The Friends We Keep(31)
Every evening, Ben would show up at her hotel after spending the day with his friends, not knowing that Evvie had wasted the day counting off the minutes until he arrived. He would walk in the room and she would be all over him, tearing at his clothes, the pair of them falling on the bed laughing as they rolled around, playing with each other’s bodies, reveling in the heights to which they could bring the other.
Ben brought toys one night. Handcuffs, silk scarves, a paddle.
“Is this your thing?” Evvie had asked, concerned. It hadn’t been either of their “thing,” it turned out, other than for the fact that it made them laugh. When Ben tapped her backside with the paddle, she started giggling, and when he tried it harder, at her request, to see if it might do something for her, she let out a loud “ouch!” There was nothing sexy about it, which made them both crack up, and somehow their shared laughter, the sense of sex being fun, made Evvie feel closer to Ben than anything else.
“If I come to New York, can I see you?” Ben said on their final morning.
Evvie nodded. “And I’ll come to see you if I’m in London. How about that?” She wondered why there seemed to be a lump in the back of her throat.
Evvie was about to experience huge adventures; the last thing she wanted was an English boyfriend who would get in the way. And yet, she couldn’t quite believe that she probably wouldn’t ever see him again, couldn’t quite believe how attached she had got in such a short time.
The modeling agency had sent a car to pick her up and take her to the airport. Ben had carried her suitcases and put them in the car before taking her in his arms and holding her tight. They had clung to each other for a long time, and when Evvie disengaged, she thought she might have seen tears in his eyes.
It’s not real, she told herself on the plane. It wasn’t like they’d spent quality time together. They had had amazing sex, and some fun. They had even gone out for dinner on the last night, which felt like a date, even though Ben had had far too much to drink and ended up passing out as soon as they got back to the hotel room.
* * *
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Her apartment was a loft in the Meatpacking District. It had sounded glamorous when the agency told her, but it was five flights up, and the stairs were dark and dingy. She arrived outside the door of 5B and pulled out the key the agency had sent her, opening the door to a huge open-plan room with exposed brick walls and floor-to-ceiling windows, through which daylight poured.
There was an L-shaped white sofa and a large distressed coffee table on which sat three empty wine bottles, five glasses, three coffee mugs, and an overflowing pile of magazines.
“Hello?” Evvie hauled her suitcases in. “Anyone here?”
“Hello!” An enormous blonde with legs like a gazelle came running into the room, flinging her arms around Evvie. “You must be Evie!”
“Evvie,” she corrected.
“I am Sophie from Hamburg. We’ve all been waiting for you.” She picked up Evvie’s biggest suitcase as if it weighed nothing, and started striding toward a corridor. “You are sharing a room with me, but I have left you lots of space.”
The room was big, and tidy, unlike the bedroom next door shared by Annabelle, who was Dutch, and Kat, who was English, which had clothes strewn all over the floor. By the time she had unpacked and put her clothes away, she had stopped thinking about Ben, and by the end of her first week, after late-night getting-to-know-you chats with her roommates, and appointments with hairdressers, bookers, and photographers, her old life at West Country University felt like it had happened to someone else, many lifetimes ago.
It was a whirlwind, and a wake-up call after a sleepy Somerset university. Everything was bigger and brighter in New York. Every night, the girls would try on one another’s clothes before heading out to a club. There was more champagne than they could drink and cocaine to kill their appetites and sober them up, and everywhere they went, there were dozens of creepy old men willing to keep them in drinks, drugs, and occasionally expensive presents, mostly just for the privilege of their attention.
After six weeks, Evvie got her first official modeling job. Dressing to get ready, she pulled on some pants from Kat that she had borrowed a few times before. They had always been a little big, but as she shrugged them up and tried to fasten them, the material stretched, the button refusing to meet the buttonhole.
Evvie groaned. It wasn’t like she’d been eating—living with three other girls who didn’t eat did wonders for her dieting. All of the girls were going to extreme measures to stay skinny, and Evvie’s Dexatrim combined with the odd line of cocaine at the parties they went to was proving magical. So how was it possible that these pants didn’t close? She grabbed a safety pin and pinned them together, wondering if she might have been bloated from something she ate.
She forgot about it once she arrived at the photo shoot, until a change of outfit and the photographer instructing her to jump off a box with her arms high up in the air. As she launched herself, the military jacket she was wearing popped open, the button clattering to the floor and spinning into a corner, revealing Evvie’s nonexistent breasts. Except they were no longer nonexistent; they seemed much fuller, and rounder than usual.
“Fantastic!” shouted the photographer, who kept on shooting as Evvie frantically pulled the jacket over her breasts, silently and shamefully vowing to eat nothing for the next two weeks.