Still holding my hands, she looked closely at my palms. She ran her thumb past one of the lines. Concerned, she began to say something, but then scanned my face and stopped herself. Instead, she decided to say something else:
“You have small hands.”
“Not really.”
“Yeah, you do.”
Her own hands felt petite and slightly calloused, and some of her nails were glittered with little diamond-looking things. She smelt like some rosy perfume I once smelt on some woman I met at some New Year house gathering in some fancy apartment in the Valley in January. She had ears that were a little too large for her face and she told me she’d just had her eyelashes done. After enjoying an exciting conversation with her about Haruki Murakami’s most confusing works, the woman proceeded to vape, and so I promised there and then to never speak to her ever again. I’d only broken that promise twice in my life: once, at around one in the morning, when I felt terribly lonely and saw her post an Instagram story of her looking the complete opposite of being terribly lonely (jealous, I messaged her: Hey how are you? How you been?), and another time at around three in the morning, when I’d drank too much and was also feeling terribly lonely (I messaged her: Long time no see! How you been?) — she left both of these messages on “seen”, probably because she found me ugly, or uninteresting, or not six foot and rich. She’s eighty-five years old.
“I can tell your future based on what I see on your hands, you know.”
“You can?”
“For eighty-nine dollars.”
“Eighty-nine bucks?”
“Per session, and I think we’ll need about twelve sessions.”
Jude rolled his eyes. “Enough with your bullshit you big-titted hustler! Just hurry up and do that thing.”
Still holding onto one of my hands, she led us inside the Airbnb.
The Airbnb was an impressive three-storey-home: one of its walls was pretty much just a large window overlooking a lake, and surrounding the lake were other large and modern homes, also with walls that had large windows overlooking the lake.
Everything inside the home looked modern, bright, clean, unlike the cramped and damp-smelling homes I was very familiar with. But one day, I thought to myself, this modern home will also become old, and the lake will lose its appeal, and the rich will find something more beautiful to spend their money on; in the end, we will all just smell like armpits and no one will think we’re important anymore. I remembered the eight-five-year-old woman who left me in a perpetual seen zone; I thought about the Instagram stories of her smiling and vaping and being happy. It annoyed me.
“Nice place,” I said.
“I’ve been here for months now,” she sighed, letting go of my hand. “You wouldn’t believe how much my partner is paying for this.”
Jude looked around, unimpressed. “Why don’t you own your own place? Looks kind of old. And there are places with bigger lakes.”
Ignoring him, she glanced over at the kitchen. “You boys want some lion’s mane coffee? Some kombucha? They’ll keep you from ageing.”
“Nah,” Jude quickly said, checking his watch. “My mate Dean needs the service. Just give it to him so we can go.”
She looked at my legs. “Your mate Dean needs a waxing first.” She smiled at me. “I can wax your legs for a hundred twenty. And it’ll take two sessions. Yeah?”
“I’m pretty happy with my hairy legs,” I said, and I said it in a way that I thought would be funny. No one laughed.
“Look, let me do it for eighty dollars. And I’ll read your future.”
The woman, who looked eighteen but was actually thirty-eight, did way too many things to earn an income: she taught yoga, she taught pilates, she had a beauty lash business, she had a podcast; she was a life coach, she was a wellness coach, she was an organic perfume reseller, she was a meditation coach, she did social media management, she had ten eBooks, she was a lion’s mane mushroom affiliate, she did fortune telling and she also “did a bit of NDIS.” She was terrible at all of the above.
Jude put his hand on her shoulder. “Stop trying to sell all your other shit and bring us upstairs, like you did with me last time. It makes you the most money, so why do you keep upselling random shit? Was your botox in Japan really that expensive?”
“I get it done in South Korea, not Japan,” she sighed. She then looked at me as if looking at me was going to help her win some sort of imaginary argument: “Look, I can wax you for fifty dollars, balls included. But it’ll still have to be three to five sessions if you really want the fortune telling. You look like a good guy. You don’t need the service upstairs. I’ll even refund the payment Jude made.”
“What paym—”
“You’re not allowed to refuse,” Jude said, his voice now rising. “I transferred the payment to your stupid boyfriend last night, which he happily took. He didn’t give you permission to give the money back. We all want this done except for you, so just do it.”
I was confused. “What’s going on?”
“Shut up, Dean. Now’s not the time to be afraid.”
That was it. That was all it took for the whole atmosphere of that entire day to shift towards a completely new direction. A cruel shadow had quickly crawled onto Jude’s face, and after knowing him for more than a decade, I’d just realised that he was taller than me.
“Fine,” she said, “but don’t hate me if your mate Dean ends up regretting everything.”
Looking annoyed, she led the way, and we walked upstairs in silence.
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