Free Unzipped by Nicki Reed Page A

already?’
    I’m picking at my porridge. ‘Yes, Mark.’ That’ll do. ‘And I’m worried we’re becoming a little too good at you not being home.’
    He’s unattractive when he scowls. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s all I ever hear from you, Peta.’
    ‘If you’re home to hear it.’
    ‘You’re never home either,’ Mark says. ‘What about last Saturday?’
    BJ’s. Her iPod up loud. I don’t hear the rain. Her hands on my breasts, her tongue flat on my nipple. I don’t have to worry about that anymore.
    Mark has had two pancakes and is on his third.
    ‘Okay, I’m missing you already,’ I say. ‘Remember our fight at Safeway?’
    We’d had an aisle nine flare-up that continued through the register and the walk home. A fast temperature drop and raindrops the size of fifty-cent pieces. Expensive rain, he’d said, like your biscuits. I’d stopped walking. Come on. No. The bags filling up, drizzle in plastic. He dropped the shopping, soft to the footpath. Kissed me. My T-shirt and shorts clinging. His hair, dark and glossy, reminding me of Superman.
    ‘I remember,’ he says. He puts his hand on the table palm up, I rest mine in it. We fit. It’s usual, comfortable. All history and yesterdays, we can be so easy.

    The walk through the terminal is long and Mark is chatting enough for both of us. At the bookshop he buys the latest Matthew Reilly. He’s read them all and only on planes.
    I walk him to the gate and that’s when I cry.
    ‘Don’t cry, Pee-Wee,’ he says. ‘Two weeks isn’t even long enough to develop a new bad habit.’
    Yes it is.
    ‘Mark…’
    I want to tell him we’re over, tell him I need him to stay home, try harder, help me fix this. I want to tell him I don’t know what to think anymore. But I can’t let him step onto a plane worrying about his future. He has work to do, a partnership to claim. And he’s right. Two weeks is nothing.
    I wipe my eye on the turn of my wrist. ‘It’s airports. Unless you’re on your way, you’re being left. Besides, it could go down.’
    ‘Pete, no plane crash jokes in the terminal. Look, it says so on that sign.’
    I can’t laugh with him.
    Mark is at the gate. He’s waiting to be frisked by either the big bloke with no neck or the blonde woman in the tight, white blouse. He’s hanging back. It works. He has the woman. He waves a happy goodbye.
    I wave, smile.
    I’ve paid twelve dollars for forty-five minutes’ parking. I’m about to pull out of my spot when I receive a text from Mark. Plane delayed two hours. Typical. It’s also typical he doesn’t say I love you. I want him to, don’t want him to. That’s not typical.

    Get home, dump my bag, do the washing, hang it out in the early-evening chill. Do ironing for the week. Polish shoes. Mrs Dalloway is asleep on a jumper Mark has left on a chair. Check phone, no texts from BJ. Good. Not good. Make toasted ham and cheese sandwich for dinner, burn it, eat it anyway. Still no texts.
    Pack bag for Monday.
    Take shower, brush teeth, set alarm, lock doors.
    My phone beeps a text.
    Run to it, heart in mouth.
    The text is from Mark: boarded.
    Will. Not. Cry.
    Go to bed.

15.
    With the internet, and most documents available digitally, what is it bike couriers carry? BJ said a bloke in a firm on Lonsdale Street has a ham and salad on rye delivered to his office every day. That’s eighties behaviour.
    Couriers lie about in clusters outside 447 Collins Street, 35 Collins Street, 600 Bourke. Turns out they’re not on a break, or having lunch; they’re waiting for work. They don’t get paid unless they’re moving.
    Before BJ, I didn’t see cyclists unless I was seeing red. Didn’t know about the disabled toilets at McDonald’s. Didn’t know it took only twenty minutes to drive from my place in Balwyn to hers in Northcote, another world less than half an hour away.
    I’ve spent days trying not to think about BJ, being annoyed she hasn’t texted and relieved she hasn’t texted.
    I