I pasted a bright smile on my face and clamped my lips together.
Don’t tell Jenny about the proposal, don’t tell Jenny about the proposal, don’t tell Jenny about the proposal.
‘Are you OK?’ Jenny asked.
Don’t tell Jenny about the proposal.
‘Maso— mais oui,’ I replied with a flourish to back up my sweet French save. ‘Yes. Absolutely. Why wouldn’t I be?’
She didn’t look entirely convinced but she didn’t ask any follow-up questions either. That went down as a win in my book.
‘We had a meeting across town and I thought it would never end,’ Erin said, explaining away their lateness and almost taking my eye out with her razor-sharp blonde bob. ‘Traffic is a bitch tonight.’
‘You could have taken the subway,’ I suggested. ‘No traffic down there.’
Erin and Jenny looked at each other and exploded into laughter.
‘And that’s why you’re the funny one,’ Erin smiled, shrugging off her oversized Burberry pea coat and dumping her Hermès Birkin on top of my MJ satchel on the spare chair. My bag slid to the floor sadly, ashamed to be in the presence of something so superior. Jenny grabbed it from the ground and passed the offending article back with a disapproving frown.
‘You’re still using this?’ she asked, pulling a lip gloss out of her own studded leather Alexander Wang duffel. ‘Angie, you must have like a thousand bags now, you have to let that thing go.’
‘You’re confusing my bag collection with yours,’ I told her, stroking the soft, supple brown leather. ‘Anyway, I love this bag. I think it gets better with age.’
‘It doesn’t, you should ditch it,’ Erin assured me. ‘Nothing does really. Red wine and George Clooney are literally the only exceptions to that rule.’
‘We’ll end up burying you with that thing,’ Jenny sighed as I cradled my bag in my arms to shield it from Erin’s cruel but worryingly accurate statements. ‘Sometimes I think all my work with you was for nothing.’
‘Give me a break,’ I begged as the waitress reappeared with our cocktails, ‘I’ve had a shitty day and my brain isn’t up to it.’
‘Same here,’ Erin said, clinking her teacup against mine. ‘I’ve been up since three – TJ has some kind of bug and I spent half the night stripping beds and cleaning up baby puke. And you know if he has it, Arianna’ll have it by tomorrow.’
‘To the glamour of motherhood,’ I said, clinking her back. ‘Cici announced she’s been my assistant for long enough and wants a “bigger role” at Gloss. Also, they’re completely restructuring the company and everyone is on the chopping block, which I probably should have mentioned first, so ha-ha, I win. Worst day in forever.’
Jenny peeled off her tight black sweater to reveal a low-cut black T-shirt and every man in the bar turned and looked.
‘Mason emailed me about the restructure,’ she said as she crossed her toned legs. If you got up and went running every morning like Jenny did, you could have legs like that, said the little voice in my head. I drowned it with another sip of my cocktail. ‘You’re overreacting. They haven’t announced any closures yet.’
‘The fact you added a “yet” on the end doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence,’ I told her. ‘It’s just unsettling.’
‘Not as unsettling as that demon spawn twin, Cici,’ Jenny corrected. ‘Surely you’ve put up with her for long enough? It’s time for her to disappear.’
‘The worst part is, she’s not actually wrong,’ I admitted, washing away the words with a mouthful of gin. ‘Most assistants move up after a couple of years and she’s been with me for three. As much as it pains me to admit it, she’s good at her job, even if her people skills are still, you know, a bit rough.’
Never had there been such an understatement.
‘I only wish she wanted to move to another magazine, I know the rest of the team would like to see the back of her.’
Erin stretched her arms above her head until her shoulders clicked. ‘I don’t know how you sit in an office with that woman every day. I’d rather have an underfed hyena outside my office. Do you keep a loaded gun in your desk?’
‘She is an underfed hyena,’ Jenny replied for me. ‘If not worse. Remember that time she threw out all the shoes under your desk?’
‘She thought I wanted to donate them to the homeless,’ I said weakly. ‘She said she was trying to help.’
Jenny blinked in disbelief. ‘Really, Angie? She thought you wanted to donate Chanel ballet pumps to the homeless?’
My stomach clenched tightly with the pain of loss and I took a sip to their memory. The worst part was, I was still paying off that credit card bill.
‘I read about the restructure – we sent Delia congratulatory flowers, of course. You don’t really think they’re going to close any magazines, do you?’ Erin asked, nervously clicking her fingernails. Erin owned a PR agency, the PR agency worked with the magazines, the more magazines closed, the more difficult her life became.
‘Gloss is doing fairly well,’ I said, repeating the same story I’d told a thousand times over already that day and hoped I’d start to believe it soon. ‘I’m sure we’ll be fine.’
Panicking would get me nowhere, I reminded myself. Listing all the magazines that had closed over the last three years would not help, I reminded myself. Imagining myself sat on the floor outside a Burger King with a sign that says ‘will work for nuggets’ was entirely unproductive.
‘So, I had a shit day, Angie had a shit day …’ Erin looked at Jenny. ‘Anything to add, Lopez?’
‘I’m breaking up with Mason,’ she replied casually, holding up her cup for a toast. ‘So yeah, cheers.’
I stared at her across the table. Now my deodorant really had some work to do.
‘What?’ Confusion crumpled Erin’s delicate features. ‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘No,’ Jenny replied simply. ‘I’ve been thinking about it and he really isn’t leaving me with much of a choice. So, I’m going to end it.’
‘Is today National Everyone Make Dramatic Statements Day?’ I asked, putting my cocktail down so I could fully and soberly concentrate on my best friend. ‘Because if it is, I missed a memo. What do you mean you’re breaking up with Mason?’
Jenny rolled her eyes as though we were the ones being irrational.
‘We’ve been dating for almost three years,’ she replied, all calm and rational and entirely unlike herself. ‘He knows I want to get married, we’ve talked about getting married but nothing has happened. I told him back in the spring that I wanted to get engaged this summer, and if he didn’t propose, I was going to have to end it. He hasn’t proposed. How long am I supposed to wait?’
‘You told him he had to propose or you’d dump him?’
I just wanted to be clear before I began screeching louder than an exceptionally miffed dolphin.
‘Yes.’
Exceptionally miffed dolphin noises are go.
‘That’s not very romantic, is it?’ I asked, my mind and my words racing. ‘You can’t break up with Mason because he hasn’t met your deadline, what happened to an old-fashioned courtship? What happened to waiting?’
How could I tell her she couldn’t finish with him because he hadn’t proposed, because he had just told me he was planning to propose, without telling her he had just