Chapter 14
It’d rained in the afternoon, and the burnt orange evening sky was reflected in the puddles on the cracked pavement.
The bar in Bushwick reminded me of the bars I sometimes ended up at in Dalston or Stoke Newington.
Small, exposed brick walls covered in queer art, and more undercuts per capita than most cities.
“We’re friends of Roka’s,” I told the woman behind the bar, a statuesque blonde with sleeve tattoos and the kind of confident smile that suggested she could handle anything from drunk tourists to minor apocalypses.
Her face lit up. “Any friend of Roka’s is a friend of mine.”
I ordered two gin and tonics, but before she made those, she lined up two shot glasses and filled them with something that looked suspiciously like it could strip paint.
“These are on the house. Fair warning: they’re strong enough to make you confess your deepest secrets. Or start a fight with a street lamp.”
I grinned, then knocked mine back, making an immediate face. Was it, in fact, paint stripper?
Eliza threw hers back and did similar. “Blimey, that is lethal. But if it makes you confess your secrets, here’s mine. I’m impressed with myself because I’ve been in New York for more than 24 hours and I haven’t contacted or shagged Michelle. This is genuine progress.”
I nodded. “I was surprised you brought Michelle up with Roka. What happened to keeping it professional?”
“Normal rules went out the window with a pop star. Also, after you gave us both an early bath. Which I still haven’t forgiven you for.”
“You have,” I told her with a grin. “And I’m proud of you for not contacting Michelle.” I framed my face like I was in the Vogue video. “Clearly, all you really needed was this gorgeous face to distract you.”
Eliza’s smile died midway to fruition.
I didn’t think my boast was that out of bounds.
“You’re like a reformed addict, but instead of avoiding drugs, you’re avoiding your ex-wife’s—”
“Don’t finish that sentence.” The colour drained from Eliza’s face. “Oh, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Whose idea was it to come to a sapphic night where Michelle might also turn up, too?”
My mouth dropped open as I swivelled on my bar stool. “She’s here?”
I followed Eliza’s gaze to the entrance and saw the woman I’d only ever viewed via Instagram. Tall, dark-haired, wearing a highly styled jeans-and-cardigan combo. Like Eliza, Michelle was the kind of woman who turned heads. She’d just turned both of ours, but not for the right reasons.
Michelle scanned the room, and I turned back to the bar, slapping Eliza’s leg in an effort to make her do the same. She complied.
The bartender delivered our gins.
“I can’t deal with this,” Eliza said. “Not tonight. Not when I was finally feeling like I might be getting my life together. I don’t want to speak to her. I don’t want to be weak again.”
This was panic stations. But Eliza had helped me out. I had to return the favour.
Then it struck me what we needed to do.
“Right,” I said, my brain kicking into gear. “We’re together. As of right now, we’re madly in love and have been for a few months.”
“What?” Eliza looked at me like I’d suggested we rob a bank. However, when she looked over my shoulder, she swore, then ducked her head.
“Shit, I think she saw me. She might be walking this way.”
“This is not the world’s biggest bar. You can’t avoid her unless you do something drastic.”
Eliza winced and threw me a panicked stare.
“She needs to see that you’ve moved on. That you’re happy. But we need to sell it properly before she walks up.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean...” I took a deep breath, hardly believing what I was about to suggest. “Lean in and kiss me. Like you mean it. Just for show.”
I knew it sounded ridiculous. I also knew that my heart was beating overtime at the thought that it might just happen.
Eliza stared at me for a moment, her eyes wide. Then she glanced over my shoulder, and something decisive flickered across her face.
Without another word, she cupped my face in her hands, looked me straight in the eyes, licked her lips, then pressed them to mine.
Even though I’d suggested it, nothing could have prepared me for this.
Because this wasn’t a tentative, awkward kiss.
Not by a long shot. It was soft and urgent, making every nerve ending in my body wake up and pay attention as if they’d been sleepwalking for years.
Her lips were warm and tasted faintly of that lethal shot, and when she deepened the kiss, her tongue sliding against mine with a confidence that made my knees forget their job, I forgot entirely why we were doing this.
I forgot about Michelle, about the bar, about everything except the way Eliza’s fingers gripped my face, and the small sound she made against my mouth that went straight through me like a live wire.
On the rooftop earlier, I’d wanted to kiss her.
But this? This was something else entirely.
What I’d suggested as a simple distraction was rewriting something fundamental inside me, as if my brain was frantically scribbling corrections in the margins of everything I thought I knew about myself. About us.
