Nick is free all day – he just has a dinner meeting – so once we’ve finished breakfast and, yes, had sex again, we head out into New York. It’s freezing, of course, but the sun is bright and the buildings and streets seem to sparkle. Out on the main street, I actually see steam rising from underneath a manhole and have to stop to take a photo.
The whole day is like a montage from a romantic movie. We go up the Empire State Building, kiss at the top and try to spot our hotel. Once we’re back on the ground, Nick says he needs a drink, so we walk up Fifth Avenue to Grand Central Station – stopping at a street market selling clothes and toys and retro metal advertising signs. Nick buys one about baseball for his office and I get a vintage New York travel poster for … wherever.
We eat oysters and drink champagne in the Grand Central Station Oyster Bar then walk up to Central Park and Nick convinces me to have a carriage ride, even though he can’t stop laughing. He tries to talk me into a boat on the lake too, but I resist. We wander hand in hand around Bloomingdales and then queue for frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity III. Which we feed to each other. It’s almost nauseating. Almost.
We walk up Fifth Avenue alongside Central Park and I pretend again that I’m living here. But I already feel like it wouldn’t be the same without Nick. Which is a dangerous road to go down.
‘I feel like we’re in a film,’ I say, as yellow cabs swish past and we swerve around tour groups gathered around the guide’s umbrella. ‘It doesn’t seem quite real.’
He puts his arm around me and pulls me against him. ‘If this was a film, you’d say you wanted popcorn or … ’ He looks around and gestures at a cart on the opposite side of the road. ‘A hotdog. And I’d run across the road to get it for you. Because I love you. And then, on the way back, I’d get run over.’
My heart is thumping at the sound of his casual ‘I love you’, but I laugh as he drops his arm and grabs my hand instead.
‘Or we’d go into the museum,’ I say. ‘I’d go to the loo and when I came out, you’d have disappeared. I’d run around in a panic asking people if they’d seen you and they’d all look at me like I was mad –’
‘They’d check the CCTV and see that I’d never been with you at all. You arrived alone. Duh duh duhhhhh.’
‘Or!’ I say. ‘They’d check the CCTV and see you coming in, but not leaving. They know you’re in there somewhere. But where? What have you got planned?’
‘A heist!’ he says. ‘I like it.’
‘What are you stealing?’
He grins at me. ‘Do you want me to say “your heart”?’
I laugh. ‘God no.’
‘In that case, I don’t know. I’ll tell you when we get there.’
We cross the road – carefully – and, once inside the bright, white, museum we take the lift to the top floor and then work our way back down the spiral.
‘How are people not running?’ Nick asks me after a few minutes.
It would be brilliant to run from the top to the bottom, but I’m not going to do it. ‘Skates,’ I say. ‘We need skates.’
‘Or they could flood it!’ Nick says, his eyes sparkling. ‘It would be like a giant slip and slide.’
‘Culture is wasted on you,’ I say. ‘Do you know which one you’re stealing yet?’
A stern man in a red velvet suit turns to look at me.
‘Not really,’ I tell him. ‘Just an imaginary heist.’
He frowns and turns back to the painting. It’s a monstrous thing with what looks like a head sticking out of someone’s stomach. ‘Not that one,’ I tell Nick.
Nick pretends to be thinking, frowning and rubbing his chin. ‘I haven’t seen one yet. And how would I get it out, do you know?’
‘The slip and slide?’ I say. ‘You, I don’t know, start a fire? The sprinklers come on. And you take advantage of the panic to grab the painting and slide all the way out.’
‘I’m wearing a wetsuit under my clothes,’ he says.
I picture Nick in a wetsuit and for a second forget that we’re planning an imaginary heist.
‘You’re picturing me in a wetsuit, aren’t you?’ he says, grinning.
I make a growling noise and he pulls me against him and kisses me.
The man in the velvet suit tuts at us so we stop kissing and carry on walking.
‘So where do we go from here?’ Nick asks after a couple of minutes’ silence.
‘Down the slope and out through the doors?’ I say and grin at him.
