Page 14 of Star Struck
I rolled a bloodshot eye up at him and heaved a few more intestines closer to the waterline. To his credit, Jack brought me a glass of water, although I couldn’t steady my hand enough to take it and he ended up feeding me sips, crouched next to the nasty-smelling toilet with me.
‘And you missed such a fantastic outing.’ Felix patted my back ineffectually as another burst of retching caught up with me. ‘Gethryn is down there, chatting. You could have had your moment with him, if you hadn’t been—’ he cast an eye over Jack — ‘making friends up here.’ And then, impatiently, ‘Surely there can’t be anything else to bring up.’
A commotion in the bedroom, and both men turned. My already rock-bottom self-esteem managed a feat of geology to become even lower as Lissa’s penetratingly nasal voice asked, ‘What are you all doing in there?’
Jack straightened up beside me. ‘We’re looking after Skye.’
‘Well, fuck you.’
I managed to sit away from the toilet bowl for long enough to clock Lissa’s expression of revulsion peering into the bathroom.
‘Jeez, Jack, you do pick them. Surely it doesn’t take two of you. Felix, you could come back downstairs with me.’
‘Lissa and I met earlier,’ Felix explained, and the way his eyes traced the contours of those very tight pink jeans spoke an absolute library. ‘So. You and Jack been together long?’ He spoke to her without meeting her eye, which said even more.
‘Way, way too long. How about you, you two . . . ?’
‘Oh, no, we’re — look, it’s a long story.’
All this was going on over my shoulder as the final crisps exited my system in the most undignified and, possibly, loudest, way imaginable. My eyes streamed from the effort, my nose trailed vomit and my head hurt. I just wanted to lie, very still, on the cool floor of the bathroom. Instead I had an audience.
‘Does she have a very low tolerance for alcohol?’ Jack asked. ‘I only gave her a couple of glasses. What? Don’t look at me like that, Lissa.’
‘Here we go again . . .’
‘No! No, this isn’t like that, Liss.’
I could feel the blonde’s eyes on me. They didn’t seem particularly angry, as I would have expected from a girl finding her boyfriend, however ‘ex’ the nature of the relationship, embroiled with another woman. She looked more sad. ‘If you say so. But if you’d rather chat to some whacked-out, beat-up English chick than me, man, you have your priorities way wrong.’
‘Lissa, you didn’t want to talk, you wanted to harangue me about some director you’ve met that I need to know, nothing that’s going to help me, just some bunch of auteur fuckwits who want cheap labour and a British accent to give credibility to their pseudo-porn.’
As I dribbled the remnants of my pathetic breakfast down my chin, Felix grinned at me. ‘Aren’t other people’s lives fun? You see what you miss when you’ve got your face in someone else’s flusher?’
‘I didn’t exactly choose this position,’ I said, round the drool.
Jack and Lissa had moved back into the bedroom to continue their argument. Felix grabbed my elbow and dragged me to my feet, keeping up the momentum so that we staggered through into the next room, with me still hunched forward over an invisible toilet. ‘Chucker-upper coming through, don’t mind us, keep chatting amongst yourselves and thanks for the most wonderful insights into coupledom. Remind me to stay single forever, would you? Rather sand off my own nipples than go through this, okay, ready to make a dash to our room? And here we go.’
We shot out, down the corridor to our room, where Felix propped me against the wall. ‘Key?’
‘I don’t have it. I thought . . .’ A threatening belch erupted, ‘I thought you’d got it.’
‘Why would I take the key, when you were in the room?’ He dropped his head into his hands in a moment of despair. ‘Thought you’d be there all morning, catching up on your beauty sleep. Oh, this is buggering terrific. And you — just breathe, my days of the mop and bucket are long behind me.’
I took a deep breath. ‘Won’t the reception desk have a pass key?’
‘Suppose.’ Felix turned to head towards the lift.
‘Don’t leave me! Fe, please . . .’
With a dramatic sigh and a turn that was more flouncy than Cinderella’s party frock, Felix came back and grabbed my elbow again. ‘All right. We’ll both go down, but I am warning you now, any more vomit and you can spend the rest of the convention sitting outside in the yard with the kitchen boys Miguel and Carlo — cute, but put it this way, they’re not much good to you.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I tried to explain as we got into the lift, which was apparently working again, but now bore a sign in very large letters saying ‘three persons maximum’. ‘I really only had two glasses of wine . . . thought it would be fun, the Valium was stopping me feeling scared, it was boring being on my own and he asked me—’
‘And he was so cute you couldn’t resist.’ Felix looked sour. ‘Yeah, all right, ten out of ten for lusty thoughts, lover, but Jesus H-in-a-catsuit, you never, never drink on Valium, you got that?’
‘An hour ago that would have been good advice.’
‘I thought you knew.’ The lift arrived on the ground floor and the doors sprang open to reveal that the foyer was packed with people coming and going, mingling, queuing out of the door of one room and round into another. Felix and I dropped into this crowd like a shovel full of shit in church.