Emma was hardly ever at home these days. Where she was Charlotte didn't really know. She believed that Emma was still seeing that teacher, Dorothy, and one of Emma's colleagues had told her that it was now common knowledge that she was having a relationship with her boss.
Charlotte felt totally excluded from Emma's life. It seemed that the only times Emma ever came back to the flat was when Charlotte was out - perhaps spending the night at Josephine's or still at work. Whatever it was, though, Charlotte knew she wasn't part of it, and she was sure that Emma wasn't even paying her enough attention to be bothered to intentionally avoid her. Nevertheless, Charlotte was a faithful lover and nothing that Emma could or couldn't do would shake her love for her flatmate.
Perhaps, she hoped, when Harriett returns from her jaunts abroad, Emma might be home more often. But even that hope - compromised as it was by her feelings that she'd again be excluded from their lovemaking - didn't seem very likely judging from Harriett's last letter from Baghdad where she was making a sex film with a Kurd with whom she claimed to have fallen passionately in love. It seemed that Harriett had more or less forgotten about returning home. Every assignment she had seemed to lead to another assignment in yet another exotic location. Charlotte felt incredible envy at her good luck in visiting and working in places she'd only vaguely heard of, and then in the most bizarre of places : Damascus, Samarkand, Shanghai, Puerto Rico, the list was endless. Charlotte hadn't realised that the sex industry was so widespread, but then these were modern days and the sex industry was the world's single largest industry (or so she read once).
However, Charlotte wasn't actually lonely. In fact, her position as the last of her flatmates to stay in actual residence was not at all a lonely one. Her relationship with Josephine was building towards an intimacy and passion that outstripped anything she'd had with Emma. However much she pretended that her love for Emma was unassailable, the evidence of her heart as she greeted Josephine when she came back from work was that Emma had become pretty much the secondary passion. It was difficult to be sure what Josephine's feelings towards her actually were, though she was sure that she had no other lover. However, as Josephine made a living from making love with people, it was not for sex that she'd need a relationship.
Josephine was always much more enthusiastic about taking work in stage performances rather than in film or television, despite the fact she earned more from a short slot in an advertisement or a short role in a film than from a month's run with a production in the theatre. However, she was in a play at the moment where she played a princess in a harem in a production of Sindbad The Sailor. This production seemed to spend far more time between the harem sheets than anywhere else, and even though Josephine's role was fairly minor she still had to have sex with Sindbad, a portly actor with a stuck-on goatee beard, and two of the other harem girls.
"The advantage of a stage performance," Josephine asserted while the two girls were resting after their lovemaking, "is that you make love to the same people every night. No surprises, you see. The disadvantage, however, is making love to the same boring people night after night. No surprises at all."
