‘You’re my favourite,’ she sang down the phone. ‘Tomorrow at six – I’ll send you all the deets. I love you, Angie. Fuck it all, I’ll marry you. After the cocktail party.’
‘Thanks.’ I rubbed my semi-bare arm and stared in through the window of the restaurant. Alex was still chomping away as though he hadn’t seen food in a month. He wasn’t a big sushi fan, and God knows how long he’d lived on ramen before the band made money. Japan must have been a little bit tricky for him. ‘Have you talked to him yet? Has he proposed? Can I book the venue?’
‘Jenny.’ I used my stern voice. ‘Leave it.’
‘I still think it’s worth talking about. How many times are we going to discuss your issues with communication?’
‘How many times are we going to discuss your issues with keeping your nose out?’
Jenny laughed in response. It was almost impossible to piss her off when she was getting her own way, which was always, and therefore massively annoying. ‘OK, lover, we’ll talk tomorrow. I have to go ravish my Viking.’
‘Sigge is from Sweden, not Norway,’ I pointed out. Given that she’d been shagging him for almost four months, you’d think she’d have basics like geography down.
‘There’s a difference?’ she asked. ‘Anyway, got to go. Sigge wants to make dinner. It had better not be freaking fondue.’
‘And that’s Swiss,’ I sighed. ‘Talk tomorrow.’
‘Everything OK?’ Alex asked as I shivered back into my seat. ‘Did she burn the place down yet?’
‘Not yet.’ I pulled my coat around my shoulders. This was my punishment for wearing a T-shirt just because it made my boobs look nice. ‘She wants me to waitress at a party tomorrow night.’
‘Do they make a waitress visa?’ He rubbed his denim clad leg against mine under the table. ‘I’d leave you really great tips.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Wow, I’d managed to go a whole thirty seconds without thinking about the V-word. I bit my lip for a moment, watched him shove in another mouthful of chicken, and then went for it. ‘Jenny says she’s going to marry me. For the visa.’
‘I’ll buy you soundproof headphones as a wedding gift.’ He speared a red pepper and popped it into his mouth. ‘But if it’s the only way for you to stay, I could totally get behind you two hooking up. You marry Jenny? Hilarious.’
I threw back a mouthful of icy water and tried to ignore the brain freeze.
‘So I should marry Jenny, then?’ I asked.
‘Angela, I would drive you down to City Hall myself,’ he replied.
Well, at least I could ride the elephant in the room all the way back to the apartment.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘Are you shitting me?’
Jenny stood in front of me with a hopeful smile on her face and a PVC French maid’s costume in her hand.
‘I thought this was supposed to be a fashion party?’ My arms were folded tightly, hugging my satchel to my chest, hoping the holy presence of Marc Jacobs would protect me from the ensemble Jenny was waving at me. ‘Have you got a fluffy tail and a pair of ears to go with that?’
She cocked her head to one side and looked at the outfit as though it were entirely defensible. ‘Would you believe it’s a last minute demand from the designer?’
‘Is this why the other waitress quit?’ I asked, gingerly rubbing the wipe-clean fabric between my thumb and forefinger. As soon as I touched it, Jenny let go. Great. Now it was all mine. My precious.
‘No.’
‘Jenny, I know when you’re lying to me.’
‘Fine. Yes. She said she was an actress, not a whore.’ She flicked her smooth, straightened blow-out over one shoulder. Without her trademark curls, Jenny didn’t look herself, but she did look intensely polished and professional. Something that would be difficult to pull off in a French maid’s costume. A red PVC French maid’s costume. ‘I did try to explain that she’s a waitress, not an actress, but that just seemed to make her even more pissy. It’s the designer – he’s kind of a, um, enormous sleaze. Angie, you have to do this for me. I’ll make it up to you. Please.’
I gave her the look.
‘For Erin?’
I closed my eyes.
‘For Christmas?’
Now that was a low blow. That was practically ‘If you loved me you’d wear it’, and I had no defence against that.
‘If you loved me—’
‘Fine.’ I held out my hands to stop her from talking and looked to the heavens for strength as Jenny wrapped me up in a giant hug. She really was very strong for such a slim girl. And I was very stupid for such a British girl. ‘I cannot believe I’m going to do this. Alex is going to laugh himself sick.’
