Read Online False Advertising by Dianne Blacklock - Free Book Online Page B

stranger?’
    â€˜Well, not once they start living with you –’
    â€˜I don’t think I could do that, Tony.’
    â€˜Look, I’m just saying it’s an option, Hel,’ he said. ‘And you don’t seem to have a whole lot of those.’
    â€˜Thanks for reminding me,’ she said glumly.
    â€˜Are you getting any counselling, Hel?’ asked Tony after another pause.
    â€˜Why do you ask?’
    â€˜I just think it would be good to talk to someone about all this.’
    Helen didn’t say anything.
    â€˜Look, I have to go,’ said Tony. ‘But, listen, call me, Hel, any time, even if you just want to talk. You should call me more often.’ He paused. ‘We’ve gotten out of the habit the last few years, and I miss talking to you. You know we’ve only got each other now, Hel.’
    She breathed out. ‘I know.’

Pyrmont
    Gemma rolled over with a groan. Her bladder was giving her a nudge. Again. She’d already got up once at four. She’d heard somewhere it was nature’s way of preparing the mum-to-be forinterrupted sleep. After all, that’s the only kind of sleep she’d be getting for the next three years, give or take. Mother Nature was a bitch.
    Her bladder could not be ignored any longer. She opened one eye and squinted out. Daylight. Perhaps if she kept squinting the whole way to the bathroom and back again, she could trick her body into believing it hadn’t actually woken up, and she’d be able to go straight back to sleep. She peered out through barely opened lids and climbed carefully out of bed, as though she was trying not to wake a sleeping partner. She crept from the bedroom, down the hall to the bathroom, lifted her nightie and sat. Aargh! Straight onto cold porcelain! She jumped up, looking behind, scowling at the toilet bowl as she slammed the seat down. She hated men.
    Gemma sat back on the toilet, wide awake now. She turned to focus on the digital clock conveniently located at eye level on the vanity cabinet. Phoebe was a time-management freak and she had clocks in every room, sometimes more than one. She probably timed her toilet stops: forty-five seconds for ones, three minutes thirty for twos.
    The vanity clock had just ticked over to 8.40. Gemma supposed it could have been worse. She listened for signs of life, but it was quiet in the apartment. Well, as quiet as Pyrmont could get. There was never any respite from the traffic noise; it was like living in the middle of a freeway. Which, come to think of it, was a pretty apt description of the suburb.
    Phoebe and Cameron were probably still sleeping it off after their big night last night. And what an excruciating night that had turned out to be. Gemma had had to stay sober while a bunch of finance and law prats jostled verbally with each other to prove who was richest and cleverest and could drop the most designer names for everything, right down to gardening tools and cooking utensils, for chrissakes. Food, apparently, was the new black. Phoebe knew her stuff, and with thorough preparation and planning her menu had been a triumph of style over substance, incorporating the hippest, coolest ingredients sourced with varying degrees of difficulty from the hippest, coolest purveyors of foodstuffs across the city. Her guests had beensuitably impressed, though quick to detail their own recent culinary feats to the oohs and aahs of their little coterie. They were like a bunch of preschoolers trying to outdo each other in the sandpit. It was nauseating, which Gemma found all the more annoying as she’d only just got over her morning sickness.
    She stepped in front of the mirror and considered her reflection. Her blonde mop could do with a cut – she was getting a bit of a surfie-chick, bed-hair look about her, and even Gemma conceded she was too old to get away with that. She turned sideways. Did she look pregnant? She had to meet this MD bod next week