Page 76 of Power Moves
This is true. I definitely pulled my own underwear off. On purpose.
I decide to change tack. ‘Look, I know you do your player thing, and that’s fine. I know you—’
‘Millsy!’ Archie interrupts. ‘Stop calling me a player as some kind of excuse. I’m not, and you know it. I don’t have a sex-favours database filled with phone numbers. I’ve told you about every single person I’ve dated in the last four years.’
‘And I’m happy for you. Really, I am.’ My voice sounds brittle and shrill. ‘So let’s pretend the festival never happened. We’ll never tell a soul. It’s what we both want.’
Archie is quiet. I can’t even hear him breathing. I wonder if he’s noticed the issue with the air vents too.
‘No,’ he says eventually.
‘No, what?’
‘No, I don’t want to pretend it never happened.’
I don’t know what he’s saying. He’s not making sense. ‘Archie, you’re speaking in double negatives.’
‘I can’t help it, Millsy. You make my brain malfunction.’
‘That’s not my fault, Archie. Maybe you should have done a comms degree instead of flaking out to play rugby in France.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
To be honest, I don’t know what it was supposed to mean, but now I need to form a cogent argument so he doesn’t realise my brain malfunctions around him too.
‘It means you didn’t even train to be a journalist. You did an internship, skipped off to France, played one season for the Roosters, then landed a job that thousands of people would work their arses off to get.’
‘Millsy, I work my arse off too.’
‘I know. I just don’t think you appreciate your footy privilege.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘It means there are always jobs for the boys! And you’re the biggest boy of all. You just didNews & Viewsfor Christ’s sake! Everywhere you go, people are like:You’re the dude, man. You’re the man, dude.All you ever had to do to be successful was drink protein shakes. Your giant limbs have opened doors for you that people like me can’t imagine. At uni, you got all the girls, and now you get all the scoops. As soon as you finish the political beat you’ll probably get a tap on the shoulder from 2GB and you’ll be able to spend the rest of your life as a shock jock, making millions of dollars a year flaming up drama about cash-strapped drycleaners who sneak tenners from their customers’ pockets every now and again to feed their malnourished children.’
A part of me can see that I’m spiralling—Archie isn’t Chappo, he actually does work hard, hecaresabout people—butit doesn’t change the fact that parts of what I’m sayingaretrue. Heisprivileged and he doesn’t realise it.
‘Archie, we’re both too smart to pretend that the festival was anything more than a mistake. Boss told me to keep you close, so I did. We’re two people who only hang out because we have to—’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘Don’t tell me what to do!’
Archie’s voice is furious. ‘But you’ll fuck me on your boss’s orders?!’
‘That’s not what happened!’ I shriek. Or is it? I have no idea. All I know is that it feels like I’m on a burning bridge and there’s nothing left to do but run through the fire because the path behind me is crumbling. I’m begging now. ‘Archie, can we please pretend we never slept together? Everything can go back to normal. I can hate you, and you can hate me, and—’
‘Millsy, I’ve never fucking hated you!’
‘Well, you’ve never liked me,’ I snap, and the pain of the night under the frangipani tree resurfaces. How I thought he was funny and thoughtful, and maybe even attracted to me, but in front of his friends that counted for nothing. ‘Even if it meant you’d win the stupid uni res bingo, I still wasn’t good enough for you!’
‘The bingo was why I couldn’t … argh!’ Archie groans. ‘I’d been trying to work out what to say to you all year, and I didn’t want to stuff it up. And then there was the whole thing with your mum. You didn’t know what you were doing. You wouldn’t have taken me seriously any other night. You’d never even noticed me before.’
‘What do you mean, Archie?’ He’dseenme looking at him; our eyes felt like magnets the way they’d automatically connect across a room, even though we’d never spoken before. It’s why I always had to turn away when he came into a room, because it wasembarrassinghow much I wanted to look at him. ‘Of course I’d noticed you,’ I bleat pathetically. ‘You fill up all my eye-space.’
Tears are suddenly leaking out of my eyes, and my chest feels like it’s pressing in on my heart. I don’t know what I’m feeling. Confusion. Pain. Fear that something is slipping away from me before I’ve worked out what it is.
I think of Archie’s text—We need to talk—and that makes me think of my phone, which makes me think of Boss, and my job, and my tiny shoebox apartment and how much it would destroy me if I lost my job, if I couldn’t afford rent, if I had to move home; how I’d be reminded of Mum every single day.
