Lindsey Kelk 5-Book 'I Heart...' Collection (101 page)

‘Good to know.’ I sniffed, determined not to cry. I still had more questions. ‘So what happened the other night? On your birthday?’

‘You tell me.’ He twisted himself around until he was sitting cross-legged in front of me. ‘You’re the one that went all weird.’

‘Nuh-uh,’ I squeaked. ‘It was totally you. You said all that stuff about not getting married or having kids and then you said you didn’t want to move in with me any more.’

‘Oh. That.’

‘Yes. That.’

‘Well,’ he looked down at the floor, ‘you kept saying you didn’t want to move in with me, so I just thought it would be easier for my ego if I took away the stick for you to beat me with.’

I frowned. I hated when Jenny was right about stuff like this.

‘But I do want to move in with you,’ I said in a tiny voice. ‘I was just scared about, you know, the last time I lived with someone.’

‘And I’m scared too. The last time I lived with someone didn’t go so great either,’ Alex said, looking back at and me, and brushing my hair behind my ears. I though it was very sweet of him not to comment on how gross it was. ‘But I want to live with you. I want to do everything with you.’

‘But you said—’

‘I know what I said, and I was being a dick.’ He held his hand against my twice-bruised cheekbone and shook his head. ‘I guess seeing Solène fucked me up more than I thought it would. I don’t think I ever told you, but I actually asked her to marry me. It was dumb, things weren’t working out, she was having problems with her visa, and I thought it would make everything better. It wasn’t the strongest foundation for a lifelong commitment, I know.’

‘You didn’t tell me, but she did,’ I said, pressing my hand against his. ‘But you know I was engaged before, I would have understood.’

‘Yeah, like I’m not totally jealous every time I remember that.’ He raised an eyebrow and smiled. ‘And really? You would have been totally cool with it?’

‘I would have understood eventually,’ I admitted. ‘Really, I do get that it’s not a big deal. I suppose I wondered why you never mentioned it, but I do get it. I wouldn’t go around spouting off in favour of marriage if someone waved my ex around in my face.’

I chose not to mention that I’d only realized that once Jenny had pointed it out. Let him think I was wise and empathetic, he could work out whether or not it was true in his own time.

‘Yeah, well that was some of the stuff I was thinking about,’ he said quietly. ‘Saying that I didn’t want those things kinda made me think about them.’

‘Oh?’ My mouth was suddenly very dry. ‘And what did you decide?’

‘That maybe, I do want them,’ he said, raising his face up towards mine. ‘With you.’

‘Really?’ I whispered against his lips.

‘Really,’ he whispered back. ‘This is it for me, Angela. I’m yours, however you want me. If you want to get married tomorrow, we’ll fly home via Vegas. You want to move back to London, I’ll get Graham to pack up my stuff and we’ll go right now. You want eighteen kids and a white picket fence, shit, I’ll get a job in advertising, slick back my hair and we can go totally Mad Men. Except without the philandering and prescription meds. Whatever you want. As of now.’

‘Maybe we can just start with the whole living together thing before we get on to talking about marriage,’ I suggested, my heart pounding so hard I could feel my pulse in my bruised cheekbone. ‘Or kids.’

‘Let’s just hope that when we do have them, they aren’t as dumb as me and as clumsy as you or they’re screwed from the start,’ he said, ending the conversation with a kiss. I pulled him up on to the bed, never taking my lips off his and, as I felt his familiar weight above me, the warmth of his body against mine, all the voices in my head finally went quiet.

Later, curled up around each other in the darkness, a thought crossed my mind. ‘Alex?’ I said, stroking lazy circles on his chest with my fingers.

‘Yeah?’

‘What were you going to do when you got to London? I mean, how were you going to find me? You knew I didn’t have a working phone.’

‘Oh yeah.’ He yawned, rolling over on to his side and wrapping his arms around me. ‘Tomorrow morning, we need to call your mom and tell her you’re OK.’

‘You called my mother?’ Suddenly I was very awake.

‘In the morning,’ Alex replied, kissing the back of my hair. ‘Sleep now.’

‘Easy for you to say,’ I whispered, as angry as it was possible to be with a man who had just been doing something incredibly rude to me not fifteen minutes earlier. ‘I cannot believe you called my mother.’

