A is for Apple

by Kate Johnson

  “How old is he?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Right.” The most unreasonable age there is. “Send me the pic and I’ll keep an eye out.”

  “Okay. Let me know how tonight goes.”

  “Bye.”

  I switched off and checked to see if anyone else had left a message. They hadn’t. I rolled over and looked at Xander, who appeared to have gone back to sleep.

  “It’s a good job he doesn’t have a video phone,” I said, and he opened one eye.

  “That was your boyfriend?”

  I nodded.

  “Could he tell I was here?”

  “Don’t think so. He didn’t yell or anything.”

  “He’s a jealous type?”

  “Yep.”

  “Oh well. You’re safe with me.”

  “I guessed that.”

  He got up and wandered into the bathroom, looking unshaven but not too bad. I knew I’d look awful—hangovers made me pasty and puffy. My head felt heavy and swollen, my stomach squished uneasily and my feet were still killing me. I looked at my careful plasters. Half of them had come off.

  I heard water drumming in the bathroom and deduced, super sleuth that I am, that Xander was in the shower. Great. I wasn’t sure if I could face all that water without accidentally drowning, so I hung up the beautiful, but somewhat wrecked dress that I’d thrown on the floor last night and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt proclaiming that men made great pets. I guzzled all the water that was left, along with some ibuprofen and Resolve left over from Fuerteventura—was that only two days ago?—and flopped back on the bed, waiting for Xander to come out.

  We’d sat up drinking and trying to get answers out of each other until about three in the morning, when the vodka had run out and we were both too drunk to get any more. Xander had asked me all about Luke, and I’d got drunkenly tearful about missing him and sobbed in Xander’s arms and I must have eventually fallen asleep, because the next thing I remember is the phone ringing.

  Xander wandered out, wearing only a rather small towel, and I felt my mouth go dry. I really need to get close to Luke, and soon.

  “Does this place have a laundry?”

  I shook my head, trying to find my voice. It couldn’t have gone far. “I don’t think so,” I croaked.

  “Damn. Okay. Want to go shopping?”

  I stared.

  “You seemed to find the Y.E.S floor in Bloomies all by yourself,” Xander went on, scratching the back of his neck, “but did you find Saks?”

  I shook my head.

  “Or Barney’s?”

  “No.”

  “Boy, we have some educating to do.”

  He bullied me into taking a shower, telling me Saks would chuck me out if I was too scruffy, and when I emerged, feeling slightly more human, he threw some prettier clothes at me.

  “Get dressed and put on your makeup. And do something about your nails.”

  Bloody cheeky. I spent hours clipping and shaping and buffing each talon to perfection, messing about with my cuticles, painting them in a pretty shade of pink, then daubing on makeup very carefully. I hung the dress in the bathroom with me to steam out the wrinkles, spritzed it with perfume, and it looked respectable enough to wear again.

  When I emerged, I looked a hell of a lot better. Xander looked me over and shrugged. “You’ll do,” he said.

  “You’re still a mess.”

  “Honey, I’m with you. No one will care.”

  Was that a compliment, or not?

  I repackaged my feet and gingerly put on a pair of soft mules. I took a few cautious steps. Yeah. Didn’t seem like my feet were going to fall off.

  Of course, this lasted until we got outside and it was still raining. Xander sprinted for the subway, while I fumbled with my umbrella and all my careful plasters peeled away. Damn.

  On the train, while Xander laughed at me, I sat and showed the world my knickers as I tried to wrap some more tape about my poor raw feet. By the time I was done there was hardly a toe unwrapped, my feet were bound like a little geisha’s, but I felt a bit better, so long as I didn’t flex my foot too much and break the bindings.

  “That’s gonna be great for trying on shoes,” Xander said, and I scowled at him.

  “Don’t you have a home to go to?”

  He shrugged, his eyes on a subway poem. “Nothing to do there until I get my money.”

  Anyone else think he’s lying?

