‘I did,’ I confirmed.
‘Did they tell you it would never work?’ she asked.
‘They did,’ I confirmed.
‘So here’s the thing.’ Delia was considerably more persuasive than me. As soon as she started talking, everyone perked up and leaned in to listen. Even Mary. ‘My grandfather is Bob Spencer, as in Spencer Media. And while I’ve spent a lot of years avoiding nepotism in all of its forms, I’m ready to cash in. Angela came to me with a great idea involving a lot of great people, and I want to present this to my grandfather and have him back us. I mean, why isn’t there a great weekly for women that isn’t just full of celebrity gossip and crappy fashion? Other countries have made weeklies work – we can do the same.’
‘So you have a business model?’ Mary was clearly still having issues with the fact that this was not Sadie. ‘As much enthusiasm as there is around this table, we’d still need a staff. We’d still need a sales team, a marketing team, a web team, all of it.’
‘And we’ll work that out,’ Delia agreed. ‘With you as editor-in-chief and me as publisher. And yes, Angela and I have been working on a business plan. The idea is that we’d start out as a free magazine, funded by advertising with an exclusive online component, sort of combining strong editorial with an online deal site. We’ll distribute through high-end fashion retailers in New York who will benefit from the deal side of the business, then we move to LA and – stage three – we’ll revisit our expansion plans across the US.’
‘Delia did most of it.’ I sipped my water with forced modesty. ‘I just came up with the idea of the magazine.’
‘You should get dumped more often.’ Sadie patted me on the back and I fought the urge to take her arm and break it. ‘This is awesome. When do we start?’
‘We’ve started.’ Delia looked around and smiled. ‘If you’re all in, I’m going to schedule a meeting with my grandfather next week.’
‘And what are you going to do?’ Jenny asked me. ‘Because this is awesome, but it needs to get you a visa, otherwise I swear I will marry your ass.’
‘That is very sweet, but I’m going to be web editor.’ I patted her hand in an attempt to get the scary look out of her eyes. ‘I talked to Lawrence and he thinks that will be enough to put through an application, so don’t worry – that’s one less wedding for you this year.’
‘I knew you’d work this out,’ she smiled. ‘And it’s a relief. I’m trying to keep it down to just one ceremony per annum. You know you’re amazing, right?’
‘I’m pretty good,’ I laughed. ‘I’d be better if I had my disco fries.’ Our waiter was busy behind the bar, back to the restaurant, arse bopping along in time to Donna Summer. Clearly he had better things to do than feed his customers. Like, oh, texting. I nudged my poor, poor bag open with a booted foot and checked my new iPhone. Nothing. But just looking at the iPhone made me happy. I was such an Apple whore.
‘Stop staring at your phone,’ Jenny commanded. ‘Every time someone swipes the screen of an iPhone, a fairy dies.’
‘iPhones kill fairies?’
‘iPhones will kill us all,’ she said sagely. ‘Cell phones suck. Phones suck. Communication sucks.’
‘Has he called again?’ I asked while Mary and Delia hammered out some points on the business plan and Sadie asked Erin incredibly inappropriate and personal questions about her pregnancy.
‘Which one?’ Jenny fiddled with the cuff of her purple silk dress. ‘I feel like shit. Sigge is so sweet and I was just going to eff him over without a thought. I’m such an asshole.’
‘Yeah.’ I tried to sound sympathetic, but it was kind of true. Though only Jenny and I were allowed to say it. ‘But you love Jeff. You weren’t thinking.’
‘I love Sigge too,’ she replied. ‘I really do. When I sat down and thought about everything, the idea of not seeing him again made me really sad.’
‘And the idea of not seeing Jeff?’
‘I don’t have an idea about not seeing him.’ Jenny’s eyes burned. ‘But I’m pretty sure if I saw him right now he’d be leaving this restaurant on a stretcher.’
‘So call Sigge, meet him for dinner. Or brunch, maybe – less pressure,’ I suggested. ‘You won’t know until you see him.’
She nodded slowly. ‘Gonna take your own advice?’
‘He said he’d call when he could.’ I was not going to cry in front of my new business partners. ‘And he’ll call.’
