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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I hadn’t expected to be sad to be checking out of The Hollywood, but after Jenny and I had bundled all of our bags into the back of the Mustang, I felt strange walking out of the doors for the last time.
‘Are you sure you’ve got everything?’ I asked a very hungover Jenny, who nodded back and draped herself delicately across the back seat, in between her cases.
‘Angie, I’m only moving, like, ten minutes up the road,’ she said from behind her hair. ‘If I forgot something, I think I can come and get it when I turn up for work here tomorrow.’
‘Did you speak to anyone about last night? Is everything still OK about you working here?’
‘Everything’s fine for me,’ she said, sipping from a bottle of water. ‘Joe got his ass fired so I don’t imagine I’m gonna have any hassle.’
‘He got fired?’ I hissed, watching Alex wander outside, looking around for us. ‘How come?’
‘I don’t think the management really like it when the staff get into a bar brawl with really famous movie stars. Or when they sleep with the guests.’
‘But he didn’t sleep with the guests,’ I said quickly as Alex waved and started over to the car. ‘And it was James that hit Joe. Not that I’m defending him, obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ Jenny said. ‘And, don’t get mad, but they think that because I told them he did. And it really doesn’t matter who started or finished the fight, this is Hollywood: celebrities are never guilty. He deserved it, Angie. Don’t start feeling all guilty now.’
‘I don’t.’ I was as surprised as she was. ‘He’s a complete shit.’
‘Yeah, he is.’ Jenny gave me a feeble high five. ‘Hey, Alex.’
‘Hey.’ He stood by the driver’s door. ‘Am I driving?’
‘Well she’s not.’ I looked back at Jenny, who was getting greener by the second. ‘And if I’m being totally honest, I don’t really fancy it. I have no idea where we’re going.’
‘Then I’m driving.’ He opened the door and dropped in beside me. I hadn’t ever really thought about it, but living in New York, I’d never seen Alex drive. I didn’t even know that he could, but as if he wasn’t amazing enough, he put on a pair of Ray-Bans, turned over the engine and pulled out onto Hollywood Boulevard.
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ I smiled happily. ‘I just didn’t know you could drive.’
‘I guess there are still lots of things you don’t know about me,’ he said, slowing down for a red light. ‘And I guess there are lots of things I don’t know about you.’
‘Guys, pull over,’ Jenny groaned, batting me on the back of the head. ‘I’m gonna be sick.’
‘Well there’s one less thing not to know about, Jenny,’ I said, stroking her hair while she threw up into her handbag, trying not to think about what Alex could mean.
‘So, I’ll call you when we get back?’ I said to Jenny, carrying her bags into the living room. Daphne’s place was beautiful, all open plan, big windows and a terrace with a view out over LA. Maybe there was something to be said for having a sugar daddy.
‘Yeah, call me when you’re back at the apartment.’ Jenny propped herself up against the doorframe. ‘I guess I might need you to send some stuff.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said, thinking how weird it would be to walk in without her, not knowing when she would be home. If she would be home.
Jenny slipped down the frame, buzzing her own door bell. ‘I have to be sick again.’
‘Do you want me to stay for a bit?’ I risked her puking down my back and went in for a hug. ‘I can stay if you want?’
‘I’m cool, go get your flight,’ Jenny said, falling on the bell again. ‘What is that noise? Angie, say you don’t hate me for staying here?’
‘Of course not, I do get it,’ I said reluctantly. ‘I just wish you didn’t have to be so far away to sort your head out.’
‘You could always move here with me for a while?’
I looked back out at the car. Alex’s head was bobbing along to whatever he was listening to on the radio.
‘Or you could stay in New York with him.’
‘If he still wants me to after all of this,’ I said.
‘Jesus, Angie,’ Jenny let go of the doorframe long enough to slap me round the side of the head. ‘I’m gonna have to get more minutes on my call plan if I have to talk you out of this every time you guys have a row. You’re just gonna get in the car, fly back home, maybe fool around a little on the plane and then pretend that none of this ever happened.’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ I said, letting her out of the hug. ‘I love you, Jenny, you always know what to say.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s my thing,’ she said. ‘Love you too, Angie. You always know how to mess up and make me feel needed.’
Walking back to the car, I tried not to cry but I couldn’t help it. When everything else had gone wrong in my life, Jenny had always been there to help me make sense of myself. What would happen now? And why was it so easy for us to throw around the reasons why we loved each other when I couldn’t say to the person who needed to hear it the most?
‘She OK?’ Alex asked, turning down the radio.