The trouble was, I had no idea if she was just that good at pretending, or if the ground was shifting under her feet, too.
When we finally broke apart, the absence of her lips was like a physical ache.
My mind scrambled to reassemble the pieces of reality, but it was like trying to solve a puzzle after someone had shaken the box.
It was as if I’d been struck by lightning, and then immediately hit by a bus for good measure.
Eliza no longer looked over my shoulder. Instead, she stared at me with something like the same freaked-out wonder that must be written all over my face.
She opened her mouth, closed it, then shook her head like she was trying to clear it. When she finally did glance over my shoulder, her eyes widened.
“She’s leaving. I think it did the trick.” Eliza ran her fingers through her hair, then sat looking at them, as if she’d forgotten they were attached to her body. When she glanced up at me, her gaze went to my lips, but she dragged it away almost immediately.
She stared at the door. “Should I run out after her?”
I reached out and ran a hand up her arm. Which only caused more shockwaves to echo through my body. I tried to control my nerves which were beyond frayed, but it wasn’t easy. I took deep breaths and tried to pretend I snogged my former friend-turned-nemesis-turned-mentor every day of the week.
“Why would you do that? You wanted to avoid talking to her, right?”
She nodded. “But now I feel a bit mean.” She stared at her drink, then back at me.
Her eyes had changed from their usual crystal blue to something darker: storm-cloud blue in the dim bar lighting.
I wanted to chart the way her cheekbones caught the shadows, how her mouth was still slightly parted from our kiss.
When had I started noticing these things about Eliza?
When had the sharp angles of her face become something I wanted to trace with my fingertips?
We sat there for another moment, the weight of what had just happened settling between us like an uninvited guest. The kiss was fake, a performance, but it had felt 100% real to me. What if it never happened again? I couldn’t let that be one and done.
Before I could even think about what I was doing, I leaned in and pressed my lips back to Eliza’s. When she responded, my entire body sparked back to life.
This time, there was no pretence, no audience to perform for: just the soft press of her mouth against mine and the way she tasted of something that was purely her.
Her hand found the back of my neck, fingers threading through my short hair, and right then, I didn’t care about how this complicated everything.
Tomorrow was a different story. Right here, in this moment, she was perfect.
“You two!”
A familiar voice cut through the bar noise beside us.
I jerked away from Eliza like I’d been caught doing something illegal, my heart rate immediately switching from post-kiss flutter to full panic mode.
Roka slid onto the bar stool next to us, still in her Fleetwood Mac T-shirt, hair a little more slicked back. “I thought I picked up a vibe, but you were both being so coy about it.”
“We’re not—” I started.
“Actually, we’re really not…” Eliza said at the same time.
Roka waved us both away with a grin. “Please. You were just sucking face so hard at this bar, people were pulling up stools to stare in wonder. You want me to believe you just fell into each other?”
My face burned with the kind of heat that meant I’d turned an alarming shade of crimson, and my hand shook as I reached for my drink.
The adrenaline from kissing Eliza coursed through my system, making everything feel too bright and too much.
The last thing I wanted was to make conversation with a pop star. But I had no choice.
Roka signalled to the bartender, who greeted her with a fist bump, and lined up three shots of the liquid that got us into this mess in the first place.
“Believe it or not, that was our first kiss. Ever.” I stared at Eliza. I still couldn’t believe what had just happened.
“You’ve been wasting a lot of time if that was the first. I suspect there might be more to come.” Roka grinned, then raised her glass. “To you two, and to our future collaborations.”
I took a large gulp to cover my embarrassment.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier about collaboration and taking risks. I’m doing a festival next month in Suffolk. Why don’t you come as my guests? VIP backstage passes, stay in one of our fancy glamping tents.”
Eliza glanced at me, then back at Roka, her eyes wild. “One question: is there a lake?”
Roka laughed. “I’ll put it on my rider: no lakes. How’s that?”
I grinned, thankful that the spotlight had turned 90 degrees.
“Are you serious about the festival?” I was already thinking about what might happen in the glamping tent.
The thought of being in such close quarters with Eliza, away from our normal every day, sent a thrill through me that had nothing to do with business partnerships.
Look what had happened when we came to New York.
Would we kiss again in Suffolk? Would the festival vibe make things escalate?
“Completely. It’ll be fun, and you get to see me in action. I did just witness you two in action, so fair’s fair.”
Eliza’s cheeks turned purple, but she gave me a slight nod and a shy smile.
I looked at her, then at Roka, and gave her a nod.
“We’d love to.”
Was Eliza thinking what might happen in the tent, too?