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“Tell me about them,” he suggested. “What are you looking for out of this? Do you have a boyfriend they don’t approve of?”
Her eyes grew large. “No! I don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t want a boyfriend. I want to do my Master’s, but my dad is super old-fashioned and thinks that if I study any more my womb will shrivel up and fall out, and my mum agrees with him, and last week we were arguing and I said I was sick of them trying to set me up with every nice Chinese boy they meet, and Mum said that wasn’t true, and they’d be happy with literally any boy I dated, as long as I found one.” She stopped at last and drew a breath. “I’m babbling, aren’t I?”
“It’s fine,” Harry assured her. “So you want to test that theory?”
Angie rolled her eyes. “It’s so stupid! But they’re driving me nuts, and my friend Anna said she knew this girl who hired this fake boyfriend who was a theatre kid, and…” She shrugged. “And here I am.”
“That would be Ambrose,” he said. “I took over from him. Okay, so basically you want to turn up to lunch with a boyfriend who is so awful they’ll be happier you’re single, right?”
She flashed him an anxious smile. “Right.”
“Okay,” he said. “So, the deal is, you pay for my lunch and also my fee on top of that. I have like a sliding scale thing, depending on how big you want me to go, or if I have to get anyone else involved.”
Her brow crinkled. “Anyone else?”
“Yeah, for an extra fifty my housemate will turn up and say he’s my parole officer and remind me that I can’t be within two hundred metres of a school.”
Angie’s eyes grew even larger.
“For an extra hundred, he’ll pretend to be a detective and arrest me on a warrant.”
“Oh, wow. I don’t think any of that is necessary.”
“Okay, then. What flavour of awful did you want? Ambrose specialised in ‘hot but an asshole’ but, well”—Harry gestured to his distinctly un-muscled physique—“I’m built in a way that lends itself more towards awkwardly terrible. Bad clothes, bad past, ‘society’s out to get me’ kind of thing. Would you prefer me to be unemployed, or working at something really questionable?”
Angie gave a grin that was ever so slightly evil. “Definitely unemployed. And if you could turn up late and drunk, that’d be ideal.”
“Easy done.” Harry nodded. “I do a great sloppy drunk. Now, let’s talk rates.”
After his English Lit lecture, Harry stuck a ‘Housemate Wanted’ flyer on the noticeboard outside the Student Union. Tristan had said he’d put one here the other day, but there was no sign of it, and Harry didn’t know if that was because the noticeboard had already been cleared off once, or because Tristan was full of shit. He was leaning towards the latter. Tristan was easily distractible, however many times Harry had told him how important it was that they got another housemate. Mr Erskine, their incredibly elderly and doddery landlord, was pretty lax when it came to rent and other associated landlord business—like fixing the plumbing, which really shouldn’t make that banging noise when the tap in the bathroom was on—but even he wouldn’t let them slide too far behind on rent. And since Ambrose had moved out, they needed someone in as soon as possible to pay his share.
Harry missed Ambrose. He was happy that Ambrose was happy, and his boyfriend Liam was a great guy, but Ambrose had been his best mate since they’d met at their first O Week at uni, and it wasn’t the same now he’d moved out of the crumbling old terrace house in Newtown. He got on fine with Tristan, but he missed Ambrose.
He sighed and hefted his backpack onto his shoulder and headed back towards Parramatta Road and the bus stop. His route took him past the Courtyard Restaurant and Bar. The food was pretty good there, but his wallet was feeling the pinch lately, so he tried to drum up some enthusiasm for the instant noodles he had waiting for him at home.
It didn’t work but fuck it. He was going to eat them anyway, even if they tasted like MSG and sadness.
Cutting through the sunlit courtyard, he caught sight of Mia, and he brightened. Mia was cool—she’d been his first Bad Boyfriend date and she was always happy to chat with him when they spotted each other around the campus. She was sitting at a table with a blond guy who was wearing jeans and a faded Ramones T-shirt. The guy was sipping some sort of pink smoothie.
“Hi, Mia.” Harry dumped his backpack on the ground. “How’s it going?”
Mia blinked at him. “Oh, hey. Hi, how are you?”
She looked a little off, and Harry wondered if he was interrupting something. Ambrose always said he couldn’t read a room with a pair of binoculars, and he probably had a point.
“I won’t bother you,” he said. “I’m just on my way home. Great to see you though.”
“You too.” She darted a look at the blond guy.
Harry looked too.
“Hey,” the guy said. He stood up and stuck out his hand. “Jack.”
“Hey,” said Harry. He shook it. “I’m Harry.”
The guy dropped his hand, his eyes narrowing. “Harry? As in, the Harry who dated Mia?”
“Oh,” Harry said. “Um, sort of? I mean?—”