He rolls his eyes. ‘I mean … when we get home. Are we going to, you know?’
Now I really want to run down the slope. I’d kill for a pair of skates. ‘I don’t know,’ I say.
‘Will you think about it?’
I nod. ‘And will you? I mean, New York – in a bubble – is one thing. Back home will be something else.’
He stops walking. ‘I know. And we don’t know if it’ll work again. Maybe it won’t. But I want to try. Do you?’
I nod. I do. But it’s not that simple. There is so much I need to tell him. But this is the bubble. We agreed it was a freebie. We agreed that what happens in New York stays in New York. I can tell him when we get home. And then if he hates me – if he doesn’t want anything to do with me – we’ll still have had this.
I step right up to him and reach up, pulling his face down to mine. ‘I do,’ I say and kiss him.
Nick’s dinner is in a restaurant just around the corner from our hotel, so we hail a taxi outside the Guggenheim and for the first few minutes I stare out of the window, transfixed by New York lit up in the dark, people rushing past with shopping bags, tourists with cameras, even a group of schoolchildren, all wearing matching jackets and backpacks and holding onto a rope held by their teachers front and back. We turn into the Upper East Side and I crane my neck to look at the beautiful buildings – the green awnings make me think of practically every New York-set film or TV show I’ve ever seen – and the designer clothes and bags in the sparkling shop windows. The cab turns onto a wide road running alongside the river and Nick tugs at my hand.
‘This is FDR Drive,’ he says.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘It’s really boring. And we’ll be on it for about twenty minutes.’ He grins.
‘Seriously?’
He nods. ‘Yep. Nothing to see.’
‘What’s that over there?’ I point across the river at the tall buildings, darker and sparser than the buildings on this side.
‘Long Island,’ he says. ‘Nothing to see there.’
‘That bridge is pretty,’ I say. The bridge up ahead is lined with white lights and looks beautiful.
‘The 59th Street bridge,’ Nick says. ‘Once we pass that there’s nothing to look at. Trust me.’
I look at him in the darkness of the cab. Do I trust him? Not about this, obviously I trust him about this, but could I trust him again? In a relationship? I think I probably could. Whether he will trust me once he knows … I don’t know.
I slide across the tatty plastic seat towards him and he drops an arm around my shoulder and kisses my temple.
‘Cass? You fell asleep.’
Nick is shaking me gently. I’m not quite sure where I am, but then I realise. In a cab. Which has stopped.
‘Jeez, I thought you weren’t going to wake up,’ Nick says, smiling. ‘You were really flat out.’
‘Sorry,’ I say. I wipe some drool off my face, hoping Nick hasn’t noticed, knowing he probably has.
We get out of the cab and Nick pays.
‘Let me pay half,’ I say.
Nick shakes his head. ‘It’s on expenses. Everything’s on expenses.’
‘God. Your job.’
He grins. ‘I know, right?’
The cab pulls away and we look at each other.
‘I think you need to go straight to bed,’ Nick says. ‘Do you want me to go up with you?’
I shake my head. ‘I’m fine. Thanks. I’ll have a bath, I think, and then, yeah, go to bed. Wake me up when you come in though.’
He leans down and kisses me. ‘Oh I will.’
‘Unless you’re too pissed.’
He barks out a laugh and says, ‘Be careful. Don’t fall asleep in the bath.’
I roll my eyes, kiss him again and then head into the hotel.
The bath is enormous – almost to my waist. While I’m waiting for it to fill up, I grab my phone and sit by the window to phone Adam. His phone goes to voicemail. I Google the time difference – I can never trust myself to get it right – and realise he’s in a tutorial. There’s no point leaving a voicemail – he never listens to them – so I end the call and text him instead.
Sorry, phone on fumes. Having fab time. See u soon. x
I get up to check the bath, which has filled much faster than I expected. I strip off, leaving my clothes on the floor next to the bed and clamber into the bath. I don’t know how long I stay in there – the water’s so hot and the bath is so comfortable that I drift in and out of consciousness and when I get out, I can barely manage to have a wee and clean my teeth before I stagger into bed and fall straight to sleep.