I nodded. ‘She will be.’
‘You OK?’ he asked, wiping away the tears that were rolling down my cheeks.
‘I will be.’ I ran my fingers under my eyes to pick up any stray mascara streaks and smiled. ‘Airport?’
‘We’ve actually got a couple of hours,’ he said, rolling out into the street. ‘And I’m not desperate to spend any more time than we have to in LAX.’
‘What do you want to do?’ I asked, suddenly nervous to be alone with him, even though he was smiling.
‘I know this is going sound weird, but I was kind of thinking the beach? Who knows when I’m going to be back in LA, right? I feel like I should at least see the Pacific Ocean.’
‘Alex Reid, beach bum,’ I shrugged off my cardigan, getting my last few rays of LA sunshine. ‘Who would have thought it?’
I paused on the boardwalk to kick off my sandals while Alex strode on across the beach. Seeing him silhouetted against the sky and the ocean was so surreal, I hardly dared to follow, in case he disappeared like a mirage. Except instead of a palm tree and a sparkling spring, there was a pair of black jeans and an un-ironed Kellogg’s Corn Flakes T-shirt hanging from his wide shoulders and slim hips. He turned and smiled, interrupting my shameless ogling.
‘You checking me out?’ he held his hand over his eyes, the Santa Monica sun too much for his Brooklynbred eyesight, even with his Ray-Bans.
‘Maybe?’ I said, stepping into the sand. Good God it was hot. Good God he was hot. So much hotter than James Jacobs. Anyone could spend half their life in the gym and get a two-hundred-dollar haircut. Only Alex could pull off that too-long-on-one-side fringe that hadn’t seen a comb in – well, how long could it be since he’d had it cut? A month? But it was still so soft when I tiptoed across the sand towards him and cautiously brushed it away from his face. ‘You’re going to burn even faster than me. Do you have any sunscreen?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ he said, taking my hand from his face and holding it in his. ‘Don’t tell anyone but I actually tan pretty well. I just don’t see that much sun at home.’
‘I suppose you don’t get many tanned rock stars,’ I said, happy to be talking about nothing. ‘It’s not very hipster, is it? Not very—’
‘Angela, I love you.’
I knew that my mouth was hanging open in a slightly unattractive fashion but I couldn’t move a muscle.
‘Angela?’
I blinked. Nope, he was still there. I wasn’t asleep. Maybe I had sunstroke from not wearing a hat in the car on the way to the beach. Or maybe I was still drunk from, well, the whole week.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes,’ I said finally. ‘What did you say?’
‘Something I should have said before you left but I didn’t want you to freak out and then be too far away to do anything about it. I love you, Angela.’
‘Why?’
‘What?’
‘Why do you love me?’
Well, why not try and ruin this perfect moment? Well done, Angela.
‘Sit down,’ Alex sighed, pulling me down onto the sand beside him. It really was red hot; fine for him in his jeans but more than uncomfortable on the backs of my legs. ‘Of all the responses you could have given me, I wasn’t expecting that. You want me to tell you why I love you?’
‘Yes please,’ I said quietly, not quite able to meet his eyes. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him – well, it was; but more that this scene was so surreal – Alex sitting there next to me in his skinny jeans, his crumpled T-shirt, all pale skin and black hair clashing against the sun and the sand – that it genuinely felt as though I was dreaming.
‘OK, I love you because you have that knee-high stack of books at the side of your bath that are all curling up at the corners because you spend hours in that tub when you should be working. I love you because you put my socks on the radiator if you get up before me, which you always do. I love you because you make me want to do things that I would never have done six months ago.’ He shook his head. ‘I love you because you make me want to come out to LA and tell you I love you.’
‘Oh,’ I pushed my hair behind my ears and tried to smile at the sand, ‘really? Even after all this week’s nonsense?’
‘Any particular bit of nonsense you’re referring to?’ he asked.
I actually wasn’t sure if there was. ‘No?’
‘So no four a.m. phone calls you want to elaborate on?’
Well, that could have been worse. ‘Oh. Yes. There was one of those,’ I nodded, looking away again. ‘That would be the one when I said I love you.’
‘That was the one I was thinking of, yeah,’ Alex replied evenly. ‘Why, what did you think I meant?’
I shrugged, drawing a figure eight in the sand with my finger. ‘Just been such a mad week. I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular.’
‘So you weren’t thinking about you spending the night with that guy James knocked out last night?’ he asked.
I paused my circling, paused my breathing for a moment. ‘Not especially.’
