Upper East Side #9

by Ashley Valentine

  Mekhi imitated her, wincing in pain as he tried to awaken the muscles in his legs. This was a lot more demanding than his usual workout: a walk to the corner for smokes.

  “Feels great, huh?” Nicole grinned enthusiastically while she stretched, as though a good stretch was better than a hot bath.

  “Yeah,” Mekhi wheezed. “Excellent.”

  “I thought we’d start here,” Nicole explained, putting her feet back on the ground. She locked her knees, then reached down, touching the ground with both palms. “You know, head across 14thStreet to the Hudson and then downtown to Battery Park.”

  Mekhi did some mental math. That was at least two miles, which was two miles farther than he’d ever jogged in his life.

  What had he gotten himself into?

  At first it seemed like he was going to be fine: the first block went by without incident. Mekhi followed the sexy wiggle of Nicole’s ass as she jogged down the sidewalk, dodging pedestrians and strollers.

  This is fun! he told himself. It feels great.

  When they reached the corner of Fifth Avenue, they paused for the light, and Nicole turned to him. “Are you okay?” She furrowed her brow in worry.

  Mekhi’s skin felt prickly. The sweat poured off of his forehead and down his nose, dripping on the sidewalk. The early evening sun was beating down on them. He was pretty sure he’d be dead by sundown.

  “Sure,” he responded shakily. “I’m fine.”

  When they’d been moving, the burn in his legs and the pounding in his chest had been somehow bearable, but as soon as they’d stopped his knees had felt like they might buckle underneath him.

  The light changed and Nicole dashed into the street. “Come on!” she called over her shoulder happily.

  Mekhi took a deep breath and stumbled into the street, just missing running over an old lady in a big straw hat, pulling a shopping trolley.

  “Watch it, asshole!” she shouted.

  Ignoring her, Mekhi kept running, following Nicole like a dog at the track chasing that mechanical rabbit. His heart pounded in his ears as they jogged down the sidewalk past 6th, then 7th, 8th, and, finally, 9thAvenue. Between 9thand Greenwich the traffic cleared, so Nicole ran in the street. Ignoring the hot blasts of exhaust from the oncoming buses, Mekhi followed behind, jogging toward the shimmering Hudson River, just two blocks away.

  Hang in there, he told himself. Just make it to the river. Just keep going. He had no idea how he’d make it all the way down to Battery Park, on the tip of Manhattan, but first things first: he had to get to the river. His feet throbbed inside his not-quite-broken-in New Balance bought-for-ten-bucks-at-the-Paragon-Sports-sale running shoes. He’d wiped so much sweat from his forehead that he was scared that he might be completely dehydrated. He was dying for a drink of water. He was dying to sit down.

  Maybe he was just plain dying?

  They dashed across the West Side Highway and into Hudson River Park, where a wide paved jogging/rollerblading/bike path ran from midtown to Tribeca. They weren’t the only ones taking advantage of the clear, sunny day—hundreds of people were running and rollerblading, bicycling, and strolling hand in hand. Nicole beat him across the street and wove through the crowd until she reached the chain-link fence that presumably kept people from diving right into the river. She kicked her legs up in front of her, jogging in place as she waited for Mekhi to catch up. Despite the heat, she was barely sweating.

  Mekhi hurled himself in Nicole’s direction. This is great, he told himself. He felt great! The sun was bright, the air was fresh, and there was a breeze blowing in off the river. He grinned wildly. He could do this!

  Then his legs gave way underneath him and he landed on the rough pavement with a thud as he crumpled to the ground.

  “Mekhi!” Nicole cried, leaning over him. “Are you okay?”

  Mekhi looked up to see her flushed face framed by wispy ringlets of black hair. His vision started to cloud.

  “Am I dying?” he asked out loud. “Are you an angel?”

  “I better administer CPR,” Nicole announced sternly, crouching down and pressing her mouth to his.

  As if that wouldn’t give him an even bigger heart attack.

