23. Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Literally my week could not have been more boring,” Prisha concluded. Hope had started finishing early on Fridays, letting Bevan take over the clinic mid-afternoon to work a late evening and take the burden off weekend bookings. That meant she could start meeting Prisha for a debrief again. She’d missed her time with her friend, though apparently her slot had been more than filled by one Alison Hartmann. Which, speaking of… “How about yours?” Prisha went on. “Please tell me something interesting or I might actually die.”
Hope decided to swoop in and save her. She was just about bursting with the need to tell someone, anyway.
“Alison kissed me.”
“What?” Prisha almost dropped her coffee. “No! ”
“Yeah.”
“I mean… that was always going to happen,” Prisha backtracked with a small frown. “You two have been far too hot for each other from the beginning.”
“No,” Hope said. “I mean, yes. But also no?”
“Good point.” Prisha raised her eyebrows.
“I mean, yes I’ve always been attracted to her,” Hope tried to explain. “And there were times, obviously, that I wondered if she felt the same.”
“Hope! You are hope less when it comes to knowing what women feel about you, I swear to god-”
“Did she say something to you?” Hope jumped on that embarrassingly fast.
“Oh, you don’t deserve to know that.” Prisha flat out denied her probing. She had a loyalty to Alison now too, which felt weird to contemplate. It made Hope feel warm though, to think of the growing closeness between Ali and her friends. Their friends .
“Ugh . Rude . The thing is, though, it’s actually been fine, ” Hope went on. “Up until now, I’ve been okay, you know… with being able to look but not touch.”
“You’re a disciplined woman,” Prisha allowed fondly.
“But Preesh… I don’t even know how to describe how she kissed me.”
“Oh, you better be about to try. Tell me everything .” Prisha pushed her coffee away and regarded her seriously. “Every horny detail.”
Hope tried. The intensity of the moment, the rain on their skin, Alison’s eyes filling so fast with hunger, the way she’d licked into Hope’s mouth, taking everything she wanted like she’d been holding herself back on the very edge of this since the moment they’d met. The blaze of awakening it had sent through Hope until every single one of her nerve-endings had begged for that same ferocious overpowering, a bone-deep craving for Alison, everywhere, all at once.
“Okay,” Prisha said faintly, when she was done. “I can see that,” she concluded. “She’s got that intensity about her. Those steely eyes, and those arms, that when you look closely are actually incredibly cut.”
“No,” Hope shook her head. “That’s the thing. I never suspected it. She’s always seemed so tightly wound. I thought if anything ever happened, I’d be trying not to spook her, you know? But this… ” She slumped back against the booth seat .
“Mm-hm,” Prisha agreed. “It’s always the uptight ones. Honestly, I’m kind of proud of her,” she said. “I feel a bit like her thrilled gay aunty. Kissing a hot little cutie like Hope Sullivan and blowing her damn mind, first go? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this rattled.” Then she cocked her head. “So how long do you think you’ll hold out? Are we talking days or hours?”
“We’re not going to have sex,” Hope told her firmly. “We’re chalking it up to a mishap. A little mouth-on-mouth that shouldn’t have happened. She still feels like friendship is all she can offer at this point in her life. And I’m okay with that. Even though it’s pretty much physically painful at this point… I care about her as well, you know?”
“Oh, honey, no .” Prisha sat up straight.
“It’s okay,” Hope reassured her. “Nothing has really changed. I’ve always wanted her and we’ve always been friends. It’s just a little more... acute, now. It’ll calm down eventually.” When I finally get that kiss out of my head. In about seventy years time.
“I object,” Prisha said firmly.
“Am… I on trial?” Hope had definitely missed that part of the conversation.
“Hope.” Prisha was frowning, her dark eyes serious. “I don’t want this for you. ”
“Want what?”
“You think you can handle it, but I’m telling you now that you can’t . It’s not what it’s cracked up to be, okay? It’s not all fun, horny wanting while your friendship just ticks along in the background. It’s… savage.”
“ What is?”
“Falling for a friend.”
Hope was about to protest. She wasn’t falling for Alison. But something in Prisha’s face stopped her like a brick wall. Alison’s observation slammed into her ears. Prisha’s big dark eyes looked haunted.
“Prisha,” she said, a cold feeling starting to expand in her chest. “Preesh. Tell me what’s happening. Right now.”
Prisha took a deep breath. She looked desperately sad.
“Camille.” It was the only word she said, the name bursting from her as if from deep inside her chest. Then she couldn’t seem to go on.
