I Heart Paris

‘Yeah, it’s awful being popular, isn’t it?’ I wanted to raise an eyebrow, but ow ow ow.

  ‘It sucks,’ he relented with a small smile before his face fell again. ‘And, you know, well, I should have figured that Paris wasn’t strictly speaking, my happy place. I’m just not feeling myself.’

  It didn’t take a genius to guess what he was talking about, but I had made a promise with myself that the name ‘Solène’ would not be passing my lips this evening.

  ‘I’m really glad you’re here right now,’ he added, putting down his knife and fork. ‘I’m sorry we haven’t spent more time together.’

  ‘We’re together now,’ I said, forcing a smile. ‘But you are going to have to talk for a bit so I can eat this amazing steak.’

  ‘How about we both eat and then we can talk?’ Alex bargained, his foot rubbing up the inside of my leg. ‘Just listen to everyone else for a while.’

  ‘That’s all right for you to say,’ I said through a mouthful of bloody meat. I held my hand over my mouth, but really, we were a long way past that. Thank God. ‘You can understand what everyone else is actually saying.’

  ‘And it kills you that you can’t,’ he said with the first genuine smile I’d seen in over an hour.

  ‘I’m a writer, I’m inquisitive,’ I protested.

  ‘You’re nosy,’ he bounced back.

  ‘And I thought we weren’t talking while we were eating?’

  Alex speared a piece of steak with his fork and grinned.

  ‘So, does it feel different?’ I asked later as we walked through the streets eating ice creams. It was still warm and Alex paused to lick an escaping trickle from the back of my hand.

  ‘Does what feel different?’ he asked, going back to his own cone and swinging my arm happily. The second bottle of red and the champagne I ordered while he was in the bathroom seemed to have loosened him up.

  ‘Being thirty,’ I explained. ‘Do you feel different?’

  ‘Nope,’ he replied quickly. ‘How’s that ice cream?’

  ‘It’s not a good enough liar to distract me that easily,’ I came back just as quick. ‘You must feel a bit different, surely.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, pulling me down a narrow cobbled street lined on either side with small shops filled with bright fabrics. ‘Do I look different?’

  I took a big lick of my ice cream and stopped to look at him. Same shiny black hair, short and ruffled in the back, one chunk always slightly stuck up from where he’d been running his hand through it all day. Long and shiny in the front, parted slightly to the left so one side fell just below his eyebrow, fluttering in front of his eyes, a bright and vivid green. They looked a little tired, but it was late and I was guessing that spending half the night in an armchair wasn’t conducive to clear eyes. A few laughter lines reminded me that, despite the last few days, he spent a lot more time smiling than he did brooding and sulking. The other side of his hair fell longer, past his high cheekbone, highlighting the contrast between his black hair and pale skin. His lips were just as full and red as ever. As they stretched into a small smile, I could see that they were stained with the red wine we’d been drinking.

  ‘So, do I look old to you?’ he asked again.

  I shook my head and reached up on tiptoes to kiss him, ignoring the ice cream that was melting all over my fingers. ‘You look OK.’

  ‘Well, thank God for that. Come on.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked, my heart skipping along faster than I could in my borrowed Louboutins and tossing my messy almost empty cone into a bin while Alex munched his.

  ‘You wanted to see Paris.’ He pointed up a set of steep steps. ‘So let’s go see Paris.’

  I looked upwards and saw a beautiful church with a gorgeous domed roof. ‘Sacré-Coeur?’ I asked, channelling my inner Rough Guide.

  ‘Sacré-Coeur,’ Alex confirmed. ‘Can you take the stairs in those shoes?’

  ‘I love that you know me well enough to ask,’ I said, looking down at the pretty instruments of punishment I’d buckled to my feet. ‘And I love that I am comfortable enough with you to say no, no I cannot.’

  ‘Come on,’ Alex laughed, pulling me towards a little tram-looking thing. ‘We don’t have long until they close up.’

  Once we’d run the gauntlet of men trying to sell us plastic Eiffel Towers and Sacré-Coeur snow domes, and squeezed into the rush of people clicking their cameras before they’d even got in front of the church, I turned and stared out over Paris. It was so breath-takingly beautiful, a pitch black sky dotted with stars reflected in the city below it. Once I’d got my breath back, I turned around to take in the church, if you could call it that, it seemed so inadequate a word. It was so beautiful. Prettier than Notre-Dame, more welcoming than imposing, but still so dramatic, I couldn’t find words for it. The white stone seemed to glow in the darkness, floodlights shining from below the building and carefully placed spotlights illuminating every beautiful feature. If there were any flaws, I couldn’t see them. Jenny would kill to find out who had designed the lighting on this place and get them to do her next headshots.

