Love Of Lust

Chapter Sixteen

A man like Riad had no time for someone like me. He'd made that abundantly clear. Finally, I managed to drag myself up off the sofa and over to my studio, in the spare bedroom. I folded up my easel and packed up all my charcoals and pastels, getting everything ready for a move to... ...where the hell would I go?

This whole time, I'd been picturing myself going back to my old apartment. But of course, that wasn't "my apartment" anymore. Someone else lived there now. I hadn't expected to grapple with this question so soon, and now I was completely lost. Where on earth would I go? And I had to consider that quite literally. With two million dollars, I could go anywhere I wanted and start an entirely new life.

Riad had left his laptop bag sitting in the living room where he'd dropped it, so I pulled out the computer and started to browse. After a few minutes, in spite of myself, I found myself back to browsing apartments that were ten minutes away. I didn't particularly love this city, but at least it was familiar. There was something to be said for familiarity.

When Riad finally emerged from the bedroom, I half-expected him to have packed all my clothes into liquor boxes. He hadn't, of course. I wondered if he expected me to do it. Which reminded me - I was going to need some boxes. While he stood in front of the open fridge, staring, as if he expected some previous unknown foodstuffs to have appeared in the last few hours, I heard his phone go off in his pocket. I made the barest effort to pretend I wasn't listening, but of course I was.

"Zara," he said, turning to look at me. "Hi." I perked up. "You're going to be in town this weekend? Well, that's great news. Just you?"

I watched his face carefully, but he betrayed almost nothing.

"Of course you can stay here," he said. "Becky can move her art supplies out of the big spare room....no, no, don't worry about it, it's no problem."

After they'd finalized their plans and said their goodbyes, I stood up and headed into the kitchen. Riad shoved the phone back in his pocket.

"Well," he said. "I guess we'd better delay things until she's gone home, at least."

"See," I said. "This is the kind of thing I'm talking about." He shrugged.

"If you'd already moved out, I just would have told her you were away at an...art conference." He pulled a beer out of the fridge.

"That's a thing that exists, isn't it?"

"With all my clothes and personal belongings?" I countered. "And the place is being sprayed for cockroaches, so she can't come over."

"Sure, there's no way she'll get suspicious."

"We can talk about this after she leaves," he said, meaningfully, prying the lid off his beer and tossing it into the trash can. From his tone, it was quite clear he wasn't really open to further negotiations. Well. We'd see about that. -

Zara arrived on Friday evening, all smiles and sass like usual. She hugged me tightly, then promptly took us out to a late dinner and bought us enough drinks that we were actually able to act like a couple again.

Riad retired to bed early, leaving me and Zara sitting on the sofa, quietly chit-chatting about everything that came to mind. She'd managed to land another big client who was even more insufferable than the last, so we chuckled over her stories for a while as the clock ticked quietly in the background.

After a silence, she switched gears.

"Is everything going okay between you two?"

I hesitated. Obviously, we weren't pretending as well as I'd thought.