Dana decided that she couldn’t carry on with the way they were behaving; she grabbed her supper, made her way over to Alice, and pulled up a chair.

Trying to master a bright and breezy tone of voice, Dana started, “Hey Al, how’s things? Working hard or hardly working?!” She teased the writer, knowing exactly what buttons to push to provoke some kind of reaction… it was this interaction that Dana missed the most. Alice looked up suddenly; inside, her body was screaming, but she couldn’t let Dana see, so instead she replied in an equally light-hearted tone “Hey Dane, long time no see! Yeah, you know, gotta get my scripts done for Ruth, a.k.a ‘big boss from hell’ or else I’ll probably get sacked… and not in the good way…”

It wasn’t quite the response Dana was expecting, there was no quick-witted come back or sarcastic reply; she could tell that Alice was avoiding the issue, and as the familiar tension began to settle between the two friends, Dana tried to keep the topic neutral, “Right yeah, ok cool… sounds good…. Umm, I’ve just got back from training, Harrison absolutely kicked my ass today, he said I haven’t been concentrating properly for the past couple weeks,” At this, Alice’s head snapped up, looking intensely at Dana trying to read the intonation in her voice to see if it was some sort of dig, or reference to her actions.

Dana realised what she had said and quickly tried to recover, she hadn’t meant for it to come out that way, “I mean, what with Tonya being away and all, he thinks that I haven’t been focusing, but she’s back next week, so I’m sure things will settle down and y’know, get back to normal…”

Alice looked up again, “Is that what you want Dane?” The athlete was thrown by this sort of response; she wasn’t sure what to say next, she wasn’t sure if Alice meant what she was saying but she plucked up the courage and simply replied “well, I don’t know Al, but anything’s gotta be better than this, right?”

Alice felt her frustration rise in her body; she didn’t want to keep skirting round the issue, talking in hidden statements and reading between the lines every time they had a conversation. Yet she couldn’t seem to control her feelings and before she could stop herself she was saying:

Alice: (angrily) “Yeah well look Dane, that’s really great that everything is working out so well for you, but seriously, I came hear to get away from my distractions, and for you to come and sit here and talk at me about how well everything is going, really isn’t helping, so if you wouldn’t mind…”

Dana was surprised at Alice’s sudden turn of emotion, and before she knew it, she was arguing back.

Dana: (her voice rising in anger) How well everything is going? You obviously haven’t been listening to a word I’ve been saying, but if that’s your attitude then fuck you Al, initially I came to ask you if you wanted to come over to mine tonight and we could have dinner, but forget it, I’ll leave you to it seeing as ‘your work’ is obviously so important to you…

With that Dana stood up and stormed out, not really sure what had caused that particular argument, or in fact what it was they were even arguing about.

Alice just sat, staring at the blank screen of her laptop. ‘Great Al,’ the writer berated herself. ‘Just great, pick an argument with her, that’ll stop her from realising how you really feel, that was real classy…’