She is cold and hot at the same time, tries to tell him, I didn’t ask you to come. It is very important that she make this clear and so she says it again, more slowly and with great concentration. ‘I. Didn’t. Ask. You. To. Come.’

‘What?’ Will stands. Without his weight her bed is a flimsy thing, likely to float away. ‘I’m not talking about you. It’s nothing to do … Forget it. Go to sleep.’

Anger in his voice, and for the first seconds after he leaves the room her blood itches with worry for him and for her and for what has passed between them. Gratefully, she remembers the narcotics have been waiting for her to stop resisting. She lies back and lets the surge take her.

LENA

LENA

Two beers and three sambucca shots in, after Kylie had filled Lena in on Lacey’s birth, and then working backwards, her gestational diabetes, her miscarriage, her escape from an abusive relationship, her mother’s breast cancer and her various high school flings and suspensions, Lena blurted out that there was a video of her having sex online.

‘No way!’ Kylie said, slapping her hand over her mouth. ‘Kim Kardashian in the house! Woot woot!’

‘Shhhh,’ Lena said. Ty was sleeping in the bedroom, which was one very thin wall away from where they sat.

‘Serious, though. Can I see?’

‘No! It’s not something I want to, like, share. I didn’t do it on purpose.’

‘Your bloke uploaded the vid without you knowing?’

‘He took the vid without me knowing. Then he uploaded it.’

‘Fuuuck. What a cunt. Sorry, Leen, but that’s a seriously cunty thing to do. Do ya need someone to smash him? Is he big? Ty does all right, but if your bloke’s big we can get Ty’s karate teacher to do it. Brick shithouse.’

‘Don’t karate teachers have some honour code or something? Not allowed to use their skills on randoms?’

‘Yeah, probably, but this bloke’s not proper. He just fucking loves karate, teaches some mates in his mum’s basement. And anyway, this wouldn’t be a random. It’d be targeted.’ Kylie karate-chopped the air, dropped the empty shot glass she’d been holding. It bounced off the carpet and Lena caught it mid-air. The two of them couldn’t breathe from laughing for several minutes.

They calmed down by knocking back another shot each. Lena’s stomach felt dangerously queasy but the rest of her felt better than she had in weeks.

‘So tonight, earlier, I went to a hotel with the fuckwit who filmed me.’

Kylie slammed her fist on the floor. ‘What are you telling me? Fuuck, Lena. Spill, spill.’

Lena told her what had happened but with more violence and kick-arse repartee on her part and more grovelling and crying on Josh’s.