‘Yeah, often,’ I say before leaning over and kissing her forehead, ‘I’m going to go take a shower.’
When I come out she’s sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed and ready to leave and I’m surprised.
‘I took that as my cue to get moving,’ she says, flashing a wholly unconvincing smile. ‘I think I’ll probably go in a bit. Leave you to it.’
‘I didn’t mean for you to rush off,’ I say. I didn’t. I have a few bits and pieces to get done but I’m not leaving for a little while, and whatever this is, is exactly what I wanted to avoid.
Now she’s telling me she doesn’t want me to be late and that she understands I have somewhere to be and all I can do is nod. She stands up and runs her hands over her thighs, wishes me well for tonight, and turns to leave.
What am I doing? If she walks out of here now I’m scared it might snuff out the spark. What if I let her go and she thinks I didn’t do anything to try and stop her? What if she leaves this hotel room now and I never see her again?
‘Can I call you later?’ I say. ‘Probably not today, but tomorrow, before I go.’ The words are out before I even knew I was going to say them.
She looks surprised for a second, and then composes herself.
‘Err, yes, if you like.’ She writes a number on a pad of note paper, leaves it on the nightstand, and turns to go. ‘So… bye,’ she says, and she’s got her hand on the door handle. This is beyond awkward.
‘Look, Cassie, wait. Are you sure everything’s okay? I feel like maybe it’s not. I don’t know?’ And the last of her resilience crumbles. It’s the first time she’s shown any vulnerability at all. She’s definitely more fragile than she makes out. She lets go of the door and shoves her hands into the pockets of her jeans, takes a breath, blinks really slowly and chews her bottom lip.
‘Look, I get it if this was just a one night thing, and I know how crazy this is with the distance and how different our lives are. But if you’re not going to call me, don’t tell me that you will. Just… please don’t mess me around, yeah?’
‘I wasn’t going to,’ I say. ‘I don’t know how any of this is going to play out, but if there wasn’t something there, then none of last night would have happened.’
I mean it, as well. I don’t need to travel halfway around the world to get laid. If there hadn’t been any chemistry, we’d have had that drink and maybe gone to dinner and that would have been that.
She smiles at me. It looks genuine, but I can’t be completely sure. ‘Okay.’
‘So, I’ll call you. I promise. I like you. This has just thrown me for a loop, and I didn’t come here expecting that. Keep your phone with you tomorrow, and Cassie,’ she looks up from the floor and into my eyes for the first time since we were having sex just half an hour earlier. Hers are gray-blue. Wide. Beautiful. I want to look into them every day. ‘I’m sorry I can’t spend more time with you now. Would that I could, but this is my job, and the biggest part of my life, you know?’
‘I know that,’ she says, nodding her head. ‘I get it.’
I wrap my arms around her and we kiss one last time. A typical goodbye kiss. She presses her nose into my t-shirt and breathes deeply, and then she pulls away and starts along the corridor. She doesn’t look back.
After she’s gone, the room feels different somehow. Dimmer. Cooler. Duller. I might just get something to eat and then head to Hammersmith early because I’m not sure I really want to be in here.
Outside, Cassie crosses the street and stops. She fishes around in her purse for something – headphones – puts them in her ears and carries on walking. She doesn’t look up. She’s gone back to her real life, and when I turn away from the window I’ve gone back to mine. The bubble has popped.
Chapter Fifteen
Cassie
Instead of making a right out of the hotel and heading straight back down into the tube station, I turn back towards the river, cross the road and duck down the steps on the bridge to the South Bank. I walk past the Tate Modern and Shakespeare’s Globe and the Golden Hinde replica, taking in lungfuls of fresh air, and cutting down a side street to get to Borough Market, where I weave through the crowds to find a cup of coffee. Drink in hand, I amble over the bridge and into the tube station at Bank.