  28

  Wobbling uneasily, Yasmine gripped the wrought-iron railing and steadied herself on the low marble steps leading up to the ivy-covered mansion on 87thStreet. She burped noisily and jabbed at the doorbell four or five times before she finally managed to ring it. Maybe consoling herself with an ice-cold bottle of pinot grigio hadn’t been the wisest decision she’d ever made, especially since she was minutes away from a job interview.

  After being thrown off the set of Breakfast at Fred’s, Yasmine had ridden the elevator with the Porsha-Sinclaire-in-training Destiny, who had informed Yasmine that it just so happened that her mother was looking for a highly qualified, energetic, and enthusiastic person for a very important job. Yasmine had been too upset to get the exact details, but Destiny tore a page from her Louis Vuitton agenda and scribbled an address, urging Yasmine to follow up on it immediately.

  After a few glasses of wine stolen from Rufus Hargrove’s personal stash, Yasmine had started to see things more clearly.

  Ken Mogul is a soulless sellout. He was making a run-of-the-mill Hollywood teen soap while she was an experimental auteur! She had no business wasting her time and her talent on that crap. She was bound for NYU, the best film program in the country. She’d have access to the finest professors, world-class equipment, and an entire acting program full of the most talented student actors around. Why should she be wasting her time as a hack, working on a project she didn’t believe in when she could be working her ass off and saving up the cold hard cash to produce her own film in the fall. She already had an idea for a feature, about a conflicted young artist forced to choose between following her muse or staying in a rapidly decaying relationship with her insane incense-and-herbal-tea-addicted writer boyfriend.

  Sounds like a case of art imitating life.

  A sour-faced maid in a black skirt with white apron and little white lace doily on her head opened the heavy glass door. “Can I help you?” she demanded suspiciously.

  “I’m here about the job,” Yasmine slurred. “The mom’s daughter...” She paused momentarily fumbling with the girl’s name. “Destiny! That’s it. She told me to come and see her mom about a job. So I did.”

  The maid frowned. “I see. Come in then. The lady of the house will meet you in her office.”

  Yasmine stomped through the marble foyer, past a sweeping staircase illuminated by a massive crystal chandelier, and into a mahogany-paneled room lined with bookcases and furnished with tasteful antiques. She had no idea what the job in question was, but clearly this was a very successful business woman. She was probably a busy executive in desperate need of a competent personal assistant. It was sure to be shit work, but artists always had to suffer for their art, unless they wanted to make commercial shit like Ken Mogul.

  “Please wait here,” the maid instructed.

  Yasmine perched on the edge of an ornate wood chair. The room was ever-so-slightly spinning, and she gripped the seat tightly. Just don’t throw up, she told herself.

  “You my new friend?”

  Yasmine looked up. There was no one there.

  Great, I’m so trashed I’m hearing voices.

  “You my new friend?” asked the voice again before dissolving into giggles.

  “Wh-who’s there?” Yasmine called out nervously. The last thing she wanted was to be caught talking to herself in front of her new boss.

  “Are you a girl?” another voice asked.

  “Why don’t you have any hair?” asked the first voice.

  Two voices? How much had she had to drink?

  Yasmine held her breath and listened. She stood up. Where were the voices coming from? She knelt and pressed her cheek to the cold, perfectly polished wood floor, scanning the room from that vantage. It worked: under the gilded wood couch she could make out the
figure of a skinny little boy with curly hair.

  “You found me!” he cried, clambering out from under the couch.

  “Yeah, hi,” Yasmine said. “Is your mommy home?”

  “You smell like wine,” the boy announced, frowning. “I’m four. How old are you?”

  “Find me too!” cried the other voice.

  What could she do?

  “Where are you?” she called out, propping herself up on her hands and knees. She looked under the other furniture.

  “Find me, find me!” the voice called.

  She followed the sound of the voice to the corner of the library, where a large globe stood on a round glass-topped table. She lifted the tablecloth, and underneath was a little boy who looked, and was dressed, exactly like the other kid.

  “You found me!” the boy cried. He dashed out from under the table and ran over to the couch, where his brother was still bouncing. He leaped onto the couch and rammed into his brother. The two boys tumbled onto the floor.

