Chapter 12
One drink – two, max – then back to the hotel.
This time, my body reluctantly conceded that my mind’s plan was probably the right one, especially with the impending snowstorm.
As we walked to the bar, which Ethan said was only a few minutes away, he turned up his coat collar to make up for the absence of his hat.
More than anything, I wanted to pull him close to me, so we could share body heat, penguin-style.
But now the likelihood of intimacy had faded – and, along with it, my new-found self-assuredness – it felt like an overstep.
Ethan stopped outside an unassuming basement stairwell next to a laundromat. ‘This is us.’
‘Huh, okay.’ The only thing suggesting there was anything down there other than rats and mould was a simple A-frame blackboard perched just inside the door, which bore the words Secret Smile chalked inside a set of lips.
I followed him down into the bar, which opened up into a larger-than-expected space that looked to be about half full. Fifteen or so booths lined one wall, and the longest bar I’d ever seen lined the other.
‘Ooh, is this a dive bar?’ I asked, my eyes adjusting to the soft, warm light.
‘Nah, this is way too gentrified. I could take you to an actual dive bar if you want?’
I had a flashback to last night’s ‘happy hour’ swindle. ‘No, this looks perfect.’
‘Great! Go grab a booth and I’ll order drinks. Any preference? They’ll mix any cocktail you want.’
‘You choose. Just not a Manhattan,’ I said.
‘Got it.’
I chose a table at the far end of the room and sat on the side that faced towards the entrance so I could maximise my view of the space.
The speakeasy’s ‘secret smile’ theme was peppered here and there, with the lips motif appearing in unexpected places including, quite delightfully, on the porthole-like window of a vintage washing machine next to the end of the bar, on top of which was a turntable with space behind it for a DJ.
Ethan returned with our drinks after a few minutes.
‘This place is great,’ I said, taking a sip of a pleasingly sharp strawberry daiquiri with a hint of mint.
‘Yeah, we like it here because the vibe is good, the cocktails are excellent and the music is on point – and, crucially, never too loud if you get out of here by eleven.’
‘The perfect combination. I’m still not convinced it’s better than a classic English pub, though.’
‘Hey, we have pubs!’
‘No, you have bars that cosplay as pubs. They’re not the same. Like, you wouldn’t find a kids’ play area inside an American tavern, would you?’
Ethan nearly spat out his drink. ‘You’re joking?’
‘Nope. Everyone goes to the pub – especially on weekends during the day. It’s a family destination.’
Ethan shook his head, baffled. ‘I guess I wouldn’t know.’
‘Oh yeah, you’ve never been to the UK.’
‘Exactly. The whole airplane thing.’
‘Do you even have a passport?’ I asked, trying not to judge.
‘Yeah, of course. But I haven’t been on a plane since… I wanna say 2014. And that was a domestic flight after acupuncture. Let’s just say it didn’t go well and I ended up with a fear of needles as well as flying.’
‘Gosh.’
My response was wholly inadequate, but what are you meant to say to someone who seems worldly-wise, but likely hasn’t ever left their home nation before?
‘Yeah, I mean, I know I joke about it, but it’s become something of a problem in recent years. The agency has been keen for me to go over to London for a while now.’
‘To schmooze your big client?’
‘Yeah, something like that.’
‘Well, if you ever do make it over…’
My words trailed off, because it was a stupid thing to say on every level. Thankfully, the awkward moment was interrupted.
‘Carmy!’ The shout had come from an extremely tall and extremely thin man dressed from head to toe in black who was waving from the other end of the room. He bounded over – his head was almost touching the ceiling, but he seemed unimpeded by the risk of injury.
Ethan stood up to greet his friend – Ethan was a good few inches taller than me, but there was at least a foot of height difference between them. ‘Frank! You’re early, bro.’
‘Yeah, I was at a screening nearby and thought I might as well head straight here once it finished.’
They clasped palms in a high-five inspired handshake and hugged briefly before Ethan turned to me.
‘Flora, this is my buddy Frank. Frank – Flora. She’s visiting from England.’
‘Sweet. How do you guys know each other?’
I shot a glance at Ethan. Good luck explaining this one, fella.
‘We met yesterday,’ he said matter-of-factly, now sitting next to me instead of opposite. He took a sip of his drink.
‘Huh,’ Frank said, his forehead creasing slightly as he looked between the two of us from his elevated viewpoint, some kind of realisation dawning. ‘Oh! Shit, dudes, have I interrupted something here? I should get out of your hair…’
Ethan looked like he was trying to slide under the table. Tipsy Ethan was fun.
I dragged him back upright and replied for the both of us. ‘No, it’s all good. I’ve just been helping him out with his best man’s speech and we thought we’d have one for the road, right, Ethan?’ I raised my glass to Frank to indicate the ‘one’ in question.
‘Yeah, exactly,’ Ethan said, in the affirmative, although his body language didn’t match the words.
Frank cocked his head to one side. ‘Nah, this ain’t tracking, Carmy. I’m gonna go grab a drink, and then you can both fill me in on the full story, yeah?’
‘Ha, okay, man,’ Ethan said, blushing as Frank headed to the bar.
‘I should head off now your friends are arriving,’ I said, taking a larger than average slurp of drink so I could leave them to it sooner rather than later.
‘Nah, Frank’s at least an hour early. Please don’t leave. Not yet.’ Ethan’s hand squeezed my knee under the table and my eyebrows shot up involuntarily, prompting him to end the contact almost as soon as it’d begun.