‘You know that trust is really important to me, Angela,’ Alex said, putting his hands over mine. ‘It’s not like we didn’t have this conversation already.’
Oh God, I thought, squeezing my eyes closed tight. Don’t let this be happening again; don’t let him do this again.
‘I would really appreciate you telling me what happened instead of me having to piece it together from what I heard last night. I’m guessing whatever I dream up will actually be way worse than what actually happened.’
‘I didn’t know you were there,’ I said. ‘You heard all of it?’
‘I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?’
‘OK,’ I started, trying to run through the story in my head before it all came spilling out. Was there any way for me to tell him the whole story without him getting up and walking away at the end of it? Probably not. ‘Right, short version? I thought I’d lost my job, I thought I’d lost you, James was refusing to sort everything out and so I got totally wasted at the hotel bar. Joe helped me get back down to my room, he kissed me and I passed out. The next thing I knew, I woke up, he was there, I freaked out and that was that. And I only really found out what happened last night. Which was nothing. Nothing at all. It was just so stupid. I was just so stupid.’
‘So you weren’t going to tell me?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t know what there was to tell.’ I looked up but Alex was leaning back on his elbows, staring out at the sea. His nose was bright pink. ‘OK, no I wasn’t going to tell you.’
‘Even when you thought you’d slept with him?’
Was there even a right answer? ‘I think I would have told you when we got home. But when it turned out nothing had happened, no, I don’t think I would have said anything.’
He didn’t move, didn’t speak.
‘I couldn’t see the point in making things worse than they were. Nothing happened; I didn’t think it made sense to hurt you for no reason.’
After what felt like for ever, he breathed out and nodded. ‘Makes sense.’
‘And the rest of it is all sorted, right?’ After being almost scared to make eye contact with him all morning, now all I wanted was for him to look at me. ‘All the stupid photo internet stuff.’
‘Did you know James was gay when you were in his hotel room that night?’ he asked.
What happened to ‘you don’t have to explain anything to me’?, I thought, puffing out my cheeks in concentration. ‘No, but there was nothing going on,’ I said. That wasn’t a lie. Nothing actually went on.
‘I don’t want to come off as paranoid, but it seemed kind of strange that you would call me at four in the morning and tell me you love me hours before the pictures of you and James came out.’ He turned his head to look at me and took off his Ray-Bans. ‘Why do you love me, Angela?’
Arsehole. Turning my question back on myself. ‘Why do I love you?’
‘It’s really easy to say I love you, it’s another altogether to explain why,’ he said. ‘As you know.’
‘Yeah, OK,’ I closed my eyes again. It wasn’t that bloody easy, was it, or I would have told him weeks ago and we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. Why was this so tricky? I was for ever telling other people why I loved him.
‘I love you because you always have a T-shirt under your pillow for me, even if you don’t know I’m coming to stay. I love you because you know I want sugar in my tea in the morning but not at night and because you always pretend you forgot I wanted a skinny hot chocolate in Starbucks because you know I really prefer full fat but don’t like to order it in case the girl behind the counter thinks I’m fat.’
Alex started to smile. So I carried on.
‘I love you because when I get out of the subway and I see you in the coffee shop by your place or I’m coming back home and you’re in the deli buying me Lucky Charms, I actually get butterflies in my stomach. Every time. Or when I’m knocking on your door, just before you answer, I can feel them bubbling up inside me. And when I wake up, I look for you, even if you’re not there. It’s like my brain just thinks you should always be there, like waking up with you is my default setting.’ I copied his pose and leaned back on my elbows. Damn, the sand was still hot. ‘Is that OK? Did I pass?’
He leaned over and kissed me gently on the lips, his skin warm against mine. For the longest moment, no one said anything.
‘I’m sorry, it wasn’t a test for you,’ he said, pulling away slightly. ‘It was a test for me. I didn’t mean to make you feel shitty, I never wanted to be one of those asshole boyfriends who doesn’t trust his girlfriend but, there’s no excuse, I guess I’m not totally over what happened with my ex. But you’re not my ex. I know that. I promise I’ll never ever question you, ever. I was totally being that asshole.’
‘Is that it?’
‘That’s not enough?’
‘I mean, you’re not going to say you love me but you can’t be with me?’ I pressed my forehead against his, wondering why I couldn’t just shut my mouth.
‘I was just going to stop at I love you,’ he said, pushing me back into the sand and kissing me again.
‘I can work with that,’ I said, rolling on top of him. The sand was still awfully hot.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
‘Jenny, it’s me,’ I mumbled into my mobile. ‘Pick up if you’re there?’