  ‘You like it?’ Alex asked, placing his hands on my shoulders from behind me.

  ‘I love it,’ I said, switching my eyes back and forth from the city to the church. ‘Thank you for bringing me here.’

  ‘I know you like a view,’ he whispered. ‘And I’m pretty sure it’s the only thing in Paris that’s older than me.’

  ‘Yeah, you do look a similar age.’ I punched him lightly on the arm.

  ‘I’m getting tired of having to tell you to shut up,’ he said, hopping lightly on to the low wall in front of us. ‘It’s beautiful, right? I used to love coming here, having Paris all laid out in front of me.’

  ‘Better than the Eiffel Tower?’ I asked, looking around for the landmark.

  ‘It’s on the other side,’ Alex said, reading my mind again. ‘And yeah, better. Parisians hate the Eiffel Tower you know.’

  ‘Snobs,’ I said, clapping his hands between mine. ‘This is gorgeous though. I love how Paris ripples.’

  ‘Ripples?’

  ‘Yeah, you know,’ I said, trying to find the words, but only gesticulating randomly. ‘It’s like, up and down. The buildings are round then square, high then low. It feels, I don’t know, curvy.’

  ‘And how does New York feel?’ He looked bemused. It was fair, I was supposed to be a writer after all.

  ‘New York is skinny,’ I decided. ‘Everything is tall and thin and holding in its breath. It’s the one thing I miss about London, there aren’t nearly enough little green spaces in New York. It can be so claustrophobic. Not enough places for you to just sit down and have a minute.’

  ‘People don’t have a minute,’ he rationalized for me. ‘Manhattan is always busy.’

  ‘True.’ I nodded, trying to work out how to bring the conversation around to my moving in with him. ‘But I feel like I would never get anything done here. It’s a city made for wandering around, holding hands, eating ice cream.’

  ‘And for getting drunk, did you notice how many bars there are here?’ he pulled me towards him, resting his head on my chest.

  ‘I’m trying not to notice,’ I said, thinking back to how much I drank when I was in LA. Not good. In fact, I’d had the same bottle of vodka in the apartment since I got back and I’d actually had a bottle of wine in the fridge for over a week. How things had changed since Jenny had moved out.

  ‘So maybe London is the perfect mix of the two?’ he suggested.

  ‘It’s not perfect,’ I disagreed. ‘It’s missing a few vital New York ingredients.’

  ‘Yeah?’ he asked as I rested my forehead against his.

  ‘Yeah.’ I pressed my lips to his for as long as I could without breathing. He tasted hot and warm like red wine, but with a cold ice-creamy sweetness.

  ‘So, seriously,’ I said, nestling in between his knees and resting my hands on his shoulders. ‘You don’t feel any different at all? About
being thirty?’

  ‘I honestly haven’t thought about it,’ Alex said, taking a few strands of my hair away from my face and brushing them back. ‘But no.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ I shook them back again. He might have forgotten about my black eye, but I hadn’t. And neither had the American tourists at the side of us who were whispering and pointing. But since they were both over forty and wearing baseball caps and bum bags (or fanny packs, tee hee) I wasn’t too concerned about their opinions. ‘So when you were younger, what did you want to be doing when you were thirty? What did you think you’d be doing?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He pushed up off the wall and stood staring past me, up at the church. ‘I guess I stopped thinking about it a while back. Thirty creeps up on you so fast.’

  ‘You talk like you’re so old already,’ I said, leaning in to rest my chest between his shoulder and his chin. ‘You must have had ambitions, you must have wanted to do stuff.’

  ‘Yeah, I did.’ He nodded, brushing his lips against the top of my head. ‘I wanted to make music for a living and I was lucky, I got to do that pretty young.’

  ‘And you wanted to do soundtracks, music for films?’ I asked. His body was always so warm, even as the night got cool around us. ‘You said that ages ago.’

  ‘I do, I’m looking into it,’ he said. ‘James Jacobs actually emailed me about some stuff yesterday. I should get back to him.’

