but before I could form a coherent sentence, Alex reappeared with two large glasses of red wine.
‘I know you want to leave, but Sam on the bar just gave me these and I couldn’t say no – you want?’ Alex asked, sliding into the chair at the side of me. ‘I thought maybe a drink might do you some good.’
On one hand, this clearly was a bad idea. I was exhausted, I’d already passed out once and I needed a clear head in the morning. On the other, I could really, really, really do with a drink. But back to the other hand, it really was a bad idea.
‘Sam on the bar?’ I asked, nodding and holding out my hand for the glass. I could maybe just take a sip.
‘Old friend,’ he explained, pushing the glass towards me. ‘Just this one drink and we’ll make a move.’
I nodded and leaned against Alex, taking in the mirrored walls, high ceilings and racks and racks of bottles behind the bar. It reminded me of Balthazar in New York, except instead of posing as a French bistro, it actually was one. Every single table was full, and it immediately made sense to me that the guys had picked the café. There wasn’t one ugly person in the place and I was pretty certain that none of them were bank managers or geography teachers either. Nothing so ordinary here. So this was where Paris’s pretty people came to hang out. Note to self. And Belle magazine.
The boys talked band while I held my wine quietly, concentrating on not spilling it down my T-shirt. The odds were pretty good that I was going to have to wear it again. Oh, it had been a long time since I’d washed something out in a hotel sink – where was my mother when I needed her? Although her area of expertise was really knickers in a Mallorcan bidet rather than American Apparel V-neck in a Parisian boutique hotel. Much of a muchness though, surely? Maybe it was in my blood.
I clutched my wine, but just couldn’t bring myself to drink it, so I people watched instead. I couldn’t help but stare as four girls rose from a table at the back and started dancing around a raised DJ booth. They were laughing happily, pushing each other on to the dance floor, and just like everyone else in the café, they were all skinny jeans, long messy hair tossed over one shoulder and at least a fortnight’s worth of eyeliner smudged all over their faces. But my God they were gorgeous. I’d never had so much as a same sex leaning in all my life and even I wanted to go over there and lick their beautiful faces.
The tallest of the four, a slender blonde with masses of Debbie Harry-a-like white-blonde hair hanging in her bright blue eyes, looked over at our table and then disappeared behind a door in the back wall. Was that her? The girl I thought I saw with Alex when I walked in? I looked back at the boys around the table. They were discussing their set for Sunday’s festival and without meaning to, more or less ignoring me altogether, aside from an occasional arm stroke from Alex or lewd grin from Craig. Once Alex was into ‘work stuff’, he was impossible to distract. I could have stripped off and performed an entire Pussycat Dolls routine and he wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. It might have slipped into his subconscious enough to throw an ironic cover into the set, but that would have been about it.
Not having eaten anything in, bloody hell, I had no idea, the wine was making its way through my system fairly quickly. I slipped away from the table and followed the blonde girl through the door at the back of the room, hopefully to the toilets. Not that I wanted to give her the wrong idea, I wasn’t nearly that drunk. Although maybe some girl-on-girl action would get Alex’s attention back. Wow, sometimes I wondered if I’d been spending far too much time with Jenny. The blonde girl was washing her hands as I pushed through the door.
‘Oh, sorry,’ I said, bashing into her. Face to face, she was absolutely stunning. Her heart-shaped face looked to be bare of make-up aside from the lashings of eyeliner, and her platinum hair wasn’t even dyed. I wasn’t jealous at all. ‘I was just looking for the loo.’
‘Pardon?’ she replied.
Right. I was in France. Completely forgot.
‘Uh, la toilette?’ I asked, pointing at what was very obviously the toilet.
‘Oui?’ She looked at me without quite the same reverence I’d sent her way. In that she looked at me as though I was slightly retarded. Which was probably fair.
I made some sort of laughing, oh-I’m-so-stupid snorting noise-cum-hand gesture and locked myself in the toilet cubicle. OK, so I couldn’t even attempt to make myself understood when trying to get in the lav, but that wasn’t going to be a problem, was it? Alex was practically fluent, and when I wasn’t with him, I’d have my French Belle assistant. Surely she would be ecstatic to spend all her time translating for me. And lead me around town all day long. Surely the super trendy, young, hot, French fashionista would love that. Oh crap.
When I came out of the toilet, the gorgeous girl had gone. Reluctantly, I checked myself out in the mirror, trying not to compare and contrast. My light brown bob looked better for its trim last week, but without hair straighteners, a half-decent conditioner or even serum, it was a fluffy, bird’s nest mess. Flat at the roots, puffy at the ends. My skin was dry and greyish from the flight, but for some reason, my nose and forehead were so shiny, I could see a reflection of my reflection in my forehead. How could my skin be dry and shiny at the same time? For want of a better idea, I pulled down the V-neck on my T-shirt until I could almost see the edge of my bra. Admittedly, it wasn’t my finest moment, but a girl had to fight with whatever weapons she had, and until I’d been to a pharmacy or something and picked up hair product, my 34Cs were all that I had.
But they weren’t going to be enough.
Wandering back through the busy bar, I fought the fug out of my brain and tried to spot our table, but I couldn’t seem to see it. Mainly because the tiny table populated by three very American boys that I was looking for, was now covered in four very French girls. Most notably, the beautiful girl from the toilets, who appeared to be compensating for the lack of chairs at the table by kneeling on the floor. At Alex’s feet. I paused by the maître d’s station and watched for a second. She took his hand in hers and cocked her head to one side, smiling. Alex was not smiling. Instead, he pulled his hand out of hers, took his phone out of his jeans pocket, stood up and walked out the door. And down the street. The girl laughed, said something hilarious to the others and hopped up, taking Alex’s seat. I looked down, breathing deeply. What was that all about? Was that the girl I had seen when I came in? And why was there a number listed by the phone for ‘Centre Anti-Poison’? Well, she’d be needing a number for an ambulance if she touched my boyfriend again. Not that she could, given that he’d completely disappeared out of sight.
I cautiously wandered back over to the table, standing awkwardly beside Graham and waiting for him to acknowledge me. Instead, he and Craig giggled with the other French girls, chattering away. Did everyone speak French except me? The blonde stared at me from Alex’s seat, then picked up his wine glass and drank deeply. Colour me stunned.
‘Marie,’ she said to the brunette girl to her left. Who I was relieved to see was at least wearing make-up. Even if she was still hatefully good-looking. ‘C’est la fille qui était dans les toilettes.’
Now, even with my shoddy ‘je voudrais un croque monsieur, s’il vous plaît’ GCSE French, I managed to pick up ‘fille’ which was girl and ‘toilettes’ which was toilet (she wasn’t getting anything past me). She was totally talking about me. The other three girls stopped talking, put down their drinks and turned to stare at me. I felt like I was back in year nine, knocking on the common room door and asking the sixth formers if they wouldn’t mind awfully turning their stereo down because we couldn’t hear our recorders in the music room.
‘Oh, shit, Angie, I so totally forgot you were here,’ Craig said, once he’d realized everyone had stopped talking. ‘This is Marie, Lise, Jacqueline and Solène.’
The blonde raised an eyebrow and looked me up and down. ‘Angela?’ she asked Craig. He nodded into his fresh beer.
‘Solène,’ she said smiling and holding out a hand, but still not standing up or getting the hell out of my boyfriend’s seat. ‘We