‘I cannot believe you didn’t call me!’ my mother screeched down the phone at the top of her voice. ‘First you’re coming home, then you’re not. Then I’ve got strange American men ringing me up and asking where you are. Then you’re calling me up and telling me everything’s fine. Well it’s not fine, Angela. You bloody well get your arse home right now. I’ve been up all night, sick with worry, no idea how to contact you. We tried that Facebook thing and you didn’t answer, we called Louisa, we called your flat in America, I called that Jenny girl and she told me to “chill out”. Chill out! You tell me Angela Clark, what was I supposed to think?’

I closed my eyes and made a mental list of all the people I needed to call and apologize to. ‘I’m sorry Mum,’ I said once she’d stopped to breathe. ‘Yesterday was a bit mad, but I’m OK and I’m going back to New York this afternoon. I actually really need to go, we’ve got to get to the airport.’

‘Oh no. No, you’re coming back here immediately, young lady. My nerves have had all they can take. First you’re running off to New York, then it’s gallivanting around LA, next you’re in Paris, then you’re in London. No, you’re coming home.’

‘Mum—’

‘Don’t mum me—’

‘Will you please just let me finish?’

‘There’s nothing else to say! Get on a train right—’

‘Mum, will you just shut up for a minute?’

She shut up for precisely one second.

‘Did you just tell your mother, your own mother, to shut up?’ she breathed out slowly. ‘Well. Honestly, I can’t believe—’

‘Oh, don’t start!’ I was really, seriously thinking about hanging up and telling people I was an orphan, but I knew this was all just because she cared. Somewhere, somehow I knew that. And had to keep reminding myself. ‘And it wasn’t strange men calling you, it was Alex, so don’t make out like I’ve got random blokes ringing you constantly.’

‘Get off the phone, get off it,’ my mum was ranting, her voice getting quieter as she went on.

‘Mum?’ I asked, ignoring Alex, who was laughing at me from the bathroom. ‘Mum, are you there?’

‘Angela, it’s your dad.’

My mouth dropped open. I hadn’t heard my dad’s voice in months. According to my mother, he ‘never had much to say’, but I was more inclined to believe that she hadn’t left him anything to say. And besides, she didn’t like him talking on the phone in case he got ‘ideas’.

‘Dad?’

‘Yes, Angela, love?’ he replied, calm as anything despite the clattering and commotion that was going on around him. I could still hear my mum rattling on in the background, louder than before if anything.

‘It’s really nice to talk to you,’ I said, crying before I realized. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I am,’ he said. ‘Now, are you all right?’

‘I am,’ I replied. ‘I really, really am.’

‘And you’re going back to New York, you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you know you can come back whenever you like?’

I couldn’t hear my mother any more and had a strong suspicion that he had locked himself in the cupboard under the stairs. I’d always wondered why there was a bolt on the inside of that cupboard.

‘I do, Dad.’

‘Then you get yourself back off home and we’ll see you when we see you,’ he said. ‘Love you angel.’

‘Love you too.’ I didn’t want him to know I was crying, but it was hard to stop. ‘Look after Mum.’

‘Will do,’ he said and hung up.

Alex had stopped laughing and was looking on from the bathroom doorway. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked. ‘Do we need to go back to London? I can take you home, you know.’

‘We are going home,’ I nodded, wiping away the tears, ‘not to that home though, our home.’

‘You’re sure?’ he asked.

I hung up the receiver. ‘Positive.’

Twenty-four hours later, I was sitting outside Mary’s office, jetlagged out of my tiny mind and fairly certain I was drooling. But this had to be done. I’d called and left a message on her machine as soon as we’d got back into New York, Monday evening, telling her I’d be there the following morning. I knew she got in early, usually earlier than Cici, so it was my best chance of seeing her without having to get past my New York nemesis. Wow, from no nemesis to two in one week. I really had been busy.

At eight on the dot, the lift doors pinged open and she strode in, coffee in one hand, BlackBerry in the other, a look of annoyance on her unlined fifty-something face.

‘Angela,’ she said, walking right by me, her steel-grey bob bouncing as she went.

I followed, trying to fight the urge to vom, and sat down in the chair opposite her desk.

‘Shoot.’ Mary set everything down on her desk and shook off her hoodie to reveal a cute black cashmere tank top. She had unfeasibly toned arms for a woman of her age. Or you know, for a woman.