  ‘You should,’ I replied, letting myself feel a little bit pleased that I could take at least a bit of credit for helping him. I sometimes worried that there wasn’t much I could give Alex, nothing that he didn’t already have or couldn’t get for himself. ‘But there’s nothing else? Nothing you wanted?’

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked, his arms tightening around me. ‘By the time you’re thirty, where do you want to be?’

  Hmm, wasn’t expecting him to turn the tables. ‘I don’t really know either, maybe I’d like to write a book? I’d like to be writing for more magazines, not just the blog, but more stuff like this, like I’m doing for Belle.’

  ‘In New York?’

  ‘Yes, in New York.’

  In Williamsburg, in your apartment with you, I added in my head. Why couldn’t I say it out loud? Now was the perfect time.

  ‘Cool. For one really scary minute I thought you were going to say married with babies,’ he laughed. ‘Phew.’

  ‘Yeah, phew,’ I repeated.

  Hang on a minute, what?

  ‘Alex?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What would you have said if I had said married with a baby?’

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, but I felt his arms and his jaw tighten. ‘But you don’t want those things. Do you?’

  ‘Not necessarily by the time I’m thirty,’ I said, choosing my words as carefully as humanly possible. ‘But I wouldn’t say I’m not ever going to want them.’

  ‘OK,’ he said diplomatically.

  ‘Don’t you?’ I said, staring hard at one of the buttons on his shirt. ‘Want those things?’

  ‘I did once,’ he said slowly. I knew he was putting just as much thought into his words as I was. Not that it made me feel any better. ‘But I stopped thinking about them and they just sort of fell off the radar a while back. I would say I don’t think I need those things to be happy.’

  My hands loosened around his waist and dropped on to the wall behind him. ‘Right,’ I said quietly, hoping that tears wouldn’t come. I would not be that girl. As much of a surprise as it was to hear him say that, my reaction was an even bigger surprise. It wasn’t on his radar? He didn’t need those things to be happy? Did he even need me then?

  ‘You’re not freaking out, right?’ he asked the top of my head. ‘I mean, with you not wanting to move in and everything, I figured that you wouldn’t be thinking about those things either.’

  ‘Uhmm,’ I mumbled, hoping it sounded noncommittal. What the hell? I was a girl, of course I was thinking ‘those things’! Maybe not morning, noon and night and maybe not in my immediate future, but how was I supposed to not have ‘those things’ cross my mind? While sitting in a gorgeous Parisian garden, fantasizing about how gorgeous I look in my Funny Face wedding dress, while Louisa and Jenny look like crap in canary yellow.

  ‘I guess that’s one thing that’s been good about coming here,’ he sounded relieved. ‘I totally realize I was pushing you on the whole moving in thing and I just want you to know that I’m happy to wait as long as you need to. It is too soon, you’re right. Rushing stuff like that just ruins everything.’

  I pressed my fingertips into the cold stone of the wall until I felt the tension all the way up in my shoulders and my hands started to shake.

  ‘Are you cold?’ Alex asked, tipping my face up towards his.

  I looked away quickly, trying to turn brushing away a tear into a yawn. I nodded into the hands covering my face. ‘And tired.’

  ‘Let’s head back,’ he said, scooping up my hand and squeezing it. ‘We’ll get a cab, we’re kind of a long way from the hotel and I know, birthday or not, you’ll kick my ass if those shoes get ruined.’

  If he could tell there was something wrong he was pretending he hadn’t noticed. I kept level with him, my face straight ahead. So I’d promised myself I wouldn’t say it, but I hadn’t promised I wouldn’t think it. He had wanted to get married and have babies once. It didn’t take a genius to work out when once was. He had wanted to get married and have babies with Solène. But he didn’t want them with me.

  ‘Alex?’ I said as we crossed the street to a taxi rank. ‘I’ve actually been thinking a lot about the moving in thing.’

  ‘Angela, it’s OK. Rue Amelot, s’il vous plaît?’ he added for the cab driver. ‘I told you, I know I was being pushy. Moving in is off the table, you don’t have to worry about upsetting me any more. I get it.’

  ‘But I was thinking that maybe I was ready to, well, to move in,’ I said, crawling across the back seat. Even I wasn’t convinced by my tone of voice. How could I be now?

  ‘Yeah?’ He sounded even less convinced. ‘Let’s just talk about it when we’re back in New York. Not tonight.’

