Lindsey Kelk 5-Book 'I Heart...' Collection (114 page)

‘Tell me a plan of yours that didn’t involve either violence or leaving the country,’ he retaliated. ‘And every single time you’re in this situation it’s because you don’t talk to people.’

To be fair, he wasn’t wrong. The last eighteen months or so had been heavy on the air travel and slapping people about a bit. First I hit my best friend’s husband with a shoe and ran away to New York because no one had bothered to tell me my ex was a cheating scumbag and I had chosen not to notice. Then I went to LA and accidentally outed a gay actor. Didn’t hit anyone that time but I really had thought quite hard about it. And then there was the trip to Paris where I slapped one girl around the chops, took a train back to England, raided M&S Simply Food and went straight back to Paris to have an out-and-out brawl with another girl live on stage at a festival. That had been a high point. Oh. And my recent Cici-slapping situation. But if ever there was a deserved decking, it was that one. So perhaps my plans hadn’t been terribly well laid out to date, but this time I had a real live actual action plan. And a notebook! How could I fail?

‘I’m talking to you now?’

‘Nice try.’

‘If I promise to discuss all important decisions with you from now on, not leave the country, hit anyone with a shoe, buy any shoes or throw drinks at anyone, will you please open the door so I can come in and talk to you properly?’ I asked.

There was a moment of splishy quiet while he considered my offer.

‘It’s open,’ he said finally. ‘I lied about locking it.’

‘Arsehole,’ I muttered, pushing the door open and crawling along the bathroom floor to lean against the side of the tub. Alex was a picture. Bubbles up to his chin, hair wet through, mardy look on his face and beer in his hand. On the upside, it was impossible to be mad or upset at him. Unfortunately, it was also very hard to make puppy-dog eyes at someone when (a) all you wanted to do was laugh and (b) the recipient of said expression was refusing to look at you.

‘Nice bath?’ I asked, flicking a handful of bubbles into the air.

‘Yes.’ He readjusted his bubble blanket. He had achieved excellent coverage. ‘Thanks.’

‘The beer really makes it very macho.’

‘Screw you.’

‘Charming.’

We sat in a semi-comfortable silence for a moment, Alex drinking his beer, me resting my chin on the side of the bath. I would have let it play out longer but the bathroom floor was not a comfortable place to hang out and his bubbles were disappearing at a rate of knots. I had a feeling I’d struggle to keep up my end of a serious conversation once I could see the goods.

‘Are you really mad at me?’

‘Yes,’ Alex said, pushing his wet hair off his face. ‘I am really mad at you. But I’m sorry I lost my shit. I shouldn’t have shouted. What is it going to take for you to actually start telling me stuff?’

I shrugged and wiped a drop of water from his forehead before it fell into his eye.

‘There’s nothing you don’t know now,’ I said quietly. ‘And I promise this won’t happen again. I’ll tell you everything. You’ll be so sick of hearing about my every thought, you’ll want a mute button for my mouth.’

He took my hand in his, all warm and wet from his bath, and squeezed it tightly.

‘I’m not joking,’ he said, his eyes all serious. ‘I know you’re on this. And I’m pretty sure Jenny’s on this too, right?’

I nodded.

‘And as we all know, Jenny always gets what she wants. But I need to know about these things. It’s important, Angela. How do you think I feel, finding out you could get thrown out of the country and you didn’t even bother to tell me even though all your friends know about it?’

‘Not brilliant?’ I suggested.

‘Not brilliant,’ he confirmed. ‘You’re my girlfriend. We live together. We’re supposed to deal with this stuff together.’

‘I know.’ I was trying not to whine but it was quite hard. ‘I’ve just got used to sorting things out for myself over the last year, and I suppose I’m not good at asking boys for help. And I really didn’t want you to worry.’

‘I’m not boys,’ he reminded me. ‘I’m your boyfriend. I want to help. I want to worry. I worry about you breaking your neck in some dumb pair of shoes, I worry about you choking on a pizza crust because you inhale your food so damn fast, I worry about you dying of exposure because you won’t wear a proper winter coat. At least this would have given me something real to worry about.’

I was quite touched. Mildly offended but mostly touched. And I wanted to tell him I worried about him too, but mostly I worried that some gorgeous, super-cool, super-skinny blonde girl was going to steal him away in the night, and that didn’t have the same sweet sentiment as his concerns, did it? I didn’t need to read Cosmo (again) to know that rabid paranoia and groundless jealousy were not attractive qualities in a girlfriend.

