smiled. ‘Airport?’
‘We’ve actually got a couple of hours,’ he said, rolling out into the street. ‘And I’m not desperate to spend any more time than we have to in LAX.’
‘What do you want to do?’ I asked, suddenly nervous to be alone with him, even though he was smiling.
‘I know this is going sound weird, but I was kind of thinking the beach? Who knows when I’m going to be back in LA, right? I feel like I should at least see the Pacific Ocean.’
‘Alex Reid, beach bum,’ I shrugged off my cardigan, getting my last few rays of LA sunshine. ‘Who would have thought it?’
I paused on the boardwalk to kick off my sandals while Alex strode on across the beach. Seeing him silhouetted against the sky and the ocean was so surreal, I hardly dared to follow, in case he disappeared like a mirage. Except instead of a palm tree and a sparkling spring, there was a pair of black jeans and an un-ironed Kellogg’s Corn Flakes T-shirt hanging from his wide shoulders and slim hips. He turned and smiled, interrupting my shameless ogling.
‘You checking me out?’ he held his hand over his eyes, the Santa Monica sun too much for his Brooklynbred eyesight, even with his Ray-Bans.
‘Maybe?’ I said, stepping into the sand. Good God it was hot. Good God he was hot. So much hotter than James Jacobs. Anyone could spend half their life in the gym and get a two-hundred-dollar haircut. Only Alex could pull off that too-long-on-one-side fringe that hadn’t seen a comb in – well, how long could it be since he’d had it cut? A month? But it was still so soft when I tiptoed across the sand towards him and cautiously brushed it away from his face. ‘You’re going to burn even faster than me. Do you have any sunscreen?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ he said, taking my hand from his face and holding it in his. ‘Don’t tell anyone but I actually tan pretty well. I just don’t see that much sun at home.’
‘I suppose you don’t get many tanned rock stars,’ I said, happy to be talking about nothing. ‘It’s not very hipster, is it? Not very—’
‘Angela, I love you.’
I knew that my mouth was hanging open in a slightly unattractive fashion but I couldn’t move a muscle.
‘Angela?’
I blinked. Nope, he was still there. I wasn’t asleep. Maybe I had sunstroke from not wearing a hat in the car on the way to the beach. Or maybe I was still drunk from, well, the whole week.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes,’ I said finally. ‘What did you say?’
‘Something I should have said before you left but I didn’t want you to freak out and then be too far away to do anything about it. I love you, Angela.’
‘Why?’
‘What?’
‘Why do you love me?’
Well, why not try and ruin this perfect moment? Well done, Angela.
‘Sit down,’ Alex sighed, pulling me down onto the sand beside him. It really was red hot; fine for him in his jeans but more than uncomfortable on the backs of my legs. ‘Of all the responses you could have given me, I wasn’t expecting that. You want me to tell you why I love you?’
‘Yes please,’ I said quietly, not quite able to meet his eyes. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him – well, it was; but more that this scene was so surreal – Alex sitting there next to me in his skinny jeans, his crumpled T-shirt, all pale skin and black hair clashing against the sun and the sand – that it genuinely felt as though I was dreaming.
‘OK, I love you because you have that knee-high stack of books at the side of your bath that are all curling up at the corners because you spend hours in that tub when you should be working. I love you because you put my socks on the radiator if you get up before me, which you always do. I love you because you make me want to do things that I would never have done six months ago.’ He shook his head. ‘I love you because you make me want to come out to LA and tell you I love you.’
‘Oh,’ I pushed my hair behind my ears and tried to smile at the sand, ‘really? Even after all this week’s nonsense?’
‘Any particular bit of nonsense you’re referring to?’ he asked.
I actually wasn’t sure if there was. ‘No?’
‘So no four a.m. phone calls you want to elaborate on?’
Well, that could have been worse. ‘Oh. Yes. There was one of those,’ I nodded, looking away again. ‘That would be the one when I said I love you.’
‘That was the one I was thinking of, yeah,’ Alex replied evenly. ‘Why, what did you think I meant?’
I shrugged, drawing a figure eight in the sand with my finger. ‘Just been such a mad week. I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular.’
‘So you weren’t thinking about you spending the night with that guy James knocked out last night?’ he asked.
I paused my circling, paused my breathing for a moment. ‘Not especially.’
‘You know that trust is really important to me, Angela,’ Alex said, putting his hands over mine. ‘It’s not like we didn’t have this conversation already.’
Oh God, I thought, squeezing my eyes closed tight. Don’t let this be happening again; don’t let him do this again.
‘I would really appreciate you telling me what happened instead of me having to piece it together from what I heard last night. I’m guessing whatever I dream up will actually be way worse than what actually happened.’
‘I didn’t know you were there,’ I said. ‘You heard all of it?’
‘I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?’
‘OK,’ I started, trying to run through the story in my head before it all came spilling out. Was there any way for me to tell him the whole story without him getting up and walking away at the end of it? Probably not. ‘Right, short version? I thought I’d lost my job, I thought I’d lost you, James was refusing to sort everything out and so I got totally wasted at the hotel bar. Joe helped me get back down to my room, he kissed me and I passed out. The next thing I knew, I woke up, he was there, I freaked out and that was that. And I only really found out what happened last night. Which was nothing. Nothing at all. It was just so stupid. I was just so stupid.’
‘So you weren’t going to tell me?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t know what there was to tell.’ I looked up but Alex was leaning back on his elbows, staring out at the sea. His nose was bright pink. ‘OK, no I wasn’t going to tell you.’
‘Even when you thought you’d slept with him?’
Was there even a right answer? ‘I think I would have told you when we got home. But when it turned out nothing had happened, no, I don’t think I would have said anything.’
He didn’t move, didn’t speak.
‘I couldn’t see the point in making things worse than they were. Nothing happened; I didn’t think it made sense to hurt you for no reason.’
After what felt like for ever, he breathed out and nodded. ‘Makes sense.’
‘And the rest of it is all sorted, right?’ After being almost scared to make eye contact with him all morning, now all I wanted was for him to look at me. ‘All the stupid photo internet stuff.’
‘Did you know James was gay when you were in his hotel room that night?’ he asked.
What happened to ‘you don’t have to explain anything to me’?, I thought, puffing out my cheeks in concentration. ‘No, but there was nothing going on,’ I said. That wasn’t a lie. Nothing actually went on.
‘I