I Heart Christmas (23 page)

‘Hey.’

I never would learn my lesson about knocking on individual toilet cubicles.

Thankfully, on this occasion, I had not walked in on a secret gay tryst, just my managing editor washing his hands. I silently thanked sweet baby Jesus in the manger that I hadn’t been two minutes earlier. It was one thing to accidentally kiss him mid-hug, it was another to accidentally wander in while he was having a slash.

‘Is this my secret Santa?’ Jesse asked, half laughing and half trying to get out of the toilet. Since I was all desperate to pee, I backed up against the wall and let him past. ‘Because you set a ten-dollar limit on gifts and I gotta tell you, you’re selling yourself short.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I replied, trying very hard not to wee on my shoes. My bladder had seen the toilet. My bladder was not going to wait much longer. ‘Ten dollars gets you a slap on the arse and if you’re not out of here very quickly, quite the show.’

‘I might be into the ass thing but I figure you can keep the show.’ He closed the door as he left, leaving me just enough time to bolt it shut. Seriously, what was wrong with American men? Why couldn’t they lock a toilet door behind them?

Unless he was waiting for someone. Unless Jesse had a secret party hook-up arranged that I had just completely ruined. Which I would feel bad about just as soon as I’d had the world’s longest wee.

‘Killer party, huh?’

Jesse was stood outside the loo, ducked underneath the metal staircase, when I eventually emerged in considerably less pain and miserable in the knowledge that now the seal had been broken, I would have to go again at least twice in the next hour. Stupid girl parts.

‘You are taking the piss, aren’t you?’ I asked, accepting one of the two drinks he held out. Aha! Two drinks! So he was waiting for someone … I glanced around, looking for a likely suspect. I hoped to God it wasn’t Cici because I couldn’t accurately report that level of potential crash and burn to Megan in the office without having some sort of aneurysm. ‘This is a disaster.’

‘I know, right?’ he agreed, resplendent in a dark green shirt and black jumper that looked very soft. His hair was halfway between its messy Brooklyn best and the tidy sweep he kept up for work. ‘Just such a bunch of phoneys. I know they all work in our building but altogether? Just the amount of cologne in the air is affecting my allergies.’

‘Oh yeah,’ I hastily agreed when, really, I didn’t give a toss about the ‘phoneys’. If they were dancing round with their ties around their foreheads, singing along to ‘All I Want for Christmas’, I would have forgiven them anything. He was right, though, someone had gone a bit heavy on the old Lynx. It made me nostalgic for Year Ten. ‘Yeah, loads of phoneys.’

‘I bet they flipped their shit when you came in wearing that.’ He pointed towards my sweater, sitting back on the radiator. ‘No one here has a sense of humour.’

I knew he didn’t mean to be offensive and I couldn’t work out the best way to explain that there wasn’t anything even slightly ironic about my outfit. What was more Christmassy than red sequins and a sweatshirt covered in ice skating penguins? But I didn’t see a lot of point in alienating one of the two allies I had in the entire room so I just nodded, sat down next to him, drank my drink and waited for a better song.

‘You know what?’ Jesse, it seemed, was not prepared to wait for a good tune. I had a feeling our DJ didn’t have anything with him that Jesse would consider a good tune. ‘There’s only one way to get through a party like this?’

‘We leave?’ I asked.

‘No.’ He took my glass from me and placed it on the floor beside his own before holding out his hand. ‘We dance.’

‘Do we have to?’ It was fair to say I was a little bit hesitant. ‘Because I did some dancing the other night and it did not end well for me.’

With a sigh and a shake of the head, Jesse bent down to pick up our glasses and waited for me to chug my cocktail before repeating his less-dramatic-the-second-time-around gesture.

‘No one else is dancing,’ I said under my breath as he led me right into the middle of the bar and in front of the DJ booth. ‘You do know that?’

‘No one else is going home to Brooklyn either,’ he said. ‘No one else came on the subway, no one else is gonna get dropped off at the twenty-four-hour bagel place on Bedford. These are not our people, Angela, this is not our party. All we can do is claim a small piece of it. Dance with me.’

It was a bold and pretty accurate declaration and there and then, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, what else was a girl supposed to do? And he was right – I was absolutely going to Bagelsmith on the way home, even if I’d actually taken a taxi to the party, but there was no need for him to know that.

