Lindsey Kelk - I Heart Paris

‘Hey.’ Alex dropped his coffee in the bin beside him and leaned his head down to mine for a kiss. ‘How was Erin’s?’

‘Amazing,’ I replied, reaching back up for another slightly longer kiss that made me catch my breath. ‘You should come with us next time. Provincetown is beautiful.’

‘I’m not really beach people,’ he said, catching my hand in his and pulling me down the street. ‘And from the look of those shoulders, neither are you.’

‘Oh, I know.’ I shrugged the strap of my bag back on to the narrow strap of my dress, revealing my attractive lobster red skin. ‘I should just stay inside until September.’

‘Hmm.’ Alex squeezed my hand. ‘That’s not going to play exactly into my plans, but I’m not entirely against the idea.’

There was that shiver again.

‘And what plans are these?’ I asked as we walked up the block to Alex’s apartment. His place was only five minutes from the subway, but in this heat, they were five minutes too many.

‘So the band has been asked to play a festival,’ he said, forcing his hand into the skintight pocket of his jeans, feeling around for a key that wasn’t there.

‘Really? That’s great,’ I dipped my hand into the tiny pocket inside my bag and produced my key to Alex’s flat as we reached the door. He took it from me with a heart-stopping grin. It was sickening how much I fancied him. It was like, I’d see him every day and after a while I stopped seeing him. And then, out of nowhere, I’d just get a sidelong glance at him and the wind would be completely knocked out of me, as if I were seeing him for the first time.

‘See? This is why I need you to move in,’ he slid his hand around my waist and pulled me in for another, deeper kiss as we staggered sideways into the apartment building. My skin prickled with goosebumps from the shock of the air conditioning.

‘Or you could just remember to take your key out with you,’ I whispered, pulling away with stinging lips. Must remember to buy lip balm with a higher SPF. ‘Tell me about this festival.’

‘Tell me you missed me this weekend,’ he whispered back, running his finger over my bottom lip.

I paused, looking down at my flip-flops for a second. It was moments like this that made me feel like a complete idiot for not running back to Manhattan, throwing all my belongings in a bag and pitching up at the apartment in Brooklyn in a heartbeat.

‘Of course I missed you,’ I took the key from his hand and opened the apartment door. ‘Did you cry yourself to sleep every night?’

‘I cry myself to sleep every night you’re not here,’ he shot me a grin and walked over to the fridge, producing two icy beers. ‘But since you won’t move in, I’ve had to find a way through it.’

I dropped my bag onto one of his knackered old sofas (better for it than the floor) and took the beer. This was the perfect time to have The Conversation. To say, I really do want to move in with you, but I’m ever so slightly shit-scared. But I didn’t.

Alex vanished into his bedroom and I didn’t follow. Instead I looked around the apartment. The tiny openplan kitchen, littered with take-out boxes and empty coffee cups. Two huge, squishy sofas faced the huge floor-to-ceiling windows with all of Manhattan laid out in front of us, sparkling in the sunlight. It didn’t look sweaty, hateful and oppressive from in here. It looked beautiful. And whenever I got bored of looking at the New York City skyline, if that was in fact possible, there was always the massive flat screen TV shoved in the corner, with the DVR already set to record all my favourite shows.

Was I being completely ridiculous? What was the worst that would happen? I’d move in, there would be fewer takeaway cartons in the kitchen, more products in the bathroom. We’d go to bed together every night, wake up together every morning, go out, come home, watch TV, cook, shop, clean, moan, bitch, stop having sex, stop talking, start cheating and end up hating each other.

Wow. I followed my bag down on to the sofa. Now that was not a healthy internal reaction to the idea of moving in with my lovely, lovely boyfriend.

‘So, the festival,’ Alex called from the bedroom. ‘It’s pretty cool, we’ve played it before, but they’ve asked us to come back and play again, it’s like the second headline slot.’

‘That’s amazing,’ I yelled back, trying to wipe those horrible thoughts out of my stupid head. ‘So when is it? Next summer?’

‘Uh, it’s kind of next weekend.’ He appeared in the doorway. ‘Yeah, it’s not that amazing. Someone else dropped out and we were first runner-up.’

‘But still,’ I let myself be distracted by the biceps peeping out of his T-shirt as he stretched against the door frame. ‘It’s better than a slap around the face. Is it in the city?’

‘That’s the other thing,’ he let go of the door and came over to the sofa, ‘it’s in Paris. France.’

‘Paris, France?’

‘Paris, France.’

‘Is there another Paris?’

‘Paris, Texas?’

‘All right smart arse.’ I rubbed my forehead. ‘So you’re going to Paris next weekend?’ At least that would buy me another couple of weeks to try and get over this whole moving in nonsense.

‘We’re going to Paris next weekend,’ he corrected. ‘You’ll come right? I figure I can’t leave you alone in the city after what happened in LA.’

‘Nothing happened in LA.’ I slapped his thigh. It didn’t matter how many jokes he made about my ill-fated work trip to LA, I still wasn’t OK with it. As much fun as an all-expenses paid trip to Hollywood to interview an up-and-coming Brit actor who turned out to be gay and tried to convince me to be his professional beard might sound, it almost cost me my job, my work permit and Alex. So I thought it perfectly understandable that I might still be a little bit sore about it.

‘OK, OK.’ Alex grabbed my hands to hold off the attack. ‘So how about you look at it like a romantic trip to Paris. We’ve never taken a trip before.’

‘True.’ I nodded, letting him slide his hands up from my wrists to interlink his fingers with mine. ‘And I have always wanted to go to Paris.’

‘You’ve never been?’ he asked, looking surprised. I shook my head. ‘But it’s so close to the UK.’

‘I missed the GCSE trip after I fell down a pothole on the geography field trip,’ I admitted. ‘Not my finest moment.’

‘I don’t know what a pothole is, but it sounds like something you would do.’ He kissed me lightly on the lips. ‘You know I love you even though you’re a walking disaster zone, right?’

‘Thanks.’ I couldn’t really be offended, it was true. I’d already broken two glasses in a week. ‘Won’t Paris be super expensive though? I’m still broke from LA.’

Broke, but beautifully dressed, I thought, just not today.

‘You don’t need to worry about anything.’ Alex started to plait a section of my hair. ‘I’m hardly gonna ask you to come away with me and then expect you to pay for it.’

‘But I want to.’ I frowned. ‘I don’t want you to have to pay for everything. You know I’m really not that girl.’

‘I thought every girl was the “let my boyfriend take me to Paris for the weekend” kind of a girl,’ Alex said, pulling my hair. ‘Or is this just an excuse for you to weasel out of the trip the same way you’re trying to weasel out of moving in with me?’

‘I’m not weaseling out of anything,’ I pulled the loose plait out of his hands. ‘I do want to go to Paris, I just don’t want you to have to pay for me to go to Paris. I’ll find a way to make it work. And if it’s next weekend, we’ll be away for your birthday. Your big three-oh.’

Alex’s thirtieth birthday had been looming on the horizon for months and, while he was pretending to be super cool about it, the official line was that I wasn’t allowed to ‘make a big deal out of nothing’, which I had translated from boy-speak to mean ‘if I don’t acknowledge it, it won’t actually happen’. Typical boy-logic that could be applied to many, many of his actions.