Since leaving Vegas, James had become my official AA sponsor; that was Alexaholics Anonymous. Every time I wanted to call and demand he forgive me, I called James. And in return he gave me some scandalous Hollywood gossip. Win-win really. Alex got the time he needed, I got to find out who was secretly gay.
‘Guys take so much longer to work stuff out – everything hits them harder,’ she said simply. ‘Women have so many shitty, annoying things to deal with every day. Smudging your manicure, beautiful shoes that hurt like a bitch, not fitting into your jeans – it’s constant disappointments. The worst thing that happens to a guy is his sports team loses. It makes sense that they lose their shit completely when things don’t go their way. They’re not used to it like we are.’
My best friend was truly a genius. ‘Please can you write that into an article for the magazine?’
‘I can and I will. But you know, sometimes it’s better to know than to wonder,’ Jenny said quietly. ‘What happens if he doesn’t call?’
I considered her question for a moment. What would happen if he didn’t call? Well, Christmas would happen; that was only a couple of days away. The New Year. Then the magazine. Then Louisa’s baby. Then Erin’s baby. Then Jenny would probably get married. And then I would die alone with a thousand cats.
‘He’ll call,’ I said again and looked around the table, taking in the excited expressions and passionate conversations that were going on. ‘I know it.’
New York outdid itself with Christmas Eve. The sky was clear and pale blue, the air was crisp and cold, and we had the lightest smattering of snow that was threatening to give me the white Christmas I so badly wanted. Jenny, Erin and Sadie had also done a pretty good job of showing their goodwill to all men. Or rather women. More specifically, me. So far we’d had brunch at Sarabeth’s off Central Park. We’d been to see the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular. We had fought through the crowds to see the Saks holiday window displays. We had made Jenny sit on Santa’s knee. They were doing a stellar job of distracting me from the fact that my boyfriend, the love of my life, still hadn’t called.
We were rounding out ten days and my faith in him was starting to waver. Jenny had stopped encouraging me to call him. Sadie had stopped tiptoeing around me in the apartment. Erin had bought me an airbed. I wondered how long it would be before they started suggesting I look for an apartment. I figured I was getting an extended Christmas grace period, but New Year and all of its promises of fresh starts would put an end to that. Who wanted to make a fresh start in January? Most days I didn’t even want to put on fresh clothes it was so cold. Stupid January.
‘So, ice skating next?’ Jenny pushed her arm through mine, feeling through the padded parka for my hand as twilight fell on Manhattan. ‘Rockefeller Center?’
‘This is awesome,’ I said carefully. ‘But I am sort of exhausted.’
The three of them looked horrified, but there was nothing I wanted more for Christmas than to just go home and sleep. Well, aside from the obvious. Delia and I had been working every waking hour on our business plan and a mock-up of the magazine to show to Bob, and when I wasn’t working, I was panicking about everything un-Alex-related as possible. What if my visa didn’t go through? What if Bob refused to back us? What if he backed us but the magazine failed anyway?
‘No way.’ Sadie shook her head. I was starting to regret bringing her into the fold. I was constantly getting outvoted by her and Jenny. Plus she left the bathroom messy. ‘We are getting our holly jollies on and you are not getting out of it that easily. Tired,
my ass. It’s motherfucking Christmas.’
‘Indeed.’ I replied. I turned to Jenny. ‘Really?’
‘I’ll let you,’ Jenny shrugged, ‘as long as you’re not going to go to bed and listen to his album and cry?’
‘What if I am?’ I sulked.
‘I swear, woman, don’t make me send your iPod the same way as your phone.’ Jenny dragged me down Fifth Avenue against the surging stream of last-minute shoppers. Salmon were stupid. ‘We’re going ice skating, you’re going to like it, and then we’re going to, I don’t know, consume a million calories in hot chocolate.’
‘Fine,’ I sulked. ‘Ice Skating. Yay.’