  We rode back to the hotel in silence. Alex staring out of the window, one hand pressed against his temple and his forehead leaning on the glass, and me staring at the back of his head, trying to work out where the evening had gone so very wrong. So, he didn’t want to move in with me any more? And he didn’t need to get married and have babies? I breathed in deeply. I was making a bigger deal of this than it was. I must be. I was tipsy, I was tired, I was stressed. I wasn’t going to be getting married, moving in or having babies with Alex.

  ‘We’re here,’ he said eventually, tapping me on the thigh. ‘You awake?’

  ‘Hmm, yeah.’ I opened the car door into the street, narrowly missing a passing scooter. The rider beeped his horn and barked out some French expletive while I pressed up against the car door, now actually awake and paying attention.

  ‘Hey.’ Alex scooped me up as the driver pulled away, leaving me in the middle of the road. ‘You trying to get run over? Come on inside.’

  I let him put his arm around me and we walked quietly through reception, which was again Alain-less. Alex was talking at me about the warm-up gig on Saturday night, what time we’d need to leave for the festival on Sunday, how much he was dreading the flight back. I nodded along, but it felt as if I was watching myself rather than participating in the conversation.

  Once we were in the room, I took my time in the bathroom, scrupulously removing every last trace of my make-up instead of sneakily leaving on some mascara, which would be removed ‘after’, and brushing my teeth for the full three minutes. After my second wee, I couldn’t put it off any longer. Oh my God, was I really putting off going to bed with Alex? Opening the bathroom door, I saw he was already in bed, all the lights out except the one on the bedside table. I crossed the room and slipped under the covers, assuming the position, my right arm across his st
omach, my head resting on his collarbone. We lay there in awkward silence for a couple of minutes, his hand trailing up and down my forearm while I absently played with the sleeve of his T-shirt. Well this was a first. Not just that he’d got into bed in a T-shirt, but that I wasn’t tearing it off. And he was hardly ravishing me. And I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted him to. After a couple more minutes, I rolled over and flicked out the light. The clock on the nightstand flashed one-thirty a.m. I’d been awake for over twelve hours without a nap, no wonder I was so tired.

  Before I could roll back, Alex turned against me, pushing his body closer to mine and wrapping his arm around my waist. I felt a warm kiss on the back of my neck before he yawned loudly.

  ‘I can’t believe we’re in Paris on my birthday and we’re just gonna go to sleep,’ he said into my hair. He didn’t sound as if he couldn’t believe it. He sounded as if he was making sure I knew that’s all we’d be doing.

  I didn’t know what to think. He wasn’t even going to make a move for me to awkwardly rebuff? I didn’t want to have sex with him because I was pissed off and confused, but what the hell? He didn’t want to have sex with me? He should always want to have sex with me! Wasn’t he genetically programmed always to want to have sex? Isn’t that what the Y chromosome was for?

  ‘It’s probably because I’m so old.’ He yawned again and gave me a squeeze.

  A couple of minutes later, I felt his breathing even out, and his grip around my waist slackened. I squinted at the bedside clock until my eyes adjusted to the light. One forty-seven. I knew things always felt worse in the night. I wouldn’t feel half as bad in the morning. My stomach would stop feeling like a family of hamsters had set up home in there and were having their housewarming party. And I wouldn’t want to cry until my eyes fell out. I’d definitely feel better after I’d slept on it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It turned out I didn’t feel great the next morning. Possibly because I didn’t technically sleep on anything. I’d checked the clock every fifteen minutes, occasionally drifting off into tense dreams that ended in me falling off a kerb or a wall and once, most appropriately, the top of the Eiffel Tower, before snapping wide awake. Eventually, I slipped out from under the covers without waking Alex and showered quickly. It was only seven, I wasn’t meeting Louisa until twelve-thirty, but I just wanted to get out and clear my head. Literally and figuratively since I must have drunk more than I’d realized at dinner, my brain was fuzzy and my head was sore. The morning-after mirror was rarely my friend, and today was not an exception. My busted cheek wasn’t purple any more, but it had taken on an attractive yellow tone. The eye pretty much still looked like I’d gone ten rounds with, well, I didn’t know any boxers, but that was the general look. Not sleeping hadn’t exactly helped, my nose was red and my eyes all narrow and piggy-looking. Sexy.