The Love Club

My suave opening line was, “I don’t think I know you.”

She cocked those curved, dark eyebrows, the smirk never straying from her lips. “Well that’s a set of circumstances. Isn’t this your party?”

Two sentences in and I already didn’t know what to say to her.

“It is,” I managed to stammer. “I’m Harry, but I guess you already know that.”

Her hair was like silken champagne, waved like sea. The bass was pumping through the club at this point, I could see people dancing in my peripherals, the lights flooding the skin and surfaces with a pulsing magenta hue, undulating slowly from bluer to redder. Down, down, down.

“Lex.”

One word, tongue to the teeth, crackling at the back of my mouth. Lex. The sound rang against my enamel. I think now about all the places I’ve uttered her name – in bars, in studios, in taxi cabs, in cafes, in her room and in mine. Repeated like a sacred chant to the gunshot-girl.

“I have a friend with a dog named Lex,” I proceeded to reply, even more suavely than before. My recent hermitage had worn me rusty, out of practice of my so-called playboy days. Twenty years old with playboy days in my past. I didn’t think of them that way, but The Sun surely did.

“Oh?” she questioned, stifling a scoff. “Well that’s flattering. I hope she’s at least an attractive dog, for my sake.”

“Oh god, I didn’t mean, you’re not – “ Her laughter could melt ice cubes. “Yes. Lex is a really lovely dog. Beautiful, really.”

Beautiful, really, was the way I would describe Lex Parker that night at the Oasis, the Leiscter Square massacre that Nick put together for me – already I could see Louis and Liam absolutely decimated by the boozy brunt of the evening. Even in the vacillating violaceous cast, her dress was very clearly emerald, slipping just over her curves and showing inches of her legs I don’t think I was supposed to see. But I couldn’t take my eyes away – not from those lips, simpering and red, or from her eyes, hazel and distant.

I remember wishing I could feel what her laughter felt like resonating in my bones. Down, down, down.

“Only joking,” she replied through her laughter. “I’ve met Lex Grimshaw a few times, assuming that’s her. If there’s a dog I must share a name with, I’m perfectly glad it’s Grimmy’s.”

“You know Nick?” I asked dumbly. Clearly, she knew Nick. It just was unusual that I wouldn’t have seen her before if they were friends; Nick rather liked parading around his new playthings for all to see. Especially pretty new playthings.

“Are you a little jealous he has other friends?” she teased.

I was flabbergasted, at an entire loss of words. It wasn’t often that I was found at a loss for words, seeing as talking had kind of become my profession over the last few years, even more so than music – talking in interviews, talking in meetings, talking talking talking. Before I started feeling like the world was closing in on me, I could have talked for days straight and would have never noticed. I probably did, really. And she was right, anyway: an odd part of me did feel odd that Nick had this friend he’d never mentioned to me, who I’d never met – maybe I’d been out of the game for so long that I managed to miss an entire chunk of life without even noticing. I’d missed Lex Parker’s entrance into it. Then I found myself standing before her, asking –

“Can I buy you a drink?”

She grinned. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to buy one since it is an open bar, Birthday Boy. But I’ll let you pick something out if it makes you feel better.”

It did make me feel better. “What do you drink?”

“Surprise me.”

I ordered a Long Island Iced Tea. I look back on that now and wonder what sort of divine intervention caused me to buy her that drink; to this day I think that the only reason I stayed in her mind was that I managed to peg her favorite right off the bat. I know now that not many people knew the real Lex very well.

“So, Lex,” I began again, feeling a little more confidence rooted in her approving smirk, “what brings you here tonight?”

She shrugged, her lips ghosting the rim of her drink in a way that made my heart lurch. “Nick invited me, thought I might give this Leiscter Square nonsense a go.”

“You really don’t hang out around here? A girl like you?” I questioned, disbelieving. At the time, I had every reason to believe that Lex was the upper-crust girl she projected herself to be, with the designer dresses and effortless equanimity. I had every reason to believe she’d been hiding in the eaves of my public life all that time, that our paths had crossed at some point and I just hadn’t known.

Lex twisted her lips into a dissenting moue. “I’m afraid you don’t know me well enough to put a judgment on me like that, Mr. Styles.”

That brusque coolness. It captivated me, it held me captive.

“Well, I’d like to,” I replied, the words out of my mouth before I could even register what I was saying. “Get to know you better, that is.”

Lex Parker’s smile was a rare one, this I still believe. In the swarming sea of people I knew, half-knew, and used-to-know, steeped in amethyst slowly bleeding to beryl, it was like a beacon. My heart swelled unknowingly, pleased that I was the reason for that smile. I think it had been a long while since I’d made anyone smile.

“That can maybe be arranged,” Lex hummed, sipping deeply at her drink, the drink I placed in her hand. “Maybe you can have your people call my people.”

I didn’t get the joke, really, then; my people called other people’s people all the time. I didn’t know then that Lex didn’t have any people. What I knew that she was beautiful and entrancing and I sure as hell would get to know her. Whatever it took, I would know that smirk inside and out, I would know the soffits of her soul – I didn’t know I felt that way then, but I knew I felt something.

“You’re not at all like I’d thought you might be,” she told me, like it was a fact that we’d both known and she was simply commenting on its existence. I opened my mouth to ask her what she meant but was interrupted by her inflowing chuckle and instantly I lost my words, only able to stare at her in some kind of wonder.

