I Heart New York Read Free Page B

muttered, turning the radio all the way up.
    Twenty minutes of talk radio later, I was hanging out of the window like a dog in a bandana, and I had just about stopped crying when I spotted it.
    The New York City skyline. Manhattan. The Empire State Building. The beautiful, beautiful Chrysler Building. The Woolworth Building with its big old churchy steeple. And I fell in love. It hit me so hard that I stopped crying, stopped thinking, stopped breathing. I felt as if I’d been winded. Winding the cab window all the way down, I breathed in the skyscrapers, the giant billboards, the industrial riverside stretches and the sweaty, steamy air. I was in New York. Not at home in London, not at Louisa’s wedding, and nowhere near my filthy, cheating fiancé. And so, for the want of something else to do, as we disappeared down into the midtown tunnel, I burst into tears again.
    The first hotel we passed turned out to be the last hotel the cabbie had dropped off at, and it was beautiful. The Union was set just off Union Square Park, with a lobby dimly lit to the point of a power cut, and filled with the overpowering scent of Diptyque candles that smelled like fresh washing on the line. Overstuffed sofas and ancient leather armchairs filled the space, and the reception was picked out in fairylights. Suddenly finding myself in such perfect surroundings, I was very aware of the state of my hair, my dehydrated skin and my rumpled clothes. I really, really did look like complete crap, but this place couldn’t be further from a two-bedroomed terrace in south west London. It was just what I needed.
    ‘Welcome to The Union,’ said the incredibly beautiful woman behind the counter. ‘My name is Jennifer, how can we help you today?’
    ‘Hi,’ I said, pulling my handbag high up on my shoulder and kicking my travel bag towards the reception desk. ‘I was wondering if you had a room available?’
    She smiled serenely and began clicking away on a keyboard. As she tapped, her glossy spiral curls bounced away behind her. ‘OK, we are a little busy but…I have a junior suite at $800 a night?’ She looked up. My expression apparently suggested that was a little bit out of my price range. ‘Or I have a single at $350. But it only sleeps one.’
    ‘Oh, OK,’ I fished around in my battered old bag for a credit card and tried not to work out the cost of the room in real money, ‘it’s just me. Well, I just found out my boyfriend was cheating on me and we broke up and I had to leave home and I thought, well, where’s better to get away to than New York? And,’ I paused and looked up. She was still smiling at me, but with a healthy dose of terror in her eyes. ‘Sorry, I’m sorry. A single would be fine.’
    ‘And how long would you be staying with us?’ she asked, tapping away again. I guessed she was alerting everyone to the fact that there was a desperate woman checking in. My photo was probably being distributed to the whole staff with a ‘do not engage in conversation’ note.
    ‘Sorry?’ I hadn’t thought that far ahead.
    ‘When will you be going home?’ she said slowly.
    ‘I–I don’t have a home,’ I said, equally slowly. ‘So, I don’t know.’ I was dangerously close to tears and really didn’t want to let them go in the reception of the swankiest hotel I’d ever stepped in. But, wow, I really didn’t have a home.
    ‘Well, I kinda just wanted to know when you would be checking out, but the room is free for the next week, shall I put you in for seven nights and see where we go from there?’ she suggested. I nodded and handed over my credit card. Jennifer exchanged it for a sexy black room pass key, emblazoned with a silver U. ‘Room 1126 on floor eleven, take the elevator and then turn left. It’s at the end of the corridor.’
    I nodded numbly and took the key, tripping over my own bag as I turned.
    ‘Do you need anything at all, Miss Clark?’ Jennifer asked. I turned and tried to smile, shaking my