It would not be until almost two in the morning that Kyra would come stumbling through the door of the cabin, shushing herself, and then turn every single light in the whole place on full glare by mistake.
Nikki
‘A toast,’ said Annie Spark, indicating to the table to raise their glasses, ‘to the birthday boy!’
Due to the tightness of the dress she was wearing, the sharpness of her shoulder pads and how aggressively they appeared to pin her arms to her sides, Annie didn’t seem able to raise her own champagne coupe much above waist height. This didn’t escape Ned’s attention, or that of Jackson Crane. Even though the two men were sitting on either side of her, Nikki could sense without turning her head that both were wearing sly smirks.
‘Did I miss the dress code, Sparky?’ Ned had laughed when he strode into the room before dinner, looking her up and down. ‘Let me guess . . . space pirate? But then what do I know about clothes? You’re Home’s resident fashionista.’ Annie had giggled as if she was in on the joke, but Nikki could tell that if her shoulders had not been buttressed by the dress, they would have dropped three inches in embarrassment. It was not an entirely unreasonable jibe, though. Even Nikki had done a double-take and briefly questioned her own low-key outfit choice, a black halterneck Stella McCartney jumpsuit （80 per cent off, the last size eight left, bought with the Net-a-Porter five-thousand-pound voucher Ned had given her two Christmases ago, which she had been chipping away at in the sales ever since）。
She should not have been surprised. As these launch weekends had grown ever more overblown, so too had Annie’s ensembles for them. Even for her, though, this one was OTT: a skin-tight ankle-length gold pleated gown, simultaneously retro and futuristic. With the fake tan and fire engine red dye-job with bum-length extensions, it added up to quite the look （Nikki could barely keep track of Annie’s hair colour and style from month to month – from blonde crop to chestnut bob to pale pink curls）。 The unfathomable thing was that Annie didn’t need to try this hard – when she’d started at Home, she was a porcelain-skinned, willowy brunette with poker-straight hair down to her waist, so striking she was often mistaken for an actress herself, and was constantly being asked out by the members. Nikki could not quite recall the moment Annie Spark had started dressing like her own drag tribute act, but she hadn’t seen her in jeans and a sweater for a very long time.
It must be absolutely exhausting being Annie Spark all the time. It was definitely exhausting working with her. The shouting. The showing off. The pathological need to be noticed, as if she thought she might actually evaporate if ignored for thirty seconds. Despite being her colleague for nearly two decades, Nikki had never really understood her. Or wanted to understand her, particularly. Or liked her very much. The members? They all loved her. At the start of this evening, she had watched Annie slink around the table, rearranging her gown as she crouched behind chairs, resting her chin on the seat backs, complimenting Georgia’s highlights while twirling a lock of the actress’s hair, laughing as Jackson whispered something into her ear, lustily fingering Freddie’s garish paisley velvet smoking jacket.
Nikki wondered if it was only she who secretly found her colleague so annoying, so brittle. The fact that she called everyone in her orbit some version of darling, lovely, dearest, gorgeous, beautiful. The whoops. The jarring brightness of her lipstick （a trademark acid orange Chanel, ostentatiously and frequently reapplied）。 On the one hand, it was impossible to imagine Home without her – she made sure the club was always packed with the right people, had an astonishing knack that Ned valued above all else for knowing who was about to be the next big thing. She seemed to smell the faint whiff of gunpowder when a career was about to explode, whether it was an actor on the cusp of being offered a plum role in a major franchise, a singer with a sure-fire hit, or a model secretly dating Hollywood （or actual） royalty. And when she got the scent, she made it her absolute mission to understand everything about them, bring them into the fold, like some sort of benevolent stalker.
As valuable as Annie was, Nikki thought, she should still be treading very carefully right now, with Ned so on edge. Because if there was one thing Ned Groom could not abide, it was being upstaged.