“I’m sorry,” she began again, shaking her head, when all I could do was smile at her dumbly. “I have a plus-one I have to track down. But maybe I’ll see you ‘round, yeah? And happy birthday.”

The bass pumping in my head was almost deafening as she walked away, the hem of her dress skirting the back of her long, waxen legs. I wanted more than that but I knew that she was gone, taking my breath with her. I didn’t even know what it was, really. I know now that it was just Lex.

It was brief, it was short, it was – for all intensive purposes – nothing. I read a line in Morrisey’s Autobiography recently that resonated with me – “It was probably nothing, but it felt like the world.” Lex’s conversation with me that night was probably nothing, but it certainly did feel like the world.

And as soon as she was out of sight, I headed toward the door. I needed to get some air. Fast.



As promised, Nick showed up at mine around half ten with a bag of scones from the bakery he liked so much beneath his flat. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d managed to drink away my appetite that morning because I knew he’d end up making me eat one anyway. And, for that matter, he would probably be thrilled I drank so much I got that hungover.

“Morning, mate,” he greeted coolly, his smile too perky for someone who had been as knackered as he the night before. “See you’re doing well today.”

He gave me a brief once-over, taking in my size-too-large pyjama bottoms and ratty old Holmes Chapel Comprehensive t-shirt I was too stubborn to get rid of. Not entirely up to Nick’s early morning chic, he sporting some denim-on-denim and pearly whites. I rolled my eyes as he pushed past me into the house, bee-lining straight for the kitchen for tea.

“They’ve currants in them, that alright?”

“Didn’t even give me the chance to say morning, Grimmy,” I chided with a sigh, rubbing my head through what had grown to be a rather out-of-control mop atop my head. Lex Parker was still pounding in the space between my ears.

“Say it then! You’re moving slower than traffic on Jamaica Road during rush hour this morning.”

“How would you know?” I asked flatly, following his footsteps into the kitchen to find him with a kettle on already. “You take the Overground.”

“I work on radio, Harold, Jesus,” he sighed. “There’s such a thing as the traffic segment. Come on now, up and at ‘em.”

“And how do you get your hair to defy gravity like that every fucking day?” I asked, not paying him much mind as I took my own spot at the kitchen counter, falling back onto a stool. His brown quiff looked like he’d been prepped for an episode of Sweat the Small Stuff or something, with a styling team and everything. Only Nick would do his hair to the nines to get on the train.

Nick took it upon himself to not answer. “So you had a good night last night, then? Everything went smoothly after I left?”

Nick had also taken it upon himself to leave with a group of his mates around midnight to go to someone’s flat without telling me he was leaving. I’d only received a text that next morning saying, “Be there in an hour with apology scones” to let me know he was even alive. Well, I had something else in store for him, then.

He came over with the intention of talking about my meeting with Richard but instead got slammed with questions about Lex.

“I met a girl last night,” I opened ponderously, hoping to get something more out of him than I’d gotten out of Lex herself. As expected, his face lit up immediately, a Grimmy-ish grin breaking out.

“Alright, Hazza, what’s her name then?”

“I think you may know her,” I hummed, leaning forward on the counter. “Lex Parker.”

“Lex Parker!” Nick exclaimed. “Oh, she’s lovely isn’t she? Very quick. Kinda leaves you speechless, even me.”

“Lovely, yeah,” I mumbled in agreement, my voice trailing off. “What do you know about her?”

Nick gave me a look of confusion. “Weren’t you the one who met her last night? Did you not learn anything about her from, oh, I don’t know, meeting her?”

I sighed, pressing my head into my hand. “She was a little quick for me, given how properly pissed you lot had gotten me with all the shots and the drinks and everything. I couldn’t quite find the right words to say.”

“It couldn’t have been that bad,” Nick insisted.

“I may or may not have inadvertently compared her to your dog.”

The kettle whistled.

“I suppose it could have been worse,” Nick managed to eek out, eyes wide with laughter and disapproval, before pouring some milk into the bottom of the mugs he’d picked off the shelf.

“Nick, please,” I sighed. “What do you know about her?”

Nick plopped two tea bags into the mugs before passing one to me, staying across the counter while waiting for his to steep. “Well, what do you want to know?”

“God, I don’t know – what does she do?”

He looked at me for a moment. “That’s really what you want to know?” I looked back at him just as hard. “Christ, Harry, I don’t know. I only ever see her out. I met her when I was out at a pub in Camden with Finchy nearly a year ago. We sang ‘Like A Virgin’ on karaoke together and I fell in love. But she kind of keeps to herself, you know? Other than when she’s out. Maybe she just goes out for a living.”

Even now, I wonder why I even bothered to ask Nick. I guess at the time, I didn’t know that no one really knew Lex – not anyone I could access then, anyway. If I’d bothered to ask to meet her plus-one, I’d have met Grace, the one who knew Lex best, then. That would have maybe led me down a more helpful path.

“How old is she?”

Nick shrugged.

“Does she have a boyfriend?”

Nick tapped at the lip of his mug without any sort of an answer.

“Where is she even from?” I asked incredulously, my patience running thin.

“Knightsbridge or something,” Nick finally answered, giving a thoughtful look. I sighed with relief, before he continued, “I think… you know, I’m really not sure.”

I groaned with annoyance, having not gotten anywhere at all, much against what I’d planned. “Do you have her phone number? You have to have her phone number.”

Nick’s grin returned. “That’s the Harry I know. She’d love if you called. But only if you tell me what happened with Richard.”

I guess Nick Grimshaw was "my people." And I just had to call her myself.