  We wandered up to Bloomingdales and went around picking out clothes for each other. Then shoes—on a mission to find the silliest pair we could. The mens’ shoes were boring—how do they cope?—but there were lots of silly things in the women’s department. Pink and yellow slippers, polka-dotted wedges, fat Spice Girl trainers with neon laces, heeled hiking boots. Xander tried to persuade me to get the Spice Girl trainers, but I wasn’t biting. What was this, 1996?

  At Sephora we had a lipstick fight. He sprayed me with CK1, which I hate, so I grabbed his hand and painted three of his nails pink.

  “Not my colour,” he said, eyeing them critically.

  I painted the other two blue.

  “Now you’re just taking the piss.”

  I grinned. He might be hiding a lot from me, but he was still a large amount of fun.

  It had stopped raining, so we went up to Planet Hollywood for lunch and sat looking out at Times Square. “This is so kitsch,” Xander said. “Want a strawberry margarita?”

  “Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?”

  So it was that we were both slightly pissed—well, pissed enough to think that my confusion over getting the “check” vs. getting the “bill” was hilarious—when we wandered out to look up at the MTV studios and my phone rang. It was Macbeth, and I may have greeted him a little merrily, because he asked in a pained voice, “Sophie, have you been drinking?”

  “No! Well,” I giggled, “let me clarify that. Yes.”

  “It’s six in the afternoon.”

  “Well, that’s eleven p.m. in England.” Right? Or was I too pissed to work out the time difference properly?

  “You have work to do.”

  “Such as? You never called me last night.”

  “Figured there was nothing for you to do. Listen—I’ve had stuff monitoring Shapiro’s suite all night and all today. There’s been no sign of him. He went out yesterday aftern…n…hasn’t b…seen…” The line crackled, and I missed part of what he said.

  “What?”

  “He’s vanished.”

  Uh-oh. “Does he have a laptop or anything you can hack into?”

  “No. There’s nothing here. Listen, that guy you were with yest…day—Harvey Number Two—he was after Shap…too?”

  I glanced at Xander, who was watching a troupe of orange-clad dancers wriggling about up in the MTV studio. “Yes,” I dropped my voice, “but he won’t tell me why. Not the real reason.”

  “You think…s lying?”

  “Omitting things.”

  “Try and get…of him.”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing?”

  I could hear him laughing. “Is this anything Luke c…hear about?”

  I deliberated. Technically, yes, but in the real world… “Tell him and I’ll—I’ll paint your nails pink.”

  Obviously this was a dire enough threat for him. “My lips are sea…ry an…et it out…him. Oh, an…ophie?”

  “Yes?”

  “I…go…wants…ria…p you…”

  “What? You’re breaking up. Macbeth?”

  “…”

  “Are you there? Can you hear me?”

  “…”

  Great.

  I ended the call and looked up at Xander.

  “Xander,” I said, and he turned his head to me fractionally. “Are we far from Central Park?”

  “Seventeen blocks.”

  “Can we go there? I’ve always wanted to go there.”

  He tore himself away from MTV and we started up Broadway. On the way he pointed ou
t the Hershey’s store, where I went and bought lots of junk for Luke. Hell, if he didn’t like it I could give it a good home.

  Central Park amazed me. I knew it was big, but Xander said it was eight hundred and forty acres and a hundred and fifty years old. There were massive bits of rock sticking up out of the grass and, after walking a few blocks in we were suddenly miles away from the city. Buying a couple of ice-cold bottles of water, we sat down on one of the rocky outcrops and I fussed over my feet again. I’d bought some baby wipes from a chemist—sorry, drugstore—and cleaned off the dust and sweat and carefully repackaged my tootsies with tape and plasters. Xander watched me for a while, then he asked, “So why are you really here?”

  “Well, my feet hurt, and I wanted somewhere to sit down—”

  “I mean in New York.”

  “Oh. I told you, business.”

  “Business that lets you sleep in until eleven and go out shopping all day?”

  “Yes,” I said stubbornly, snipping off a bit of waterproof tape.

  “Wow. Great job.”

  “Right back at you. Don’t you have work to do?”

  He shrugged. “Until I get my money I can’t afford any materials.”

