Page 73 of Break the Ice

‘You too, lovely. Keep the change.’

The cab driver looks at me. Over here, everyone’s a buddy or a bro. ‘Lovely’ is a London thing. Everyone is always lovely. It’s not a bad thing. But he nods suspiciously. ‘Appreciated.’

I shut the door of the cab and look up at my folks’ brownstone, lit up for Christmas, a big tree in the bay window. It’s good to be back but I am beat. I got in late last night and went straight to bed, but as soon as I was up I was in demand. Maddie wanted to take me for coffee, I got a call from my dad to join him for brunch uptown, which turned into me meeting people from NYU, where I used to work, for wings and drinks. All the while, I kept looking at my watch, because yesterday I formulated a crazy plan with a crazy Brit for her to fly into New York and spend New Year’s with me and I knew that she would be arriving. Soon. And I would have to introduce her to everyone. Because every time I tried to mention her, the words couldn’t quite come out, and now she’s likely here, with my family, in my house, entertaining them with stories about the time I went to Stonehenge, wore her Juicy Couture track pants and pushed her into the icy sea.

Except not.

She’s sitting on my stoop in the cold with T and Lenny. Is she having a slice? She has a huge checked scarf wrapped around her, a long wool coat and a fur-trapper hat. She looks like she’s here to eat pizza but also survive an apocalyptic winter. But I can’t stop smiling to see her here, safe and standing on my street.

‘JOSHY!’ she screams across the road when she sees me. ‘What’s good?’ she yells like she’s just rolled out of the hood. I shake my head at how very happy and excited she seems to be to be here and how she seems to have made friends already. ‘How is this your place? Are you serious? What else you been hiding from me?’

I see T and Lenny laughing in the background as I walk over and she throws her arms around me, that piece of pizza still in her hands. I hug her back firmly, allowing her to plant a cheesy greasy kiss on my cheek. ‘I see you’re having fun.’

‘Lenny took me to this place called Luigi’s and I’ve had a slice and I put extra cheese on it and it’s bloody yum and we drove through the tunnel and I saw the skyline and Jesus, this place is awesome.’

She has a bit of olive in her teeth but I can’t tell her it’s there much less get a word in edgeways.

‘Nice girl you got there, young Abelman,’ Lenny tells me, winking. ‘T and I approve, five-star rating all day long.’

I laugh. ‘Thank you for picking her up and taking her for a slice.’

‘Oh, let’s remove all doubt there, she took us. Thank you for the treat, Miss Phoebe,’ he replies.

She goes over and hugs them in turn. ‘Least I could do. Will I see you again?’

‘Well, for sure. Someone’s gotta show you where the best pastrami is round here and I wouldn’t trust this one here…’ Lenny says, playfully pushing me.

‘Hey.’ I shake their hands in turn. ‘Be kind, it’s Christmas. You fellas done for the night?’

‘Yes, sir. You guys have a fun evening,’ Lenny replies. ‘Miss Phoebe, the pleasure was all mine.’

‘Welcome to New York,’ T adds. Phoebe puts her arms in the air in a celebratory fashion as they drive away and I watch her wave them off, probably the first time anyone’s done that for a while. I look at her for a moment. There was a part of me that thought she’d find this whole premise a bit too impulsive, that maybe she’d see that coming all the way here to help a person she’d only met five days ago bordered on the ridiculous. But I know that is the sort of chaos she likes in her life. It means she is here. This makes me strangely happy.

‘I feel bad I didn’t get you a slice. Do you want the last bit of mine?’ she says, passing me a bitten half-triangle of pizza.

‘I’m good,’ I say, looking at the actual indentations of her teeth on the crust. ‘Tasty pizza?’

‘Josh, it was like… massive. Like an elephant’s tongue. Tasty as fuck.’

I smile. I’ve never heard it described like that before. I watch as she finishes the pizza and gets out her phone to take short videos of my street, looking up to the sky in wonder. I see numerous bags lined up on the stoop and have flashbacks to our trip of her many bags in the trunk of the car, the way she rifles through each, not knowing where anything is.

‘Have you not been in the house yet?’ I ask

‘We literally just got here and had a chinwag and pizza outside like in⁠—’

‘Sex and the City,’ I say, grinning at the word ‘chinwag’ because I love how it sums up the art of gossiping so well. ‘Except when SJP does it, she’s in couture and it’s summer. It’s two degrees out, aren’t you frozen?’

‘I think I’m just warmed by the excitement of it all,’ she says, jigging on the spot. She turns to the house. ‘This here is fancy pants though, Joshua.’

‘Is it?’

She nudges me. ‘Uhhh, yeah. It’s beautiful. We going in?’ she says, grabbing at her tote.

‘Yeah, but… one thing,’ I say, hesitantly. ‘I’ve not had the time to mention to anyone that you’re coming. Not that I’m not happy you’re here but it happened so quickly and…’

She smiles. ‘We don’t even have much of a backstory to what this is.’

‘Exactly,’ I say, and walk up the stairs to the house nervously, helping her with her bags. At the top I put my key in the door. ‘I’m just going to say we met in the fall and we’ve been casual ever since.’