She pushed away from the door and sighed as she hauled the box of her stuff to her room at the far end of the corridor. The bigger room, because Bia had insisted she take it, even though they paid the same amount of rent. She grimaced at the purple tinsel Bia had put up around her doorframe. She had half a mind to tear it down, but wouldn’t because, despite her feelings on the subject, she knew it would upset Bia.
She’d only just dumped the box on her bed when she heard a key in the front door. Speak of the tiny she-devil.
“Jose? Josie!” The sound of Bia’s voice was followed by the sound of various objects falling, including the clanging of a set of keys, and Bia swearing, loudly. Josie huffed out a small laugh despite herself as she stuck her head around her bedroom door to see Bia’s multicolored handbag on the floor, contents strewn everywhere, and one of Bia’s arms stuck inside her coat as she flapped around to try to get it off. Bia caught her eye and held up a bottle of wine in her non-trapped hand. “I saved the essentials, and that’s what counts.” She carefully set the wine down on the step that led up to the kitchen, then maneuvered her way out of her coat and flung it into her bedroom without looking. “Come on, you look like you need a glass.”
Josie followed Bia obediently to the open-plan kitchen–slash–living room and perched on their secondhand sofa while Bia clunked around in the kitchen for glasses. The living room was currently cozy and festive—fairy lights across the top of the fake fireplace and around the windows, a bowl of nuts on the coffee table in the middle of the room and a small Christmas tree in the corner, decorated erratically with blue, silver, red, and gold baubles and tinsel, so that if you stared at it for too long you felt dizzy. All Bia’s handiwork, except for one decoration on the tree—a small wooden swan—which Bia had given Josie the first year they lived together and forced her to put on the tree every year since then.
How lucky Josie was that Bia had been one of the four people she’d shared a house with when she first moved to London. She’d known no one here, so had to opt for the SpareRoom option, making a decision on which place to rent based on a twenty-minute viewing and awkward chat with the other housemates. It had been Bia’s sparkle then that had sold her on that first place and now, eight years later, they were still living together, albeit in a different flat.
“So,” said Bia, setting down a glass of red in front of Josie, before leaning against the counter that separated the living room and kitchen, “I passed short-arse coming down the stairs.” At four foot nine, Bia was hardly in the position to call anyone short, but she’d always been sure that Oliver had a complex over being just a few centimeters shorter than Josie. Maybe she was right, thought Josie, given Cara was perfectly petite and not long and gawky like her.
Josie scowled her displeasure to Bia, who already knew all about the breakup and how he’d told her he’d slept with someone else while she was still in bed, barely awake and not yet dressed.
“Want to talk about it?” Bia asked.
Josie shrugged. “Nothing more to say. He was just dropping back my stuff.”
Bia snorted. “Nice of him.”
“Quite.”
Bia took a gulp of wine, closed her eyes and groaned in not entirely faked pleasure. “Thank God for that,” Bia sighed. “I swear to God, Jose, if someone offers me one more glass of mulled wine, I’m going to throw some goddamn mulled water in their face.”
Josie raised her eyebrows. “What happened to the jolly, festive you?”
“Oh, she’s still here, but she wants champagne, not stewed alcohol.” Bia took another grateful gulp of wine and Josie sipped hers, too.
“It’s nice.”
“Malbec.” Bia grinned. “To get me in the mood for my flight tomorrow.”
Josie frowned. “What?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”
Josie hesitated, caught in the headlights.
“Argentina!” cried Bia, her wine sloshing dangerously close to the surface of the glass as she punched it in the air. “Remember? You were the one who told me to go for it. I’m going to go, find the lust of my life, spend Christmas on the beach, then party in Buenos Aires for New Year. I told you this,” she insisted.
“Yes, but I didn’t think…” Josie didn’t finish the sentence. She’d told Bia to go for it, yes, assuming, at the time, that she’d be spending Christmas with Oliver like they’d planned, but she hadn’t really thought she’d book it. Bia was constantly announcing grand plans and then never following through—over the summer she gave up on a month-long yoga retreat in Spain because she decided she didn’t really like yoga, then there was the time she signed up for acting courses in London before figuring out she couldn’t afford them, or when she thought it would be brilliant to make some more money selling beauty products from home, until she discovered that actually involved quite a lot of effort.