Chapter Thirty Netta
Chapter Thirty
NETTA
Netta and Mo sat cross-legged on the floor with the deck of cards between them.
‘So, how does this work?’ Mo gestured at the cards and lifted his beer to his mouth.
Netta looked away before the bottle made contact with his lips.
He might be seeing Lorena, but that mouth of his still had a stranglehold on her.
She examined a chip in her nail polish to break the circuit.
‘I’m guessing we just ask each other the questions on the cards and reveal our innermost thoughts and emotional scars to each other. ’
Mo looked mortified.
‘I’m joking,’ she said. ‘It’s probably just stupid stuff, like what your favourite food is and what you’d wish for if you found a genie in a bottle.’
‘A lamp.’
‘You’d wish for a lamp?’
‘No!’ He laughed. ‘The genie would be in a lamp. Not a bottle. A message would be in a bottle.’ He started hammering a beat on his knees as he sang the chorus to ‘Message In A Bottle’ by The Police. Netta joined in on the last line.
‘Hey, you can sing!’ His smile of admiration revealed the depths of his dimples, his perfect lips and those teeth of his sending a shot of warmth through Netta that settled defiantly south. Lorena Long was a lucky cow.
‘In the shower maybe.’ She took a big gulp of beer and lifted the first card from the pile. ‘Righto. Prepare to bare your soul.’
Mo straightened like a schoolkid on his best behaviour, ready to do some gold-star listening.
‘Okay,’ said Netta, looking up from the card. ‘When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?’
‘That’s easy. I wanted to be a rock star.’ He spread his arms wide, as if displaying the evidence of his childhood wish come true.
‘Really?’
He shook his head. ‘Nah. I wanted to be a train driver. What about you?’
‘A vet. And a check-out chick. Your turn.’
Mo took the next card. ‘What’s the best date you’ve ever been on?’
With you, today, at Bianchi’s. Except it hadn’t been a date, had it?
Especially now she knew Lorena was on the scene.
‘Hmm.’ Netta rifled through her memory. ‘There was one, years ago. It was summer and I’d just moved into my apartment in St Kilda.
I’d met this guy at one of the bars on Fitzroy Street.
He asked for my number and the next night we went to the Espy for drinks and then afterwards we walked down to the end of St Kilda Pier and saw phosphorescence in the water.
We wrote our names in the wet sand and they glowed. It was pretty magical.’
‘And did it get serious?’
‘Oh, no.’ Netta rocked back and let out a half laugh. ‘He turned out to be a not-so-closeted cokehead. It got messy very quickly. But the date was nice. Okay, your turn. What’s the best date you’ve ever been on?’
Mo’s brow furrowed in a way that made Netta’s stupid heart bounce.
This thing—this all-consuming, gut-melting, brain-fading sensation—was always going to happen.
Her man ban might stop her from acting on it, but it had no power to stop the effect he had on her body, or the way he seemed to be living rent-free in her head now, intertwined with every single one of her thoughts, his voice in constant conversation with her inner monologue.
‘To be honest, I haven’t really been on many dates,’ he said. ‘And the ones I have been on have been pretty shit. Definitely no glowing sand, although probably more than a few cokeheads, I’d say.’
‘Surely you’ve had a good date at least once.’
Mo held her gaze. ‘You’re right, I have. Quite recently, actually. But I don’t think she thought it was a date, so it probably doesn’t count.’
‘Alright, my turn.’ Netta slid the next card from the top of the pile. ‘Ooh, this is juicier. What’s your biggest regret?’
‘That’s easy,’ said Mo. ‘Agreeing to sing a Mariah Carey song at the Christmas Eve Gala.’
Netta tipped her head to the side and raked the card along her knuckles. ‘Come on. Gimme a real one.’
Mo’s face darkened, his eyes suddenly stormy under downcast lashes. ‘I have lots,’ he said tightly. ‘But the biggest one … it’s not something I talk about.’
His obvious discomfort was a presence in the room, urging Netta to move on. ‘You already know mine.’
A smile hovered at the corners of his mouth. ‘Driving a 1971 VW Beetle?’
Okay, so he was fine again. ‘Ha, ha,’ Netta said drily. ‘I’d drive it across Australia and back again—even if I had to push it for half the way—if it would erase the Mitch fiasco. That’s my biggest regret. I doubt anything will ever top it, to be honest.’
Mo’s eyes softened. He unfolded a leg and gently nudged her knee with his foot. ‘It really wasn’t your fault. I hope karma shrinks his balls.’