And all the way home I replay the last fourteen or so hours over and over in my head, leaning against the glass partition by the train doors and analysing everything that happened in minute detail as the train rumbles west. Not just the glorious, glorious sex, but the little things as well. All the incidental touches and the way we continued conversations we’d started online. The anecdotes about what it was like being in Franko. How once, early on, Adam had snapped three guitar strings and it threw them all off. How it turned out all the stories were true, and the change was life-altering for a kid born and raised in the Midwest, but now he can’t imagine living anywhere other than the OC. How genuinely interested he was when I told him how desperate I am to peer down into the Grand Canyon, and feel spray from Niagara Falls on my face, and visit Machu Picchu, and the pyramids at Giza, and see the carnival in Rio, and watch the northern lights dance across the sky. How, most weekends, I like to take myself off, pick somewhere on the tube map, and have a mooch around a part of London I haven’t been to, or would otherwise have no reason to visit.
And I remember how I felt just before he kissed me and I was just waiting for it to happen, and knowing that it would, with my head tilted back and my eyes closed and my fingers grabbing on to the embankment wall like I might collapse and fall if I let go of it.
Only an hour earlier he’d said that he liked me, and that he’d felt it, too. Those wild sparks and that palpable, reactive chemistry between us, obvious from the very beginning. Popping and igniting over and over, like a lit splint in a test tube of hydrogen.
So why am I not reassured by all that? There’s something holding me back and I know what it is, too; leaving that hotel room. There was no easing back in slowly. I went from being with him, where everything was lovely and I had exactly what I wanted, to a mucky train heading back to Shepherd’s Bush, and that’s one hell of a comedown.
And there’s a cynical part of me that doesn’t know if I really believe he’ll call. Perhaps now we are apart the reality of it all seems slightly less vibrant and magical than it did whilst we were snogging under the lights of the Oxo Tower. How easy would the trade-off be between saying what I wanted to hear and getting what he wanted? How simple to fly away and delete me from his life altogether. And if he does, there won’t be anything I can do about it. I don’t like the heavy feeling in my chest. I want to remember him telling me I’m beautiful, snuggled up and sleepy. You’re beautiful, Cassie, do you know that? I want you, Cassie. I like you, Cassie, and it’s thrown me.
By the time I get home, all my adrenaline has ebbed, and a hangover has set in. I grab a packet of crisps on my way upstairs, flop on my bed and make lists in my head of all the possible ways this can go whilst I eat. Just like I had yesterday at work, before we’d met. Before all this. I only manage half the crisps. Prawn cocktail was not a good choice. I feel a bit sick. At some point in the afternoon, I fall asleep.
* * *
My phone’s vibrating in my handbag and it startles me awake. I have no idea what time it is, but it’s light outside and I’m disoriented. I don’t think it’s Sunday, but I can’t be sure. Suddenly I am wide awake, I tear my bag open and grab for the phone before it stops ringing. It’s Rachel. My heart sinks.
‘Where have you been?’ she shrieks down the phone as I answer it. ‘I was beginning to wonder if you’d be found washed up at the side of the Thames somewhere. Why didn’t you text me? I’ve been pacing.’
‘Well, you can stop pacing. I’ve been napping,’ I tell her, pinching the bridge of my nose and glancing over at the clock on my radio. Four thirty-three. Wow, I’ve been asleep for hours. ‘I’m fine. One hundred percent not drowned in the river. It’s all good.’
There’s a silen
ce on the other end of the line.
‘Well?’ she says eventually, and, I think, somewhat tentatively. ‘How was it? What’s he like?’
I scoot back on my bed, leaning against the wall.
‘Do you mean in general? Or just what he’s like in bed?’
‘Fuck! Called it! Tell me everything. No, wait, the shagging. Argh, no, I need it in chronological order. But get to the good bits fast.’
So I start at the beginning, but she doesn’t care about what we talked about at the bar, or what we ate for dinner, or that two slushy margaritas is almost certainly one too many after two large glasses of wine and I’m sort of hanging today. She definitely wants to hear about when things got saucy and she hurries me along. We go over and over giant sections of my night, combing through details, like watching a favourite part of a movie on VCR, or listening to a cassette on repeat. Rewinding and analysing again and again, like we used to do with their songs. Pulling apart the riverside kiss and exactly why he had a jumbo pack of condoms in his bag, as if people just carry that many around with them on the regular, and how everything that happened inside that hotel room was Very Much a Good Thing.