I’d been doing a really good job of putting on a brave face. The public crying had subsided, and last night I’d managed to go an entire bath without sobbing once. I was still waking up breathless in the night, and I was still checking my phone fifteen times a minute, but I was trying. Trying just took up so much energy, I didn’t have a lot left for Christmas, and no one was sadder about that than I was. The day the words ‘dashing through the snow on a one-horse open sleigh’ couldn’t raise a smile from me, let alone a rousing chorus of ‘horses, horses, horses, horses’, was the saddest day of all.
The ice rink at Rockefeller was busy, as always, but Erin knew a girl who knew a guy who knew a more important girl and we got in right away. Playing her knocked-up card, she sat out and held handbags, officially in training for motherhood, while we swapped our boots for skates. This was not the first time today I wished Jenny had told me her plans instead of surprising me with this Christmas extravaganza. I would have worn jeans instead of a dress. And if I’d known we were going to Sarabeth’s, I would have worn an elasticated waist. The gorgeous Alexander Wang wool shift Sadie had given me as an early Christmas present was beautiful, but it was not conducive to eating or skating. I skittered onto the ice looking like Bambi on his way to a very fashionable funeral. I doubted he had worn Wang to see off his mum almost as much as I doubted I would be spending the next thirty minutes upright.
Of course, Jenny was a skating pro. She whirled and spun around the ice while Sadie clung to the side and waited for hot single dads to come and chat her up. And come they did. Determined to live out my Christmas in New York fantasy, I put one foot in front of the other and slid out further onto the rink. I’d been good at this when I was fifteen. Louisa and I used to go skating every week. But then I’d also been good at braiding friendship bracelets and crimping my hair, and neither of those things happened terribly often these days. Hampered by a tight hemline and the wind resistance of my parka, I was not having fun. I wasn’t having fun in general. I’d done such a good job at faking it, pretending to smile and laugh and have a good time, that I’d forgotten to actually enjoy myself. I’d forgotten howto enjoy myself.
And now it was Christmas Eve.
Right in the middle of the Rockefeller Center ice rink, I stopped. I looked up at the giant tree covered in colourful lights and froze. He hadn’t called.
It was Christmas Eve and he hadn’t called.
That was it. Something inside me snapped, something that needed to shout before it cried. He was not going to ruin bloody Christmas. But it wasn’t a good idea to be angry on ice skates: I’d seen Dancing on Ice; I knew what could happen. Enough was enough, I decided, determined to get off the ice or die trying. I was going to get out of these skates, into my boots, get on a train, sit patiently for fifteen minutes, get on another train, sit slightly less patiently for fifteen more minutes and then march straight into my apartment and kick his arse. Of course it would have been far easier to commit to this plan if I hadn’t immediately fallen flat on my face.
‘Shit, Angie, are you OK?’ Jenny was by my side in a moment, but it was too late. My palms stung and my knees ached and I couldn’t quite catch my breath. Cue the tears.
‘I’m fine,’ I panted between sobs. ‘It just hurts.’
Most of New York’s skaters had the decency not to stare at the grown woman sobbing like a toddler as she was escorted from the ice. Dropping hard onto the bench, I yanked at my laces, angry at Alex, angry at myself, angry at whoever had told me I needed to tie a double bow in my skate laces fifteen years ago.
‘You need a hand?’
‘No, I don’t need a—’ I looked up with a glare that would put the Grinch out of business and stopped dead.
There he was. Alex.
For a moment I wondered if I had actually fallen and bumped my head, but one look to my left showed Jenny, Sadie and Erin sidling away, small smiles on their faces.
‘About time,’ Jenny said, just loud enough to hear. ‘I thought the asshole was never going to show.’
‘Let me help you.’ Alex knelt down and went to work on my ice skates. ‘Jesus, do you have these tied up tight enough?’
I still didn’t have any words. He was there, right in front of me. His hair covered his face as he bent down but I could see his long, slim fingers working the knots in my laces, the tips turning red against the cold.
‘I was coming to see you,’ I said.
‘It’s cold, but it’s not that cold,’ Alex replied, still busy with the skates. ‘The East River didn’t freeze.’
‘And I didn’t hear anything about mobile phone networks crashing either,’ I replied. This was so confusing. I wanted to hug him and apologize and feel his skin on my skin and never, ever let him go. But I also wanted him to get my skates off as quickly as possible so I could bludgeon him to death with them. Until I made a decision which one of those I was going to go for, I sat still.
