain. She guessed anyway and looked stricken. “I didn’t mean it like that, Min,” she said, standing and trying to reach for me. I avoided her as I neatly collected my bag and walked up to the desk. While I was handing my credit card over, Bree abandoned her meal and came running up to me. “I meant that I just hate the whole Barbie thing in general and that you seem like the kind of person who would be above all that superficial image stuff!”

I had no idea if that was true or not and I didn’t have the energy to think about it. The waitress looked between us, but didn’t comment as she ran my card and let me sign the receipt.

Bree put both her arms around one of mine. “Please don’t go, Min,” she said. “I’ll be quiet, I promise!”

Somehow I doubted it. “Where do you live?” I asked her calmly. She frowned at me. “How far away from here is your house?”

“Courtney lives near Parramatta,” she said when she figured out what I meant. She sounded crestfallen. “I’m going back to hers tonight.”

I took a fifty out of my wallet, opened her hand and gave it to her. She just stared at it. “That should be enough for a taxi,” I told her, deliberately not looking at her so I didn’t have to be subjected to those big puppy-dog eyes. “I’m going home. Please don’t try and stop me this time.”

Of course she did, anyway. She followed me out of the restaurant, and as I was walking along the waterfront she grabbed my wrists and tried to put the fifty back in my hand. “Min, I don’t want your money. I didn’t mean it like that. Just come back in and have dessert.” She didn’t sound as enthusiastic as she had earlier in the evening, and I didn’t think she was channelling her cancer-curing grandmother anymore. She just sounded really disappointed.

She probably was disappointed. But I just couldn’t do this, I felt really weird and I just wanted to go home. “You managed to get your dinner,” I said, probably sounding as tired as I felt. “Now can you just leave me alone?”

She didn’t let go. “Please,” she said, sounding desperate. “Please don’t go. I’m sorry. I know I say things without thinking, but whatever I say I never mean it like that. You’re awesome. Please just come back inside. The dessert here is incredible, you’ll enjoy it, you really will…”

I had to physically pry her fingers one by one from my arm in order to get her off me. This time, though, she let me. She didn’t even steal my handbag again. When I was free, I gave her one last look. “Make sure you get a taxi,” I told her. “Don’t risk the train this late at night, okay?”

She just nodded mutely, her hands by her side for once. She didn’t say anything else and I could hardly fucking bear to look at her because she just looked so upset. Over a goddamn meal, seriously? Who was this girl?

I turned away from her and continued towards the bridge, feeling my stomach sink. Now, on top of everything, I also felt like a terrible person. I just seriously didn’t have the energy to deal with her right now. I just couldn’t, no matter how upset she was. I felt like complete and utter crap in general, and my feet were killing me in these stupid shoes. What had I been thinking in the first place, anyway? I should just have gone straight home after work. Then I could have avoided hurting her feelings, avoided having mine hurt and felt like crap quietly in the privacy of my own apartment. Somewhere that didn’t have people walking past me who all double-took when they noticed how tall I was. I wonder if they all thought I shouldn’t bother, as well.

Before I stepped onto the footbridge, I looked back towards the restaurant. Bree was still standing there on the waterfront, watching me.

As if I wasn’t feeling crap enough.

She’ll be fine, I told myself, she can catch a taxi home. I kept walking.

It was a good thing I’d disabled vibrate on my mobile, because when my alarm went off in the morning, there were a hundred and nine messages waiting for me on Deviant Art.  I lay there, half dead, staring at the little white numerals at the corner of my screen and wondering if I had double-vision or something. I’d never gotten that many messages for my stuff before. Maybe it had been featured?

I tabbed through them, expecting the usual series of ‘omg wow’s to the extremely occasional detailed critique from someone who knew what they were talking about, but that didn’t even begin to resemble what the messages actually were. They were mostly from women, and mostly telling me how hot the ‘me’ in the painting was.

I scrolled down and down and down through them, the surprise waking me up a lot faster than I normally did. Sure, I’d selected ‘self-portrait’ as the category, but didn’t they look up in the corner of my page and see that I was a… oh, right. A year or two ago I’d changed my profile so it hid that I was female because I was sick of creeps hitting on me with lines like, ‘looks like you’re pretty good with your hands’. Yeah, no.

I put my phone down on my chest and lay flat on my back, staring at the ceiling fan rotating slowly above me. All those women wanted that guy in my ‘self-portrait’. How ironic. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry, so I just laughed bleakly. I would have been great as a guy, too. Women loved tall men. Conversely, men hated tall women. Well, most men.

I buried my head in my pillow and groaned loudly into it. Okay, well. I had a presentation today and I couldn’t spend all morning stressing about that stupid painting and those poor women who had no idea they were lusting after a fictional character. I changed my mind several times over whether or not to display my sex again, and in the end I decided to just do it.

I was in a weird mood the whole time I got dressed, especially as I watched myself hopping around in the mirror trying to get my stockings on. As nice as it was having people hot for what they thought I was, it was also kind of depressing. I couldn’t let those women keep assuming I was some sort of stud when this was the reality.

I stopped awkwardly stumbling around for a moment and just stood and stared at my reflection. I was wearing a bra and undies that didn’t match, and my stockings were cutting into my stomach. There was nothing in the world less sexy than this. It was a pretty far cry from that stylish guy reclined in an expensive suit on the balcony. Those poor women. It was just dishonest to let them keep complimenting me. Fuck, though, it felt good when they did.

While I was doing my makeup, I toyed with the idea of just taking down the painting. The trouble was, as much anxiety as it was causing me, I liked it. Repertoire-wise it also showed that I wasn’t just good for environments and nothing else. Not that I should really care that much about my repertoire at the moment;  there was no way I had time for private commissions and it wasn’t like I needed the money. I decided I actually just really liked the painting. I liked it, and I didn’t want to take it down.

After I was done with my face, I wasted a minute or so frowning at Deviant Art again before I slipped on my heels, collected my handbag and headed off to work. This was ridiculous, seriously. Sales was running my team’s pitch today and that was what I should be focusing on.

Once I’d arrived at work, I didn’t even get to sit down before one of my teammates came rushing over to me. “Hey, Mini!” he began, using the ironic nickname they all had for me which I hated. “Did Sales give you a copy of the info pack? Because they’re in some meeting somewhere and I don’t think we transferred all the files onto the USBs in them. I want to check before I just go barging in on them.”

I shook my head as I side-stepped around him and put my handbag into my drawer. I never worked on those, which he should know by now since we’d been in the same department for four years. Anyway, apparently this file transfer issue was some enormous drama that required the whole team to freak out. I knew marketing was all about teamwork and I was supposed to actually care about stuff like this, but I was seriously too tired. I’d been back here while they were all home with their families or relaxing in front of the TV, as far as I was concerned they could panic without me. Perhaps that was a bit harsh. Most of them were pretty nice, I guess. Given the option, though, I’d design whole projects by myself. Even after several years, teamwork was still up there with group assignments, rocket lettuce and sunburn; things I’d rather avoid if at all possible.