Whether it was happy coincidence or the DJ felt our commitment to making this party happen, but the music shifted from unfamiliar chart ‘hits’ that I barely recognised to classic eighties goodness. Nothing you’d want to listen to walking down the street but a catalogue of office party classics, and when someone was playing ‘Billie Jean’, it didn’t matter whether you were in a super-fancy Meatpacking District holiday party or at your cousin Sharon’s wedding reception, you just danced. The weak, brightly coloured cocktails might have gone straight through me but they’d had the decency to leave a bit of a buzz on their way out. As soon as I started moving my feet, I felt that wonderful sense of coordination that only comes with one too many beverages. Jesse was a genuinely good dancer, I was not, but I didn’t care anymore. Everyone already had me pegged as a twat so I figured I might as well enjoy myself. After five minutes on the floor, I was convinced I could have won
Strictly
. Jesse spun and dipped me, completely ignoring whatever was playing as well as every other single person at the party and, for the first time since I’d walked through the door, I was happy. I was having fun. And it felt like Christmas.

Rick Astley was halfway through promising he was never going to let me down, run around or desert me when Jesse grabbed both of my hands and dragged me off the dance floor. Something magical had happened while I’d been concentrating on my moves and the entire bar had started dancing. The miserable girls were smiling, the short men were waving fists in the air and barely a single tie remained knotted. Jesse put his arm around my shoulders and nodded silently, smiling at the crowd.

‘Our work here is done,’ he said, waving his hand at the mass of uncoordinated bodies jumping up and down to Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s finest. ‘Man, I’m so proud.’

‘As you should be,’ I said, patting his back. ‘This is going in your appraisal.’

‘It’s going on my résumé,’ he replied before looking at his watch. ‘You’re taking the L too, right? Wanna jet?’

‘These shoes are killing me.’ Hardly a new sensation. ‘Do you want to split a cab? I mean, it is Christmas.’

‘I guess.’ He gave me the same disappointed look Alex always wore whenever I demanded a taxi instead of the train and I made a mental note to pitch a feature based on men having to wear heels for a week and then seeing how many blocks they fancied walking to get on a bloody subway at one in the morning in December.

The night was freezing, but after our sweaty dancefest it felt refreshing. I hugged my arms tightly around myself, wishing I hadn’t been such a stubborn Brit and had brought a coat with me, even if it meant standing in a queue at the coat check, while Jesse ran out into the middle of the road to flag down a taxi. Why had everyone decided the neighbourhoods with the worst paving would have the coolest bars? I considered it one of New York’s great mysteries. The Meatpacking District was all cobblestones aka stiletto kryptonite and Soho and Tribeca were just as bad. How did Beyoncé manage? I could only assume Jay-Z picked her up and carried her to their car, as opposed to standing holding the door open, rolling his eyes as she picked her way carefully across the street, one stone at a time.

‘It’s not my fault, it’s the street,’ I said, crawling across the back seat and immediately turning off the in-taxi television.

‘Nothing to do with your choice of shoes at all?’ Jesse asked, slamming the door behind himself and giving the driver his directions. ‘Dude.’

‘I will not be told what shoes I can and cannot wear just because New York can’t be bothered to pave its streets safely,’ I maintained, immediately kicking the instruments of tootsie torture off my feet. Really, though, they were so pretty. ‘I should sue. Someone’s going to break their neck.’

‘I hope it’s someone from that party,’ he replied without hesitating.

‘Oh, ouch,’ I laughed, pretending to be scandalised when I was actually delighted. I had not spent an evening in a room full of my favourite people by any stretch of the imagination. ‘You’re not a massive fan of the Spencer Media crowd, then?’

‘It’s not that I don’t love my job, I do,’ said the man who was insulting his company to his sort of boss in the back of a taxi on the way home from a corporately funded free bar. ‘I’ve always been a word nerd. Once an English major, always an English major. But I just can’t stand those kinds of people.’

Closing my eyes and cuddling up into the corner of the cab, I slipped my hands up inside my sweatshirt sleeves. ‘And what kind of people are those?’

‘Eh, I’m allergic to Manhattan, is all,’ he yawned. ‘I don’t meet my people there very often.’

The lights of the city rushed past, dark then bright, dark then bright. Even half asleep, without looking I knew we were cutting through Soho, headed for the Williamsburg Bridge. New York got under your skin, the sounds and the stoplights acting as an internal GPS.

‘Your people?’