And then we get to this morning, and I begin to feel like I’d been a little petulant. Like I’d been a bit of a baby about the whole thing. It’s not like I didn’t know he had a gig today. He’d always been upfront about it.
‘Well. Isn’t all that exactly what you wanted?’ she asks. ‘Didn’t I tell you that would happen? I don’t know what the problem is.’
‘The problem is, I just can’t see how this can end well for me, realistically.’
‘Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t. For now, though, I think you should just go with it.’
‘What if he doesn’t call me though?’
‘Pessimist. Stop it. I didn’t get the impression you got an arsehole vibe from him,’ she says. ‘But if he doesn’t, you’ll always have the memory of his face between your thighs.’
My pulse races again and I let out an involuntary squeak.
‘Sooo, are we still on for tomorrow?’ she asks, slowly, in case I’ve forgotten, ‘Covent Garden. Brunch. Wedding shoe shopping.’
‘Of course.’
‘Mimosas?’
‘I might just stick to coffee. Not sure I want a drink again any time soon.’
‘Have a can of Coke. Put some vodka in it, that’ll see you right.’
‘God. No. Hideous,’ I groan.
‘Get Jon to make you a cheese toastie.’
I contemplate this. Carbs and fat and salt sound brilliant. ‘Not a terrible idea.’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
She hangs up and I rub my eyes and search my nightstand for paracetamol.
‘Jon,’ I yell from my bedroom door. There’s a vice inside my head and it’s squeezing my brain. I wince. ‘Are you in?’
* * *
Sunday morning is dull, the bright blue skies of the previous week are shrouded in a blanket of white cloud. Friday night feels further away now, and the things that happened unreachable and almost dreamlike. There are no notifications on my phone but I turn up the volume anyway, and check that the vibrate function is still working. It’s not leaving my side today, and it comes into the bathroom with me as I shower, and downstairs whilst I make coffee. I keep pressing the home button as I’m getting ready, worried that my hair dryer might drown out the ringtone. I hold it in my hand all the way to the station, but it stays silent.
I think, deep inside, I knew I’d miss the call. How else could it have gone? I step out of the busy tube station at Holborn, and reach in my bag for my phone. I wave it around in the air and curse at it as it takes ages to pick up any signal. I am just about to give up and toss it back in my bag when the jolty vibration of a notification makes the phone buzz. One new voice message. Nooo! As I shakily dial into my voicemail I hope against hope it was Rachel, but Rachel would have sent a text.
‘You have one new message,’ the posh, robotic voicemail lady says, and then he’s talking. It’s disjointed and he sounds a bit nervous, like it’s thrown him that I haven’t answered the phone.
‘Hey Cassie, this is Jesse. Calling you like I promised. I’m at the airport, and…’ there’s a pause. ‘Wow, really thought this would be easier… So, Friday was nice, huh? Didn’t really feel like a one night thing. And I don’t want it to be. I meant what I said about liking you, and I’ve been thinking a lot about that.’ Another pause. ‘Sooo… oh man, I so wish you’d answered your phone. I hope that you really were okay when you left. I just kind of bummed around for a bit and wished that we could have hung out for longer. It felt kind of weird in there after you’d gone.’ He sighs down the phone. ‘Anyway. I hope you’re having a nice day, whatever it is you’re doing. Tell me about it later, okay? Oh! They’re calling my flight. I’m gonna have to wrap this up now. I’ll talk to you when I get home. ’Kay. Bye.’
The message ends with voicemail lady advising me to listen again (press one) save the message (press two) or delete the message (press three) and I realise I am standing in the middle of the street in Holborn, with my phone pressed to my ear, and not giving a single fuck that I am getting jostled and bumped and tutted at by people. Right at this second I don’t care about anything. I replay the message again as I cross the road, and again as I walk down towards the coffee shop where Rachel and I are meeting. Inside, I sit down and order – one latte with an extra shot, one cappuccino – and I listen to it some more whilst I wait, only stopping when the drinks arrive.
