PART 1

One

Magnolia

Hipsters aren’t my favourite people. They used to be my least favourite kind of person, but they’ve actually been usurped.

They’ve been replaced by — arguably — a subset of the hipster that is worse than what came before, like a mutation of a virus that’s a bigger pain in the arse than the original. This subset is often a lot more grubby and, unfortunately, usually at least semi-naked. I think they’d call themselves ‘free-spirited.’

I see them standing topless in fields that they’re probably trespassing on because they can hardly own property by working four hours a week as an artisan barista. Their arms usually seem to be thrown up in the air, there’s knots in their unkept hair, and they’re probably holding sparklers as they use grainy, overexposed filters to make it look like their photos weren’t actually taken on what I can only imagine is a cracked iPhone 7 but instead some old-timey camera they traded a poem for.

When I see them I just want to pop on some latex gloves, hand them a shirt, give them a good shake and yell, “WHAT ARE YOU SMILING ABOUT YOUR JEANS ARE FROM H&M FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.”

I’ve met a lot of these people in New York, actually. Many a free spirit on the subway — which I’d never take. There’s a stop by my apartment though, so I see many a miscreant pass by.

It’s lonelier here than I thought, and I did think it would be lonely.

It couldn’t have been any other way, I knew that — leaving it all behind. Leaving him.

No packing up, no goodbyes. Just the first flight out of London to get as far away from it all as quick as I could.

It’s been nearly a year. Not exactly, but almost.

And everything is different now.

There’s an incessant knocking at my front door.

I live on the top floor of 995 Fifth Avenue. I chose to live here because it looks like London, or about as much as a 16th floor apartment in Manhattan can look like London.

The knocking is louder and more insistent than the standard knock-knock-knock a regular person would make. This is an aggressively bright and rhythmic knock. Knock-knock-knock. Knock, knock. Again and again.

It’s obvious who is on the other side of the door before I even open it. What isn’t obvious is why she’s here or how she got upstairs without me buzzing her in.

I swing open the door and there she is — arms folded over her chest, brows knitted behind her Cartier Trinity cat-eye sunglasses in the tortoise shell which she then shoves on top of her head and glares at me.

“Took you long enough,” Taura Sax growls.

“I was upstairs,” I shrug. “And I wasn’t expecting company.” I stare down at her feet. “Do you really dare wear those Balenciaga monstrosities in my presence?”

“I know, I know,” she groans.

I shake my head at her wildly. “They look like—”

“—Geriatric shoes,” she jumps in. “I know.”

“Have you no pride, Taura? No sense of self-worth?”

“Alright—” She rolls her eyes. “I’m wearing a shoe you don’t like, I didn’t sell my baby…”

“I might have preferred it if you did.”

“They’re just very comfortable.” She shrugs as though she’s innocent.

“So is nudity, Taus, but there’s a time and a place. And for these—” I stare pointedly at her Triple S Clear Sole logo-embroidered leather, nubuck and mesh sneakers. “—that place is a rehabilitation unit for the elderly after a nasty fall.” I cross my arms and eye her with suspicion. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

She pulls in her little Brics carry-on and follows me to the kitchen.

“I thought you’d need me,” she shrugs.

I wrap my white Juliet cashmere cardigan from Khaite tighter against myself. “That’s very thoughtful.”

“Yes.” She gives me a smug smile. “I am quite thoughtful when you don’t think I’m a raging slut.”

I give her a look. “You are a bit of a slut though.”

She laughs brightly. “Yeah, I am.”

“I’m here to fly home with you,” she tells me.

I frown at her. “Why?”

“Because.” She shrugs. “You haven’t been back in a year, and there’s the wedding, and your mother’s basically a contestant on her own personal version of Love Island.” I roll my eyes at her, though I know it’s true. My mother has taken my father marrying my childhood nanny like an absolute champion, if we consider champions today as high functioning, trollop-y alcoholics.

“You’re still not talking to Jonah. BJ’s dating someone now.” She watches me closely as she says this and I avoid her eyes, looking down at the checked stretch sports bra that I’m wearing from Burberry. He’s dating someone new. That’s the one everyone’s worried about. I don’t let it show, not even a flicker on my face, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the beast I’ve beaten, bound and buried for the better part of a year is so restrained and controlled and sedated that not even a whisker of emotion breezes across my poised little face.

I cock my eyebrow in defiance of her — she of little faith, waiting for my heart’s knees to buckle at his name.

Never again.

“It’s going to be a hard couple of weeks for you,” she tells me cautiously. “I’m here to bring you home because that’s what best friends do.”

I glance over at her. “Are we best friends now?”

She perches up on the kitchen island and I hand her a glass of pinot gris.

2014 Hans Herzog. Peach blush tint. Dry but not overly tart. Refreshing tannins.

I was sleeping with a boy here for about a month whose family owns vineyards all over — Napa, Burgundy, Champagne, Marlborough.

The alcohol was an important component of the relationship.

During that time I picked up some obnoxious, sommelier-adjacent qualities which were the only real takeaways from the relationship.

“Are we not?” She frowns. “Who else would your best friend be?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. Henry? My sister?”

“Sisters don’t count.” She rolls her eyes. Very blue. They’re quite like sapphires. I used to hate them, but now I’m rather fond of them.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t have one, so it’s not fair.”

“Fine.” I roll my eyes. “Besides Bridget and Henry, you’re my other best friend.”

“Don’t tell Henry.” She gives me a look which I mirror.

I could never.

I’d never hear the end of it.

The day he turned up in New York with Taura Sax I could have thrown him in front of a taxi.