‘People with a sense of humour.’ Jesse’s voice seemed so far away. I was so tired. ‘People with passion. Creativity. Honesty. A genuine drive to do something good that they enjoy and not just something cool.’

I had to laugh.

‘Yeah, you do know you live in Williamsburg and play bass in a band, don’t you?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ He seemed genuinely confused.

‘You’re a total hipster. Seriously, you’re like the king of them. Do you actually need those glasses at all or did you just buy them from Urban Outfitters like everyone else?’ I opened one eye and nicked his specs, pushing them up my nose, just like Mary. He was clearly as blind as a bat. ‘Oh. OK, fair enough.’

‘I’m not a hipster,’ he replied, from somewhere in the taxi, I assumed. I really couldn’t see anything. ‘I’m an artist.’

‘Spoken like a true hipster.’

No reply. Typical bloke – he could dish it out but he couldn’t take it.

I rolled my head against the sticky black leather seats and squinted at him through the very strong prescription lenses. ‘You still there? I can’t see a bloody thing.’

‘I’m still here,’ he replied, removing his glasses carefully, his face awfully close to mine. ‘I’m always here.’

‘In the cab?’

Jesse didn’t make any attempt to back up and all of a sudden I did not feel brilliant about being in the back of a taxi with my friend.

‘Hey, look,’ he said, pulling a bit of wiry-looking twig out of his pocket and holding it up. ‘Mistletoe.’

There wasn’t time for a snarky comment, vocal protestation or even a timely slap. Before I could react in any way, shape or form, Jesse’s lips were on mine, the mistletoe still in his lap. My first thought was to get his face off my face. My second that he wasn’t even doing this right. Amateur.

‘Jesse.’ I regained control of my faculties and gave him a good old-fashioned shove as we turned onto Delancey and caught sight of the Williamsburg Bridge ahead, lit up like a string of fairy lights stretched over the river. A beautiful backdrop for some unexpected sexual harassment and impending violence. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

‘I’ve got mistletoe?’ He held up the offending bit of weed and wore the face of a saint. ‘It’s Christmas.’

I snatched the mistletoe out of his hand and lobbed it out of the cab window, the taxi whizzing away as it spiralled into the river. It wasn’t even really mistletoe, it was just a bit of branch with a white flower on it. I was appalled. At the act and the fraud. How dare he take Christmas’s name in vain?

‘It’s never OK to kiss your married friend on the lips, mistletoe or otherwise.’ I was well aware I was raising my voice but this was surely a lesson that would benefit everyone, including the cab driver. ‘You know I’m married. You can’t possibly be that drunk?’

‘But we hang out all the time,’ he spluttered. ‘And you always reply to my texts and you laugh at my jokes in meetings and we like the same stuff and you get me. No one else gets me.’

‘I’m not getting you right now.’ I slapped his approaching hand right back to the other side of the taxi. ‘And I reply to your texts and I laugh at your jokes because you’re funny and I’m polite and … Jesus Christ, is that really all it takes?’

‘You get me,’ he said again. ‘I think it’s because you’re British. I’ve always felt really connected to British people.’

‘Oh my God,’ I groaned, palm to face. ‘You did not just say that.’

‘And your husband didn’t come to the show and you kissed me at the bar, remember?’ He wasn’t going to give up, even though the cabbie had already turned the radio up to full blast. Even he wasn’t interested anymore. ‘You kissed me first.’

‘I did not kiss you at the bar,’ I shouted. There was a worry some people in New Jersey hadn’t heard my indignation. ‘I turned and you turned and … oh God, don’t be stupid. Of course I didn’t kiss you at the bar. I cannot believe you just did that.’

I shook my head at the insanity and held my hands out in front of me to ward off any further madness. For five more minutes, we drove on without saying anything, turning onto Bedford Avenue, our silence soundtracked by an ironic cover version of ‘Away in a Manger’. Oh brilliant, the universe wanted to play me Christmas songs altogether too late to save the evening. Eventually we pulled up at the corner of Bedford and N7th and even though it was past one and tiny snowflakes were starting to fall from the thick purple sky, the streets were littered with those too cool to care about the temperature. I’d seen heavier coats on girls out in Newcastle. Jesse coughed a small, embarrassing cough when the taxi driver turned to see what was going on. The bagel shop was right outside but I wasn’t in the mood anymore. I was so angry, I wasn’t hungry. Shit had got real.