I hear someone in this room has a party to go to later.” Victor Dalgleish leered at Dylan across the lunch table. It was Saturday afternoon. They were sitting in the Taylors’ brand-new kitchen, and Victor’s vulgar, bleached teeth were sparkling garishly enough to give the custom-made marble countertops a run for their money.
I think someone should go back to the kennel where he belongs, Dylan thought, and carried on eating her smoked salmon in silence.
Victor snorted with laughter. “I know what you’ve got on your mind,” he grinned, clearly not noticing he was the only one in the conversation. “You can’t wait to get your grubby mitts on some English boys, can you? Oy, oy!” He jerked back in his chair and guffawed, slapping his hand on Dylan’s mom’s thigh. “At least we know you can’t get up to anything naughtier than this little kitten and I do every night!”
“What the fuck? That is disgusting.” Dylan dropped her knife onto her plate with a clatter.
“Don’t be a prude. Sex is marvelous—it’s a force of nature,” Victor proclaimed. “Go to any farm you like. The cows and sheep are always jumping on each other, trying to have it off. And rabbits… don’t get me started. They’re horny little buggers, at it all the time.”
“Mom!”
“Vic, darling, thank you. I think you’ve made your point,” Piper Taylor said, rubbing her lover’s fingers hard on top of the table. “And don’t swear, Dylan.”
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Dylan muttered, scraping her chair back. “I’m going out.”
“Dilly. Dill Pickle, sit down,” Piper pleaded.
“How many times do I have to tell you not to call me that? Leave me alone.” Dylan stomped up the stairs to the ground floor and over the black-and-white marble tiles of their entrance hall. The whole damn place still smelled of fresh paint and sawdust, and it was making her nostrils burn.
Dylan’s mom had bought this huge pile in swanky Holland Park a few months ago, but she’d only moved in over the past two weeks while Dylan was at St. Cecilia’s. Dylan didn’t know why she’d bothered. Lauren reported that their mom spent most of her time at Victor’s shag-pad anyway.
It had been surreal this afternoon, when Dylan had walked in and dropped her weekend bag at the foot of the carpeted staircase. Looking round, she knew she’d never be able to think of this house as home. The oversized vases of lilies on every table, the bathrooms with their little round colored soaps, the two grand living rooms with their rich cream furniture—it all seemed like paraphernalia from someone else’s life. She hadn’t unpacked anything, except her toothbrush. That bedroom way up at the top, where her mom hadn’t even bothered to hang curtains, would never feel like hers.
Grabbing her wallet and the dusty-rose pashmina Mimah had lent her, Dylan swung open the door and stepped into the afternoon.
The rack of condoms loomed at Tristan in the basement level of Boots on Notting Hill Gate. He’d never bought condoms before, and was finding the whole experience incredibly embarrassing. His mind boggled at the absurd amount of choice they had: ribbed, large, extra-large, flavored. Even vibrating ones. It was enough to make you wonder if the world was full of perverts. How about a type that just said Normal on the box? You know, for normal people. Like him. Then he wouldn’t have to stand here for so long looking like an overprivileged sex-addict with a scruffy prepster quiff.
Oh god. The lady behind the cash register was definitely staring at him.
Tristan’s iPhone shook in his pocket and he slid his finger across the screen to unlock it, grateful for the distraction. He hoped the message was from Alice.
It wasn’t.
Jas’s house pre-party. 8 sharp. No girls said Seb’s text. No totty? Tristan narrowed his intelligent eyes, trying to work out what was going on with Seb these days. Girls were the reason they’d come to London. He had no intention of sitting around getting lean at Jas’s house, playing Guitar Hero on the Wii and watching Jas mix lounge beats—badly—on his decks. Jas was convinced he was the music industry’s next major mogul, even though Seb and Tristan were the ones who could actually play instruments and who were bothering to start a band.
Anyway, T wanted to go out for mojitos before George’s party, maybe to that new Brazilian bar near Piccadilly Circus. And, more important, he wanted to get to the bottom of whether Alice planned to let him stay at hers tonight. The day was starting to gnaw at Tristan. Not because he was the kind of anal guy who needed to plan out every second of his life, or even who needed everything to go his way, but because this evening, he had some pressing business on his mind.