‘Your winter coats make me look like the Michelin Man,’ I said, giving his hand a gentle return squeeze.

‘That’s because it’s minus ten outside, you idiot.’ The frustration in his face broke into a reluctant smile and he stretched over to place a very light kiss on my lips. ‘Now get out so I can take my bath in peace, and go get a job before I kick your ass out of the country.’

‘You girl!’ I snatched the beer bottle out of his hand, jumped up and legged it out of the bathroom. ‘Do you want a candle lighting or something?’

‘We didn’t have any,’ he shouted back as I closed the door to.

Sipping what was left of his warm beer, I gazed at my very professional pile of shit in the living room. I had survived our first proper shouty row; arguing my way to a work visa would be easy. Provided I could survive Vegas.

Bright and early on Thursday morning, I kissed Alex goodbye and skipped out of the front door into a shiny black town car, impervious to the bitter cold.

I’d had a great week. After our motivational tiff, I’d put together dozens of proposals for editors all over the place, offering myself up as their eyes and ears on the ground in New York. I was a great choice, I told them. Connected to the city’s cultural underground, Hollywood celebs, totally in the fashionable know and situated smack bang in hipster central. There was no better US correspondent than Angela Clark. So what if I was a bit biased? If you tell yourself something often enough, it starts to sound true, good or bad, and I was genuinely feeling so much better about things. A quick call to Lawrence the Lawyer confirmed that the media visa was all but in the bag if I could get a contract with a ‘recognized media outlet’, and what with all the phone hacking scandals, I was pretty sure loads of newspapers and magazines were looking for bright, upstanding young go-getters with their integrity intact. Who were perfectly happy to out celebrities for a living. An honest day’s wage for an honest day’s work. It was probably a plus that I couldn’t work out Twitter, let alone break into Hugh Grant’s voicemail.

Plus things with Alex were great. From the moment he had dragged himself out of the bath on Sunday, he’d been the perfect boyfriend. Winter walks in the park, playing teaboy, suggesting features for my proposals, bringing M&M’s back from Duane Reade unbidden. It was wonderful. My wedding mags were still stashed under the mattress, spines broken, corners folded over, automatically opening at the dirtiest pages (the dresses), but I’d put it out of my head. Yes, I wanted him to put a ring on it. Yes, I wanted to lock it down. But I wanted it done right. I’d been engaged before after all, but that time, when presented with a modest ring on the back of a horse-drawn carriage in Seville, my reaction had been sort of ‘Oh. Yes, I suppose so.’ When I thought about Alex proposing, I actually held my breath. And people needed to breathe, generally speaking. I wanted to share the rest of my life with him. The spectre of deportation had confirmed that for me, but what about Alex? I knew he wanted me with him – he’d said that over and over – but there was no mention of making it official. We shared an apartment. We shared a love of pineapple on pizza. We shared a razor, even though he didn’t know that. But did he want to share the rest of his life with me?

The more I tried not to think about it, the more it plagued me. All I could think about was weddings. A trip around the supermarket turned into a trial for the aisle. Every song on my iPod was a contender for the first dance. Every time Alex reached into his coat pocket, my heart stopped – phone or ring? Phone or ring? Quite often, it was ChapStick. What a girl.

I hadn’t seen Jenny since our tuna bagel liaison. I’d called, I’d texted, I’d offered to come over for lunch, for drinks, for coffee, but she was ‘way too busy’. Apparently taking two days out of the office at this time of year was ‘insanity’ and she just didn’t have the time. The fact that I didn’t point out to her that she’d only been working full time in said office for two months was evidence, to me at least, of how I was growing as a person. Not having had time to chat, of course, meant that we had not had the chance to discuss the Jeff situation. Namely whether or not Jenny knew about his bachelor weekend and whether or not the timing of our impulsive getaway was in any way related. I’d told her Alex was going to be in Vegas, I’d told her he was going with Jeff, I’d sighed with frustration when she just replied by reminding me this weekend was about ‘bros before hos’. She was giving me nothing.

‘Yo-yo-yo.’ Jenny utched across the back seat of the car to make room for me and my massively overstuffed satchel. There was nothing I could need that I did not have in this bag. Blanket, snacks, socks, plasters, headache tablets, Berocca, kitchen sink. ‘Are you excited? I’m excited. Vegas, baby!’