‘It’s hard to know where to start,’ I admitted. ‘But to keep it brief, Cici screwed me over. Really badly. She cancelled my BlackBerry, she set me up with an assistant from French Belle who was trying to stop me from getting my article done, she sent over a list of rubbish places to visit, and then she tried to convince the assistant to convince me not to come back to New York at all.’

‘Right.’ Mary sipped her coffee and looked at me over the top of her glasses.

‘I don’t know what else to say, Mary.’

‘And I don’t know what you want me to do. Is the piece done?’

‘Not yet, but it will be,’ I said. ‘No thanks to Cici.’

‘As far as Belle will be concerned, whether or not you get the piece in really isn’t anything to do with Cici,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t work for Belle, she wasn’t assigned to you by Belle, anything she did with, for or to you is on your head.’

‘You believe me, don’t you?’ I was feeling sicker by the second. ‘About what she did?’

‘I do.’ Mary nodded. ‘Unfortunately, there’s not a lot I can do.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Not a lot you can do about what?’

‘Not a lot I can do about the fact that Cici forwarded some email you sent cursing her out on to her grandfather,’ she said, flicking her computer monitor into action. ‘You want to read your own rather colourful words?’

What. The. Fuck?

‘But I didn’t send an email to Cici?’ I said, leaning across the desk. I didn’t send an email to Cici. Did I? I was sure that was something I’d remember, jet lag and France’s vast quantity of booze aside.

But there it was, a forward from Cici to ‘Grandpa Bob’, her sob story all in caps, labelling me a bully and a tyrant, claiming she hadn’t said anything before because she was trying to be my friend. And then a much shorter email from Bob to Mary, the gist of which was ‘get rid of her’. At the bottom of the page was the email supposedly from me. And, I had to admit, it was littered with lots of very colourful words, all aimed at Cici.

‘I didn’t send this to her,’ I said, recognizing some of what was written on the screen. ‘I sent this to you. But not this, it’s been changed.’

‘You sent me an email bitching Cici out?’ Mary asked, sliding her glasses on to the top of her head. ‘To my work email address? Are you serious?’

‘Um, yes?’

‘Angela, who is my assistant?’

‘Cici?’

‘And so who has access to all of my emails?’

‘Cici?’ Shit.

‘And who, it would seem, really, really does not like you?’

‘Cici?’ Double shit.

Mary rested her hands on the desk in front of her. ‘To say that Bob is no longer your biggest fan would be something of an understatement.’

‘Am I fired?’ I whispered, definitely about to be sick.

She nodded. ‘It’s safe to say that you will no longer be writing a blog for TheLook.com.’

Triple shit, shit, shitty shit shit.

‘But they still need your Belle piece, it’s too late to fill the pages with anything else,’ she went on. ‘And who knows, if that’s really good, after the heat has died down, I might be able to rehire you. You certainly bring in a lot of traffic and that brings in advertisers. But right now, you’re too hot for anyone at Spencer Media to touch you.’

‘What about my visa?’ The room was spinning fast and it had nothing to do with my jet lag. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening.

‘You’re not completely fucked,’ Mary clarified. ‘You’re still a contributing editor for The Look in the UK. Your visa isn’t going to be revoked immediately. I spoke to one of our lawyers and she seems to think that you can stay for a couple of months before anyone from Immigration makes enquiries. Even if they did, you could appeal that you’re technically still an employee of Spencer Media. But if they make a check and they don’t agree with what could be a costly appeal, you could be deported. The lawyer suggested you head back to the UK and apply for a new media visa that’s not tied to an employer as soon as you can.’

‘How long will that take?’ A new visa? Go back to London? Was she serious? I’d just bloody come from London.

‘I’m not the US Embassy, I have no idea.’ She shrugged. ‘But if you need a reference, I will be more than happy to give you one. Look, I’m sorry, this is a really shitty situation.’

‘But Virginie, from French Belle, she said she would call you?’ I said desperately. ‘She was the assistant who was helping me, she said she would explain everything.’

‘And she did,’ Mary took another look at her computer screen, ‘but one rambling voicemail from a junior assistant at French Belle isn’t going to mean much to Robert Spencer when he has a sobbing granddaughter on his hands and an email from some random employee, calling his pride and joy a, and let me quote this directly, “crazy fucking psycho bitch who needs to be put down like a rabid dog’’.’

‘I did not say that in the original email,’ I protested. ‘I said she was a bloody crazy psycho bitch who needed to be put down like a dog. Not a rabid dog. And no eff word.’