She goes out, she meets men, they give her their numbers and she never calls. And then at the same time she’s rattling on all the time about how she’s not getting any. I just don’t know what to do for the best. I know she’s hung up on Jeff still but it’s the one thing she absolutely will not talk about. Sober.’
‘Does she still think they’ll get back together?’ Alex leaned his head against mine.
I shrugged and pouted. The official line was that she was totally over her ex, but the unofficial, drunk-at-two-a.m. line was, ‘I’ll never get over him as long as I live, he’s my soul mate.’ But I had a feeling that wasn’t something she wanted to share with Alex.
‘So I don’t tell her that some blonde moved in with him yesterday?’ he asked. ‘Sorry I didn’t say anything earlier. I totally forgot.’
‘Seriously?’
Alex nodded.
The fact that he had refused to sell his apartment just because it was in the same building as Jenny’s ex was usually reason enough for her to decide she wasn’t talking to him for days at a time, so it seemed to make sense to keep this little bit of information to myself. ‘No, she cannot find out about that. She’d probably take to her bed for a month.’
‘Sounds fun,’ he smiled, one hand sliding up my back, the other holding fast to the balcony. ‘Can we do that now please?’
I looked up into Alex’s ridiculously green eyes, his fringe catching in my eyelashes as he dropped his face to mine for a long kiss. His body was warm against the thin silk of my dress and the balcony pressed into the small of my back. I felt my clutch slip out of my fingers and drop, not sure if it had fallen over the balcony, not sure if I cared.
‘I should probably leave soon,’ I said, my voice catching as Alex ran his hand down the back of my neck, curling the hair at the nape around his long fingers. ‘I have a meeting with Mary at nine.’
‘So my place is closer by subway, yours by cab.’ Alex’s eyes were dark and dilated, his breath quick. ‘And I don’t think people on the subway would be OK with what I have planned.’
‘Cab then,’ I smoothed down my dress and scooped up the bag. Thank God it hadn’t actually gone over the edge and bashed anyone. I’d assaulted enough people at weddings in my time. ‘Have to say, didn’t think you’d be the sort of bloke to get turned on by weddings.’
‘What sort of “bloke” did you think I was?’ Alex smiled. ‘And it’s not so much weddings as you. Now get your ass in a cab.’
The next morning was grey and cold, just like every morning had been since the end of November. The hardwood floor in my bedroom felt like ice as I gingerly poked my toes out of the bed and felt around for my slippers. I knew it was stupid not to wear my giant bed socks when Alex stayed over, but we hadn’t been together that long, I just didn’t think he was ready for it and so I suffered. Like an idiot.
March was the opposite of July. I’d sweltered from the moment I stepped off the plane but now I sometimes wondered if I’d ever be warm again. Hot and sticky summer had given way to a cool and crisp autumn, which was all too quickly overtaken by subzero temperatures and snow storms. As pretty as three feet of snow was, I had learned already that it was a) not a rarity in the city and b) not a good thing. When it snowed at home, everything stopped. My mum waited until the gritter had been around the streets, then trekked up to the shops in her wellies, walking in the road, to buy unnecessary quantities of canned food and eight pints of milk that would go off before she could force my dad to drink them all to avoid them going off. When it really snowed in New York, the roads jammed and the subway stopped but life didn’t. And walking in the bitter winds with a face full of sleet did not make it easy to lead the glamorous life that my family in England might have imagined me living. Although that could also be because my emails and phone calls rarely mentioned the fact that I’d been walking around with a Rudolph-red nose, bundled up like the Michelin man for months.
I flicked at the curtain to check the state of the streets. At least it hadn’t snowed in the night, but the sky looked grey and threatening and, below, people dashed backwards and forwards, bundled up for an arctic expedition.
‘What time is it?’ croaked Alex, rolling towards me and pulling the curtain back across the window.
‘Seven-thirty,’ I sighed, allowing him to pull me back into bed, my feet disappearing under the quilt. Alex was like my very own human hot-water bottle. No matter how cold the apartment was, he was always like a furnace. Aside from the obvious, it was one of my favourite reasons to have him in bed with me. ‘And as much as I don’t want to, I really do have to get up.’
‘See, I go around telling people how awesome it is having a writer for a girlfriend,’ Alex grumbled as I pulled away again, ‘because she doesn’t have to be in an office at nine a.m. every day. And here you are, at seven-thirty…’
‘I can’t help it,’ I said, wriggling away from him and braving the icy floorboards again. I pulled on my giant fleecy dressing gown and looked back at him, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, the covers up around his nose. ‘Do you really tell people your girlfriend is a writer?’
‘Mmm,’ Alex rolled himself over under the covers, hiding his head as I flicked on a lamp. ‘What else am I supposed to tell them? You’re a British refugee who can’t go home because you broke some guy’s hand?’
‘Arse,’ I grabbed a towel off the radiator, heading into the bathroom. ‘You can tell people whatever you want.’ As long as you tell them I’m your girlfriend, I added silently with a great big smile.
The Spencer Media building was on Times Square, one of my least favourite places in all of Manhattan. Even today, on a frigid Monday in March at eight-fifty in the morning, the streets were pulsing with tourists, clutching their Starbucks and digital cameras with inadequate knitted mittens. I had never thought I’d consider a North Face padded coat a necessity, but then I’d never tried to live through January in New York with nothing but a pretty Marc by Marc Jacobs swing coat and a feeble H&M leather jacket. Never, ever in my entire life had I been so bloody cold. Now I understood the need to forgo my newfound interest in fashion and put on As Many Layers As Humanly Possible before I left the apartment. It was insane.
I pushed past a group of school kids taking it in turns to snap shots of the group, one switching in, one switching out to take over photographer duties, and wondered exactly how many tourists’ pictures I had managed to land in since I started working for The Look. There were probably millions of shots of a disgruntled-looking girl tutting and sighing in the background all over Facebook.
The views from Mary’s forty-second floor office almost made the trekking across Times Square worth it. The higher up I got, the more amazing New York looked to me. At ground level I could sometimes forget where I was—H&M here, HSBC there—but up in the office, surrounded by skyscrapers, watching the rivers sweeping around the island, I couldn’t be anywhere else but Manhattan.
‘Mary’s been waiting for you,’ an uninterested voice came from behind a huge computer monitor as I tried to locate the group of kids below.
‘Aren’t I early?’ I asked the monitor. Mary’s assistant, Cici, had never been my biggest fan but she usually gave me the courtesy of a dirty look. Unfortunately
