“It’s not a date. I’ve been meaning to do more arts and culture stuff. The only London thing I do is hit the sales at Liberty.”
Nathalie ignored this. “Everyone knows when people say, ‘Let’s be friends,’ what they mean is they’re never going to see each other again.”
“Right, but this isn’t some guy off Tinder—”
“No,” said Nathalie. “It’s Ket Yap, whose name is mud. We agreed his name was mud! Remember the exorcism?”
Renee grimaced. The exorcism had been Nathalie’s idea. Nathalie had proposed it when, several months after Ket Siong had stopped talking to Renee, she was still crying herself to sleep every night.
Ket Siong had returned to Malaysia by then. They were not in contact; because he wasn’t on Facebook, Renee couldn’t even stalk him online. It was, Nathalie declared, becoming an unhealthy obsession.
“It’s time to get over him,” she decreed. “We need to cleanse your spirit.”
She officiated at the ceremony, watching sternly as Renee burnt photos of herself and Ket Siong together, printed off from her phone for the purpose.
“This is crazy. Why am I doing this?” Renee grumbled, but Nathalie was justified by the results. Three weeks later Derek Lim had asked Renee out, and they’d ended up dating for almost two years. They’d only broken up in the end because Derek wanted to further his studies in New York and neither of them was up for a long-distance relationship.
“I can’t believe you got me to do that,” said Renee now, shaking her head.
“I thought it worked. But clearly it has not,” said Nathalie. “Because not only has Ket returned, you took him home and slept with him—”
“Shh!” Renee glanced around the café. Her Instagram follower base was mostly Southeast Asian, but there were times people recognised her in public, even in London. She said, in a low voice, “You’re always saying a rebound is the best way to get over an ex.”
“Not a rebound with your first love! Your first love who dumped you in the worst way possible!”
“I thought you’d approve. It’s a flex, if you think about it,” argued Renee. “Twenty-year-old me would be freaking out.”
“Twenty-year-old you would be pinning wedding inspo,” said Nathalie. “No, I do not approve. If you had left it at the hookup—yes, fine. I assume he is hot and not, like, portly with a receding hairline.”
Renee nodded, though she felt she was being a true friend in refraining from pointing out that “portly with a receding hairline” was not an inaccurate description of Nathalie’s husband, with whom Nathalie had as passionate a sex life as two sixty-hour-a-week jobs and a three-year-old allowed for.
“You know how you were saying how beautiful Ket Siong was back then?” Renee smiled reminiscently. “You should see him now.”
Jason was pretty, and worked out in accordance with the demands of his job, but his audience favoured the ethereal look. Ket Siong, too, had been on the slender-brooding-artist side of attractive ten years ago, but that had changed. He’d always been tall; now he was broad in proportion.
“I think he must have gotten into the gym since uni,” added Renee.
“I have changed my mind. He was not beautiful. He was a dick. A poop emoji with hair,” said Nathalie.
But as Renee expected, she couldn’t resist. After a moment she said, “Do you have photos? You didn’t take a selfie with him? Oh, and of course he is not on social media.”
She let out a sigh of thwarted nosiness. “I’ll take your word for it that he is not ugly. That is good, so far as it goes. But this seeing him again, being ‘friends’”—Renee could hear the quotation marks in Nathalie’s voice—“that is much further than it should go. You can’t be friends.”
“Why, because I’m a straight woman and he’s a straight man? Well, a man attracted to women,” Renee amended conscientiously, thinking of Derek. “He might be bisexual.”
“No. Because it’sKet,” said Nathalie. She was so cross she downed the remainder of her beetroot latte without even grimacing. She patted her mouth with a napkin, continuing, “He broke your heart! Do you think that’s a good foundation for friendship?”
Renee had known she would come in for a telling-off when Nathalie heard about Ket Siong, but she felt injured. Did Nathalie think she hadn’t changed at all from the naive twenty-year-old who’d had her heart broken?
Sure, thinking about that night with Ket Siong made her giddy and warm and smug. But who wouldn’t feel like that about getting off with a hot guy? It didn’t have to mean anything. Itdidn’tmean anything. Renee was one hundred percent in control of the situation.
“That was a long time ago,” she said. “We’re both adults now. There’s no reason we can’t decide to let go of all that baggage.”
“Ket only came up with that line about being friends when you said you weren’t up for a relationship,” said Nathalie. “I thought you learnt your lesson about being friends with guys who only want to sleep with you.”
That was a hit. Renee winced. She wasn’t proud of that phaseof her late teens and early twenties, before she’d grown out of appreciating the perverse validation of men feeling entitled to her body, and pruned guys like that out of her social circle.
Nathalie pursued her advantage. “Remember all the whining about friend zones?”