Well, whatever ‘teamwork’ they were doing on the other side of the partition was making Michelangelo’s head nod. I watched it for a few moments. This was way too much energy for eight on a Tuesday morning on the amount of sleep I’d had. I needed a Red Bull.

Another marketing rep I’d worked with some time ago was already at the machine, stuffing coins into it as I walked up to her. Sarah, her name was, except everyone tended to call her by her surname which was ‘Presti’ for inappropriate reasons. I didn’t.

“Hey, Min! Long time no see,” she said as I walked up to her. I smiled at her greeting. Her voice was husky; it was the kind of voice you ended up with after spending all night getting drunk at a bar and singing loudly along with the music. Even with makeup, she looked that part as well. The concealer was doing nothing for the bags under her eyes. She gave me about the same look I was giving her. “Guess you were here late, again?”

I sighed. “To about eleven,” I said, watching her select a low cal from the panel. “How are you, anyway? I haven’t seen you for ages.”

She collected her energy drink, held it at me in a toast and then took a huge mouthful. “How’s that for an answer?”

I laughed. I knew exactly how she felt. “I hear you. My team’s running that Queensland pitch today.”

“Oh, right,” she said, leaning a shoulder on the machine. Her hair fell perfectly around those slender shoulders even though she wasn’t paying any attention to it. How did other women just do that? “I heard about that. That’s a major project, isn’t it? You must be so excited.” She said the last part with such exaggeration it was practically dripping with sarcasm.

I grinned. “Like it’s my wedding day. I don’t know how I’m going to contain myself.” When she realised she was blocking my access to the machine, she shifted across a bit so I could get a drink for myself. I glanced up at her while I slotted coins in. “You look like you pulled a late one yourself. What’s your excuse?”

She laughed. “My man just got back from Broome. He’s doing FIFO this year. It’s, uh, great to have him back if you catch my drift.” She had a smug grin as she took a sip of her energy drink.

Well, that explained the husky voice: it wasn’t drunken singing, they’d just been keeping each other up. She seemed happy about it, too; I knew she was really into him. “How long has it been for you two, now?”

“Three whole years.” Her smile didn’t slip at all.

“Wow,” I said, opening my own can. I remembered when they’d met. “Three years? You do know I sell diamonds for a living, right? You’re practically my target market.”

She waggled her ring finger on the can. “You should study me,” she said. “And write a report about my shopping behaviour.”

“I’ll make some illustrative graphs to explain you,” I agreed. “Please specify your preferred colour scheme.”

She laughed openly and patted me sociably on the arm. I wasn’t actually a big fan of being touched, but I quite liked her so I let it slide. She’d always made working long hours far less torturous. “Min, you completely crack me up,” she said. “I hope we’re on another project together at some point. Anyway,” she checked her watch, which had fashionably slipped to the inside of her wrist, “I should let you get on with it, your pitch is in like forty-five minutes. Good luck!”

I smiled appreciatively, she was right about getting on with it. If I cared about career progression, I needed to at least feign helpfulness despite my role being complete. Standing chatting at a vending machine wasn’t likely to score me any points with the bosses.

“See you ‘round,” she said, and then with zero attention and effort, sashayed gorgeously back to where her team were gathered. I wished it were easier to hate her; some women just made everything look so easy.

The actual pitches were always completely anti-climactic as far as I was concerned. My job was mainly managing the design and layout of the materials and presentation, and then someone far more bubbly and outgoing would deliver it to clients. After that, we’d break for lunch and all the smooth-talking closers from Sales would casually mingle with the clients while they ate, engaging them in pleasant conversation until there were signatures on contracts. I found the whole process sleazy and was glad I didn’t have to be part of it. Just in case there was a terrible PowerPoint crisis, however, I needed to be on hand to divert catastrophic presentation failure. I was yet to figure out why IT couldn’t do that, but I guessed it was more of this ‘teamwork’ thing I kept hearing about.

During lunch, we all stood at an acceptable distance from the conference room, waiting for the word on whether or not we’d been immediately successful. Sometimes clients wanted to go away and have endless meetings before they’d make a decision, occasionally we’d find out directly afterwards. We all hung around just in case.

I had my mobile with me because I’d missed a couple of calls from my mum before, and being a hopeless masochist, I’d opened the painting again to agonize over. There were more comments on it, and the image was on the front page of the category it was in. I couldn’t stop reading and the better I felt about the compliments, the more I felt like I was staging this huge lie to the women of the internet.

While my finger was hovering indecisively over the ‘delete’ button, all the boys started whooping and, remembering how close they were to the conference room, almost immediately muted themselves. Instead, they smacked each other’s shoulders and made borderline offensive victory gestures. It was like being at the footy.

We must have signed the clients, but truthfully I wasn’t really that surprised. It was a pretty hard market at the moment so as long as we were actually able to deliver we’d get the contracts.

Whoops, what was I saying? Of course it was obviously my amazing presentation that won them over.

When the clients had left and Sales started trickling out of the room with their chests puffed out, I saw Diane Frost shake hands with Omar the Sales Manager and then walk sharply over to us. I watched the boys all turn from drunken yobbos into executive marketing reps on six figure salaries in the space of about two seconds.

She stopped in front of our team and just stood there for a moment. Fuck, she was scary. “Congratulations on the pitch,” she said cordially, but it was difficult to know if she meant that or if it was just her way of saying hello. Then, she held up one of the brochures from the info pack like it was evidence in a murder trial. “Who did this?”

I started to sweat; that was one of my brochures, and it stood out like a sore thumb in our greyscale office. I’d chosen a really bold colour scheme because the set of companies we were pitching to used really strong themes in their own advertising and I wanted them to feel like they were holding their own material. Now that I looked at it, though, the colours were really fucking loud. Obviously too loud for Frost International. Shit.

I hadn’t said anything, not that it was a huge surprise. One of my teammates spoke for me. “That’s Mini’s work,” he said, indicating me. “She does presentations and print.”

“’Minnie’?” she asked, looking at me for clarification of my name. Recognition crossed her face.

I swallowed. No one was going to field this one for me. “Min. Min Lee.”

She looked down at the loud brochure, and then thoughtfully back at me. “You again,” she said obliquely. “’Min Lee’.” Was she trying to commit my name to memory? When she spoke to us all again, her smile was the epitome of ‘professional’. “Good work, that contract is worth six million.” She nodded her head amiably towards the lifts. “Get out of here, go celebrate.”

She gave me one last look before heading back into her office.