Nothing. And I was trapped in a pitch-black apartment with none of the lights working. No matter how many times I flicked the light switch by my bed on and off. My mum would have been very proud.
‘Shit,’ I sighed. ‘Well, if you get this, can you call me back and tell me where the fuse box is? Seriously, what were you thinking, moving to LA?’
I pressed the red button to cancel the call and waved the light from my phone around the room, wandering out into the hallway. Surely it would be somewhere around here? I’d been living in the apartment on my own for a week and so far I’d had to call a plumber in when I dropped my Tiffany necklace down the plughole in the kitchen, call an exterminator in when I mistook one of Jenny’s old clip-in hair extensions for a mouse, and call some random stranger in off the street when a massive spider decided it wanted to share the shower. I was determined to conquer this crisis on my own.
Stupid Alex and his stupid three a.m. phone call. I squinted up above the doorframe, was that big white thing a fuse box? But as much as I appreciated his semi-drunken declaration of love at all hours of the night, if he hadn’t called this time, I wouldn’t have woken up, then I wouldn’t have had to go for a wee and found out the electricity was off. Which would have meant I wouldn’t have worked myself up into a panic that there was a blackout, which would have meant I wouldn’t have called him back and he wouldn’t have worried me even more by saying it was just my electric that was out. Living on my own was not working out well.
I bit down on my bottom lip and pressed my hand to my forehead, not knowing quite what to do. I glanced around, looking for inspiration, and found it sparkling through the window. The city skyline lit up the living room, the Chrysler building outlined in white light down the street. I felt my way across the room, successfully only stubbing my big toe twice.
Leaning against the windowsill, I stared out onto the still busy street below and I breathed out, slightly calmer. How could Jenny leave this? How could year-round sunshine and a convertible compete with New York City? Even now, in the middle of the night, the streets were alive with people. Could Jenny pop on her Uggs right now and be eating chow mein within five minutes? Not likely. Well, it was possible but I was pretty certain she’d have to at least get in that convertible and drive ten miles to find it. I watched a stream of yellow cabs and police cruisers rolling past, couples holding hands and running across the street, trying to beat the light; a general assortment of characters wandering around, ridiculously early on a Tuesday morning, not freaking out because they couldn’t reset their electricity.
‘Come on, Angela,’ I said to myself, ‘this is stupid.’ For a second, I considered just going back to bed and worrying about it in the morning, but I knew it would keep me awake. I was going to beat this. I padded back through the living room, bashing my knee as I went.
On closer, tiptoe, inspection, the white thing over the door did look an awful lot like a fuse box. Only one of the switches was down and, from my feeble recollection, that meant a fuse had tripped. Of course, I didn’t have a stepladder. Or a step. Or anything that could feasibly be used to climb on to reach. I looked at the phone in my hand – I could call Alex? He could probably reach but that would feel a tiny bit like admitting defeat. And I had to be in the office at nine. If he came over now, half cut, there was no way I’d be getting to sleep anytime soon. Which wasn’t a horrible thought, I smiled to myself, but no, I had to do this. I refused to be such a rubbish girl. Unless being a rubbish girl might be just the thing … I dashed back into the bedroom, looking for my highest heels. Two minutes later, I’d accessorized my hot pink Victoria’s Secret pyjama top and American Apparel hot pink boy shorts with my gold Christian Louboutin stilettoes. Very sexy.
I grabbed a can of hairspray from the side of the sink on my way back into the hall and reached up as high as I could, bashing at the cover of the fuse box until it flipped down.
‘Come on,’ I puffed, extraordinarily pleased with myself. I pushed up onto my toes, trying to flip the tripped switch without spraying myself in the eyes with Elnett. Every part of me strained. If I could do this, I could do anything. I could sort out all the bills I had to transfer into my name. I could work out what the 401k thing was on my wage slip from The Look. I could work out what the equivalent to Night Nurse was in the chemist – how many variations on a cold medicine did one city need?
On my seventh little leap, I bashed the lid of the can against the switch, clattering backwards into the door.
‘Angela?’ yelled a voice on the other side.
I jumped up, my heart pounding from the shock of my late-night caller and my admittedly surprising (even to me) success at resetting the fuses.
‘Angela, are you OK? I heard a bang?’
I pushed myself up out of the pile of shoes I’d landed in (Jenny had always been on at me to put them away) and peered through the peephole. It was Alex.
‘Ange, let me in.’ He was standing with one arm against the wall, staring at the floor. ‘I’m not drunk. Well, not really.’
