stories — just the almosts.
Chapter 1:
Eleni pouted her lips as she dabbed the berry-toned cream liptint on with her right ring finger, wiping the excess across her cheeks and she pursed her lips together and raised her brow toward the reflection of herself in the mirror. The bathroom was cluttered but functional—every surface occupied, everything exactly where it needed to be. A life that looked chaotic but ran with precision.
She retreated back through the doorway after tucking a stray hair back behind her ear, and faced the two outfits she had laid out in preparation for her evening: a gray silky slip dress with a muted blue velvet style military jacket and heeled thong sandals, or a beige-based floral printed pair of wide leg trousers with a square-neck tasteful cropped black corset-style vest and a black leather bomber coat and her favourite pair of simple black booties. Soft versus structured. Romantic versus controlled.
She was still thinking about Hennie. The anxiety hadn’t left her - not really. It clung, faint but persistent, like an abrasion just beneath the skin. It had been the entire summer since the breakup. If it could even be called that. A rushed, unravelling word-vomit over the phone. Not even FaceTime. From Luther’s perspective—her perpetually unimpressed gun dog—it would’ve made a perfect cautionary tale. The kind they’d show in school assemblies titled What Happens When You Bottle Everything Up.
Hennie was just what Eleni needed when she met him a year before: Chivalrous. Disciplined. Effortlessly attractive in a way that felt engineered—sub-15% body fat, sun-warmed skin somewhere between burnt sienna and olive, and those blue eyes that held contact just a fraction too long. He grew up in a well to do family in South Africa, and had the heart-melting buttersoft accent and manners to accompany his privileged upper-middle class upbringing. The kind of accent that made people trust you before you’d earned it.He exuded classic masculinity, quiet confidence, and a disciplined yet tender approach to life. Or so she thought.
She tilted her head left and right, considering her two choices carefully as she rested one hand on her bare hip, fingertips tickling the seamline of the black matching panty set she hadn’t worn since she and Hennie had first started seeing each other.
The forecast promised rain—a relief after two suffocating weeks of August heat so she opted for the trousers, boots, and crop-topped outfit… she’d just had to hope that Kitty wouldn’t be offended if she didn’t fully indulge in the flourless dark chocolate cake she’d made homemade in honour of her first evening in the role of hostess of an intimate gathering of friends of friends, all of whom just so happen to be single.
Eleni had been back in the gym three times a week all summer - ostensibly for fitness, realistically, for quiet. For the hour or two where her brain stopped replaying things she couldn’t edit. There was definition again now—faint, but there. A shadow of abs, arms that felt stronger in her sleeveless summer tops, the kind London only allowed for three fleeting weeks a year. A small reclaiming.
Because Hennie hadn’t been loud in his criticism. That would’ve been easier. Instead, it had come in fragments. A look—quick, but not quick enough—when she ordered an extra flake in her Mr. Whippy. A hand on her hip that lingered, then squeezed, then assessed.
A tone shift when she slept past 8 a.m., as though rest required justification. Tiny calibrations, barely noticeable until they weren’t.
She’d always been athletic. Strong. Women stopped her in gyms, on streets, even in airport security lines to ask what she did, how she trained, how she maintained it. But there was always that layer—the one she couldn’t quite out-train. Softness at her inner arms, her thighs. The kind that didn’t disappear, no matter how disciplined you were. The kind that required… negotiation. Years of it, actually.
Growing up in the era of thinness as currency—heroin-chic rebranded as aspiration, reality TV selling transformation as morality, magazines praising starvation wrapped in discipline. She remembered watching America's Next Top Model like it was education. Absorbing it. Internalising it. It had taken years to unlearn.
And only months with Hennie to feel it creeping back in. Three months after they met, they had their first date. Six months later, she was shouting down the phone:
“Toxic masculinity.”
“Antiquated bullshit.”
“Misogynistic.”
“Prude.”
And—her personal favourite—