We all just stood there. One of the boys exhaled. “I feel like I just watched a Kung-Fu movie,” he said. “You guys will deck it out now, right? What the hell was that about?”

I shook my head, my heart still going for it. She seemed to have congratulated us all for the pitch? I was part of ‘all’, right? Still, I felt uneasy about that whole exchange and more than anything I wanted closure on it. It didn’t look like I was going to get any, though, because Diane shut her office door behind her and had settled behind her computer again.

Our project manager had been working at Frost International for ten years and didn’t look too bothered by what had happened. “Nah, if Diane was pissed off at any of us, we’d know about it,” he said. “That was about as close as she gets to telling us we’re awesome.” He swung his arms around the shoulders over the two reps either side of him. “Come on, let’s go have lunch and then get wasted on the company card.”

We’d all gone back to our desks to collect our things when a familiar voice greeted me. “Min,” that was Henry. I straightened to greet him and noticed his tie actually matched his suit today which was a bit of a shock. He stopped short of kissing me on the cheek; it probably would have been okay, but just to be safe he didn’t. He just put a warm hand on my arm. “I just read the email. Congratulations. Also would you answer your phone? Your mum’s been trying to call you. She just rang me to tell you that.”

There goes any last remnants of a good mood, I thought and groaned out loud. “Are you serious? Sorry,” I said and took my phone out of my handbag again. Sure enough, I had another missed call as well as a whole series of new comments on that painting. I wasn’t sure what was worse, strangers stressing me out or my mother doing it. “Give me a sec,” I said to him and put the phone against my ear.

It hardly rang once. “Min, why have you been avoiding me?” Despite the fact she spoke perfect English and my Korean was crap, she still refused to speak in English to me. “I’ve been ringing you all morning.”

Even Henry heard that. He laughed as I said in English, “Because I’m at work.”

“Henry’s at work, too,” she fired back, very pointedly in Korean. I gave him a look that warned him never to answer the phone to her again and he threw his hands up in self-defence as she kept going. “I’ve been worrying about your presentation all morning.” I bet she’d even put it in her calendar. “How did it go? Did you all close that big contract?”

“About five minutes ago, actually.” I decided not to tell her about my weird exchange with the co-CEO, because it would only make her worry even more. “Now we’re all going out to have a big lunch to celebrate, so I have to go in a couple of seconds.”

“Don’t eat too much,” she said. “Henry will never marry you if you’re tall and fat.”

Henry snorted. “Don’t believe anything she says,” he whispered, making me feel really uneasy. He didn’t notice because he was leaning into the phone and saying in Korean that put mine to shame, “Don’t worry, she still looks like a supermodel.” I sighed at him. “For now,” he added, smirking at me. “She did just discover Krispy Kreme.”

Both of them, seriously. I couldn’t roll my eyes enough and Mum was still having a go at me. “Nonsense, supermodels don’t slouch like Min does.”

Okay, I’d had it, that was enough talking about me. I looked directly at Henry as I asked Mum clearly, “How’s grandma?”

That question stopped the torrent of judgments about me, but unfortunately it got Mum started on a long story about their last hospital visit and a long list of conditions and medications. With my limited Korean, it made absolutely no sense and I had to just make affirmative noises intermittently to pretend I understood. I propped my mobile between my cheek and my shoulder as I checked I’d taken my purse. All my co-workers were gathering in the annex to wait for a lift. Henry tapped his watch; I nodded. I wanted to get Mum off the phone, but she didn’t have anyone else to talk to about taking care of grandma and to be honest, I didn’t call her very often.

When everyone was gone, Henry whispered something about needing to get back to work, kissed my cheek, and then disappeared as well.

It was twenty minutes before I managed to finally get rid of Mum, and as we were saying goodbye she dropped the whole angry mother thing and said, “Thank you for putting up with your terrible mother, Min. I know you don’t like talking to me at all, but I want you to know I love you anyway.”

I nearly threw my mobile across the room and stomped on it. I hated it when she pulled that crap on me, fucking hell! Swallowed those words, I said as warmly as I could manage, “Don’t be silly, thanks Mum.”

I hung up and didn’t lob my mobile into the closest wall. I didn’t do anything, I just glared at it and observed the notifications from Deviant Art building in the top corner. I didn’t do anything about them, either. It was lunchtime.

My team had wandered down the road to a bar-slash-restaurant that was on the corner of George Street and fronted Circular Quay. There were nearly ten of them, and despite the fact they’d only been there for maybe twenty minutes they were as loud as if they were already completely wasted.

“Hey, look who’s joined us!” one of them called as I stepped in the doorway. “Mini!”

There was nowhere for me to sit, and while I was scouting around for a chair I could use, one of the boys patted his thighs and said, “I got a seat for you!”

“Frost International might not have a seat for you if the manager of HR finds out you’re propositioning his girlfriend.” They all laughed as I went and stole a chair from another table, dragging it over to slot between two of the others. I don’t know what they thought Henry would do about it; we’d already decided between ourselves he wouldn’t get involved in any personnel disputes I had. It would make things too complicated for both of us.

That pretty much set the tone for the rest of lunch, though. There was some discussion about who was on which project team for the next pitch, but none of us knew what we were doing next so there wasn’t much to speculate on. We tried anyway, but eventually that topic ran out of steam and as the boys got progressively more drunk everything became progressively more awkward for me.

Every time the men would start talking about something other than work – women, money, sport – someone would remind him that there were girls present. Out of those, the only topic I could really do without was ‘women’. I didn’t mind them bitching about their girlfriends and wives, but any sort of discussion about who was hot at work or who hooked up with who from operations was something I didn’t want to be involved in.

Once we’d moved onto the topic of promotions, it was depressing how little they involved me. They all sat around the table together placing actual monetary bets on which one of them would end up being a project lead next… and no one put a cent on me. Or Sarah, for that matter. The hot favourites were a cocky guy who’d only been working with us for eight months and the current project manager because he was mature – code for ‘old’ – and apparently brought that whole fatherly thing with him to work.

As lunch progressed and everyone was boastfully handing around their phones with pictures of their wives and girlfriends, I just kind of sat back and kept chipping away at my wine. I had been admiring the paint work on the far wall – someone had painted the stone like old wooden panels and had done a pretty good job, actually – when I saw out of the corner of my eye a mobile being held at an angle that alarmed me.

I looked towards it just as it flashed. The guy behind it was the cocky new rep and he looked pretty proud of himself. “Hah, it’s great!” he said, smirking and sending it to everyone.

Just to humour them I took my phone out and looked at it. I wished I hadn’t. In the photo I was surrounded by drunk men – half of them a lot shorter than me, even sitting down – and I was glaring at the guy holding the phone. It was a bit of an eye-opener because I had felt mostly invisible while they were ignoring me, and I’d had no idea I stood out so much until I saw that photo.