‘I don’t think there’s a single straight guy in the universe whose initial reaction to seeing their girlfriend wearing this is to laugh,’ Jenny clucked, pulling my bag from my shoulder and hurrying me into getting changed. ‘They’d strike him off the hetero register.’
Shedding my New York winter layers in the bathroom of someone else’s swanky Tribeca duplex, I slithered into the outfit and thanked the Lord that I was wearing decent knickers since everyone and their mother was going to be able to see them for the next three hours. With a gleeful grin, Jenny held out her black patent Louboutins and a pair of fishnet hold-ups.
‘None of the other girls are wearing Louboutins,’ she said as I baulked. ‘Loubous totally class this shit up.’
‘It’s not the shoes so much as the stockings,’ I grumbled, snatching them and sitting on the edge of the bath to put them on. ‘In for a penny … Classy my arse.’
Ooh, bugger me that bath was cold.
‘Who’s actually going to be at this thing?’ I asked. I just needed reassuring that it wasn’t going to be my mum, my ex-boyfriend, every boss I’d ever had and my year nine maths teacher. Because in my head …
‘Just fashion assholes,’ she said, flipping her hand dismissively. ‘Erin is trying to get this guy to give us his account. He runs some online boutique or something, and he said if we pull off his Christmas party, we’ll get his PR business. Between you and me, I think he’s kind of a pervert.’
‘You don’t say.’ I looked down at my outfit. Low at the top, short at the bottom, tight in the everywhere. I wanted to take a photo and text it to Lawrence the Lawyer with the caption ‘extraordinary enough for you?’. Except he’d probably just reply ‘no’.
‘You should wear it home and then ask Alex what he thinks about marrying you,’ Jenny said, carefully rolling my non-hooker wear and stashing it in a garment bag. ‘Pretty sure you’d get the answer you’re looking for.’
‘I thought you were going to marry me?’ I asked, taking a regrettable look in the bathroom mirror. The black eyeliner and cherry-tinted lip gloss I’d put on at home had seemed simple and classic with my jeans. Now I looked like a shop-worn Playboy bunny. Hef would take one look and banish me from the Mansion. Could there be anything more damaging to your self-esteem than being dismissed by a jilted octogenarian?
‘I’d totally hit that,’ Jenny said, leaning her chin on my shoulder and smiling at our reflections. It wasn’t a picture I was comfortable with, Louboutins or no Louboutins.
‘Good, because I’m officially taking the whole visa marriage thing off the table.’ I rested my head on hers. ‘I’m going to find another way. But I’m staying, don’t worry.’
‘I think you need to convince yourself, not me,’ she said, kissing me on the cheek and slapping me on the arse. ‘I believe you.’
It was a good thing one of us did.
With a brave face and a bare arse, I crept out of the bathroom and into the party. People were already starting to arrive, giving me very little time to scoot into the kitchen and surreptitiously neck a glass of champagne. How was I supposed to walk around the room wearing this? Catching a glimpse of my backside in the microwave window only made me feel worse. Not only because it wasn’t the most flattering angle, but also because the only thing reflected in my micr
owave was the cheese from last night’s pizza. For a split second I considered legging it for the lift before any more people arrived, but I didn’t. Because Jenny actually looked very nervous. Because I’d made a promise. And because I didn’t know where she’d hidden my coat. So instead of dashing for the streets, I picked up a tray of champagne, tried to forget the fact that my mum still served me a half-full cup of tea because ‘I couldn’t be trusted’ and headed for the living room. While I wasn’t quite so keen for them to get a look at me, I was looking forward to seeing what a ‘fashion asshole’ looked like.
‘Oh. My. God.’
One step into the party.
One step straight back into the kitchen.
Apparently ‘fashion assholes’ looked like Cici Spencer.
Tall, blonde and the devil incarnate, this was not good. The last time I’d set eyes on Cici, she was howling with rage and drenched in iced coffee. Because I’d thrown it at her. Cici was the assistant of my former editor at The Lookmagazine and had made ruining my life her pet project. She hadn’t quite managed total destruction at the time, but she did successfully destroy my entire wardrobe. Oh, and made sure I lost my job, since she was the godforsaken hell spawn of the magazine’s owner. It was ironic that a more appropriate name for Cici also started with a ‘C’, but my mother would never forgive me if I used it in public.