I’d been here maybe five months then.

Henry was visiting me every few weeks. Still does. It was his seventh trip and I knew they liked each other by then because he’d told me they were sleeping together when I met him in Cannes and we’d had a fight over it already. We’d never had a fight before, not really. Well, besides the time he was upset when he found out that Christian and I were together, but that was a one-way fight and it only lasted the length of the drive home until I told him about what BJ had done and then it was back to regularly scheduled programming — so fighting in Cannes was big. Cannes in general was big for other less-ideal reasons, so I’d left early with Rush without saying goodbye and then a few days later he turned up in New York with her. Can you believe it? He’d just brought her here with him.

To New York.

To my apartment. To stay. In my house!

I stared at him in the lobby, blinking until it made sense.

He approached me with placating hands.

“Don’t freak out—” he started. “Or be a twat.”

I gave him a dark look. He shook his head as he hugged me extra tight.

“I just thought… you two would be friends now…” He raised his eyebrows in hopeful expectation. “Now that you know it wasn’t her who fucked Beej.”

Big, awkward smiles from both of them.

I glanced over at her for a few seconds — unimpressed — then back to Henry.

“Yeah, but she did fuck BJ, so…”

“Yeah.” Taura rolled her eyes. “But who hasn’t?”

Henry froze.

I stared at her for a few seconds.

And then I snorted a laugh. Figuratively, obviously. I don’t actually snort.

And that’s how it happened. That was how Taura Sax wormed her way into my heart and to self-professed best friend territory.

She jumps off the bench and goes fishing in my fridge.

It’s mostly just a lot of wine and olives in there because I still don’t cook, but I am on a first name basis with half the Uber Eats drivers in this city.

Taura bleakly pulls out a jar of pickles, bites down on one.

“How’s Tom doing?” she asks and I scowl over at her.

“How should I know?”

She shrugs innocently. “You might talk, I don’t know.”

In case you don’t know, here are the bones of my last few months:

I left London and I flew here.

Tom flew out the next day to meet me — just to be there for me, because he’s like that. And then we were back together. Until we weren’t.

It was hurting him. I was hurting him. We weren’t just in the foxhole. He was more like a shield and a security blanket and a pacifier and bandage and a stitch for my broken heart.

I wore him like a flak jacket. He bore a lot for me, I can see it in retrospect. He took many, many bullets. Actually, I suspect that one of those bullets nicked his little heart too, the one that deserves so much more than I could ever give it.

He stopped it. It was sudden.

I didn’t see it coming.

He flew in, we had sex, we had a fight, he left. It was bad, and so out of the blue.

I don’t do so well on my own. I never have. And that night — afternoon if we’re being specific, because I remember the tiny bit of light bending around the blackout blinds we’d pulled down because I don’t like to have sex in daylight — we fought about a film and then he just left. He grabbed a few things from the apartment that technically was just mine but really we shared — a phone charger, a watch in a drawer, his spare passport — and then Tom was gone.

Him leaving was akin to finding oneself in the middle of the Arctic Circle with nothing but a light cardigan.

Searing pain, head to toe.

It was like being back in the Mandarin all over again.

I couldn’t see properly, I couldn’t breathe.

Dying, probably just metaphorically, but maybe also literally?

My neighbour Lucía found me. Dragged me to a bar where I proceeded to make many, many mistakes with Rush Evans in a cloakroom.

Rush and I continued to be on and off whenever he was in town.

I don’t know if it was shittier of me or him. Me, the ex-girlfriend of his best friend. Him, the best friend of my ex-boyfriend.

“Technically, Sam was my best friend,” he’d sometimes say to make us feel better after we’d done it. It never worked.

He went away for a month to shoot a movie and I stumbled literally and drunkenly into the arms of Stavros Onasis, the son of the oil tycoon. That didn’t last so long, which was fine because by then Rush was back. Then he left again for reshoots, and I found that vineyard boy, Dieter Van Lauers.

Not much more to say than that, I don’t think we lasted a month.

Briefly there was a boy from South Africa — a man, I should say — Addington Van Schoor, a school teacher at Nightingale Bamfords. Very handsome, but not much there. Just chemistry and a dead end. All of them are dead ends though. I guess that’s the point.

Rush and I, we drifted back and forth as friends with a lot of benefits. He was a mess and I was a mess, we both knew it and didn’t hold it against each other. We did often hold one another though. He became one of my closest friends, actually, though it cost him a dear one in the process. Rush never ordered a Negroni in front of me, he once told a girl to fuck off because she smelt of orange blossom, he fought an old boy from Varley when I told him he started a rumour about me back at school, he’d take me shopping and let me dress him and he turned the other way at night times, pretend I didn’t have to spray Dark Rum by Malin + Goetz to fall asleep.

Rush and I properly called it around August, a bit because it was well overdue — we started to get complicated. I think there’s only so long you can be what you were before certain things start creeping in —possessiveness and feelings and stupid things like that — so we called it. We also called it because of Jack-Jack.

Jack-Jack was his housemate ways ago. We met through Rush and accidentally kissed one night while he was out of town. He was sort of cross about that, but then not really because we really were technically ‘just friends’, but anyway after that happened Rush said we had to be really done because Jack-Jack is a hardcore romantic and Rush could tell that he was already all-in. Unfortunately for Jack-Jack, I’m never going to be all-in again.

“Are you ready to tell me what happened with Lover-Boy?” Taura asks with a pointed look.

“No.” I snatch the wine from her hands and throw it back. “No, I’m not.”