As each of my teammates got the message, they were all laughing like it was the funniest thing ever. Even though there was a level of sincere affection in them playing around with me, it kind of hurt.

“This is Mini’s happy face as she celebrates?” someone said. “Fuck, I’m sending this to Sales.”

Yeah, send it to fucking everyone, I thought darkly. I don’t think there’s enough people laughing at me right now, better make sure the whole company has it. The project manager who had been setting a great ‘fatherly’ example by being the drunkest one of all of them swung his arm out and whacked me on the shoulder like I was one of the boys. “You’re fucking great, Mini,” he slurred. “My wife would kill me if I did that. But no, you’re totally cool about it.”

Nope, right now you’re lucky I don’t kill you, I thought while I smiled stiffly at him. The reps quickly got over that photo of me and moved on to someone’s ‘smoking hot’ wife in a bikini.

I watched them, feeling more and more disconnected. No wonder those internet women liked my painting, if this was what their husbands and boyfriends were actually like. It wasn’t that these guys weren’t being cruel, either, at least not deliberately. They weren’t trying to make me feel unwelcome. They were just having a good time and were completely oblivious to how out of place I felt. Or that I was here at all. It just continued to be depressing. Why the fuck was I here?

“I think I’ll head off,” I said suddenly, interrupting whoever was speaking. “Bye, guys.” I didn’t turn around to find out what their assessment of me leaving so early, either. If they were going to be here all afternoon, I was just going to go home.

While I was waiting at the lights my phone buzzed. I took it out to look at it; it was from Omar. ‘Nice photo, Mini,” he’d texted. “Definitely a character portrait haha. They should put it on your ID tag.”

Reading that just made me reach this point where I didn’t even care what happened anymore. Whatever, I thought, closing the text. If that was what everyone thought of me, whatever. I had been about to put my phone away, but there were still pending notifications from my painting.

I couldn’t deal with it now. I wanted to read them and feel good about myself for a fraction of a second, but it was all crap anyway. It wasn’t real. Actually, fuck it, I couldn’t deal with any of it, full stop. Without really thinking it through, I uploaded the photo that had just been taken as my ID on Deviant Art. There, I thought, turning off my mobile completely and putting it back in my handbag. Now those women can see who I actually am, be rightfully horrified and then everyone can just leave me alone.

I felt strangely numb and detached the whole way home, and only started to feel like an actual human again after I’d had a shower and put my pyjamas back on. Then, I had the choice of facing my computer which probably still had Deviant Art open, or turning on my PlayStation. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which option I chose.

Black Ops was already in my machine, so I flopped back on the couch and waited for a game. It was strange being home in the middle of a work day. I felt guilty, even though I’d been in the office at ten-thirty last night and even though I’d definitely served a long enough sentence with my drunk co-workers.

I chewed through game after game until there was a knock at my door. It was like being woken in the middle of a trance or something. I just sat up for a minute, feeling dazed. I looked over at the windows. It was dark outside already, what time was it?

I turned my head back to the door, and then walked over to it and peered through the peephole.

It was Henry, and he had champagne and takeaway.

I looked down my front at the faded t-shirt and baggy pants. Fuck, and I looked like crap. I didn’t even have any makeup on. “Why didn’t you give me a ten minute warning!” I hissed through the door.

“I did,” he said, not at all bothered by my reaction. “But I guess you’re still avoiding your mother and you haven’t checked your phone.” I scrunched my face up. That’s right, I’d forgotten I’d turned my phone off. My mother was the least of the things I was avoiding, but I didn’t correct him. “It’s okay, Min, I’ll just wait out here for a few minutes. I don’t mind.”

I raced back into the bedroom and tore up my drawers searching for the pair of pyjamas I always wore when Henry was over. They had an appropriately pretty, delicate pattern and were made of soft cotton and lace. They were comfortable enough, I guess, but I didn’t really like them. I couldn’t wear this t-shirt and the trackies around Henry, though. I looked like such a dag in it, and I should really make the effort for him. Ugh, and I had to put all my makeup back on, too.

When I finally let him in, I looked presentable again.

He held the champagne at me as if I hadn’t just made him wait for fifteen minutes in a hallway. “Congratulations again,” he said, and then leant across it and kissed me on the temple as he walked past me into the kitchen. “How did you celebrate?”

“By killing hundreds of people,” I told him. “Mostly with frag grenades, but I did experiment with a variety of assault rifles.”

“How educational,” he said, putting the takeaway down on my glass dining table. “Since you’ve bathed in blood, want to consume some flesh? It’s pork.” I came up behind him to peek over his broad shoulders as he opened it for me. Delicious-smelling steam poured out of the container. “Also the champagne is a really good label.”

I snorted. “Champagne is for wusses,” I said. “I prefer the tears of my enemies.”

He laughed. “I love you,” he said, turned and leant against the table. “Now, are you going to tell me why you left work so early? Not that it’s an issue given the circumstances, but it’s pretty unlike you.” I had been grinning, but as soon as he said that, it fell away. I had no idea I was that transparent, normally people couldn’t read me at all. Not even Henry. He didn’t miss my reaction this time, though. “Are you okay? Did your mother say something to you?” He pulled me into him and circled his arms around my waist.

I had a whole internal debate about whether or not to tell him about the painting, so I didn’t. I shook my head at him. “I’m just being emo again,” I said as dismissively as I could manage. “Ignore me.”

He didn’t. He never did. Instead, he took my cheeks in his huge hands. “Min,” he said sternly. “I haven’t been with you for three years to not know when you’re hiding stuff from me. It’s okay, you can tell me whatever it is.”

In the end he did coax it out of me, including what had happened at lunch and the photo I’d uploaded. I reluctantly switched my phone on and handed it to him, pointing at the notifications in the top corner. He made a surprised noise and tapped them with a fingertip.

I couldn’t bear to look at what those disappointed women were probably saying about my terrible photo, so I turned away from the screen. “You can see my painting there, too,” I told him, flopping back onto the couch and putting my ankles on the armrest and my forearms over my face. Through the gap in them, I could see he was concentrating as he tabbed through whatever he’d found on my profile. It was painful waiting for his assessment of everything, really painful. “Don’t read too much into it,” I told him anxiously, “it was just something that I did while I was—”

“It’s good, Min,” he said, interrupting me. “Actually, It’s a bit difficult to look at because of how good it is and how much it looks like you. I might start to question my sexuality.” He glanced back over at me, grinning. “That photo is actually nothing like you said it was, and I don’t know why you’d think I’d have a problem with a painting.”

Well there wasn’t much I could say to that. I had no idea what my weird problem with it was. Or why I liked it so much.