‘Oh my God, Angela.’ Cici tottered over, holding one very skinny hand to her flat chest, laughing with delight as though we were old sorority sisters. ‘Look at you!’
I was frozen to the spot. Yes. Look at me. There she was in a floor-length, one-shouldered red gown, her hair sweeping down the other shoulder in an icy cascade of blonde curls with a slash of dress-matching lipstick on her perfectly porcelain face. And there I was, in my cheap, shiny, wished-it-was-Ann-Summers French maid’s costume with air-dried hair and a dab of L’Oréal lip gloss. Sigh. I really didn’t have anything to say to her.
Luckily, Cici had lots to say to me.
‘This is amazing.’ I felt a very light, very evil hand on my shoulder. ‘I was just thinking about you the other day. I was updating Mary’s holiday card list.’
‘Oh.’
‘I cut you.’
‘Right.’
I assumed she was saying I wasn’t getting a Christmas card, but if she’d meant an actual physical slashing, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
‘Figured you would have left by now. Like, run away back to England or something?’
‘Um-hmm.’
‘Because you don’t have a job?’
‘Gotcha.’
‘Because we fired you?’
Not running away five minutes ago was turning out to be a really bad idea. ‘But look at you,’ Cici gushed. A small crowd of her cronies had gathered around to watch the entertainment. ‘You are working. As a waitress. Dressed like a hooker.’
The best part was, it was all true.
But I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of me going the full Charlie Sheen, even if the idea of throwing an entire tray of Cristal in her face before beating her to death with the tray was very tempting. It was Christmas, after all, and I really didn’t want Jenny to get fired. Or to go to prison. I wasn’t sure if New York had the death penalty or not, let alone whether they served Christmas dinner inside. That said, I would have a good defence. ‘But your honour, she was a massive bitch’ would work, surely? No, I had to take the high ground. I had to be the bigger person. And I hated that.
‘Hi.’ I reset my expression and smiled. If looks could kill, it wouldn’t have even tickled. Butter would’ve actually chilled while I looked at it. ‘Champagne?’
‘What did you do to it?’ She reluctantly took one of my glasses, sniffing it with suspicion.
‘Oh, Cici.’ I attempted to laugh, but it may or may not have come out slightly more like a sob. ‘It’s just champagne. Enjoy your evening.’
Feeling my restraint starting to waver, I turned carefully on my borrowed heel, making sure not to twist my knackered knee, and headed back towards the kitchen, passing another French maid on the way out. She gave me a supportive grimace and I nodded in return. Solidarity, sister.
Once the door was closed and I was safely away from Cici and all of Satan’s little helpers, I let out what I hoped was a relatively controlled screech of rage, kicked a cardboard box across the room and slammed a cupboard door. It actually felt quite good. Not as good as throwing a drink over her, but OK. Just not OK enough. I’d only been moved to violence twice in my life, but I was more than a little bit worried we’d hit the magic number if I went back out there. Fisticuffs were becoming my natural setting.
‘Hey, are you OK?’ Jenny snuck into the kitchen and pushed the innocent cardboard box back into position under the counter. ‘You motored back in here kinda fast.’
‘Remember my friend Cici? From The Look?’ I asked.
‘Cici?’ Jenny’s smooth forehead creased with concern. ‘Your friend? Wasn’t she the one who gave you all that bullshit in Paris?’
‘Yep,’ I confirmed. ‘And had my luggage blown up.’
‘The Balmain …’ Jenny pressed a hand to her heart. It had been a difficult time for both of us.
‘She’s outside. In the red.’
Jenny Lopez was someone who wore her emotions on her face and wasn’t terribly good at camouflaging the way she felt. In the following thirty seconds she was completely silent, but we managed to get through confusion, shock and sadness (for the dearly departed Balmain) before finally settling on intense rage. She stuck her head back through the door and peered outside before turning back even angrier, if possible, than before.
‘Halston?’ she asked. ‘The one in the Halston?’
‘I don’t know, do I?’ I loved fashion, but if I couldn’t see the label, I didn’t have a clue. Identifying shoes, on the other hand, was my secret super-power. ‘It’s long and red and one-shouldered.’
