The next morning, Jenny woke early, still half drunk and craving something sweet. I tried to convince her the best thing for everyone in these circumstances is a bacon sandwich, but she wasn’t convinced. In so far as she retched at the suggestion. I tried not to catch sight of myself in the mirror as I slipped out of bed but I accidentally caught a quick glimpse and couldn’t tear my eyes away. It wasn’t pretty. Post-gig, my hair was greasy and huge, having backcombed itself into a sweaty bouffant during last night’s fumblings. My melted make-up had managed to lodge itself into every burgeoning wrinkle and pillow crease, making me look ten years older, and, best of all, I had badger’s arse breath. This was not a good look for mine and Alex’s first morning-after-the-nothing-before.
‘At least you don’t look like this,’ Jenny grumbled, joining me in an unhappy stare before she retched suddenly and (thankfully) dry heaved over the bed.
‘That’s true,’ I said, half carrying her to the bathroom. ‘That is true.’
‘Thanks,’ she stared daggers at me, curled around the base of the toilet while trying to pull her hair into something resembling a style. There really was no use.
Despite Jenny’s best efforts to convince me otherwise, I couldn’t just slip out without waking Alex, so I went first and tiptoed across the still damp rug to where he was quietly dozing on the sofa. He looked exactly as we’d left him, apart from one noticeable addition in his boxers.
‘Nice!’ Jenny mouthed giving me a double OK sign by the door and stifling giggles. I replied with my middle finger. Plus, I couldn’t help but notice it was nothing to laugh at.
‘Alex,’ I said softly, keeping enough of a distance between us for my dog breath not to be too much of a problem. I’d swilled quickly in the bathroom and tried the old toothpaste on the finger trick, but it hadn’t had nearly enough of an effect.
‘Huh?’ He opened one eye, looking confused. ‘Angela?’
‘We’re going to get off now,’ I whispered, my hand lightly on his shoulder, eyes well away from the below the waist area. ‘Me and Jenny, we’re going to go.’
‘OK,’ he mumbled, rolling over onto his front.
‘That’s going to hurt,’ Jenny called lightly across the room. Another middle finger for her as we made our way out of the flat.
With only a couple of hours before I was supposed to meet Tyler at the park, I had some serious damage control to deal with. I packed Jenny off to bed with two Advil, a large bottle of water and half the pastry counter of the deli on the corner, then took up residency in the bathroom. For the first time in for ever, I ran a bath and got ready to soak. I needed to get all thoughts of Alex out of my head and all of Jenny’s drool out of my hair. If I’d had longer, I’d cancel, I thought, stepping into the tiny tub and relaxing. I didn’t think I was the kind of girl who thrived on drama, but then my life had been so boring for so long, maybe a bit of drama would do me good. And at least it made for a more interesting blog entry than my old life would have: got up, wrote a thirty-two-page book about a talking bee, ate some calorie-controlled rice cakes, waited around for my boyfriend to come home from shagging his tennis partner, went to bed in button-up old man’s pyjamas.
Eventually, I forced myself out of the bath and smothered myself in body lotion, sure I could still smell post-gig mustiness on me. Hopefully, a nice walk in the park would sort that right out. I picked out a shorts and shirt combo and accessorized with my beautiful Tiffany necklace, which I still hadn’t worn yet, and started to look forward to the fresh air, if not trying to talk to Tyler without mentioning any of my adventures with Alex.
As Tyler had predicted, Central Park was busy, but it was also incredible.
‘How can this exist in the middle of the city?’ I marvelled. As we ventured further and further into the greenery, the city seemed to fade away, leaving a complete oasis, packed with joggers, families, couples, groups of friends. Just about every sort of person you could imagine was in that park.
‘Would you like the history lesson or was that a rhetorical question?’ Tyler offered. He was carrying a large rucksack that I prayed was packed with food. I’d spent so long getting ready, applying de-puffing eye gel and checking Jenny was still breathing, I hadn’t even eaten. ‘It’s great though. They call it the lungs of the city.’
‘I can see that,’ I nodded as we veered off the path and over to a sunny, relatively unoccupied spot by a beautiful large lake. ‘It’s just madness to me that all this is man-made.’
‘You don’t have parks like this in London?’ he asked, spreading a blanket before he let me sit down.
‘We have parks,’ I nodded, ‘loads of parks, but this is so impressive. London is so higgledy-piggledy, which I love, but the idea that someone sat down and said, we’ve got to have a massive park in the middle of this planned, organized city, that’s ace. And even more I love that no one has been allowed to build on it when they started running out of space–not the case in London.’
‘I’m really sorry,’ Tyler smiled, unzipping the rucksack and producing a bottle of red wine. ‘I lost you at “higgledy piggledy”.’
‘Ha ha!’ I accepted a wineglass and let him pour. Please let there be some food in there too? ‘You make me feel so English.’
‘Is that a bad thing?’ He poured himself a glass and pushed the cork back in the bottle. ‘I love it when you say things like that.’
‘No, of course it’s not a bad thing.’ Why was there still no food? ‘It just reminds me I can’t stay here for ever. Which sucks.’
‘They won’t take you back if you start saying thinks like “sucks”,’ he scolded lightly.
‘Sorry,’ I smiled, holding my hand up to shield my eyes from the sun. ‘One thinks it’s a terrible shame that those dreadful builders should be allowed to build on such marvellous greenery.’
‘More like it,’ Tyler smiled, planting a tiny kiss on the end of my nose.
I lay back on the blanket and stared up at the cloudless sky. This must be the only place on the whole of Manhattan where I could look upwards and not see skyscrapers. It felt so far away from the real world.
‘And besides, you never know what’s going to happen.’ I felt Tyler lie down next to me, he was so solid and reassuring. ‘Who knows where you’ll be in six months?’
‘Bizarrely, you’re not the first person to say exactly that,’ I smiled, remembering what Alex had told me, hundreds of feet up in the air. Tyler leaned over and kissed me softly, bringing me back down to earth with a bump.
‘I guess you have to go back sometime,’ he said, producing a bag of crisps from the rucksack. Really? Crisps? ‘Cheeto?’
‘Thanks.’ Quite frankly, I’d have eaten anything at that second, but I had sort of been expecting something a little bit classier. He was such a smoothie. ‘Tyler,’ I rolled onto my belly and looked at him happily munching away, ‘have you ever had your heart broken?’
‘There’s nothing I love more than hiding in the park with a bag of Cheetos,’ he replied. ‘Is that really bad?’
‘No, but it is avoiding my question,’ I said, throwing a couple of cheesy crisps
