They continued along the street, still talking. At some point she remembered there was an apple in her bag, leftover from lunch, and she took it out, polished it on her skirt and crunched into it, then passed it on to him. Was there anything more companionable than sharing an apple with a delightful stranger? she thought happily, the two of them so easy with one another that their sentences overlapped frequently, punctuated with bursts of laughter.
‘I was feeling a bit of a fraud before tonight,’ she admitted. Maybe it was the beer making her talk so freely, or perhaps the fact that they were walking so close to one another now that their shoulders kept brushing against each other, the connection between them becoming physically, deliciously tactile.
‘In what way? Oh Christ, don’t say you’re a spy or something. Is your name even Lara?’ He stopped, eyeing her teasingly. ‘Is this the moment when you tell me you’re working undercover and you’re really a sixty-eight-year-old bloke from Dundee called Malcolm?’
She laughed again. She was starting to feel giddy. Untethered in the best possible way. ‘Ah shite. Rumbled,’ she said in a gravelly Scottish accent. Now he was laughing too and the sound almost lifted her off her feet. She liked him more with every passing moment. Did he like her too? It felt dizzyingly as if he might.
The apple was finished now and she paused by a large street planter to fish out a pip and poke it into the warm earth there. ‘What are you . . . ? Is this some stealth gardening?’ Ben asked.
She blushed. ‘Oh. It’s just a habit,’ she confessed. ‘I always plant the pips wherever I finish eating an apple. I like imagining trees springing up in my wake, everywhere I go. You never know.’
‘Like you’re a tree princess, with a legacy of mighty orchards around the world.’
‘Something like that,’ she replied, hoping he didn’t think she was too much of a weirdo. She’d become so used to doing this with apple pips, cherry stones, tomato seeds, that it no longer seemed a big deal to her, but she could see that it might appear strange to outsiders.
‘I love it,’ he told her, smiling, and then they began walking again, ignoring the man selling cellophane-wrapped roses who tried to press one on them. ‘Anyway, you were telling me about feeling like a fraud,’ he remembered, elbowing her gently. ‘How so?’
‘I meant . . .’ She tried to marshal her thoughts into sentences. ‘Well, I’ve been here nearly three weeks now, and keep telling everyone back home what a wild time I’m having, how much I love New York and all that – except . . .’ She hesitated, feeling as if she were peeling away the top layer of her skin, exposing her weakness. ‘Except it’s all been kind of exaggerated,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve felt quite lonely a lot of the time. I mean, I’ve been to Times Square and the Empire State Building like a tourist, but I haven’t really got under the surface of the city. Not properly. But this . . .’ She gestured around her, at the neon signs lighting the pizzerias and kebab places, the bars and restaurants, the zigzag of fire escapes on every building, the hum of people and traffic. She felt as if her outer edges were blurring with her surroundings suddenly, her body filling up with the evening on a cellular level, New York pouring into her veins with a heady thrill. ‘This, right here, is it. And I feel so happy, to be here, experiencing – where are we? MacDougal Street,’ she read from a nearby street sign. ‘So happy to be walking down MacDougal Street for the very first time, because I finally made it. I finally got my New York. So thank you.’
His eyes were soft beneath the glow of a streetlight. ‘Well, it doesn’t have to end yet,’ he said. ‘I say we just keep going and make a proper night of it. I could walk for hours, couldn’t you? Although . . . Wait a minute.’ They’d reached a crossroads and he peered diagonally over at a bar, his body suddenly taut with a new energy. ‘No way. There it is! Cafe Wha? – it’s on my list of places to go. Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan used to hang out there. Oh wow. Shall we? Would you mind?’
‘Absolutely!’ she replied, loving his boyish enthusiasm and immediacy, delighted that he didn’t feel he had to act cool in front of her. ‘Let’s do it.’
Inside, Cafe Wha? was grungy and dark, with framed photos of musicians on the walls and booth seating. Lightbulbs dangled from the low ceiling and a band on stage hit the last few notes of a song to a rowdy round of applause. The place was crammed with hip people in Stooges and Ramones T-shirts, snaky tattoos and great eye make-up, and for a few uncertain moments Lara wished she was dressed in something edgier than office clothes before deciding that, actually, she didn’t care. Ben bought them a pitcher of beer to share and they squeezed into the last seats of a booth, having to lean their heads together in order to hear above the music as a new song started up.
The evening progressed from talking to dancing, and then, once back in their booth to catch their breath, their eyes met, and in the next moment, they were both instinctively leaning towards the other and kissing across the table. Her lips against his, her eyes closed, her body overwhelmed by sensation. Oh my goodness. He was an amazing kisser. Before that night, she’d thought of kissing as a fairly boring and unhygienic part of foreplay. She’d put up with the thrusting tongues of previous boyfriends, her head pushed back so hard that her neck hurt, and the unpleasant taste of someone else’s mouth – none of it good in her opinion. But with Ben, wow, she finally got it. At last, the idea – and the practice – of kissing made total, giddying sense.
‘Whew,’ she murmured thickly when they eventually broke apart. His pupils were massive as they gazed at one another, colourful lights strobing across their faces. The ground beneath their feet throbbed to the bass. She felt bewitched, as if she were under an enchantment from a fairy tale.
‘This is . . . amazing,’ he shouted above the music. ‘Tonight, I mean. You. What have you done to me?’
She felt the same way. Hadn’t she known it, from that very first moment? ‘Oh, I’ve barely started,’ she replied, with the cockiness that came from her complete certainty about him. About them. ‘Let’s go back to my apartment,’ she added in the next breath.
Once there, they tumbled into bed with a new urgency. ‘Wait, I’ve got a condom somewhere,’ she said, scurrying naked from the sheets after a while to rummage through the so far unused ‘Sex in the City care package’ her friend Jodie had given her as a leaving present.
‘Look at you,’ he said huskily, propping himself up on one elbow in the bed and gazing at her. The bedroom blind was broken and an orange glow seeped through from the streetlight outside, illuminating their outlines. ‘You’re so beautiful.’
Nobody had ever said that word to Lara before. Nobody had looked at her that way either, as if he was seeing her, really seeing her, and he liked everything he saw. Her body flooded with heat at the compliment but she couldn’t relax fully into his words. She felt disbelieving, if anything, as if he couldn’t possibly mean it. The room wasn’t even brightly lit, after all. ‘I bet you say that to all the girls,’ she mumbled, sliding quickly back under the sheet.