Page 58 of I’m Dreaming of a New York Christmas

‘We met yesterday,’ he said matter-of-factly, now sitting next to me instead of opposite. He took a sip of his drink.

‘Huh,’ Frank said, his forehead creasing slightly as he looked between the two of us from his elevated viewpoint, some kind of realisation dawning. ‘Oh! Shit, dudes, have I interrupted something here? I should get out of your hair…’

Ethan looked like he was trying to slide under the table. Tipsy Ethan was fun.

I dragged him back upright and replied for the both of us. ‘No, it’s all good. I’ve just been helping him out with his best man’s speech and we thought we’d have one for the road, right, Ethan?’ I raised my glass to Frank to indicate the ‘one’ in question.

‘Yeah, exactly,’ Ethan said, in the affirmative, although his body language didn’t match the words.

Frank cocked his head to one side. ‘Nah, this ain’t tracking, Carmy. I’m gonna go grab a drink, and then you can both fill me in on the full story, yeah?’

‘Ha, okay, man,’ Ethan said, blushing as Frank headed to the bar.

‘I should head off now your friends are arriving,’ I said, taking a larger than average slurp of drink so I could leave them to it sooner rather than later.

‘Nah, Frank’s at least an hour early. Please don’t leave. Not yet.’ Ethan’s hand squeezed my knee under the table and my eyebrows shot up involuntarily, prompting him to end the contact almost as soon as it’d begun.

‘Shit, sorry, that was weird,’ he said, self-consciously using his straw to swirl the ice cubes in his glass before taking a sip.

‘Not weird, just… unexpected,’ I clarified, moving slightly closer to him and nudging his shoulder with mine to make it clear that I wasn’t rejecting his touch.

‘Frank seems nice,’ I said, trying to disperse the tension between us that seemed to be building up once more.

‘Yeah, Frank’s the best. He helped me get a foot in the door at The New Yorker. In fact, you’ll probably know him by his pen name: “Frankenstylus”?’

My mouth dropped open. ‘No fucking way.’

‘Haha, I’m gonna go ahead and assume you’ve heard of him?’

‘Umm, yeah! Hasn’t he got, like, a million followers or something?’

‘Yeah, he’s doing really well. He’s the one who set up these meet-ups for us – cartooning is a pretty solitary profession, and he wanted to start a community to help up-and-coming artists connect and break through.’

‘That’s so cool.’

‘Right?’

‘So… how much are you going to tell him?’

‘About… us?’

‘Us.’ Oh, do sod off, goosebumps.

‘Yep.’

Ethan took a long sip of his cocktail and looked up at the ceiling for a while.

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you drive.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means I’ll leave it totally up to you how much you tell him.’

‘And if I were to finish my drink and leave you guys to it… what would you tell him then?’

‘Probably a few key headlines.’

‘Such as…?’