I Heart Paris Read Free

should dress up. You know, just don’t wear what you usually wear here. Or anything you’ve ever worn here. It’s kinda fancy.’
    And there was the Cici we all knew and loved. Before I could even sigh in reply, she’d hung up. Sitting in my knickers on the cold laminate flooring, I stared out of the window at the city in front of me. Lunch with Mr Spencer as in Spencer Media? What was that supposed to mean? Surely it had to be good though, there was no way it could be a bad thing.
    What was a bad thing, was the state of me, I thought, peering at my reflection in the window as I pushed myself back up. I couldn’t really show up at Pastis in a vest and flip-flops with just-shagged hair. Bedhead was great in theory, but in reality, it just looked as though I hadn’t showered.
    ‘Do I have any clothes here?’ I asked a sleepy-looking Alex, as I dropped to my hands and knees in the bedroom to search for a stray dress or errant smock under his bed.
    ‘Pretty sure you came in clothes,’ he mumbled, throwing his forearm over his eyes. ‘I know you lose shit all the time, but surely you haven’t managed to lose your clothes in a one-bedroom apartment overnight.’
    ‘You’re hilarious.’ I pulled the slightly worse for wear strappy dress from yesterday out from under the pile made up of Alex’s jeans and T-shirt. ‘Work just called, I have to meet Mary for a meeting at Pastis at lunch. I have to go home and get changed.’
    ‘If you lived here you wouldn’t have to,’ he replied without moving.
    ‘You make a fine point,’ I said, wriggling into my dress. Leaning over the bed, I gave him a quick kiss and a gentle slap around the head. ‘I’ll call you later.’
    ‘Yeah yeah,’ he smiled, still with his deep green eyes closed. ‘I know I’m nothing more than a booty call to you. You callous, British heartbreaker.’
    I paused in the doorway, slipping my feet into my Havaianas, and watched him shuffle back under the thin white sheet on his bed. I was being stupid. Imagine waking up to that messy black bedhead every morning. And imagine not having to leg it back to Manhattan to use a decent brand of shampoo, conditioner of any kind, and find something to wear. How did boys keep their hair so soft without conditioner? Was the whole industry a sham? I shook my head and tried to concentrate. Now was not the time to worry about the effectiveness of Pantene.
    ‘You planning on going soon or are you just gonna stand there and freak me out all day?’ Alex asked from under his covers, making me jump.
    ‘Going,’ I said, grabbing my handbag from the sofa. ‘Gone.’
    ‘I’ll come over tonight? We’ll talk Paris?’ he called.
    ‘Tonight,’ I agreed, closing the door behind me. Shower and Pastis first. Alex and Paris later.
    Putting myself together for my lunch meeting would have been a lot easier if I hadn’t started running through a million different terrifying scenarios in my head on the way home, during my shower, through every wardrobe change and while applying the few scraps of make-up that might not melt off on my way downtown to Pastis. I hailed a yellow cab outside the apartment in my LA-purchased dandelion yellow Phillip Lim dress and gold strappy flats, and tried not to think about all the reasons Mr Spencer might want to see me. Maybe he just wanted to meet the girl that had interviewed and inadvertently outed James Jacobs. Lots of people did. Mostly women, young and old, who wanted to give me a really, really filthy look and then ask me incredibly inappropriate questions about his boyfriend.
    Or maybe he was a fan of my blog. My slightly random English-girl-living-in-New-York-rambling-on-about-her-everyday-life blog. Yes, that would definitely appeal to a sixty-something media magnate. Or perhaps he was a massive fan of the Shakira album review I’d just filed? Or perhaps he was a massive Shakira fan and didn’t like the album review? Surely not, I’d been super kind. No, there were just too