Netta burst into laughter, her hand instinctively landing on her knee where he’d touched her, trying to contain the feeling. ‘Alright. Your turn to ask a question.’
Mo took a card. ‘What’s the thing you want most in life?’
Netta smiled and bit her lower lip. He was with Lorena Long; she had nothing to lose by telling him the truth.
She took a deep breath and let the words gather in her mouth, ready for release.
‘I want a baby,’ she said. ‘I’m thinking about …
I’m thinking about using the money you’re paying me to go to the gala with you to help pay for fertility treatments so I can have a chance at doing it on my own.
I don’t know how much it’ll cost, but what you’ve offered will give me a good start. ’
Mo rocked back a little, his eyes different, like he was seeing her for the first time with a new haircut. ‘You’d be a great mum.’
‘It was never my intention to go it alone.’ A lump grew in Netta’s throat. ‘We tried for months, me and Pete.’
‘Pete’s the guy you broke up with before you came here?’
‘Yeah. But it just never happened. And then I found out that he’d never really wanted a baby in the first place and that he was having a weird thing with a woman from his office, so …’ She looked up to find Mo staring at her intently.
‘Pete sounds like he might need a bit of karmic ball shrinking too, if you ask me.’
Netta attempted a smile, but she was all out.
‘It was good for a while, I think. I don’t know.
My relationships never seem to work.’ She shrugged lightly, as though it was no big deal.
As though it wasn’t the biggest deal and she wasn’t blisteringly aware that she was about to turn forty alone and would probably stay alone forever. ‘I must be defective.’
‘I doubt that,’ said Mo. ‘Maybe it’s just your taste in men that’s defective.’
‘There’s no maybe about that, mate,’ she said, keen to swivel the spotlight around. ‘What about you? What’s the thing you want most?’
Mo took a deep breath and an even deeper swig of beer. ‘Freedom.’
‘From what?’
‘From everything.’ He looked unsure of himself, like the words he needed were there but he didn’t trust them.
‘There’s stuff I can’t escape from, in here,’ he said, eventually, tapping his temple.
‘And then there’s the “perks” of the job.
It’d be nice to be able to go out without being followed or photographed.
I guess you got a taste of that too, so you know what I mean. ’
Netta nodded. ‘At least it was only for a while, for me. I can’t imagine what it must be like to live like that all the time.’
He shrugged. ‘People think that when you have money, you have freedom. And I guess that’s true in lots of ways, but when your money comes from fame, there’s a price.’
They held a gaze that Netta had to break. She couldn’t let her empathy turn into another reason to fall for him. She glanced at her watch. ‘Let’s make this the last one; it’s getting late and you have a bit of a drive to get home. Or are you staying in the city tonight?’
‘Nope, home for me. I’ve got Jac on standby out the front.’
Netta smelled bullshit. Mo and Lorena had looked like a hands-down promise. Perhaps Mo had sensed her burgeoning crush and was protecting her feelings by keeping his beautiful lips firmly zipped about the sexathon he was off to next. She sighed inwardly and drew a card.
‘Ooh, this one’s a bit intense.’
‘Hit me.’
‘Tell me about a time you lost something you loved.’
Mo set his empty beer bottle on the floor beside him. ‘Yeah, you know what? I think I’m done for the night. You’re right. It’s late.’
‘Okay.’ Netta scrambled awkwardly to her feet and took Mo’s clothes from the chair he’d hung them on. ‘These are dry.’
‘Thanks.’ He disappeared into the bathroom and quickly reappeared, dressed in his jeans and jumper. ‘Sorry to leave so abruptly,’ he said, grabbing his jacket. ‘I just, ah … I just remembered that Jac clocks off in a couple of hours, so I need to go now.’
He hugged Netta goodbye. Her arms hung by her sides, frozen by the feeling of his wrapped around her.
‘Er, okay then,’ he said, straightening. ‘I’ll buzz you in the morning.’
He strode out of the room and closed the door behind him, Netta still standing like a statue, wondering whether it was her or the question that had scared him off.
Maybe he was just desperate to get to Lorena.
And who could blame him? She was probably waiting for him, wrapped up like a Christmas present in three thousand dollar lingerie.
And, Netta guessed, Lorena’s arms probably knew exactly what to do when he hugged her.
Netta wandered miserably into the bathroom to brush her teeth. The pyjamas he’d been wearing were folded neatly on the vanity, the striped top sitting on the flannelette pants. She picked them up and hugged them to her chest. They smelled like cologne and curry and beer and Mo-ness.
Oh, shit. She had it bad.
This was a disaster.