He came over and motioned for me to move my legs so he could sit under them. I lifted them up and then put them back down across his lap once he’d sat. He was still scrolling. Through what, I didn’t want to know. “I think it’s only natural you’d paint something like that,” he said, obviously about to pull out his psychobabble on me again. “For some completely unwarranted reason, you hate how you look. Of course you wish you were someone else.”

I groaned. “You know what you can do with your psychology degree?” I asked him good-naturedly.

He smirked. “I’m looking at the comments on your actual photo from these girls right now,” he told me, as if I hadn’t been about to insult him. “You want to know what they say?”

“No.”

He turned his head towards me, eyebrows up again. “Really? Because then you might start believing me when I tell you that you’re the only one who thinks you’re ugly.” He held the mobile at me.

It made my heart race. “Henry, I really don’t.”

Noting my expression, he nodded and locked it, leaning over me to place it on the coffee table. “Okay,” he said. “But can I just say there’s a whole heap of women who’d step in for me if I bailed.” He winced, thinking about that. “And I know this is really problematic on a number of levels, but that’s actually a turn on.”

“Imagining me with other people is a turn on?”

He shrugged. “I told you it was problematic. You want some champagne? Maybe that will make you feel better.”

I made a face. “Nah, I haven’t eaten anything.” I was still thinking about what he’d said. “Did all those girls really say I looked good? Because on top of looking like the grumpiest person on the planet, that photo shows what an enormous giant I am.”

He had such a warm smile. “Min,” he said gently. “I like that about you. It’s great to be able to actually feel I have my arms around another whole person, and I can’t be the only one that feels that way.”

I breathed out, watching my chest fall. I was hopeless. “It sucks that no matter how many times you tell me that, I just can’t believe it.”

There was so much affection in his eyes as he nodded. “Okay,” he said simply. “Then let me show you.”

That should have been a really sweet, romantic thing to say and I should have been completely touched and jumped lovingly into his arms. Instead, my heart sank. Of course this is where it was heading.

Even before he’d leant his torso down over me and put his lips against mine, I knew what was going to happen next. He had his eyes closed when he kissed me, too, which meant that he didn’t notice when I jammed mine shut for a second. Fuck, and he was just so goddamn wonderful that I couldn’t say I didn’t really feel like it now, could I? Not when he’d been so nice. It had been a couple of weeks, too, so it was probably about time I let him do it again.

He slipped a hand under my pyjama top. I wasn’t wearing a bra because I really didn’t need to at home, and that meant he was able to take what was actually there into his hands. He made a sound in the back of his throat and slipped one crisply suited knee between my bare ones.

I just stared up at the light fixture above my head while he kissed down my neck. Come on, Min, it’s going to be like fifteen minutes, tops. Quicker than doing the ironing. Quicker than doing my makeup, even. I should really be counting my lucky stars that I’d landed an attractive, rich, wonderful boyfriend completely unlike the idiots I worked with. He even cooked. Having sex with him was the very least I could do. Really, it wasn’t his fault he’d picked a frigid girlfriend who had weird body image issues. I shouldn’t make those things his problem when they were obviously my own.

When he started unbuttoning my pyjamas, I realized I’d just kind of been stiffly lying there. And I only realized that because he leant away from me, looking genuinely concerned. “Min,” he asked me. “You’re not up for this, are you? Because it’s fine if you’re not, I’m happy to stop.”

Looking down between us, I could already see how hard he was through his suit pants. Man, this wasn’t fair on him. I really should put in some effort. I pulled him down into a firm kiss rather than answer his question.

He leant heavily into me and his erection dug into my thigh. I slipped a hand between us to find a more comfortable position for it, and he exhaled forcefully when I touched it over the fabric.

“See?” he murmured in my ear as we kept going. “You’re gorgeous.”

It would have been over much sooner than I’d estimated before, but because Henry insisted on making sure I came first I had to put on a really convincing act about being completely into it. The whole thing took more effort than I had expected.

We were done, he always insisted on kissing for a bit. We were both a bit sweaty and it was kind of gross, but I exhaled exaggeratedly for his benefit and pretended to enjoy it, anyway. “Thanks,” I lied, feeling guilty even before I’d said it, “I needed that.”

He’d put his head on my chest, and the beginnings of stubble scratched me as he smiled. “You’re welcome,” he said breathlessly. “Do you mind if I have the first shower?”

“Go for it. I had one before.”

He pushed up, grabbed his clothes and then swaggered off into the bathroom. Pulling my pyjamas back on, I just sat there for a minute. Well, at least that was done, now we’d go a couple of weeks without him asking for it again. I was due around then, too, so maybe even a bit longer.

My stomach grumbling drove me up to go explore what food Henry had bought us; it was boxes of noodles from that Hokkein place around the corner. I couldn’t be bothered washing dishes – although to be honest Henry would probably do them, but I didn’t want that either – so I just grabbed a fork out of the drawer and took the whole box out onto the balcony.

In these pyjamas and with all my makeup on, my reflection looked quite different than the one I’d painted. I watched it as I ate a few mouthfuls of food. I didn’t like how it looked, of course, but Henry obviously did. I just didn’t understand that at all, and I wondered if he’d been lying about all those girls saying nice things about me. I wouldn’t put it past him to be that nice, honestly.

Once that thought was stuck in my head, it was difficult to dislodge. Nothing was going to settle this except actually reading them, so I abandoned my dinner on the outdoor setting and went inside to get my mobile. I didn’t open the app straight away, though. I had to spend a few seconds psyching myself up in case he had been lying and they were saying awful things about how I looked.

When I finally opened it, it only took me one glance to determine that he’d actually been telling the truth.

I scrolled through the comments. They ranged from, ‘Oooh you look so fierce! I love it!’, to ‘I like this one too J’ to ‘omg you’re so tall!! I’m jealous!!’ to, ‘yup, I’d still hit that, although it looks like it might hit me back’. There wasn’t a single nasty one at all. Judging by their usernames, most of them were women. That felt a little strange because my experience with women was that they were quite judgmental of each other. It was also strange because several of them were clearly hitting on me, which must have been what Henry was referring to earlier. I took a second to try and imagine what being with a woman would be like. Women were usually a lot smaller than me, so being the tall one and being a woman didn’t sit right. Also, the only women I could think of right then were Diane and Sarah, and both of them were just… no.

Alongside the comments there were a couple of private notes as well, so I opened my inbox and selected one. It was from one of my regulars. ‘omg ur a girl??????’ I counted them, six question marks. ‘wow okay this is a bit of a surprise!! ur still gorgeous tho*^w^*’ That was the girl who’d been having friend trouble yesterday, I think. I checked – it was. Whoops, she messaged me quite regularly and had thought I was a guy the whole time? Even though she seemed pretty fine with it, I felt bad for her and typed a quick reply, ‘Now that you know my secret, I’m going to have to kill you’. I sent it before I realized that my sense of humour might actually not come across that well on the internet. Rather than risk having the police called on me, I quickly typed another one. ‘Kidding. And thanks’.

