haven’t run away,’ I said. This was not the supportive mother-daughter talk I’d been envisioning. ‘I’m doing something with my life.’
‘And maybe if you had stayed and talked to Mark, you would have realized how terrible he feels about things,’ she carried on, completely ignoring everything I was saying. ‘Maybe you would have been able to sort things out. Not that I’m saying you should, he did cheat on you, I know.’
‘He wants to sort things out?’ I asked. The idea hadn’t even crossed my mind.
‘Well, maybe he would have if you hadn’t run away, I don’t know,’ she said, sounding distracted. ‘But now he’s moved in that Katie girl, I don’t suppose the two of you will ever get back on track. I suppose if you called him …’
‘He’s moved in with – he’s moved her with in?’ I stopped her in the middle of her sentence. ‘Into our house?’
‘Well, you disappeared, dear,’ she seemed to be listening again. ‘What was he supposed to do? Not that I’m making excuses for him. He should never have done what he did, but, he did explain—’
‘Mum, I’ve got to get off, I’m going out,’ I needed to be off the phone right away. ‘I’ll call you when I know more about coming home.’
‘All right, darling, speak to you soon,’ and she hung up before I could.
Knowing for a fact that Mark had moved that girl into my house was all too much for my brain to process, but it did put the blog problem into perspective. I sat down in front of the laptop, blocked out the images of the filthy mare wearing my Cath Kidston apron and cooking with my beloved lime green Le Creuset casserole dish and emailed the blog to Mary. Mark who?
Once Jenny had returned from her Sunday spa appointment at Rapture and checked that everything had been exfoliated, waxed and moisturized to her own high and Jeff-ready standards, we headed out to Brooklyn. I was justifiably nervous, not having spoken to Alex about our ‘double date’ and not having spent more than fifteen minutes forcing my hair into some sort of shape, slapping on some of my miraculous MAC mascara and lipgloss. But my (still amazing) Marc Jacobs bag made everything better. I wondered if I could feasibly go out in my pyjamas and still feel like a grown-up if I were carrying this. Jenny practically skipped all the way to the L train, barely a sentence tripping over her tongue that wasn’t directly related to Jeff.
‘So it’s totally on with Alex tonight?’ she asked, holding my hand and skipping lightly as we crossed the road over to the subway.
‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘I was with Tyler this morning, don’t you think it might be a bit tacky to sleep with Alex tonight?’ But just saying the words sent shivers all the way down my spine.
‘I knew this would happen,’ Jenny shook her head, swiping her Metrocard. ‘You weren’t even OK dating two guys, you were never going to be able to sleep with two guys. Not at once.’
‘Christ, it’s not a threesome, Jenny.’ I followed her down the stairs, shaking my head. ‘And you didn’t want to share that information with me? Really, I’m OK seeing them both, I like them both in different ways, but I don’t know. Tyler is so much fun, and Alex is, well, it’s different.’
‘But you like him more than Tyler?’ she asked.
‘It’s different with Alex, harder to explain. I like the way he makes me feel about myself. With Tyler it’s kind of more about how he literally makes me feel,’ I tried to explain without blushing. ‘Did you ever do that experiment at school where you get three white flowers and you put one in an empty vase, one in a vase with water and one in a vase with food colouring?’
‘Yeah,’ Jenny nodded, ‘but I really don’t know what that’s got to do with you getting your kicks with some hot banker.’
‘Shut up,’ I smiled wryly and hopped on the train as the doors slid open. ‘OK, don’t laugh but the flower without any water just wilts and dies, right? And the flower with the water blossoms and it’s just really ordinary but beautiful, then when you add the food colouring it—’
‘It takes the colour into the flower,’ she finished for me. ‘Oh my God, you’re so meta! Doll, your first analogy. I’m so proud of you.’
‘Thanks. I feel validated,’ I said, patting her thigh. ‘I know it’s cheesy, but it’s the best I can come up with. Before I was just suffocating, with Tyler, it’s like classic and romantic, he has a structure to his life that I recognize. But with Alex, it’s fun and exciting and different. I don’t know where it’s going, everything is so new.’
‘New and exciting is good,’ Jenny said, nodding thoughtfully. ‘But when you’re in a delicate emotional state, that’s you doll, or when you just need to go out and have lots of great sex because you’ve only slept with one guy your whole life, again like you, maybe classic and romantic is the best.’
‘Maybe. I just don’t know. And I don’t know how long I can keep seeing them both. It does feel weird, whether it should or not. But seeing Tyler almost takes the pressure off whatever’s happening with Alex. Not that anything bloody has.’
‘Well, how about you give Alex his shot in the bedroom tonight and make your decision tomorrow?’ She grinned as the train slowed down, approaching our stop. ‘God knows, I’m going to need you to get the hell out of Jeff’s, oh, I don’t know, as soon as we get there.’
‘Things are going well then?’ I smiled. ‘I’m really pleased. I’m not going to say anything other than, I’m glad things are working out.’
‘Like I said,’ she said, hopping out of the carriage, ‘it’s fate. Sometimes you have to put all the psychobabble stuff on one side and go with your heart.’
‘Wow!’ I linked arms with her as we strutted up the stairs. ‘I just lost all respect for you.’
‘I know,’ she smiled, happily. ‘Isn’t it amazing?’
The first thing I would have liked to have known, before I agreed to dinner at Jeff’s, was that he was a terrible cook. Which he was. The second thing that would have been helpful to know, was that, in Jenny and Jeff world, ‘dinner’ was apparently a euphemistic term for practising oral sex skills on each other’s forks and fingers. I tried not to watch while I nibbled a polite amount of the spaghetti and mush that had been presented to us the second we walked through the door. We had only been in the apartment for approximately fifteen minutes and already, it was quite clear that Alex and I were in the way. Alex openly stared, occasionally nudging me with his knee. I couldn’t even look at him. Apart from the awkward hello and half-kiss we’d shared before being rushed to our seats, we hadn’t really spoken. Jenny and Jeff’s red-light show was making the atmosphere so tense, I didn’t know where to put myself. I felt like a maiden aunt at an orgy.
‘So, how was your weekend?’ Alex asked me and Jenny, breaking the strained silence and twirling limp spaghetti around his fork. I noticed no one’s plates matched. The apartment was super swank on a Tyler scale, but it seemed as if it was just possible that Jeff hadn’t been too worried about his housekeeping recently. I figured he had something else on his mind. And possibly other parts of his anatomy.
Jenny response to Alex was a low moan as Jeff’s hand vanished under the table, so I took it upon myself to answer-slash-try to distract Alex from the incredibly inappropriate behaviour
