Chapter 6
SIX
Travis
She called just after I had popped the trunk of my Camaro in Andy’s driveway and was hauling my suitcase into it.
I knew before I looked at the screen that it was Katie. I had already talked to everyone else I needed to talk to. After the game, I got a single thumbs-up emoji text from Jonathan—his review of my performance, which raised him in my estimation. The less my agent talked to me, the better.
“Hey, Katie,” I said when I answered. “If you want me to pick you up, give me your address.”
“Travis.” She was steamed, but she was trying to be polite. It was cute. “What does this mean, you’re leaving L.A.?”
I slammed the trunk of the Camaro closed. Andy’s driveway was dark, his street empty this late. I’d said goodbye to Andy already and promised to let him know when I got where I was going. A sprinkler turned on a few houses down, the shushing sound cool in the night air.
“It means I’m leaving.”
“For where?”
“No idea. Want to come?”
“What are you talking about? We’re supposed to go on a date in a few days. At Nobu.”
I ran my hand along my Camaro. I hadn’t driven much in the last six months, and I fucking loved this car. “Katie, come on. Forget the script. Pack your bag and I’ll pick you up. We’ll hit the road and have fun.”
“What is this?” She sounded outraged, and—worse—almost hurt. “Are you screwing up the plan on purpose? Why? Is it a joke? Are you making fun of me?”
“I’m not making fun of you. Jesus.” I shook my head. “You want to ditch being a good girl for a while. You want to have a wild time with a bad boy. This is how you do it. You do something impulsive and risky and yeah, maybe stupid. That’s the risk. That’s the fun. ”
“You just said you don’t know where you’re going. I don’t even know you.”
“But we hit it off. You’ve seen the pictures, haven’t you? Of course you have. Katie, we hit it off. ”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “The pictures are good,” she admitted. “That doesn’t mean I’d drop everything for a man I don’t know. I want to be bad, not crazy.”
“Here’s my version of the story,” I said. “We meet at the game, and I think you’re the hottest fucking woman I’ve ever seen. I take my shot, because of course I do, but you don’t go for it. You’re too good for me, and we both know it.”
“Travis.”
“But you like me,” I continued. “You give me your number because you think I’m hot as fuck and you want to see me again. You can’t stop thinking about me, even though you know you shouldn’t. You’re having fantasies about me, and some of them are so filthy?—”
“Got it,” she interrupted. “Skip ahead, please.”
“So I call you, and I tell you I think you’re hot as fuck, too. Meeting you has made me realize I’ve been sleepwalking. I want more. I want to feel alive again, and in order to do that, I have to get out of this city. I want to forget everything for a while and just drive with a beautiful woman in the car with me. I think that beautiful woman should be you. And—because you think I’m hot as fuck—you do it. You pack your bags and go.”
She hadn’t hung up on me yet. I called that a win. “What do we do on this hypothetical trip?” she asked, and I stopped myself from pumping my fist. She was intrigued.
“We sightsee,” I told her. “We go wherever we want. We eat great food. We talk. We catch some good music or some good movies. We have nonstop incredible sex.”
“Travis!”
“Okay, I know that part is fictional. We can play Scrabble in our hotel room. I’m not trying to fuck you.” There was a second of silence on the line, because this was an absolute lie. “Well, I am trying to fuck you, but I’m a gentleman, so it’s cool.”
Surprisingly, my mummified dick was trying to get into a woman for the first time in an excruciatingly long time. But he could wait. I’d probably have to watch some porn just to remember how sex worked. Maybe I’d need diagrams.
“I can’t,” Katie said, and though she sounded sure, she probably didn’t know that she also sounded sad about it. “I have a life here, an apartment. I just finished shooting a movie, and there’s promo to do, and… I can’t drop everything after meeting a guy once. It just isn’t me.”
“You wanted sexy and unpredictable and hot.” I quoted what she’d said in our first meeting. “This is the last thing anyone thinks you’ll do. Which is exactly what you’re looking for.”
“And what happens after we take this little trip? The plan was for us to have a relationship, not a fling.”
“After the trip, we have a relationship,” I said. “In fact, I think we should shack up.”
“Excuse me? Absolutely not. Didn’t you even read the script?”
“I read it.”
She sounded sad again. “Travis, I appreciate that you’re trying, I really do. But I’m sticking to the script, or I’m not doing this at all.”
Surprisingly, that hurt. I spent a second feeling the thump of pain deep in my gut, because I’d been hoping she’d say yes. I hadn’t hoped for anything in a long time.
But she wasn’t saying yes. And that stung more than I had thought it would.
“You have my number,” I managed to say after a second. “Call it anytime. I mean anytime.”
“Good luck, Travis.”
“Good luck, Katie.”
There was nothing else to say.
I was flying on impulse. I had done it a hundred times onstage, where I could wing it based on what the crowd wanted from me, but I hadn’t had room to be impulsive in my personal life in a long time. Not until I lost everything and no one gave a shit what I did anymore.
I’d once had tens of thousands of fans, a staff, and an entourage of hangers-on. Now I drove out of this bitch of a city with no one to see me off.
I decided to drive north. I put the music on loud and tried to put the image of Katie Armstrong behind me. She wasn’t the first person who didn’t want me, and she wouldn’t be the last.
Sometime around two in the morning, I stopped at an all-night truck stop. I wasn’t sleepy yet, so I bought a syrupy fountain Coke and brought it back to my car. I picked up my phone and took a selfie, leaning against my car with the truck stop sign behind me lit up against the night sky. I uploaded the photo to Instagram and wrote a caption: I’m off to new adventures. Love you all. Then I hit Post.
I had 3.2 million followers, and I hadn’t posted in six months.
I tossed the phone on the passenger seat, started the car, and went back to the long drive north, wondering if I’d ever get tired.