Taking my mobile with me, I returned to my food. While I sat down and excavated my noodles for all the baby prawns, I went through those messages again. It was pathetic how good it felt reading them, even if I kind of couldn’t figure out what they saw in me.

Henry came back outside while I still had my phone out. “Plucked up the courage to read them?” he asked, kissing the top of my head as he sat down next to me with his own noodle box.

I nodded, swallowing my mouthful. “I’ve decided I’m going to leave you for this one,” I said, and showed him my handset so he could read the comment.

He held my wrist steady as he read it aloud. “’If you’re married, leave him. I’m richer’.” He laughed. “It’s winking at me, though. I think that means he’s joking.” He paused for a second, reading the username. “Wait, ‘she’? Well, that changes everything,” he released my phone and opened his meal, “invite her for dinner. I’ll even cook.”

I flicked a prawn at his cheek. It didn’t hit him, but it did sail past his nose and fly off the balcony. He kept eating. “You’d better work on that aim if you want to beat my score in Free for All.”

I couldn’t scoff loudly enough. I always beat him. “You want to settle who beats who right now? I will camp your spawn points until you’re begging for mercy.”

“I like the sound of that,” he said, and shovelled some more food into his mouth. “Come on, let’s do it.”

After a really mediocre day, that was one ‘do it’ that could really get into with him.

When I was choosing a career, I wish someone had explained to me the difference between marketing and sales. If they had, I could have been ‘networking’ right now – and by that I mean drunk under a table with prospective clients somewhere – and not sitting at a table on the thirty-sixth floor of an office building at ten on a Monday night. I clicked Send-Receive again, and surprise, surprise, nothing came through. I swear to god, all those idiots needed to do was manage to stagger over to a desktop and type the letters ‘o’ and ‘k’ so I could finally go home.

That’s too much to ask of our sales team, apparently. But, hey, would you like a mouse pad with the Frost International logo on it?

The rest of my own so-called team had trickled out already – “You don’t mind staying, do you, Min?” – and somehow I’d been conned into hanging around to get the final word from Sales on our presentation for tomorrow. It was a stupid formality, we’d been working on the pitch for three weeks and it was solid. But Sales was a bunch of bulging egos and it was just much easier in the long run to stroke them rather than piss them off. Which meant I was stuck here.

“It’s just you and me, Mike,” I said, leaning back into my office chair and staring at the ceiling.

Mike didn’t reply because he was a tacky souvenir turtle one of my old Melbourne friends had gotten me as a joke when she went to Bali. I’d never seen a worse paint-job on anything in my life – and that included some of the paintings I’d done myself when I was young and terrible – and he was only barely recognizable as an actual turtle. I’d called him Michelangelo, but given the splotches of colour all over him perhaps ‘Picasso’ would have been more appropriate.

I reached out with a finger and wobbled his head and he spent a few seconds nodding at me. That’s right, Mike, I thought. If I was going to be stuck here all night I needed to start main-lining the caffeine before I passed out.

I stood up stiffly from my desk. Over all of the partitions, I couldn’t see a single head which meant I was the only sucker who was still at work at this hour. Well, aside from our co-CEO Diane Frost, of course. The light was still on in her office on the far side of the floor and I could see the top of a very tight bun over the screen of her computer. I didn’t think I’d seen her leave for dinner, either, but I had seen her saunter into the kitchen and make what looked like the world’s strongest instant coffee maybe a couple of hours ago without saying hello to anyone. ‘Frost’ was about the right surname.

There was practically no chance of her leaving her office again, so I figured I’d risk ducking over to the vending machine in my stockings.

I grabbed my purse and walked over, the expensive new carpet soft under my feet. Every second I could get away with not having those godawful heels on was a relief, and there was something satisfying about giving a private ‘fuck you’ to the Corporate Dress Code while I was chained to my desk subsisting on Red Bulls.

In case new employees were under any sort of misapprehension about the amount of sleep they’d exchanged for their ridiculous salaries, on every single floor of head office was an energy drink vending machine. It was facing the lifts, too, just to remind you what you should be doing in case you even thought of leaving on time. Unfortunately, it only took coins and I was so deliriously bored that I’d forgotten that I only had a fifty. I sighed at it and then looked back towards the office. Well, I wasn’t going to ask Diane for change, that was for sure.

While I was trying to decide if I was desperate enough to resort to instant coffee, the lifts dinged. I remembered that I had no shoes on at the exact moment that the door slid open.

Fortunately, I recognized the black hair, brown eyes and ugly necktie on the man that walked out. I groaned. “Fuck, Henry! What are you doing up here?” I couldn’t help quickly looking around to make sure no one had heard me swear. Wouldn’t want them to think I actually had a personality.

“Being a good boyfriend and visiting you?” he said pleasantly, walking up to me with his hands full of his suit jacket and his briefcase. He gave me a quick kiss. He was over six feet and one of those guys that actually needed to have their suits tailor-made because of it. Without my heels on, we were the same height. “By the way, you do know you’re supposed to wear shoes in the office, right?” he used his I’m-an-Important-Manager voice for added drama as he looked critically down at my stockings.

“I’m probably not supposed to swear, either. Someone should tell HR,” I said neutrally.

He didn’t even flinch. “I can email you a link to the complaint forms.”

“Great. Will they get processed faster because I’m dating the HR manager?”

He glanced up towards Diane’s office and finally cracked a smile. “You,” he said with his eyes twinkling, “are going to get me fired. I hope you make it worth my while.”

He was giving me that look again. It made me uncomfortable. I was glad he clearly had his stuff and was going back to his own place without me, because it meant I was off the hook tonight. He was great and everything, but on top of all the other stuff I had on my plate at the moment I just couldn’t face having to put out. I wondered how many other women felt that way about sex with their boyfriends.

I laughed because it seemed like an appropriate reaction, and then changed the subject. “Since you’re here, do you have any coins?” I gestured at the vending machine.

“Probably.” He held up his full arms and looked down at his pockets.

Of course he wanted me to dig around in them. Of course. I was actually that desperate for a Red Bull that I did, but I made sure he knew exactly what I thought of his methods when I looked at him.

He was grinning broadly at me. “Can’t blame a guy for trying,” he said as I found a handful of coins and straightened, looking down at them in my palm. There was plenty, and I was going to take all of it. He noticed. “I’m not sure I should leave that much change with you, though. Not until you admit you have a problem.”

I rolled my eyes. “This is only my third,” I told him, turning to the machine and feeding coins into it. “Did you decide if you’re going back to Seoul at Easter?”