  “Boys!” called a voice. A tall, pink-suit-clad woman strode into the library, clutching a cell phone and a rolled up copy of Vogue. “You must be Yasmine,” the woman observed in a clipped tone. “Destiny mentioned you might be calling. I’m a little surprised you’ve decided to just drop by, but I suppose that’s fine. Shows initiative. I like that.”

  Oops.

  “Right,” Yasmine said, standing up and trying her best to appear completely sober. “You must be Mrs...?” She paused, realizing that she had no idea what Destiny’s last name was.

  “It’s Ms. Morgan,” the woman replied. “I didn’t take my husband’s name. This is the twenty-first century, after all.”

  “Sorry,” Yasmine mumbled. This was the weirdest job interview ever.

  “No matter,” the woman continued. “You’re clearly a hit with the boys.”

  “The boys?” Yasmine asked. The twins came up behind her, pulling on her hands with all their might.

  “Play with us!” they cried.

  “So, you know, the job is fairly standard.” Ms. Morgan fiddled with her cell for a moment. “A few days a week, just in the afternoons. You’ll fetch the boys from camp, run them to their therapist, accompany them on their playdates, the usual sort of thing. No doubt you know the drill.” She put the phone to her ear.

  Camp? Playdates? Excuse me?

  “I think there’s been some misunderstanding,” Yasmine stammered, struggling to stay upright with the wine in her system and the weight of two kids tugging her floorward. Suffering for her art was all well and good, but she was no Mrs. Doubtfire.

  “Yay!” the twins cried. “Mommy, is Yasmine our new friend?”

  “Yes,” the woman answered, her ear still glued to the over-size phone. “She’s your new friend.”

  She was?

  “It’s eighteen dollars an hour,” Ms. Morgan added as she clicked out into the foyer and up the grand staircase. “You can start right now.”

  Oh yeah, she definitely is.

  29

  She’d made three trips back and forth, but Porsha still hadn’t managed to get all of her bags up the five flights of stairs. There wasn’t a doorman, there wasn’t any air conditioning, there wasn’t an elevator, but she didn’t mind because the whole thing was just so...cinematic.

  Porsha had a plan for her life, a script she wanted to follow exactly. But so much of what had happened so far—buying a wedding gown, leaving Lord Marcus, getting hired by Bailey Winter, and now moving in with Chanel—wasn’t planned. If someone had told her just a week before that she’d have to get a job for the summer, she’d have screamed and protested—working for the summer was definitely not part of the story of her life—but Porsha didn’t feel like screaming. She felt...happy. Maybe there was a lesson here; maybe instead of trying to always live according to a plan, she should just go with the flow? Maybe things really did always work out in the end.

  Just like in the movies.

  Bounding down the last flight of steps to retrieve her very last bag—a Prada duffel she’d picked up in London only a couple of days before—Porsha was startled by the lanky brown-skinned guy wearing a crisp blue suit, stepping out of the parlor-floor apartment. She froze in her tracks.

  Isn’t there a handsome downstairs neighbor in Breakfast at Tiffany’s?

  “Hello there,” Porsha called out in her best vaguely Eastern European, Audrey-Hepburn-as-Holly-Golightly accent.

  “Hey,” the guy responded shyly. He tucked his hands in the pockets of his suit pants and pulled himself up to full height.

  “Good evening,” Porsha replied, strolling down the stairs primly through the narrow, badly lit space that passed for a lobby. She squeezed past the smiling stranger and bent to pick up her bag. “Excuse me,” she continued, heaving the bag full of shoes onto her shoulder.

  “Of course,” he said, leaning his back against the door to his apartment. “Can I help you with that?”

  “I can manage it,” Porsha told him stoically. She flashed her most charming smile. “Have we met?”

  “I’m Trey.” He extended his hand. “You visiting for the weekend?”

  “Oh,” she explained, “I’m moving in with my dear old friend Chanel. On the fifth floor?”

  “Oh, I know Chanel.” Trey paused. “We hung out the other night, drank some beers on the stoop. She never mentioned anything about her beautiful roommate, though.”

  And she’d never mentioned her handsome new neighbor either.

  “It was a bit spur of the moment,” Porsha explained. “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ve got time.” His lips spread into a cute, flirtatious little grin. He tucked his long fingers into his back pockets. “And I’m a great listener.”