I opened the door slowly, so happy that my heart still skipped a little when I laid eyes on him, even with his flushed cheeks and wide eyes.
‘Very sexy,’ he slid through the door, taking me around the waist. ‘Promise you’ll always be waiting for me in heels at three in the morning?’
‘Oh,’ I blushed, trying to kick my way out of the shoes. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ I’d spent months trying to maintain an illusion of sleeping exclusively in sexy nightdresses or Alex’s old T-shirts. This was not a look I’d have chosen for an impromptu sleepover.
‘So this blackout thing, just a ruse to get me over?’ he asked, pushing me gently backwards towards the bedroom.
‘No,’ I protested, albeit not very strongly. ‘The fuses tripped but I fixed it. Are you proud?’
‘Absolutely,’ he smiled glassily, flicking lights out as we went. ‘I think we should turn the lights out though, just in case.’
‘Just in case,’ I agreed. So I’d be going into the office knackered in the morning. Again.
‘Morning Cici,’ I yawned, sailing past her desk, bright and early and absolutely shattered. ‘Is Mary in yet?’
‘Morning girl-who-turned-James-Jacobs-gay,’ she sang back. ‘Of course she is. Gonna try and turn her too?’
‘It’s been a week. You’re not even starting to get tired of that joke yet, are you?’
She shook her head and smiled sweetly. ‘It’s so not a joke. You turned one of the hottest guys on the planet gay. I should kick your ass. You turned that hipster boyfriend of yours yet?’
‘Not as far as I know.’ I was fairly certain he wasn’t gay after last night. And this morning. And hopefully later this evening.
‘Good, he’s kind of hot. For a hipster,’ she shrugged. ‘Don’t come any closer, I’m dating someone who doesn’t seem to be a complete loser at last and I don’t want you turning me gay either.’
‘I’ll try to keep my distance,’ I promised. Shouldn’t be too bloody hard.
Mary sat at her computer, as always, sharp grey bob swinging as she tapped away at the keyboard, little square glasses halfway down her nose. ‘Angela, honey!’
I froze. Honey? What was wrong?
‘Sit down, honey,’ she said, looking up and switching off her monitor.
Double honey? Something was definitely wrong. And she had never, ever turned off her computer in my presence. I hoped she wasn’t ill.
‘Circulation figures are in for the James Jacobs issue of Icon,’ Mary said. ‘And they’re good.’
‘What’s good?’ I held my breath.
‘Two and a half million good. Up from one and a half.’ She could hardly sit still. ‘There are a lot of very happy faces on the exec floor this morning, Angela Clark.’
I bit my lip a little bit too hard. Two and a half million people were reading my interview? OK, really two and a half million people were reading about James Jacobs being gay, but still, it was my interview.
‘And that’s without factoring in the website hits, the uplift in traffic to your blog, even subscriptions are up. To Icon and The Look.’ Mary broke out into what could only be described as a grin. ‘Angela, I’m so, so proud. And so, so sorry about how hard it was to get here. I know I was kind of an asshole when you were out in LA.’
‘Not at all,’ I said, thinking quite the contrary but being far too English to agree with her. ‘So I’m not in trouble with anyone?’
‘Hardly,’ she beamed. ‘As of the second those numbers came in, you are the A-number-one golden girl of Spencer Media. I think you could march up there and demand your own magazine right now if you wanted it.’
‘Might be a bit ambitious,’ I said, feeling myself colour up. It was now or never. ‘I was thinking, though …’
‘Dangerous pastime.’ Mary raised an eyebrow.
‘What do you reckon the chances would be of me writing more stuff for The Look. I mean, the magazine.’
‘Like?’
‘Like maybe a column? Or some features?’ I sat on my hands to try and avoid biting at my nails. ‘Or anything really?’
‘You know I was joking about your own magazine, right?’ Mary pressed her finger against her lips and shook her bob. ‘You want to write a column in The Look?’
I pushed out my bottom lip and nodded. ‘Any chance of that?’
‘You know I don’t work on the magazine, Angela. It’s not as though I can commission a column for the magazine, just like that.’
‘But you could speak to someone?’ That golden girl status had dropped pretty bloody quickly.
‘Yeah, I could speak to someone. But so could you.’
‘I know I could speak to my editor on the magazine but I really don’t know her as well as you. She just sends me CDs and stuff to review but I don’t see her, hardly ever, and—’
‘That’s not what I meant, Angela,’ she said. ‘I meant, given the position you’re in right now – and I do mean right now as in today – you could go and talk to some other magazines. Your profile is very, very high, but that won’t last long.’