‘I’m excited,’ I confirmed with a businesslike nod and pulled out my phone, refreshing the emails and not really giving Jenny the enthusiasm I knew she was looking for. ‘Vegas, yeah.’

‘That was the weakest “yeah” I’ve ever heard.’ Jenny reached across and snatched the phone out of my hand. ‘I’m turning this off. It’s girl time. No emailing Alex, no texting Sigge – see?’

She pressed the power button on my phone first, then hers, and tossed them deep into her beautiful YSL Muse. It was so beautiful.

‘I was actually checking to see if I had heard back from any of the magazines overnight. But thanks.’

‘Any time,’ she replied, missing my point entirely. ‘So, we fly at eleven, we land at two, we need to be at the pool by three, and I want to be drunk by four. It’s been a bitch of a week.’

‘There’s a chance I’m being a bit stupid,’ I acknowledged before I asked my question, ‘but isn’t December in Vegas the same as December anywhere else? Won’t it be a bit cold for the pool?’

‘Why, I’m glad you asked Angela,’ Jenny said in her best concierge voice. ‘The average winter temperatures in Nevada rarely drop below sixty degrees in the daytime, and this week, the city of Las Vegas has been enjoying an unseasonable heat wave of temperatures up to eighty degrees. Should the weather let us down, Hotel De Lujo has a state-of-the-art climate system in their pool area, guaranteeing a balmy eighty-five-degree year-round summertime.’

‘Excellent work.’ I was genuinely impressed. ‘You are very good.’

‘That’s why they pay me the big bucks,’ she said, pulling epic amounts of long, curly hair out from behind her back and flicking it over her shoulders.

‘Do they?’

‘Not really.’

‘Right.’

We sat quietly for a moment, both holding our breath as the car swerved up the ramp and onto the BQE. Once we were sure we’d survived joining the freeway, I breathed out (my jeans wishing I hadn’t) and turned to ask Jenny the question she’d been dodging all week.

‘So.’ I turned on my serious face. ‘Jeff.’

‘Jeff?’ she asked, applying lip gloss. ‘What about him?’

‘He’s in Vegas. This weekend. On his bachelor weekend.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Are you going to tell me you didn’t know that when you booked this?’

‘Angie.’ She dropped the Juicy Tube back in her bag and gave me a smile that was so close to being patronizing, I thought I might slap her. ‘Sure I know he’s going to be there. We’ve still got mutual friends. But I didn’t know until after I booked the trip, honestly.’

‘You didn’t?’ I believed her about as far as I could throw her. Probably not as much as that, to be honest. She was very slim at the moment.

‘No, I didn’t. But even if I did, it wouldn’t have changed my plans. Jeff and I live in the same city. I’m not about to move back to LA to avoid him, am I? So what if we’re in the same town for a weekend? Vegas is a big place, we’re not gonna run into him unless we go looking for him. It’s way less likely that we’ll see him between now and Monday than it would be if I was, oh, I don’t know – visiting you? Since you live in the same building?’

I could tell she was annoyed because she was doing the fun thing where she went up at the end of every sentence, and she only did that if she was drunk or pissed off. Her very best Valley Girl accent. It was a fair point. New York was a small town; you saw the same people every day. I had any number of friends I nodded to on a regular basis – Chihuahua Man, Pink Coat Lady, Sir Coughs-A-Lot. OK, so I hadn’t slept with any of them, but I ran into them endlessly. She was a lot more likely to have to deal with Jeff on her home turf (or rather mine) than she was in the wild and wacky world of Las Vegas. But still.

‘Fine. If you say you didn’t know, you didn’t know,’ I said, softening my stern face slightly. But only slightly; I still wasn’t utterly convinced. ‘Just, is there a contingency plan for what happens if we do run into them?’

‘No. There isn’t a plan. I don’t do anything,’ Jenny replied, a little bit sad. ‘He’s getting married. I’m with Sigge. How many times have you and Erin and Vanessa and Gina and my therapist and my doorman and that guy in the bodega told me? I need to move on. I’m moving. If we see them, I’ll be polite, I’ll probably need to do a shot, and then I’ll cry myself to sleep later on.’

‘Oh, Jenny.’ I launched myself across the back seat, aided by a very cavalier swing into the next lane by the driver, and gave my friend a huge hug. ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s still shit. I didn’t mean to be an arsehole.’

‘It’s always shit, no matter how happy you are,’ she sniffled. ‘You’re kinda lucky you don’t have a big heartbreak in your past.’