A week after the threesome, Ben invited me to Canberra again for the annual classic car show. That year, we drove down with Jack and a friend of theirs. It was the first time I had seen Jack since the threesome, but it was not awkward in the slightest, and even the three-hour drive to Canberra was fun and filled with laughter. When we got there, we headed straight for a long lunch in the sun, and I started to have few cocktails. We had a very big night out planned for that evening, which I was told I had to look ‘very hot’ for, so I started getting ready at 6pm and had a break from drinking so that I didn’t end up a drunken mess. To this day, I’m not really sure what ‘very hot’ means, but I think it means a very short skirt, very high heels and a very tight top.
After turning on the shower, I went to grab my toiletry case from my bag, but it was not there. I frantically searched the hotel room and the car, but as it dawned on me that I had left it at home on the bed, my heart started to sink. I felt physically sick. Everything I needed to get ready was in that bag. Everything from a toothbrush, to all my makeup (although Ben hated me wearing makeup I still obviously wore primer, foundation and concealer), to sticky tape to tape my dress, to perfume, to a hair brush. There was no way on this planet I could go out anywhere without the contents of that case. As it dawned on me that, like his birthday night, I would be letting Ben down, I started to cry.
Up until that point, Ben had been laughing and joking, assuming I was over reacting and just being dramatic, but as soon as I started to cry he grabbed his iPad and checked to see if the shops were still open. They were not. He rang the reception of the hotel and found out there was a twenty-four-hour chemist open in the city. So, when Ben offered to drive me to the chemist, I accepted through sobbing tears. After first overreacting and saying I could not possibly replace everything that was in that bag from a twenty-four-hour chemist and crying that I would not be able to go out, I began to calm down and think things through logically.
Forty-five minutes and $250 later, I was back at the hotel room getting ready. After two hours, I stepped out of the bathroom with long straight hair (thankfully I had packed my hair straighteners), the tight pink dress Ben had wanted me to wear to his birthday meal and my new Jimmy Choo shoes (I was a little better at walking in them now but still not that great). When Ben and his friends said I looked exactly the same as I did before I went to the chemist in sobbing tears, I knew they were lying from the looks on their faces and I knew that was the best $250 Ben ever spent, because regardless of how I looked, I felt amazing. I think Ben learnt a lesson too that night; it was not about how I looked, it was all about how I felt. That night was one of the best nights I’d had in a long time. I didn’t get stupidly drunk, and Ben was so well behaved we managed to stay in the same bar all night without being kicked out. I don’t think I could have been any happier.
By the time we left, we had only been in Canberra for a little over twenty-four hours, and I literally couldn’t walk, as Ben and I had had sex twelve times. A record for me, but thinking about it, probably not a record for him.‘It’s not about how you look on the outside, it’s about how you feel on the inside.’ — Unknown.