‘Shit, sorry, that was weird,’ he said, self-consciously using his straw to swirl the ice cubes in his glass before taking a sip.
‘Not weird, just… unexpected,’ I clarified, moving slightly closer to him and nudging his shoulder with mine to make it clear that I wasn’t rejecting his touch.
‘Frank seems nice,’ I said, trying to disperse the tension between us that seemed to be building up once more.
‘Yeah, Frank’s the best. He helped me get a foot in the door at The New Yorker. In fact, you’ll probably know him by his pen name: “Frankenstylus”?’
My mouth dropped open. ‘No fucking way.’
‘Haha, I’m gonna go ahead and assume you’ve heard of him?’
‘Umm, yeah! Hasn’t he got, like, a million followers or something?’
‘Yeah, he’s doing really well. He’s the one who set up these meet-ups for us – cartooning is a pretty solitary profession, and he wanted to start a community to help up-and-coming artists connect and break through.’
‘That’s so cool.’
‘Right?’
‘So… how much are you going to tell him?’
‘About… us?’
‘Us.’ Oh, do sod off, goosebumps.
‘Yep.’
Ethan took a long sip of his cocktail and looked up at the ceiling for a while.
‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you drive.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means I’ll leave it totally up to you how much you tell him.’
‘And if I were to finish my drink and leave you guys to it… what would you tell him then?’
‘Probably a few key headlines.’
‘Such as…?’
He shrugged. ‘Just that I met someone cool, I guess. That I liked her a lot. And how it felt like I’d known her for years, not hours. But that it, well, that it wasn’t meant to be.’
My goosebumps retreated to my stomach, as if every single one of them had been cruelly flicked.
For fuck’s sake, I barely know this man. Why does this feel so brutal?
Before I could respond, Frank returned with three drinks – a beer for himself and another round of cocktails for me and Ethan. He contorted himself into the booth opposite me and, for a few beats, nobody spoke.
Frank cracked first. ‘Jeez, guys, I could slice this tension with a box cutter. Are you gonna tell me what’s going on or do we need talk about the weather?’
I took a sip of drink for courage, before I began to speak. ‘Firstly, Mr Stylus, I’m a huge fan of your work.’
Apparently I, too, was tipsy.
Frank cocked his fingers like toy guns and fired them at me in gratitude.
‘Secondly,’ I continued, ‘I landed in New York the night before last. And yesterday morning, while I was minding my own business in a coffee shop, a stranger touched my arm…’
By the time Ethan and I had told Frank most of the story, three other cartoonists had arrived, each of whom Frank had got up to speed on who I was and why I was there.
We held back the more… intimate details, but when we’d got to the part where Ethan’s parents had surprised us at his apartment, everyone had screamed with horrified laughter so loudly that the bartender had turned the music up to mask the screeching sounds.
‘And then we came here,’ Ethan said, finishing our tale.
‘This is like a fucking rom-com,’ said Suki, a tiny woman about half Frank’s height who, even from the short time I’d spent in her company, was probably the wittiest person I’d met in real life.
She’d cemented that position not long after arriving when she’d declared that it was so cold outside she’d been tempted to head to the New York Public Library and start burning books.
‘Ah, but rom-coms always have a happy ending,’ I said, emboldened by alcohol – I must have been on my third cocktail by now. Or fourth – they’d just kept coming with every new arrival.
‘Who’s to say this won’t end happily?’ mused Jem, who was beautiful in an other-worldly way, but extremely quiet – these were the first words I’d heard them say since they’d got here.
‘I’m literally about to leave,’ I said, finishing my latest drink and waggling my empty glass.
‘Well, I think you should stay a while longer,’ Suki said with conviction, nodding once in Ethan’s direction. He tipped his glass towards her in thanks.
‘That’s nice of you to say, but I feel like I’m derailing your meet-up.’
‘We’re humourists, Flora – stories like these are rocket fuel for our brains. You should stay,’ said Sonny, a baseball-cap-wearing born-and-bred New Yorker whose accent sounded like something straight out of The Sopranos.
‘You heard him, Ethan; keep Flora’s glass topped up!’ Frank said.
I sighed as if defeated, not delighted.
‘Fine, just one more,’ I said. ‘I gotta go to the loo but I’ll buy us all another round on my way back.’
‘The “loo”!’ Suki shrieked, as I shimmied out of the booth.
The floor felt as if it was tilting once I was inside the single gender-neutral cubicle, which was just beyond our table. I was way drunker than I’d intended to get.
The interior of the toilet didn’t help; it was all neon lighting and splodges of fluorescent paint, which began to swim in my vision like some kind of psychedelic kaleidoscope.
I sat on the toilet and attempted to focus on the graffitied hand dryer in front of me, trying to enforce order on the thoughts that were competing for my attention but melting into booze-infused puddles before I could grasp them.
There was a single thought I could get a fix on, however, because it was by far the dominant one: I’m having so much fun.
‘Fun’. When was the last time I’d had fun for the sake of it?
Despite my drunkenness, I couldn’t help but admit that this was exactly why Mum and Anneka had wanted to bring me to New York in the first place.
Had they been… right? I snorted out loud at the realisation, washing my hands and trying to focus on my reflected face in the UV light.
All I could see in the mirror was a smile – and it wasn’t at all able to keep itself a secret.