Hope stared at her. The knowledge she’d been struggling against, ever since Alison had pointed toward it, was finally inescapable .
“Oh, Prisha.”
“Don’t look at me like that,” Prisha said softly. “It makes it worse that you’re so sympathetic.”
“Preesh. How long?” Hope felt slightly frantic. Alison was right. How had she missed something of this magnitude? Prisha and Camille were her best friends.
“I don’t know. Maybe always? I just didn’t realise it until after we moved in together,” Prisha confessed. “She’s always just been there, like she was in such close up I’d never really stopped to see her, you know? But living together… there’s all this alone time we have. It’s so intimate, sometimes, and it feels so close to the real thing. But then the evening comes and she goes to her room and I go to mine.” Prisha swallowed hard, barely holding back her tears. “And I just lie awake, wishing she was there. And feeling so fucking guilty, imagining if she knew what I was thinking, right there in the next room. Like I’m betraying her friendship every fucking time my heart beats.”
“Preesh.” Hope was fighting something akin to horror. She adored Prisha. She adored Camille. She wanted nothing but the deepest of happiness for all her friends. But it felt like something was slipping away from her, out of her control and out of her grasp. Her friends were the centre of her world, and they’d already been destabilised by Flynn’s slow-breaking heart over Magnus. To truly see that Prisha was equally agonised over Camille … it was terrifying. “Do you think, maybe you should talk to her?” she tried. “I mean, you don’t know how she feels about you unless you ask, right?” She could almost imagine it working, Camille and Prisha, though it was taking an en tire rearrangement of her brain to see it. “You know she loves you-”
“Hope.” Prisha was looking at her with a despair so deep it looked almost like anger. “You know I have the biggest respect for you, and I know getting into veterinary school is like, harder than medicine even, so I know that you’re smarter than this. But honestly, sometimes I have no idea how you could be this naive. If I didn’t love you so very much, I would just… I would hate you. I would really, really hate you.”
Prisha was crying now and Hope was devastated. She got it, kind of. Prisha would have analysed every tiny interaction and glance and breath Camille took, if she was in love with her. Of course she knew if it was unrequited. It was cruel of Hope to make her spell it out when it felt like life or death to Prisha’s chances.
She grabbed Prisha and pulled her tightly into her hug.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Please don’t hate me. I want nothing more than for you to be happy. If I could do anything-”
“Oh, Hope…” Prisha sniffed into her shoulder. “I don’t think there’s anything you could do at this point. Nothing’s going to change. Except now Alison is in the mix and I’m scared that everything is going to blow up in our faces. ”
“It won’t,” Hope said quickly. “Ali and I won’t. And no matter what happens with you and Camille, I’m here,” she said. “I’m… here for you both. We’re going to get through this, and we’re going to be okay.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s a powder keg waiting to happen, actually,” said Prisha glumly. “And I swear to god, I think I know exactly who’s going to be the match.”
Hope lay awake for a long time that night. She wished desperately for this not to be happening. She wished, selfishly, for Prisha to magically move past it, to meet someone else and for this to turn out to be a passing infatuation that could be swept aside by a new crush. She knew deep down there was no chance of that; she’d seen Prisha’s eyes. So Camille then? Surely she could open her own pretty eyes and see what was right in front of her face - gorgeous, smart, successful, hot, funny Prisha, dying to devote herself - who wouldn’t fall in love with that? She then spent a full five minutes imagining locking Flynn and Magnus in a room and shouting at them to work it out. There. All fixed.
What a world that would be: Hope, the single one, best friends with two sets of couples. She would take that in a heartbeat over seeing her friends miserable, but it made her ache. It was already getting so complicated, with Prisha’s talk of matches and explosions and swearing Hope to secrecy from telling Camille. Which: Hope would never, but also how the hell was she going to get through date night tomorrow, looking her best friend in the eye and not imploding with this new knowledge? Hope wasn’t made for subterfuge .
On that note… was she made for this extended singledom either? She’d loved it, actually, being unattached with a whole group of friends who were also single. Deep down she loved being in a relationship, and missed so much about it, but in two years there hadn’t been a second for loneliness, between her friends and her job. But if everyone was coupled up, except her? That is, she swallowed, everyone except her and… Alison.
Hope groaned. When she’d slipped into bed she’d sworn she could still smell Alison on her pillow, a trace of the perfume that filled her with longing every time she caught the scent. Alison was all over her house at this point: on the couch, murmuring hotly to her about sex and power until Hope was literally trembling with it; passing Hope abruptly in the corridor like if she so much as looked at Hope in her towel she was going to wind up naked; fleeing Hope’s kitchen without even eating her breakfast, like she’d hit the limit on her tolerance for their growing intimacy and had to physically bolt.