  “What kind of work do you do? Do you paint?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Helpful. “Or is it more like 3D art? Sculpture, collage, performance art?”

  “What do you know about art?”

  “I have an A level in it.” Only just.

  “What’s that?”

  I looked at him. He didn’t really seem to know. “Like a degree.”

  “Oh. Well, in that case, I make life montages.”

  I blinked. “What’s a life montage?”

  “I take bits from a person’s life and use them to make a montage of that life. In Shapiro’s case I was making it a portrait as well.”

  “What did you use?” I asked, fascinated.

  “Bits of fabric from old suits, T-shirts from when he was a teenager, copies of baby photos, spaghetti, ‘cos that’s his favourite meal, clippings of hair from his barber, lines of poetry he liked…stuff like that.”

  This could be very useful. “What kind of poetry?”

  Xander took a gulp of water. “Shakespeare’s sonnets, W.H. Auden, John Betjeman… Some others I can’t really remember. Boring stuff.”

  GCSE stuff. Not very revealing. Probably the only poems he’d ever read.

  “I had a couple of pictures of his kid in there too,” Xander volunteered.

  “Marc-Paul?”

  Xander looked at me sharply. “You know him?”

  “I know of him,” I said vaguely.

  “I saw him two days ago. He was staying with his pa.”

  Not any more, I thought. Where were they?

  I got out my phone and sent a text to Macbeth. What about Shapiro’s son? He’s supposed to be staying in the suite. Have you seen him? Have they checked out?

  “Watcha doin’?” Xander asked, peering over my shoulder. I hastily sent and deleted the message.

  “Texting my boyfriend.”

  “You miss him?”

  I shrugged. “Kinda.” Kind of a lot. I didn’t think I would, but I did.

  “What’s his name again?”

  “Luke.”

  “As in Skywalker. Right.”

  “He is nothing like Luke Skywalker.”

  “What, you mean he’s actually straight?”

  I grinned, and Xander smiled too. He really was just like Harvey—same breathtaking smile. Very cute indeed.

  “So do you do a lot of portraits—I mean, life montages?”

  “Are you taking the piss?”

  “No, would I?”

  He narrowed his eyes, but said, “I do a few. Sometimes I sculpt. This is just my new thing. I’m trying to get enough together for a show—I know someone with a gallery in the meatpacking district, reckons if I get enough together by the end of the month I can exhibit there…”

  “That’s great,” I said, meaning it. My brother was a musician and what he did was great, but I knew how hard it was for his band to get any recognition. I had a feeling the art world was just as bad.

  “Will you come?” Xander asked suddenly.

  “What?”

  “To my exhibition. If I get one.”

  “You will,” I said firmly, on the basis of a day’s acquaintance.

  “So you’ll come?”

  He looked so hopeful. And I guess it would be nice…like Charlotte’s gallery exhibitions in Sex And The City. Lots of fit men. Mmm. Oh, and Luke too, of course.

  “Well, I do live five and a half thousand miles away,” I said doubtfully.

  “Won’t your ‘business’ be bringing you back here?”

  Did he have to put those quotation marks in there?

  “I don’t know…”

  “What kind of business is it you do again?” Xander asked me sharply.

  “Why won’t you go home again?” I shot back.

  “Okay, fine. Don’t tell me.” He turned away, looking moody, and I ignored him. Why wasn’t he going home? What was there that he was afraid of?

  Or didn’t he have a home?

  Fear gripped me. What if he was trying to grift off me? What if he was trying to move into my hotel room?

  Well, tough luck. I wouldn’t be here for long.

  Hopefully.

  We got back on the subway and went down to the meatpacking district, which was basically a few blocks in the Village. I liked it. The streets were more higgledy—not like normal streets, but still less blocky than the rest of Manhattan—and the houses had character. Xander showed me his friend’s gallery, which was shut down for the night, and we walked (well, he walked and I limped) to a street lined with trees where he pointed out a house with a tall set of steps outside which he said was filmed as Carrie’s stoop in Sex And The City. I was sceptical. It did look familiar, but then so did a hundred others.

