The Boyfriend Sessions Read Free

what I cannot understand … ” she took an angry breath and narrowed her eyes at me, “is you ditching said Frenchman and giving up on your lifelong dream destination.”
    I winced a bit because what she’d said was unavoidably true. The long journey home had given me plenty of time to come to peace with my decision to end things with Ben, but the bit about neglecting my lifelong dream destination hurt. A lot.
    “What were you thinking? You’re not even due back at work yet.” She shook her head at me in disgust, her long, deliciously straight, dark brown hair fanned out around her shoulders. Then she raised a slim, elegant arm and pointed down the street. “I order you to go straight back to the airport and get on the first plane to Norway.”
    “I just really needed to come home,” I replied weakly, and before I could get a hold of myself, my eyes welled and I burst into tears.
    Immediately she engulfed me in a tight hug. Sobbing and snivelling into her chest, I was only vaguely aware I was leaving a puddle of tears and mascara on her impeccable work dress.
    What a sight. A gorgeous, Amazon woman in her kick-ass corporate attire hugging a dishevelled, vertically-challenged woman in crushed flight-friendly clothes, in the middle of a busy Sydney city street. Not surprisingly, evening commuters bustled past us wordlessly.
    She eased me gently out of the hug and had the grace to ignore the stain on her chest from my torrent of tears. Confident I’d recovered from my little outburst, she said the only words a good friend could possibly say to ease my distress in such a situation.
    “Come on, let’s get you a drink.” She tugged me inside the foyer of her office building and pressed the button for the lift impatiently. “But first, let’s go upstairs, dump your luggage, get you changed and clean you up a little.”
    This was pretty much how it had been for the past twenty years. Against all odds, Madeleine Spencer was my most loyal childhood friend. Even when we were seven or eight, our parents considered ours a strange partnership but were willing to go along with it for the benefits our unusual alliance would provide—straight A’s, conservative, quiet, teacher’s pet.
    That definitely wasn’t me. My parents had hoped Maddy’s conscientiousness would rub off and set me on a straight course. Actually, looking back, I’m not quite sure what Maddy’s parents had hoped she would get out of the relationship. I suppose she’d been somewhat shy back then, but they needn’t have worried. By the time she was sixteen she was on the debating team, a school prefect and boys clambered to be near her although, for the most part, they were ignored. Not because she wasn’t interested, just because she was yet to realise the effect she had on the opposite sex and she was far more dedicated to her studies than me.
    By that age I was pretty much her sidekick. I got used to providing the comic relief and the teachers seemed to go a bit easier on me when Maddy was there, trying to keep me in line. My grades did actually improve a lot under Maddy’s influence. She encouraged me to sit still long enough to focus and I was pleasantly surprised at my ability to do well at school when I put my mind to it.
    Even through our university days we’d remained close. We were on the same campus, but Maddy was enrolled in a Business degree—you would’ve had to kill me first—while I did my Bachelor of Design. I could still remember meeting up with her regularly for lunch. She’d be cramming some micro- or macro-economic theory, or mind-numbing accounting principles, and I’d turn up energised with a sketchbook full of my latest artwork, which I’d bombard her with. She was always content to listen.
    As we reached the 17 th floor and walked through the cutting edge stainless steel and glass entrance doors, I was reminded once again that it was obviously a strategy that served her well.
    The sprawling open plan office was a