But I was still clueless as to how any of his fans might have identified me, and then I made the mistake of revisiting the blind item. And to compound it, I read the comments. All 128 of them. The majority of which had accurately named Hayes. There were no fewer than a dozen posters who had recalled his photo at Joanna Garel’s opening and inferred that it had to have been someone at Marchand Raphel. The rest was cake.
We arrived in New York late Tuesday night. The boys had shotThe Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallonearlier in the day after a handful of interviews, their PR in overdrive in anticipation of the movie and album release. Hayes was exhausted but putting on a brave face.
“Text me when you’re close to the hotel,” he said, on the phone, shortly after we’d landed. “There are a slew of fans out front and I’m going to send someone down to meet you and the girls.”
“What’s a ‘slew’ exactly?”
He laughed. “A little less than all of them. But you’ll be okay, I promise.”
He was not exaggerating. There were easily over a hundred and fifty girls outside of the Mandarin Oriental, at eleven p.m., on a school night, in December. Where were their mothers?
“Oh my God.” Georgia’s face lit up on seeing the swarm. “How cool is this?”
Isabelle turned to me, and I could see the panic in her eyes. “Are we going to walk through that? Do they know who you are?”
“Yes, we’re going to walk through it. No, they don’t know who I am. We’ll be fine.” I tried to say it as convincingly as possible.
Then, like clockwork, as the car pulled up in front of the entrance on Sixtieth, I spotted Fergus exiting the building with a bellhop in tow. I’d never been so happy to see a familiar bald head.
“Well, hello there,” he greeted us, opening the car door.
The fans were barricaded on either sides of the entrance, but the hum of their excitement and squeals of “Who’s that?” and stomping of their feet and singing of “Sorrowed Talk” en masse was still unsettling.
We had almost made it safely to the entrance when a voice off to the side called “Solène,” and I turned to see whom I might have known who was also staying at the Mandarin Oriental. And then it dawned on me: I knew no one.
Someone yelled, “That’s her!” and there was a collective gasp and flashes were going off, and I realized in that moment that my life as I knew it was over.
The girls would not sleep.
Hayes had booked us adjoining rooms on the forty-sixth floor and then came by to make certain we were settling in. Two hours later, they were still on a high, giggling and plotting and cooing over their good fortune, and I could not effectively slip out of my room to meet him in his suite on the floor below.
“I’m knackered. Just wake me,” he’d texted. “Just crawl into my bed and do things…”
It was almost two when I finally made it to his room, and at that point I would have been happy to have him just hold me, and inhale him while he slept. But Hayes evidently had other plans.
“Hiiii.”
“I thought you were knackered.”
“I’m knackered, I’m not dead,” he said, wriggling out of his underpants.
“They ID’d me.”
“Who ID’d you?”
“Your fans.”
He smiled then, pulling off my T-shirt, pushing my hair out of my face. He was not completely awake. “It’s okay. You’re safe here. You’re safe here in my bed.”
“And when I leave?”
“And when you leave… if I’ve done my job… you’ll be happy.”
In the morning, Isabelle and Georgia went for a swim in the hotel pool while I ducked out for a long run. I bundled up, donned a set of headphones, and timed my departure with a group of German tourists, and none of the fandom seemed the wiser. And that hour or so alone was heaven. Up Central Park West, cutting in at Eighty-sixth Street, twice around the reservoir, and home. The air cold, crisp, perfect. I’d missed this. New York.
In the thirty-fifth-floor sky lobby, while waiting for an elevator post-run, I encountered a guest at the front desk who was having problems with his room key.
“This key card is a bit dodgy. Could you perhaps switch it for me?”