  “So where do you live?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s sort of Tribeca, SoHo, East Village-ish,” he said vaguely.

  “In a Brownstone?”

  “Yeah.”

  Yeah, and I lived in Buck House.

  We got on the subway back to the Philadelphia Hotel and stopped for junk food on the way.

  “I am going to be so fat,” I wailed, looking at the bags of seriously addictive Lay’s potato chips that Xander was piling into the shopping basket. He, of course, was all nicely defined muscle. No fat at all.

  Bastard.

  “Hey, you wanna see fat, you’re in the right place,” Xander said. “You think you’re the only one who eats too many potato chips?”

  He had a point. In the hotel lobby had been a guy oozing over the sides of his wheelchair. I’d never seen a person that fat before in real life. He’d been complaining the doors were too narrow. I’d wondered if he was fat because he couldn’t walk, or if he couldn’t walk because he was so fat.

  Either way, I felt wonderfully skinny.

  We took the bag of junk back into the hotel and made our way over to the lifts. I still wasn’t sure why I was letting him come with me. I guess it was the little lost puppy thing. Xander was cute and helpless, and besides, he knew a lot about junk food.

  Who am I kidding, little and helpless! He was about six inches taller than me, and I’m actually the average height for a bloke.

  Speaking of tall…

  There was usually a security guy at a desk by the bank of lifts, and I was rummaging in my bag for my key card to show him when Xander suddenly grabbed me and said in a low voice, “Okay, don’t panic, but that’s one of Shapiro’s goons over there and he looks pissed.”

  “He’s drunk?”

  “No, pissed off. I think he’s—shit, Sophie, reverse, reverse!”

  He started walking very quickly back towards the entrance, spotted someone else and tugged me back over to the lifts again. The goon—a big guy in a shiny suit, marching towards us and looking mad—was closing in, and the
n suddenly Xander took hold of me, swung me round and kissed me.

  Now, I don’t have a huge frame of reference here. I’ve really only been kissed properly by four guys, and one of them was my cheating college boyfriend Pete the Philanderer. He was a crap kisser, and I used to spend my kissing time with him wondering what the hell all the fuss was about. The second is a shady guy called Docherty who’s worked with SO17 once or twice. He scared the hell out of me. I kissed Harvey once or twice, but they were sort of polite, passionless kisses.

  And then there’s Luke, and when he kisses me the entire world ceases to be.

  Xander’s kiss was definitely in the first category.

  I could figure out why he was doing it, and as a distraction it worked pretty well, because through half-closed eyes, over Xander’s shoulder, I could see the goon looking puzzled, saying something into a mouthpiece and retreating. But it wasn’t a very interesting kiss. I was quite bored until—

  Until, oh shit, oh crap, the lift doors opened, and a familiar blond head turned to face me, a familiar pair of blue eyes looked right at me, and a familiar scowl shot right through me.

  “Oh shit,” I said against Xander’s mouth.

  “What? Did it work?”

  “Yeah, it worked,” I said, heart sinking. “It worked a little too well.”

  “What do you—” Xander began, pulling back and looking around in fear.

  “What the fuck,” came a very familiar voice, “are you doing with my girlfriend?”

  Luke strode across the lobby and grabbed Xander by the shoulder and punched him in the face.

  The security guy rushed over, as did a lot of spectators.

  “What the hell is going on here?” yelled the security guy, suddenly looking very big and threatening, and there was a bulge under his jacket I thought might be a gun. Great, now he turned up.

  Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks.

  Xander and Luke were staring at each other.

  “You?” Luke said in disbelief, glaring hard at Xander.

  “No, Luke, this isn’t—” I began shakily, horrified. “It’s not what it looks like—”

  “So what the hell is it? Does Angel know?”

  I think my eyes nearly fell out of their sockets. “Angel? What—? No.” I began to laugh, and immediately wished I hadn’t. “Luke, this isn’t Harvey, he’s—”

  Then in the corner of my eye I saw Shapiro’s goon coming over to see what the commotion was, and I had a horrible image of him getting out a gun and shooting all three of us.