“Just booked my flights, actually. Are you coming this year?” I glanced over my shoulder at him and my expression very effectively delivered my answer. He laughed. “I’ll drop past your mother’s and say hello for you, then.”

Fabulous, I thought. In addition to nagging me to marry him, every time he visited without me, Mum called me and subjected me to a long lecture about what a bad child I was for never ‘coming home’. This was ignoring the fact I’d been ‘back’ to South Korea three times in my life, and one of them I was too young to remember. Well, it was her own damn fault I couldn’t visit, because she was the one who’d convinced me to go into marketing in the first place. Furthermore, the last thing she’d done before she went back there five years ago was to pressure me to apply for a top internship at international mining conglomerate Frost International. She was already gone by the time I landed it so she never saw the ridiculous hours I had to work. Even though I explained over and over that Henry was a manager and I was just a marketing slave, she didn’t seem to get that I couldn’t just take time off whenever I felt like it.

Secretly, though, I was pretty happy to have an excuse not to visit. They’re my family, but actually I’d rather jam a fork into my eyes than spend any length of time with them.

I opened the can I’d just fished out of the machine and drank deeply from it. I swear that stuff was the Elixir of Life. “Okay, that’s all I need you for,” I said in a deliberately flat voice. “You can go home now.”

He chuckled, not fazed at all by me. “I did actually just come up to say goodbye to you.” There was something about his smile which suggested that wasn’t the only reason. “And also to let you know I told Omar to stop hitting on the sales interns and sign off on that diamond pitch you’re working on.”

Now that was something he was getting a hug for. He didn’t abuse his position to help me very often. “Are you serious?” I asked him, and when it was clear he was serious I threw my arms around him and nearly spilt fluorescent yellow energy drink all over his white shirt. “Thank you, I might actually see my bed tonight!”

“Whoa!” he said, patting my back instead of whatever he’d rather have done to me. “If that’s your third I’m pretty sure you won’t be sleeping in it if you do.”

I looked at the can as I pulled away from him again, very skilfully ignoring another thinly veiled reference to what I knew he hoped we’d be doing tonight. “Nah, I’ll be fine in a couple of hours,” I said, and offered some to him.

He shook his head. “’Night, Min,” he said. “Don’t stay up too late.”

I saluted him as he stepped into the lift, and then practically ran back to my desk. On cue, my Inbox had an unread email waiting for me. A light practically shone down from the skies as I opened it and read the words, “…looks fine, see you tomorrow.” It didn’t even have any typos. I was impressed.

“Yes!” I aggressively shouted with my fists out in the air.

It echoed around the empty office and I winced, slowly lowering my arms. That had been much louder than I’d been intending it to be; normally there were enough people around that I remembered to keep my mouth firmly shut at all times.

Horrifyingly, in the office in the corner of the floor, Diane looked up from her computer screen towards me.

It was yet another one of those times I wished I was tiny and short and didn’t tower over the partitions like some sort of female giant.

She looked straight at me and for a second I wondered if I should just start packing up my desk now. Then, she glanced up at the clock. When she made eye contact with me again her face relaxed into a smile. She nodded to acknowledge me, and then went back to her computer.

I just stared at her. My mouth was probably wide open.

Diane fucking Frost just smiled at me. International mega billionaire co-CEO Diane Frost just noticed and approved of the fact I was in the office at fucking three a.m. or whatever the fuck time it was now. 22:41, my computer read as I shut it down.

“Sorry, Mike,” I said to my ugly turtle as I reluctantly stepped back into my heels and collected my handbag from the bottom drawer, “you’ll have to man the fort by yourself from here.” I flicked his head so he nodded. Diane Frost had nodded, too. Jesus.

I was grinning like an idiot all the way over to the lift, but as the lift returned from ground I remembered I still had to survive the journey back down to street level. My smile faded.

The lift wasn’t dangerous or anything like that. In fact, it was probably the most expensive lift in the southern hemisphere and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it had dual crash systems and airbags. The problem was that I worked on level thirty-six and it took a full minute to get down. That minute was worse than a long-haul flight because the only entertainment in the lift was wall-to-wall mirrors and I was forced to stare at a thousand repeated reflections of myself the whole way down. There wasn’t anywhere safe I could look.

My hair looked fucking terrible; no surprise, really, since it had been at least sixteen hours since I’d touched it with a curling iron. At least my makeup was still in-tact and I hadn’t inadvertently smeared it across my face when I’d had my head in my hands earlier in the evening. The rest of me, though. I sighed at my reflection. I thought I’d chosen a dress that made my shoulders look narrower and gave me some semblance of cleavage, but from this angle I just looked as square as I usually did. I didn’t really want to show cleavage at all, anyway—it just looked out of place to me and made me feel really weird—but at least if I had any I wouldn’t look so angular. ‘Swimmer’s shoulders’, Dad used to call them. How the hell did Henry get off on this, seriously? I looked down at the floor. I really didn’t want to wreck my good mood by thinking about any of that right now.

Not even facing my reflection was enough to put a dampener on how great I felt to have had the co-CEO of my work acknowledge me, though. On top of that, it was a really pleasant temperature outside and it made my short walk down George Street feel shorter than usual, even in my stupid heels.

The bars were already open opposite Circular Quay and filling with the usual crowd of stoned backpackers and drunk tourists. The beautiful weather had made them spill out onto the footpaths and people were laughing and joking as I walked quickly past and hoped no one would give me any trouble.

On the way up the very steep road that led to my building, the clear evening gave me a great view of both the Bridge and the Opera House. They were lit with multi-coloured lights and I stopped for a moment to try and capture that image in my head before I went inside. I liked the mix of colours, and it was about time I painted something to do with Sydney. Leaving Melbourne had made me nostalgic for all the places I used to hate while I was actually living there, and it was those cityscapes I tended to paint when I felt like going suburban. Mum would probably like it if I did some iconic Sydney sights instead; she might even print them out and put it up on the fridge for once. I think the last time I’d defeated the electricity bill was when I was about six.

Frost International owned several floors of one of the hotels bordering and overlooking The Rocks, and everyone who had been imported from other cities or countries usually ended up on one of them. Once people arrived one of two things usually happened; they realized what an awful mistake they’d made and quickly broke their contracts and fled back home, or they cashed in their souls for enormous pay packets, signed permanent contracts and bought embarrassingly extravagant homes actually in The Rocks.

I hadn’t done either. Well, apart from cash in my soul. Nearly four years later, I was still in number 2607 with uninterrupted views of the harbour and having my place cleaned and my washing done once a week. I could even order room service. It was just like living at my parents’ home but without the constant nagging, and if I leant out the side of my balcony I could actually see my office. Why would I move?

