“Oh, sorry Kylie, I just wanted to catch up with Daniel first for a few minutes.”
As she continued to chat to him, Daniel glancing at me from time to time with the worried expression on his face, as if to silently beg me to get the crazy lady away from him, I started off bemused, but as the conversation continued I actually found jealousy creeping up inside of me.
I hadn’t been jealous in years. It had been so long, since I’d really truly felt jealousy, I think the last time I really experienced it was in high school. I had a friend, Anita King, who was just naturally so smart. She never had to work for any of her grades, she did extracurriculars, she breezed through every assignment we were ever given and almost always had better marks than me. I was never down by any stretch of the imagination, but there were a few courses where in order to keep my marks high, high enough to get accepted into the best university program I could, I had to really work hard. And still, I could never catch Anita’s grades. I thought it was so unfair at the time, and while we moved on and were still actually pretty good friends (although I hadn’t seen her in months, I basically fell off the face of the earth to my friends after that fateful night), I still remember that jealousy that I felt.
Now, for the first time since I was in school, I felt it again. This time it was aimed at a boy though. God, Daniel and I had literally just agreed a couple of minutes ago to try and work out as friends, and here I was wanting to throttle the only real friend I had in this place before Daniel arrived just because she was flirting with him. What was wrong with me? I forced the jealousy out of my head. I was being stupid. This was how Fiona acted with everyone. This was her thing, to flirt with guys, and I knew she meant absolutely nothing by it. She was happily married. I was being silly, but the fact that jealousy crept into me at all worried me.
“Are you listening Kylie? I was just telling Daniel that it’s not fair that you keep them all to yourself, when there are so many other wonderful women in this place would love to be blessed with the pleasure of his company.”
Hearing my name I was broken out of the thoughts running through my head.
“Oh what? Sorry, I think I drifted away for a minute there. Besides Fiona, I’m not hogging Daniel at all. For one thing, he’s a big boy now and he can hang out with whoever he wants, for another this is the first time I’ve seen him in like three days, except for sports this morning.”
“If you say so darling, just as long as you leave some of him here for the rest of us.”
“For God sakes Fiona, leave the poor man alone. He’s not some animal in a zoo, he is here for exactly the same reason as the rest of us.”
“Yes, well, just because he’s like all of us doesn’t mean we can’t have a little bit of fun, right?”
“You’re impossible Fiona.” I shook my head and laughed at her. She was so typically what somebody thinks of when they think of the rich wife from the suburbs. If it wasn’t for the fact that she kept her hair its natural brown color, she would’ve fit every single stereotype of the rich man’s wife with a drinking problem who flirts with younger men.
We kept her entertained for a while before finally she finished her meal and left Daniel and I in peace when she saw Sam come in.
“She’s found another victim, we’ve got the place to ourselves again,” I told Daniel, who laughed. “Don’t worry about Fiona, she’s completely harmless. She just likes to flirt with anything with a pulse in this place.”
“Yeah, I figured that out a couple of days ago when I was in here and saw her flirting with basically every guy. She is strange, but seems harmless enough.”
“Definitely. She’s probably my only other friend in here apart from you, and if I’m honest I wouldn’t be surprised if she leaves sometime pretty soon. She’s looking a lot better, and sounding a lot better as well.”
“That’s really good for her. The last few days have been getting harder for me as well, I think I’m finally entering the hardest part of the whole detox process.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. The other day when I was in the gym I broke out in sweat, like I was really clammy and I actually thought I had a fever for a while so I went back to my room. Then my hands started shaking, and I went to see Doctor Emma and she told me that it was completely normal. We spoke for a while, about symptoms, whether it was safe for me to train with heavy weights while experiencing the symptoms, that sort of thing. She was good, it was good to talk to her about that sort of stuff.”
“That’s good, I’m glad you’re able to talk to her about things. And don’t worry, eventually the symptoms will pass. It will be tough, it’s really tough, but you will get better.”