Simone
SIMONE
“While we’ve been together!”
Simone could no longer maintain her composure. Up until that point, she had kept calm in order to think clearly, but Dominic’s silent confession had turned Simone’s stomach to liquid, and she began to shiver with such ferocity she hummed like a fluorescent light.
“Jenni,” their mother said. “What is going on?” She looked at Jenni, then to Simone, her eyes darting back and forth between her two daughters. “What is happening?”
“Someone explain,” their father said, pointing his finger around the circle. “Someone explain now!”
“Okay, yeah, okay,” Dominic said, taking Jenni’s hand. “Your sister and I slept together, but before you and me were exclusive.”
As Dominic’s words ran into each other, almost forming a new language entirely, Simone tried to find somewhere to interject, to take control of the conversation before he said something that—
“But I didn’t know she was your sister when I hired her!” Dominic continued. “It was just one of those things I wanted to try before I settled down. How was I supposed to know about the two of you? She told me her name was Raven. I forgot hookers don’t use their real names!”
“Hooker?” their mother whispered.
“How dare you?” Their father began to rage. He stepped forward to grab the lapels on Dominic’s jacket. “How dare you throw such accusations… hiring women… calling my eldest a prostitute! Do you know what kind of house you’re in?”
Their father shook Dominic as if waiting for him to rattle. Jenni grabbed on to their father and Dominic pleaded, “Sir! Look, I’m sorry…”
Before their father’s grip tightened any further, Simone reached forward and held her father by his shoulders. “Stop, Dad,” Simone said, accepting there was nothing else she could do. “Stop.”
Their mother was next to catch on and her hand flew to her mouth.
Simone’s father, however, was stubborn. Once upon a time her family had joked it was where she’d got it from.
She watched as he spun possible excuses in his head, voicing them all but never finishing a single one.
Finally, his shoulders dropped in defeat, his chest caved inward, and all he said was, “Simi, how could you?”
Simone had no steady clients, had been suspended from a job she loved, and had no friends or family to lean on. But her most painful realization was that the true cost of loneliness was having only yourself—and then losing that person, too.
It began with sleep. Hours and hours of it.
Simone would see the light slip through her bedroom curtains, escaping the linen gaps and pooling on the floor.
Her brain told her it was time to get up, that daylight was reserved for activity.
Simone felt herself attempting to lift her body, to slide her foot out from under the duvet that suddenly weighed more than it had last night, to lift her head that now felt like it was made of stone.
She felt herself try to reach for water because her throat was so dry and her breath so stale.
However, it proved too much to even lift her eyelids, let alone anything else.
Simone thought she must be sick, assigning all her symptoms to the flu. Then the fog in her brain would cloud her reality, the sleeping pills would kick in, and she’d fall back to sleep.
Other days, the light from outside forcibly flooded the room and she couldn’t slip back into oblivion.
Her cheek felt wet from the patch of drool it rested on, and the crust in the corner of her eyes started to itch.
Here she would think, This is not the flu, but depression .
She would need to pee soon, but she held it in until she felt a trickle down her thigh and knew she was only seconds away from wetting the bed.
It was on one of those days that Simone heard a knock on her door just as she left her bathroom. She was too tired to care what she looked like, and she opened the door to Remy.
Simone could not fully grasp what happened next.
She only understood that, after Remy walked into her flat, Simone’s hair was washed and her face was clean.
Once Simone was out of the bath, her sheets had been changed, and were now soft and dry, smelling of fabric conditioner.
When drifting back to sleep, she could hear her bedroom door close and the faint sound of her washing machine.
Days later, after Simone had urinated, ignoring the butterscotch yellow that filled the bowl, and the sour scent tanging the air like plucked violin strings, she made her way back to bed.
With her head flat against the pillow, she spotted a stack of papers on her bedside table.
She lifted her head high enough to read the front page: Untitled S&R by Remy Baidoo.
On top of that was a handwritten Post-it note.
THIS IS JUST FOR YOU TO READ.
PLEASE CALL ME. R X
For once, Simone’s intrigue triumphed over her heaviness, and she pulled a handful of pages toward her.
She was starved and dehydrated, so when she sat up, she had to close her eyes for several moments to recover from the sudden disorientation.
Once it had passed, she turned the title page over and began to read.
What Simone read was obviously a skeleton of what would be its final stage since it stood at only ninety-eight pages, but Simone read until the sky darkened and her eyes grew heavy, not able to stop until she’d finished the last page.
At first Simone had thought Remy dropped off the book to show she’d removed “her” chapters, but S was still very much a part of the story.
Remy had just wanted Simone to read the rest of it, and she could see why.
Amidst the character of S was also R—Remy—her heartbreak and desperation so vivid, as were her feelings for S, who she referred to as “her platonic lifeline” on more than one occasion.
When she’d first started reading, Simone didn’t know how to process the depiction of S and R’s friendship.
It read like a modern-day love story, and for that reason, Simone was able to distance herself from the character for a short time.
But the longer she read, the harder it was to deny that S and R had become something quite unique to one another.
Despite having different jobs and social circles, the two women had managed to seamlessly become a part of each other’s life, and while the reader couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, by the end, there was no question it had.
It was as if their friendship had known of its existence before S and R had.
The story ended with S and R on the phone to each other late at night, the two of them falling asleep in their own beds.
Simone’s reading ended with this seemingly insignificant phone call only because Remy had not finished writing the rest of the book.
Obviously, Simone had no experience as an author, but she knew that an inciting incident was due.
S and R would have to fall out so that they could make up again, but, ironically, Simone couldn’t see how Remy would achieve this.
How she would get the two women to a point where they might never want to see one another again.
Simone wished to know how Remy’s book would end while knowing exactly how it would end: with S and R back together again.