Such as: if there was any point in him buying these stupid condoms at all. He grabbed the simplest-looking pack and turned it over in his hand. Might as well go for it. He knew he’d kick himself if he got the chance and was caught empty-handed.
Out on Notting Hill Gate, Tristan stuffed his Boots bag noisily into the pocket of his baggy jeans and turned down the pavement toward Holland Park. Cars and buses exhaled past. It was only five o’clock. He had hours to kill.
Dylan blinked in the gloomy light of the Duke of Edinburgh pub. It was hard to see, coming in off the sunny street, but she slowly made out the wood paneling, the faded green upholstery, and the afternoon customers watching a football game on a small flat-screen at one end of the bar.
Excellent. This was an awesome place to have her first ever drink alone. She’d told herself she was going to go easy on the booze after a few embarrassing experiences in New York, but here, it just felt impossible. To hell with being a good girl.
“Jack and Coke, please,” she told the bartender, slapping down a five-pound note. He looked down at her dubiously. Dylan held her breath, wondering if she’d remembered to pocket her fake ID.
“What’s that then?” the bartender grunted. He sneaked a glance back at the TV. The lamps hanging above him were reflecting unattractively off his bald head. Dylan hesitated. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.
“Um, Jack and Coke. You know, like, whisky and Coke? Jack Daniel’s?”
“Oh, right. JD and Coke. Why didn’t you say so?” the bartender replied absently, plopping two tiny ice cubes into a glass. Dylan pursed her lips. Everyone here was always correcting what she said. Surely she wasn’t that hard to understand. Maybe they did it to all foreigners on purpose, just to make them feel unwelcome. They were real experts at that.
She swallowed and mustered her courage. “Do you think I could have a little more ice, please?”
The bartender gave a bitter sort of scoff and added a third cube to the glass. Out of the corner of her eye, Dylan spotted an empty table surrounded on two sides by a padded booth. Lucky no one had taken it. Funny too though, she thought, considering that all the less cushy seats around it were full. She threw down her bag and stuck her straw in her mouth, chewing on it a little with her front teeth, just like she always did. It felt comforting. But suddenly, looking up, she gasped. Literally everyone in the room was staring at her. No joke. Twenty or thirty people, mostly men, were gawking in her direction as if she’d stumbled onto the stage in some kind of seedy burlesque club. Dylan turned from one side to the other. She couldn’t see anything weird. What was their problem? Starting to panic, she raised her eyes. There, straight above her head, was a second, giant plasma screen on which men in long socks were scurrying back and forth on a grass field. Fuck. Of course, she was the moron who’d sat right under where they were showing the football match.
Just then, the room erupted in shouts and waving fists aimed at the TV. One man jumped to his feet, roared, “Blaaargh!” and hurled his cardboard Stella Artois coaster toward her. Dylan squealed and dived out of her seat. Nearby, a salt-and-pepper-haired man started cackling madly.
“Watch it there, girlie! That’s it, get your ass out of the way!”
Dylan retreated to a table in the far corner. Still blushing fiercely, she traced a skull and crossbones pattern on its surface with her finger, careful not to chip any of the pale pink nail polish she’d put on for the party to go with Mimah’s pashmina. She’d taken to wearing the thing everywhere to remind herself that she had at least one friend. It was so lonely being a stranger in a strange land. So lonely and so very, very cold. She shivered delicately and bit her lip, waiting for the tear to fall, plink, into her glass.
“Hi there,” came a familiar, playful voice.
Dylan shook back her blond hair and found her wet blue eyes gazing into a boy’s chestnut ones. Tristan. He was holding a pint and wearing a striped scarf wound several times round his neck. His hair, standing out sexily in all directions, looked longer than she remembered it, and even better than it did in all her fantasies of the summer.
“Hi,” she whispered.
Shit. She was supposed to be angry for the way he’d treated her. But somehow she couldn’t be, now that he was standing right there.
“Nice surprise seeing you. Mind if I sit down?” Tristan gave Dylan his sweetest repentant look and slid into the adjoining seat.