Living With Boys

The next week passed in a blur.

It was strange, working with Sam, but not as strange as it should have been, given our history.

Unfortunately, we had always been so very similar—heartless breakup tactics aside—and it was easy to fall back into our ordinary patterns of teasing and easy conversation.

For some reason, I didn't tell the boys that Sam was my new workplace mentor. Will had never liked Sam, and though he was long gone and no longer speaking to me by the time things between Sam and I ended, I couldn't imagine that Sam's 37-second break up phone call because he needed to go 'find himself' in the vaginas of fellow tourists would have done anything to endear him to Will.

I found myself quicker to get over it. I'd spent four years angry, and with three well-timed jokes and two earnest—without the saccharine seriousness that we both so dearly hated—apologies, I was back under the spell that was Sam Newman and could no longer summon that familiar rage. Hurt, perhaps. But not the fire that once accompanied it.

He flirted with me incessantly, but always under the guide of friendliness. The same way Jameson flirted with me, though I was almost certain that Sam actually meant it.

Still, it was a nice distraction from Sydney and Barney and all of the complicated feelings I harboured toward both. My conversation with Zara seemed to haunt me, underpinning the monologue of my own thoughts, like the sinister soundtrack to a horror movie. It was only a week until he was due to fly down again to celebrate my 21st birthday, and part of me dreaded it. I was excited to see him—I missed him—but I was afraid of my own traitorous heart.

So, I was very grateful when my phone buzzed on my work desk on Friday afternoon, displaying Jameson's name and an accompanying mirror selfie with flexed abs that he'd clearly uploaded himself.

"Can I take this?" I asked Sam, pointing at my phone.

He glanced up from his computer. "Do I seem like the kind of guy who would run such a tight ship?"

I eyed the remnants of the bagel, iced coffee and chicken salad he'd gotten up on three seperate occasions to find, the rolled up sleeves of his shirt, and the mini basketball hoop he'd installed above the paper waste bin, so he could shoot buckets with discarded reports. "No, but it's not you I'm afraid of."

"Lena's a teddy bear." At my obvious skepticism—I liked Lena, admired her a shit tonne, but would never in any world describe her as a teddy bear—Sam relented. "Okay, well, maybe one of those semi-evil ones that is occasionally possessed by a demonic spirit and appears in random places in your house. That is to say, terrifying, but she never actually acts on it. You'd have to make out with Jace or something to actually make her angry."

"That's a very long-winded way of saying yes," I told him, swiping across to accept Jamie's call.

"—belle, answer, Isabeeeeelle," came Jameson's voice through the phone.

"Yes?"

"Oh, hi," he said brightly. "How's it hanging?"

"Are you drunk?" I asked.

"At midday? Of course not." In the background, I could hear the faint hum of Seb's laughter; he worked from home on Fridays. Jamie, of course, rarely worked at all; he had the luxury of financial security paired with a disinclination for hard work, so he tried his hand at employment every six weeks or so, before quitting as soon as he lost interest. He was currently in one of his between phases, which meant he spent most of his time socialising with his hundreds of friends, citing popularity as a full-time job. "Who do you take me for? I am charmingly tipsy."