Hope had eaten alone, bemused, reminding herself to give Ali space. She was confident they’d hit their stride again, just as soon as they’d readjusted to this new intensity. They cared about each other; their friendship was starting to mean something to both of them. Lust was a force to be reckoned with - especially when it was undeniably mutual - but if Alison didn’t want to go there, then the only option was to manage it. She remembered Alison’s ragged whisper, I think about it too, and with that permission all but granted, she rolled over to open her bedside drawer and pull out her favourite rosebud, aching to relive that kiss - and all it had promised and threatened - all over again.
Date night felt off. Because Hope and Camille had always had an intimacy between them, one filled with deep admissions and soul-baring confessions. Hope had shared every detail of that afternoon back in Sydney when she’d walked into her own bedroom to find her world imploding. Camille had shared with her what it had taken to throw away every stable piece of her life to follow her art, her deep sense of never being enough that dogged her every relationship, and recently, her growing want for something more.
But tonight Hope felt stymied. She was full to the brim with secrets, building brick by brick into a wall between her and Camille. She couldn’t talk to her about Prisha. She couldn’t talk to her about Ali, either, because right now she didn’t want to rub up against Camille’s inexplicable refusal to give Alison a chance, to have another of her best friends try to list the ways this tentative balance wouldn’t work.
Camille, though, brought both women up, within minutes, pouring their rosé and flinging herself lazily back on Hope’s couch, right in that same place where Ali had sat, her flint grey eyes blazing with tormented desire. It made Hope slightly dizzy just to remember it.
“Has Preesh talked to you?” Camille asked, right off the bat, bringing Hope rapidly back into the moment.
“About what?” Hope returned cautiously.
“Anything. Because she seems off, don’t you think?”
“Off how?” Hope was not going there, but the idea of lying to Camille’s face felt wrong too.
“I don’t know.” Camille tapped her fingernails against the side of her wine glass. “It just feels weird. Like she’s right there, but she’s distant. Something’s up with her lately.”
“Have you asked her about it?” Hope felt a little sick. No matter which way she stepped, someone, someday, was going to be hurt by her actions. There was no way to win. Protect Prisha, betray Camille. Help Camille, betray Prisha. The line was so damn fine.
“Of course I have. She keeps telling me everything’s fine, but I feel like she’s avoiding me. She hasn’t said anything to you?”
“I don’t get to see as much of her as I did,” Hope stuck rigidly to the truth. “Now the clinic’s hours have changed.”
“Ugh. Do you think she’s talking to Alison?”
“Maybe.” Hope refused to acknowledge the way Camille said Ali’s name, like even the taste of it in her mouth caused Camille low-level disgust.
“God. First you, then Prisha. She’s really just slipping in there and taking over everything, isn’t she? ”
“Being our friend, you mean?” Hope wasn’t loving this conversation. “Milly… you know we both still love you, right? That you’re our best friend?”
“I know that. ” Camille looked faintly embarrassed at Hope’s directness. “It’s not primary school, you don’t have to rank us.”
“I will though,” Hope decided. “You and Prisha are my best-best friends, Magnus and Flynn are my best friends and Ali is my-”
“Crush. Love interest. Obsession.”
Hope stared at her. Camille was trying to tease her but the expression on her face wasn’t carrying it off.
“Obsession might be a bit much,” was all that came out. “She’s my friend. Who I care about.”
“And who you want.”
“Milly. What’s this about? Why are you so intense about this?”
“I’m not!” Camille denied. “I just… care about you, okay? ”
“I care about you too! Nothing will ever change the way I feel about you, you understand that, right?”
Camille bit her lip, hard. She looked like she was struggling not to cry and Hope thought of Prisha’s tears the day before. Camille might not know what was going on, but she, like Hope, could clearly sense the latent threat to the group’s connection. She looked so damn sad.
“Milly-” Hope started. She wasn’t sure how to reassure her, but she wanted to try. “I love you. Prisha loves you-”
“Hope!” Camille burst out. She looked intensely brittle. “Stop, okay? Please stop. Let’s just… let’s just watch a movie or something. Everyone is like… so on their period right now.” She grabbed the remote and within seconds, Netflix was up. Hope felt unsettled but deeply relieved. Date night usually involved a lot more talking, but not talking between her and Camille seemed like absolutely the right choice right now.