A Rose by Another Name
Rose-tinted Glasses
Without looking at the clock, she knew she’d slept overlong. As she got to the door into the kitchen everything looked ever so slightly different. The sun through the kitchen window was picking up previously unlit smears down the kitchen cabinets.
‘Hiya.’
Felicity flinched. It wasn’t just the wooden cupboards that she hated about the kitchen. There was this danger of unspeakable things sitting at the kitchen table.
The try-before- you-buy man went back to The Age. Bobbie, who she shared the house with, had presumably dragged him home in the dark hours of the morning in the reverse image of the caveman, knuckles dragging as she lugged him down the savannah streets to their feminine lair.
She turned her back to click the kettle on and disentangle a teabag, aware that her t-shirt didn’t cover the stretched pink of her underwear.
The shower turned off at the back of the house, honking a last moan through the pipes as the watched-kettle never boiled. She picked up a scouring pad and had a scrub at the food droppings on the cupboard doors. The sun, still streaming at a high angle through the window, picked out rainbows in the oiliness. Felicity smiled. She was a romantic.
A wolf-whistle jerked her upright. Bobbie had her arms around the shoulders of the mystery man, her hair spiky from the shower. Bobbie and Felicity had shared secrets since primary school; she’d tell all later. Felicity gave a mock-provocateur wriggle of her bum in answer to the wolf-whistle as the kettle finally spluttered its morning urgency. She was not a prude. She might not join the parade of man-flesh through the house but that was only because she believed in love.