Alex looked up at me with rosy cheeks. Dear God, I wanted to pinch them so badly. Then slap them. Hard.
‘I don’t have an excuse. I went away for a few days, went to visit my folks, did a lot of thinking,’ he started. ‘But I should have called you. I kept dialling, but I just didn’t know what to say.’
‘But you know now?’ It was better to know, I told myself. It was better to know than to wonder.
He nodded and pulled the sleeves of his jumper down over the tips of his fingers.
‘I’m sorry.’
Oh. Oh.
‘Everything I said, it was out of order. About you, about Jenny, about all of it. I didn’t even mean the stuff I was saying, especially about Jenny. I was just so mad, I didn’t know where to put it. I don’t do angry too well.’
‘I didn’t tell her what you said about her.’ I fought off the desire to start singing and dancing. At least until I’d got the skates off. ‘That’s why you’re still alive, in case you were wondering.’
‘So that’s why she got so pissed off when I apologized.’ Alex paused to face palm. ‘Shit.’
‘When did you apologize?’ It was not a small part of me that wanted to know why Jenny had heard the words ‘I’m sorry’ before I had.
‘When she called me last night.’ He went back to work on the knots. ‘She rang. She kicked my ass. I deserved it.’
I looked across the rink, but she was nowhere to be seen. The minx.
‘Alex, I’msorry.’ I stopped his hands with mine and bent down until our foreheads were almost touching. He was really here. ‘All those things I said, I just couldn’t get it out right. I do want to stay in New York more than anything and there are a million reasons why, but you’re the most important one. I was just too scared to say it before.’
‘Scared?’ He wrapped his fingers around mine until our hands were completely entwined. It felt spectacular.
‘Of what you would say.’ I shook my head, embarrassed. ‘That you would freak out. Mostly, that it was true.’
‘You were scared that you want to stay here with me?’ His voice was so low, the nosy cow sitting to the side of me was really struggling to listen in. ‘Why?’
‘Because.’
‘That’s not actually an answer, dumbass.’ Alex punched me gently in the knee. ‘Because what?’
‘Because that’s out of my hands, isn’t it?’ I mumbled, wriggling my fingers free and
setting to on the knots again. ‘If I was staying for a job or for my friends or even just because I didn’t want to go back, that’s all something I can control a bit. Admitting I wanted to stay for you, that puts it all in your hands. Hence the scary. And I thought …’
‘You thought I might not want you to stay?’ Alex finished my sentence. ‘You thought I might not want you to stay in the country and the best way to deal with that was to ask me to marry you?’
‘I didn’t say my logic was sound,’ I answered. ‘But that’s why I said all those incredibly stupid things about marriage not being important and that it was just paperwork. I didn’t mean it. I just … I was thinking about it in the way I thought you would be thinking about it.’
‘But that’s not how I was thinking about it at all.’ He successfully unfastened one knot as I finally loosened the other. ‘And you really made me think you believed all that stuff you said.’
‘I didn’t, though,’ I protested. Who could have known I was such a good actress? ‘I was just trying to protect myself and find a way to stay. And I just felt a bit like you weren’t taking the whole visa thing that seriously. Every time I brought it up you kept telling me to wait until Christmas, and I didn’t want to wait until Christmas – I was freaking out.’
‘Yeah, I got that.’ He helped me with the final knot. ‘You just can’t let a guy have a plan, can you?’
‘I’ve already told Jenny.’ I tried a little smile and it almost stuck. ‘You can’t ask Santa for a visa. He doesn’t have any pull with immigration.’
‘She tells me you don’t need any help any more.’ He was still kneeling in front of me, still close enough to kiss. ‘This whole magazine thing sounds amazing. I’m so proud of you.’
‘Yeah, I think it’s going to work,’ I said. It was too weird that something so epic had happened in my life and he didn’t know about it. ‘And they’re going to sponsor my new visa, so you’re totally off the hook.’
Alex took a deep breath and held my hand again. ‘What if I don’t want to be off the hook?’