Louise Bentley is a feisty, wild, 'let's-go-to-Capri-for-the-weekend-yeah?' kind of girl. She spends her days working at a party-planning company. Oh, and she never wants kids. Ever.
Ben Langford is a studious, quiet, 'I'm-busy-reading' sort of man...
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Louise stared down at her granola bowl.
The chia seeds had been a mistake. Seeing them now — little black specks littering her vanilla yoghurt — she felt slightly nauseous. After three days of combing through Hugh and Vienna's hair for nits, she wasn't sure that she'd ever be able to eat chia seeds again.
"Hard at work?" Sebastian asked.
Her boss was rifling through the office cupboard for his usual five o'clock snack. Louise shoved away the granola bowl.
"Have you ever had lice?" she asked.
Sebastian lifted an eyebrow. "No. Why?"
"You don't want to know."
He whistled. "That bad, huh?"
"I suggest that you never have kids," Louise said. "Ever."
She was joking. Sort of. Actually, Vienna's daycare had rung her today to say that Vienna was chasing a traumatized toddler with a dead mouse — and there had been a moment, Louise reflected, when she questioned why anyone would willingly reproduce.
She wasn't proud of it.
But she was willing to admit it to herself.
Sebastian picked up a bag of salt-and-vinegar crisps. "I take it that co-parenting with..." He frowned. "What's his name again?"
"Ben."
"Ben." Sebastian clicked his fingers. "That's right. That's not going well?"
"Well," Louise sighed, "I only want to murder him about eighty per cent of the time, which is a significant improvement." She gave Sebastian a pointed look. "He owns an alphabetized spice rack. And he has a chore wheel."
Sebastian ripped open the bag. "A chore wheel?"
Louise nodded. "I wish I was joking."
Ben set the chore wheel every morning. Then Louise would wake up, make the kids breakfast (cereal for Hugh, buttered toast on a separate plate from the fruit for Vienna), and spin the chore wheel around at random. Ben would come home first and fix it; Louise would wait until he was asleep and then mess it up again.
It was a fun game.
Not so much for Ben, Louise admitted, but she was enjoying herself. It beat the "make-fun-of-Ben's-boring-clothes" game and "leave-dirty-dishes-in-the-sink-until-Ben's-eye-started-twitching" game.
Louise turned back to her laptop. Stared at the screen.
"Do you know he has a tea collection?" Louise asked. "Like, Ben literally collects tea. And then organizes them by region."
Just yesterday, Louise had arrived home to find all her snacks in a plastic bin on the counter. Percy Pigs. Deliciously Ella energy balls. Chocolate digestives. And there — in her cupboard — had been at least twenty tins of tea. Ben claimed that some of the tea couldn't be exposed to sunlight, but Louise got the sense that he was doing it just to piss her off.