‘But I don’t want to go elsewhere,’ I protested. ‘I love working with you and I don’t—’
‘Yes, but imagine you’d come in here this morning and told me that you’d been approached by another publisher, maybe one of our rivals, and they’d offered you a blog and a column and that you were considering it …’
‘I’m imagining,’ I said slowly.
‘And if you’d told me that, I can’t see that we’d want to let you go, so I would offer you a raise on your blog and offer to speak to the magazine editor right away … So, anything you want to tell me …?’
‘I’ve been approached by another publisher?’
‘And?’
‘They’ve offered me a blog and a column?’
‘Right.’
‘So …’
‘So, I can offer you a raise on the blog and I’ll speak to the magazine editors today.’ Mary flicked her computer screen back on. ‘I’ll call you later.’
‘Thanks, Mary,’ I said, standing up to leave, not entirely certain of what had happened. ‘I’ll speak to you later?’
‘Yes you will,’ she said without looking up. ‘And really good work on the interview, Angela. All the bullshit that went along with it aside, you did great work.’
‘Thanks?’ I was fairly certain it was a compliment. ‘Bye Cici.’
‘Bye girl-who-turned-James-Jacobs-gay.’
Yes, of course I wanted to spend more time here.
‘So you fixed the fuses?’
‘Yes, Jenny,’ I sighed, hustling along Forty-Second Street towards Bryant Park. Already the little square of green was full of busy Midtown workers trying to snatch five minutes in the spring sunshine. The weather had broken in the last week and the streets of New York were suddenly somewhere I wanted to be again and not the subzero enemy of the ballet pump, friend only to the ugly Ugg. The last time I’d been sitting in the park, (trying unsuccessfully to mend a broken heel), it had been so cold, I could barely breath. ‘But seriously, you shouldn’t leave me alone. I’m sure I broke the oven.’
‘You have an oven?’
‘We. We have an oven,’ I practically shouted down my mobile phone. ‘It’s still very much our oven. And yes, it’s definitely there. I found some old cereal boxes in there; you’ve been using it as a cupboard.’
‘You didn’t find a roommate yet?’ she crackled.
‘It’s only been a week,’ Through sheer force of habit, I looked both ways up and down the road, even though the traffic only went north, before sprinting across Sixth Avenue. ‘I haven’t even been looking for a flatmate. I’ve been so busy.’
Which wasn’t entirely untrue. I’d had an entire week of TiVo to catch up on and, well, I was still hoping I would open the door at any second to find Jenny on the doorstep, bag in hand, sobbing that LA was a big bag of crap and she was home for good.
‘Busy turning more hot guys gay?’
‘Don’t you start,’ I muttered. ‘Anyway, how are you? Bored? Missing me? Coming home?’
‘Uh, real answer or answer that will make you feel better?’
‘The second one.’
‘It sucks. It’s been raining every day; I’m not getting to do any sort of styling; totally didn’t meet Ryan Phillippe yesterday and I hate it.’
‘Just as well,’ I said over the swishing and cursing in the background. ‘Jenny Lopez, tell me you are not driving while you’re talking to me.’
‘I’m not driving while I’m talking to you?’
Well, I had asked her to lie.
‘How’s Alex? Everything OK?’ she yelled, but not over her own horn because she wasn’t driving.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I think so. I mean, we had the talk before we left but we haven’t really discussed it since. Any of it.’
‘You two using the L word?’
‘Hmm. Kind of.’
‘You using the L word when you’re not drunk or in bed? Or drunk in bed?’
‘Not really. I feel a bit like the whole LA thing never happened.’
She went quiet for a moment. ‘Doesn’t mean a thing, Angie.’
‘Hmm.’
‘It’s not like he was totally gushing with the emotion before, is it?’
‘Yeah, he sort of was.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘But you don’t think there’s anything wrong?’ she asked. ‘Maybe he’s just, you know, expressing his feelings without words. Baby.’
‘He writes songs for a living, Jenny,’ I replied. ‘I think he’s fairly comfortable with words. I don’t know. I’m just getting so tired of trying to second-guess him, but I don’t want to say anything and risk getting into another deep and meaningful. What if something is wrong and he starts thinking it’s all just too much like hard work?’
‘It does sound a little like hard work, honey,’ she said. ‘You should dump his ass and get back over to LA. You could totally blog from here. Ooh, you and James could do an internet show! It would be awesome.’
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