‘So, I take it that was lover boy on the phone,’ Rachel announces. She sits down opposite me and makes me jump. ‘I was watching you for a moment from outside. Didn’t want to interrupt,’ she explains, pointing towards the window. ‘You looked flirty, what with your hair-scrunching and the way you were leaning on your hand. How is he? Alright?’
‘I wasn’t on the phone,’ I say. ‘In fact, I missed the call. He called whilst I was on the tube, didn’t he? But listen to this.’ I pass her the phone and study her face as she plays my voicemail. She makes tiny movements with her eyebrows and her lips, and when it’s finished, she slides the phone back across the table towards me.
‘Bloody hell.’
‘I know!’ I breathe.
‘He’s… well, he seems quite taken with you, doesn’t he?’
I nod and take a sip of my coffee.
‘You must be a dynamo in the sack. What are you going to do now you have all this unfinished business?’
I shrug, ‘I’ll send him a message when I get home.’
‘Is that it?’
‘What else can I do? It’s not as if he lives down the road, or even in the same country. He’s flying back to California right this second. That’s over five thousand miles away.’
‘Meh, you should have gone to Heathrow.’ She spoons the froth from her cappuccino into her mouth, and I think, rats! I should have gone to Heathrow. ‘Anyway, I’m going to go right ahead and assume you’re pretty keen on him too?’
I sigh, and lay my head down on my arm. ‘Like you wouldn’t believe.’
‘Oh God,’ she says. ‘I would believe it. It’s like ninety-eight all over again.’
‘I couldn’t stop staring. Actually, full on staring. I had to keep making myself stop because I think he noticed. And I felt so odd, but in a good way. Nervous but also really calm. Like it was…’ I stop talking. I don’t want to say it because it sounds a bit pathetic.
‘Like it was…?’ Rachel prompts.
‘Like it was mapped out. Meant to be. Whatever,’ I say, studying the grain of the wood on the tabletop. My eyes flick up to hers for her reaction, and to her credit, she doesn’t laugh, or react negatively at all. She just looks back at me and chews her lip, and I feel compelled to carry on. ‘But the whole way there I didn’t really let myself think it might be reciprocated, in case it wasn’t. I kept telling myself it would be a drink and maybe some dinner and that would be that, just in case that’s all it was for
him.’
‘Cassie!’ Rachel laughs, but there’s a lick of exasperation there. ‘None of what either of you did was subtle.’
I shift in my seat and play with the plastic wrapper from the biscuit that came with my drink. ‘I meant the bit after the evening. What he said when I was leaving, and especially that message. I wasn’t expecting that.’
‘And yet, there it is. Look, he just likes you. It’s both as simple and as complex as that. And can you stop putting him on some pedestal he doesn’t even want to be on, please? You’re overthinking this because he was a minor celebrity once upon a time and it sounds like he would absolutely hate that.’
‘Okay, okay,’ I say.
‘Anyway, he said he was going to call you, so why wouldn’t he? If he was just up for a one night stand with some bird off the internet there would have been no reason at all to ask for your number.’ She slurps her coffee. ‘It’s not like you could easily have gone after him. Do you even know where he lives?’
‘Somewhere near Los Angeles,’ I say. ‘Orange County.’ I look at her and even though she’s reassuring me, I feel a bit like I’m being told off. She puts her hand over mine and her engagement ring catches the light and reflections from the diamond dance across the table.
‘If it’s meant to happen, it will,’ she says. ‘So let it. You might want to downplay the Franko thing a little though. Obsessed fan doesn’t exactly scream sexy.’
I look at her over the milky dregs of my coffee. ‘And therein lies the reason I’m finding it hard to keep him off that pedestal. Because I know that if he wasn’t Jesse from Franko, we’d never have even met. If he hadn’t been in our favourite band, there is no way our paths would ever have crossed. Not when we were teenagers and certainly not now. And it’s difficult to separate that and how it all just hit me when he walked into that bar…’
I stop talking. My head is muddled. Rachel can tell.
Call Me, Maybe Page 10