‘The Halston,’ Jenny confirmed. ‘Shit, it’s gonna be so hard to do this to a dress like that.’
Alarm bells.
‘Do what?’ I reached out to hold my friend back, but she was quicker than me. ‘Jenny, where are you going?’ I hissed as she slipped back into the party with a wicked grin on her pretty face.
For a moment I stood stock still, frozen to the spot in the kitchen. What on earth was she going to do? I grabbed a small tray of snacks, mostly so that I had something to defend myself with when things got nasty, and went once more into the fray.
Jenny was right in the middle of Cici’s circle and, unlike me, she looked like she belonged there. As much as I hated the world’s most jumped-up secretary, it was hard to deny that her overall presentation was amazing. A product of several generations of excellent Upper East Side breeding, she was tall, slender, blonde and born to wear designer clothing. Unfortunately, that sort of heritage often came both with a flat chest and a chip on the shoulder. Cici’s chip was so big, she’d have struggled to cart it around in an Hermès Birkin. But Jenny … Jenny was a goddess. Blessed with the legs of a prized pony, gorgeous glowing skin and the ability to set absolutely anyone at ease, if I’d had her natural gifts I would have (a) been a complete bitch and (b) married a billionaire at the age of eighteen. But Jenny always used her powers for good. Well, good was relative, wasn’t it? As far as I was concerned she was a white knight, but I had a feeling Cici was about to see what happened when you incurred the wrath of Jennifer Lopez. And I didn’t care whether or not the other Jennifer Lopez was one of the most famous divas on earth, she didn’t have a patch on my girl. I was almost too scared to watch. Almost.
‘We’re so pleased you could come, Cecelia,’ Jenny cooed, her arm wrapped through Cici’s skinny limb. ‘Tonight is such a special night for the designer.’
‘Thomas is one of my favourites,’ Cici crooned, batting her eyelashes in the general direction of a short, very skinny, entirely repellent man with over-dyed black hair in the middle of the room. Thomas, pronounced ‘Toe-Mah?
?? of course, wasn’t wearing one of his own designs. He was wearing a red PVC Santa costume. With the arse cheeks cut out. I believe trousers such as his are more commonly known in the business as chaps. Father Christmas does not wear chaps; they are not practical in his line of business. I hadn’t laid eyes on him before this moment, but at least I now realized why I was dressed like a very cheap prostitute. And at least I wasn’t the worst-dressed person in the room. Never before had Christmas made me so sad.
‘I’m so glad I could be here – the holidays are just crazy,’ Cici was saying, rolling her eyes at Jenny. ‘All the parties, all the travelling, the shopping – it’s just chaos.’
‘Isn’t it though?’ Jenny nodded sympathetically. ‘The shopping is just the worst.’
‘It sure is. I hate shopping when it’s not for me!’ No one enjoyed Cici as much as Cici enjoyed Cici. ‘I hate Christmas.’
So it was true, she wasthe devil. I softened the shock of this news with a handful of snack mix from my tray.
‘You’re not supposed to eat those,’ one of the other dead-eyed waitresses said as she sailed by with champagne. I shrugged and went back in for seconds. I had a feeling this job wasn’t going to be a big tipper for me anyway; might as well get my money’s worth.
‘Yeah, it’s just so …’ Jenny waved her hands around to agree as emphatically as possible. And accidentally spilled a glass of red wine right down the front of Cici’s dress. ‘Oh. My. God.’
The shriek that came from Cici’s throat would have sent the virgin Mary into an early labour. There wouldn’t have even been time to get to the stable. The little donkey would have had to act as midwife. I couldn’t believe Jenny Lopez had sacrificed couture to the great girl-vengeance gods. I nibbled on a wasabi pea. This was better than the cinema.
‘This is archive Halston,’ she hissed. ‘I have to return this to the PR.’
‘Sabrina?’ Jenny waved away her concerns. ‘One of my best friends. I’ll call her. Don’t sweat it. In fact, let me make it up to you. I’ve got one of Thomas’s designs from his new collection in the back. I was going to have a model come out in it later, but I don’t suppose I could beg you to wear it for me? I know Thomas would love it. You’ve got such a perfect figure.’