‘OK, OK.’ Alex grabbed my hands to hold off the attack. ‘So how about you look at it like a romantic trip to Paris. We’ve never taken a trip before.’
‘True.’ I nodded, letting him slide his hands up from my wrists to interlink his fingers with mine. ‘And I have always wanted to go to Paris.’
‘You’ve never been?’ he asked, looking surprised. I shook my head. ‘But it’s so close to the UK.’
‘I missed the GCSE trip after I fell down a pothole on the geography field trip,’ I admitted. ‘Not my finest moment.’
‘I don’t know what a pothole is, but it sounds like something you would do.’ He kissed me lightly on the lips. ‘You know I love you even though you’re a walking disaster zone, right?’
‘Thanks.’ I couldn’t really be offended, it was true. I’d already broken two glasses in a week. ‘Won’t Paris be super expensive though? I’m still broke from LA.’
Broke, but beautifully dressed, I thought, just not today.
‘You don’t need to worry about anything.’ Alex started to plait a section of my hair. ‘I’m hardly gonna ask you to come away with me and then expect you to pay for it.’
‘But I want to.’ I frowned. ‘I don’t want you to have to pay for everything. You know I’m really not that girl.’
‘I thought every girl was the “let my boyfriend take me to Paris for the weekend” kind of a girl,’ Alex said, pulling my hair. ‘Or is this just an excuse for you to weasel out of the trip the same way you’re trying to weasel out of moving in with me?’
‘I’m not weaseling out of anything,’ I pulled the loose plait out of his hands. ‘I do want to go to Paris, I just don’t want you to have to pay for me to go to Paris. I’ll find a way to make it work. And if it’s next weekend, we’ll be away for your birthday. Your big three-oh.’
Alex’s thirtieth birthday had been looming on the horizon for months and, while he was pretending to be super cool about it, the official line was that I wasn’t allowed to ‘make a big deal out of nothing’, which I had translated from boy-speak to mean ‘if I don’t acknowledge it, it won’t actually happen’. Typical boy-logic that could be applied to many, many of his actions.
‘Yeah, well, who doesn’t want to be in Paris for their birthday?’ he shrugged. ‘The record company want us to play a couple of warm-up shows, the festival is on Sunday, but I’ll keep Friday night free so we can do dinner or something. What could we do in New York that we can’t do just as good in Paris? Or even better?’
He kissed me lightly on the lips and waited for a response. Sneaky tactics, he knew I wasn’t at my full mental capacity when there was kissing involved.
‘I don’t know, I told you, I’ve never been to Paris,’ I managed to get in, between kisses. ‘When would we leave?’
‘Monday?’
Untangling his hands from my hair, I pulled away slightly trying to remember what day it was. That was the problem with working from home, I had absolutely no sense of time. ‘Today’s Tuesday, there’s too much to organize with work and the flat and, really, Alex, it’s only six days.’
‘It turns me on when you are so smart.’ He persisted with the kissing, moving on to my neck and pushing me backwards against the sofa. ‘There’s nothing to freak out about, Angela. You pack a bag, you tell work that you’re blogging from Paris for a week, you leave Vanessa in the apartment, we go to Paris. And if you’re gonna go all feminazi on me paying for your flight, you can make it my birthday present. Seriously, how many times do I have to tell you to stop over-thinking everything?’
‘At least once more,’ I said, giving up. I reached my arms up around his neck and shifted around on to the sofa as his hand moved up my thigh and under the thin cotton of my dress-slash-vest. ‘So you say you missed me this weekend.’
I felt his breath against my ear, giving me an altogether different case of goosebumps.
‘Like you wouldn’t believe.’
‘What is that noise?’ Alex groaned from underneath his covers.
‘My phone,’ I staggered out of bed the next morning and rolled into the living room, swearing and following the beeps. ‘Go back to sleep.’ I plunged an arm into the darkness that I hoped was the sofa until I felt my vibrating phone.
‘Yeah?’ I answered eloquently.
‘Hi, Angela?’
‘Muh?’ I mumbled, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. What time was it anyway?
‘Angela, it’s Cici? From the office? Were you still in bed, sleepyhead?’
There was no wonder I was shocked. If I had to name a New York nemesis, it would be Cici. She was my boss’s assistant at The Look, tall, skinny, loaded, desperately ‘On-Trend’ and, God bless her, she might hate me with a fiery passion, but at least I could rely on her to be consistent. Until today. Shit.
‘Erm, I was in the shower,’ I lied for absolutely no reason. I pulled the phone away from my ear. According to the clock flashing on bedside table, it was eight-thirty a.m. There was no conceivable reason why I wouldn’t still be in bed. Was there? Had I forgotten something? ‘What’s wrong, Cici?’
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she giggled. Actually giggled. ‘Mary just asked that I give you a call to see if you could make an early lunch meeting today. Well, not really a meeting, more of a get-together. Twelve? Pastis?’
I almost dropped the phone. Mary Stein, my editor at Spencer Media, had never so much as walked me out of her office let alone taken me to lunch. ‘Yes?’ I asked as much as confirmed.
‘Awesome.’ Cici giggled. Again. ‘Oh, Mary said to let you know that Mr Spencer, as in Spencer Media, will be joining the two of you. So…and I just want you to know that I say this with love, you should dress up. You know, just don’t wear what you usually wear here. Or anything you’ve ever worn here. It’s kinda fancy.’
And there was the Cici we all knew and loved. Before I could even sigh in reply, she’d hung up. Sitting in my knickers on the cold laminate flooring, I stared out of the window at the city in front of me. Lunch with Mr Spencer as in Spencer Media? What was that supposed to mean? Surely it had to be good though, there was no way it could be a bad thing.
What was a bad thing, was the state of me, I thought, peering at my reflection in the window as I pushed myself back up. I couldn’t really show up at Pastis in a vest and flip-flops with just-shagged hair. Bedhead was great in theory, but in reality, it just looked as though I hadn’t showered.
‘Do I have any clothes here?’ I asked a sleepy-looking Alex, as I dropped to my hands and knees in the bedroom to search for a stray dress or errant smock under his bed.
‘Pretty sure you came in clothes,’ he mumbled, throwing his forearm over his eyes. ‘I know you lose shit all the time, but surely you haven’t managed to lose your clothes in a one-bedroom apartment overnight.’
‘You’re hilarious.’ I pulled the slightly worse for wear strappy dress from yesterday out from under the pile made up of Alex’s jeans and T-shirt. ‘Work just called, I have to meet Mary for a meeting at Pastis at lunch. I have to go home and get changed.’
‘If you lived here you wouldn’t have to,’ he replied without moving.
‘You make a fine point,’ I said, wriggling into my dress.