The apartment was still pretty generic. I’d replaced all the manchester with patterns and colours I liked, and I’d hung some of my own stuff on the wall, but it was still quite impersonal. In attempt to combat that I’d put photos everywhere and proudly created a shrine for my extensive video game collection, but it hadn’t worked. No matter what I did, the main room still looked like an experimental display suite from Better Homes & Gardens. Eventually I’d given up. What a huge life problem: ‘Hi, I’m Min Lee and my free luxury apartment full of designer furniture feels barren and soulless.’ Maybe I needed a support group.

As soon as my door was shut, the first thing I did was head straight to the bathroom, leaving a trail of uncomfortable work clothes between the hallway and the en suite. I didn’t know how the hell women didn’t just take their stockings and go on homicidal rampages, and I thought indulgently about that as I wrenched them off my ankles and tossed them in the laundry basket. I looked fucking terrible, and if I was twenty-five and expected to retire at sixty, that was another thirty-five years of this crap. Still, maybe if I worked for Frost for a decade or two I’d have enough money to retire early and go live in a cave somewhere where I didn’t ever have to somehow make myself look presentable to anyone.

Someone’s bright idea was to put a mirror facing the door in the bathroom so you could watch yourself use it. I accidentally caught sight of myself before I stepped into the shower.

“I’m a fucking cliché,” I said to my reflection as I turned on the water. A woman who hates how she looks, now there’s a plot twist. Cosmo was practically written for me.

I was getting pretty tired of listening to myself whinging about my body, so I didn’t spend too long with it in the shower before I got out and went to get dressed. My pyjamas were the oldest pair of tracky-dacks I owned and a big t-shirt I’d stolen off Henry. The beauty of them was that they were so baggy they completely hid my body and didn’t give me the opportunity to notice and hate it. As a further measure to shut my brain up, I poured myself a glass of wine and went and stood on the balcony to drink it.

I needed to get a fucking grip. I was twenty-five, not fourteen. This ‘I hate myself’ crap wasn’t cute anymore. I didn’t have anything to complain about either, really. I was already working for Fortune 500 company in a permanent position being paid way more than I should have been, I had a great boyfriend and a family who loved me. On top of that, my presentation slides tomorrow were a work of fucking art, and Diane fucking Frost had smiled at me. Everything was great. Seriously, what the hell was my problem? Whatever it was, I needed to get over it.

There was a gentle warm breeze outside. I was able to admire the lights some more from up here, and while I was waiting for the wine to take hold, I thought I might have a shot at painting them.

I went inside to grab my laptop and my tablet and then set up shop on the deck. It was distractingly quiet out there, so I put some cartoons up on the screen of my laptop while I scribbled away.

Nothing was working, though. I couldn’t get the angle right on the bridge my strokes were all over the place. After five or ten minutes there wasn’t a single thing I liked about what I’d drawn so I just erased the whole goddamn lot and sat back, seething.

I hadn’t really been paying attention to the cartoon and now that I was looking at the screen, I realized all the characters were inexplicably opposite-sex versions of themselves. They were also singing for some reason. I stared at it. This show had always been a bit weird, but I think this episode was incontestable proof that all the writers were boiling mushrooms. I sat there frowning at it for another few minutes, but the random genderbending was never explained. After some consideration I decided I actually preferred at least one of the characters that way, though.

I exhaled and looked down at my empty canvas. Well, I didn’t draw people that often anymore, perhaps it would be good practice to draw that princess as a prince? More fun than lights on a bridge that I couldn’t make work, that was for sure.

I’d been using my own face in balcony door to get her head right and I was only three strokes in when I got caught on my reflection. The way I was sitting was the perfect reference; I was hunched and I couldn’t see any sign of breasts at all. I’d also tied my hair back so it didn’t get in the way. The screen from my tablet and the lights from the streets below lit me from underneath and were a very soft blue. I liked how it fell on me.

Well, I had been complaining about all that woman stuff, right? Fuck it. I skulled the rest of my wine in one mouthful and set to work on the tablet.

Despite the fact I’d promised Henry again that I wouldn’t stay up late, it was well past midnight when I finished the painting. I sat back and looked at it. There were about ten things I didn’t like how I’d handled the pose and the lighting, but overall the atmosphere was captured really well. And then there was me. Because I knew I couldn’t look at a picture of myself with any sort of objectivity, I flipped the canvas horizontally and hoped that would help.

It did, and my first impression was that I’d done a great job. I’d given myself a really funky haircut and dressed myself in a suit with a wide-collared shirt and a waistcoat. The tie I’d left kind of loose around my neck, and I’d stolen one of Henry’s awful paisley ones. It was hideous; I loved it. The rest of how I was sitting was basically the same. I grinned at it. There was something ultra cool about wearing an expensive suit and then sitting with one leg scrunched underneath you and the other propped on a table. I’d put the tablet on my lap, too. I looked awesome, and all my angles looked really cool instead of really awkward. I sighed at it.

God, if only.

As soon as I’d thought that, I began to feel really uneasy about it. I looked down at it on my tablet, and my face stared back at me with a really intense expression, reclined exactly like I was. Seriously, what the hell was I doing? It was like a goldfish painting itself with wings. It was stupid. What a fucking stupid idea.

I closed Photoshop and went to turn off my computer, but I stopped as my mouse hovered over the Start button. Was it really as bad as all that? I opened the file again and had another look.

The execution was great, that much I had to admit. I had no idea what my weird problem with it was, but it was a good painting. I should probably just upload it to Deviant Art before I started losing watchers who thought I’d abandoned my account.

I logged in and took a quick peek at my messages. I didn’t get many these days – I was so busy with work I didn’t get the opportunity to paint much anymore – but there were a few regulars I recognized. One of them was from a girl who was having some dramas with her friend and for some reason thought that because I could draw that I would also be full of wisdom. I resisted the urge to tell her I hadn’t spoken to any of my friends outside Facebook for months and basically gave her the text version of a pat on the back.

While I was uploading the painting, I got a bit stuck on the title and eventually settled on ‘Lights out’ and clicked submit.

Leaning back in the chair, I stretched my arms over my head and yawned. It was probably about time I tried to get some sleep. I needed to be awake for that presentation tomorrow so I could soak in all the glorious adoration for my amazing, life-changing PowerPoint slides about why Frost was the best company in the world, and there was only so much Red Bull could achieve.

I put my phone on silent and went to bed, but before I went to sleep I had to log in again and take another look at that painting. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but it was still completely harmless. Normally there were things I liked and disliked about all my pieces, but why the hell did I love and hate this one so much?

I exhaled and put my phone back on my bedside table. Probably some weird body image thing, I decided, and then groaned and turned away from it and put my head under the doona.

Min, for fuck’s sake, it’s just a painting. It’s pixels on a screen. What sort of damage could it possibly cause?