  “Is that so?” Porsha shifted the bag from one shoulder to the other. It was sort of heavy.

  “Not only that,” Trey continued, “I was just on my way out to pick up a nice cold bottle of rosé. Have you been up to the roof yet? Maybe you’d like to join me for a welcome-to-the-building drink?”

  “I didn’t know we could get up there!” A cool glass of pink wine with a broad-shouldered handsome stranger sounded like the perfect way to celebrate the end of a milestone of a day: new job, new house...

  New romance?

  Chanel was busy memorizing her lines for tomorrow. A drink with Trey would keep Porsha out of her hair.

  “I know a way,” he said, winking. “I’ll meet you in fifteen minutes?”

  Under normal circumstances that would hardly have been enough time for Porsha Sinclaire to prepare herself for an evening tête-à-tête, but this was the new and improved, girl-with-a-job, ever-fashion-ready, easygoing summertime Porsha Sinclaire.

  “I’ll give you ten.” She skipped up the stairs slowly turning back to smile at him. “By the way, I’m Porsha.”

  After throwing on a casual floral tunic top and some white flip-flops, Porsha headed upstairs. Trey was already waiting for her with a blanket slung over his shoulder and a bottle clutched in his hand. He scaled the rusty ladder and pushed open the black steel trapdoor. Then he reached down to help Porsha up with more studly grace than Marcus had ever shown. Porsha grabbed his hand eagerly and let him pull her up to the rooftop.

  “I hope it doesn’t rain tonight,” she remarked as she twirled around, taking in three hundred and sixty degrees of Manhattan skyline view. “Because I’m never going down that ladder.” She was only half-kidding.

  “I told you the view was great,” Trey teased, digging a wine key into the cork and pulling it out with a satisfying pop.

  It wasn’t as commanding as the view of Central Park from the high-up terrace of Porsha’s Fifth Avenue penthouse, but there was something magical about the hot summer haze lingering over the neighborhood’s bland apartment towers. The trees weren’t as perfectly pruned as the oaks and elms that surrounded the park, but the spindly branches that peeked above the roofline were lush and green. The Upper East Side, Porsha realized, was just like Bailey Win
ter’s line: from Fifth to Park Avenues was Bailey Winter Couture, everything from the Park to Lexington was like Bailey Winter Collection, and everything between there and the river was Bailey by Bailey Winter.

  That’s one way to think of it.

  “It’s really nice,” she agreed, taking a plastic cup of chilled wine and settling onto the worn cotton blanket Trey had spread on the warm flat roof. It wasn’t as soft as her favorite cashmere picnic throw, but she had on the perfect summer outfit, a gorgeous man was sitting next to her, and her career in fashion was about to explode. Who needed minor British royalty? She was a New Yorker and this was a classic summer-in-New-York moment. London was a damp and smelly slum by comparison.

  “So, how come Chanel never mentioned you before?” Trey asked.

  “Maybe she wanted you all to herself,” Porsha replied mischievously and probably accurately. “To a crazy summer.” Porsha clinked her plastic cup of wine with Trey’s. “So far,” she added giddily.

  “To a crazy summer,” he echoed, taking a sip. “Anyway, I don’t think Chanel’s interested in me. We hung out the other night and she seemed sort of spoken for, if you know what I mean.”

  “You mean Thaddeus Smith?” Porsha and Chanel hadn’t had much time to catch up but she knew, just knew, that there had to be something going on between Chanel and Thaddeus.

  Since she and everyone else believe everything they read.

  “The one and only,” Trey affirmed. “But you know, Porsha,” Trey continued, fixing his deep brown eyes on hers. “I’m not really into hanging out with movie stars. I like regular girls.”

  Was he calling her—Porsha Sinclaire—regular? How wrong he was.

  “Wait, you’re not in the movies, are you?” He eyed her suspiciously. “Because you look like you could be.”

  “I’m more of a behind-the-scenes kind of girl,” she murmured, batting her eyelashes mysteriously.

  “I don’t have anything against it,” Trey backtracked. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I’m interested in different things. Like the law. That’s my main focus, you know?”