“It’s July,” she eventually said. “Like, well, it’s like Saturday, and we’re near the end of July.”

“Let me ask you something. Have you been hurt before?”

“That’s such a typical thing to ask. Are you a typical person?”

“I like to think that I am.”

She stood up and put some underwear on and tapped on her phone. “Here. I’m going to play Childish Gambino.”

We listened for a while before getting out of bed. I watched her take some medication before following her to the blender: she put spinach, tomato, beetroot, kale, banana slices, apple slices, protein powder, almond milk, orange juice; she blended it and we drank it together. She had scars on her thighs and I found them pretentious.

“You know,” she started, but never finished. She pulled out a pad, wrote down her daily goals. She then meditated for twenty minutes as I lay down and attempted to read her signed copy of The Alchemist before throwing it away.

She took me to a business and wealth seminar that I would “totally love,” and afterwards, in the late evening, we drove around for a while; we headed to a peep show in the Valley and she sat with me in a booth, and when we grew bored of it all we walked upstairs and she bought a porno about interracial anal, and then we went for a drive, east, I think, because I vaguely recognised Redbank or Red Hill or whatever it’s called; she took some medication and we parked and she told me to take her in the cold and the dark of the public toilets of some park. We changed into our running clothes and went for a two-hour run in the dark, and at the end, when she was well ahead of me and I was pretty sure I was having a heart attack, she took her clothes off and asked me to watch her in the distance and she was blurry, and I squinted and asked her what she was doing as she swayed and smiled and bit her lip in the silence of the cold.

***

NEWS: The Things We Do For Those Who Don’t Love Us, a short story from Surface Children, is now available as a standalone short story on Amazon.