Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
Katie
“You didn’t screw Travis White,” my agent said. “You were with him a whole week, and you didn’t get him naked.”
We were on a walk in Griffith Park—Stella’s idea. This wasn’t a leisurely, enjoyable walk, but a power walk of the burning-calories kind. Stella wore a snug workout top and skin-tight bike shorts that showed off her toned glutes. Her red hair was neatly slicked back in a ponytail. I panted alongside her in running shorts and a tee, my damp hair tangled, sunscreen sweating off my face. I was positive I was swallowing copious amounts of L.A. smog. I reminded myself to never again trust my agent’s idea of “fun.”
“I got him so naked,” I argued. “I’m orgasmed out.”
She gave me a sharp look from behind her sport sunglasses. “You forget that I was in on this from the beginning. Also, I know you. You don’t date. You should, but you don’t. You haven’t dated since Jeremy, and you weren’t orgasmed out when you dated him.”
I winced. Jeremy was the year-long relationship. “Travis isn’t Jeremy.”
“He sure fucking isn’t,” Stella said. “Thank God. Jeremy didn’t deserve you.”
I was silent, taking this in. It was the nicest thing Stella had ever said to me, and it made my heart mushy.
“Anyway,” Stella added. “It’s been too long. Get Travis’s dick in you, stat.”
The mushy feeling drained away. I cleared my throat. “Um.”
“You kissed him, at least,” Stella went on, her arms pumping professionally as a couple of rollerbladers whizzed by. “I saw the goodbye at the airport. Nicely done. I could tell it wasn’t the first time you’d kissed him. But you have to sell this, Katie. You aren’t supposed to be dating a sweet guy. You’re supposed to be boning the bad boy, day and night. I need to look at you two and believe it.”
When we’d come up with this plan—even when I arrived in Portland and threw myself on Travis—I’d agreed with this. Now, it made me queasy. I didn’t like Travis described as a bad boy as if there was nothing else to him. I didn’t like hearing him talked about like a piece of meat. If the roles were reversed and Travis was a woman, it would be wrong to objectify him. I hated it.
To tell the truth, I didn’t want to be here. Not in this park, getting lung cancer and listening to Stella talk about my sex life. Not in L.A. at all, in my weird white apartment with a closet full of clothes I didn’t want to wear. I didn’t want to do promo shoots or go to the cocktail party I’d been invited to tonight. I didn’t want to call the personal trainer I’d been neglecting to book and set up sessions. I didn’t want to wonder whether everyone who saw me onscreen thought I was getting Botox, or should get Botox, or should stop getting Botox. I didn’t want to ponder lip fillers, cheek fillers, or bladed eyebrows. I didn’t want to think about any of it.
I wanted to be curled up on that comfortable sofa in Portland, under a blanket with Travis, reading a book with the rain coming down the windows, lazily talking about what to have for dinner. I’d lived that life for a week. I hadn’t thought about work. I hadn’t worried. I had just existed, because Travis made it easy.
I had thought I was eager to get back into the game. No one can sit around forever, right? Chop chop, time to get going. Big plans. Now I found myself counting the sweaty minutes before I could book another flight and get out of here again.
Travis and I hadn’t talked about when we’d meet again. What if he didn’t want to see me? Well, he had to see me. It was part of the plan.
“I’m going back to Portland as soon as I can,” I said to Stella.
“Get him to come here,” she shot back. “You two should be seen in some L.A. hotspots. It would make the exposure happen faster.” Her Apple watch beeped, and she glanced at it. “It’s time for an official statement. I’ve put in a call to some PR people. We’ll handle this the right way for maximum effect.”
“No,” I said.
Stella gave me a curious look. “Katie?”
“No,” I said again. We were rounding the bend of our final lap, and I put on speed, anticipating my glorious return to my air conditioned car. “No to PR people. No to handling. No to all of it.”
“But Edger Pinsent?—”
“Is going to know a made-up PR romance when he sees one,” I interrupted her. “He’s going to see it for what it is, because he’s in this business. He’s going to think it’s lame.”
Stella’s arms pumped harder with annoyance as she processed this. “Fine,” she finally said. “Can I at least send you the thriller script that came in? Can I do that much?”
I perked up in surprise. “A thriller?”
She nodded. “They called right after someone posted a photo of you and Travis taking a walk. The exec said that they hadn’t considered you before, but the way you looked in that photo was exactly right for the part.”
I bit back my smile. Travis’s sexy, just-got-out-of-bed look had gotten me a call for a type of movie I’d never been offered before. He was going to be so pleased. “I’d love to do a thriller.”
“It isn’t an artsy indie film, but it would give your image some edge,” Stella agreed. “They’re looking to start shooting as soon as the casting is nailed down because someone just backed out with a scheduling conflict. They have everything ready to go.”
“Send it to me,” I told her. “I’ll read it.”
“Well,” she sniffed. “At least I’ve been some use today.”
I FaceTimed Travis as I was getting ready to go out. Gwen had just left after helping me with my hair and makeup. I hired a stylist for big events like a premiere, but since this was only a cocktail party, I usually did my hair and makeup myself. Gwen had insisted on helping me tonight after she dropped off the dress she’d ordered.
Travis picked up right away. He was on the sofa in the Portland apartment, wearing a faded Aerosmith T-shirt. His hair was wet. “Hey,” he said, his expression brightening as he saw me. “Jesus, you look beautiful.”
“Oh.” I patted my hair self-consciously. Why did a compliment sound different coming from him? “Thank you.”
Silence descended for a moment as we looked at each other through the screen.
“What is it?” I finally asked.
“You look beautiful,” Travis said again.
I laughed. “Okay. Thank you, again. Did you just get out of the shower?” Showers had been delicately negotiated during the week we were together, since the apartment had only one bathroom. There was careful choreographing of one person in the living room while the other showered, so there would be no chance of seeing each other naked. If my movies were a little raunchier, I thought that would be a funny scene—the bump-into-each-other-naked scene. I made a mental note.
Travis shook his head. “I went running,” he admitted. “It’s raining out.”
“You went for a run in the cold, dark rain?” He had never gone running—or worked out any other way—in our week. He hadn’t even mentioned it.
He ran a hand through his hair, looking embarrassed. I had a sudden rush of memory of how good he smelled, like men’s deodorant and warm male skin. I wished I could crawl through the screen.
“I thought going for a run would wake up my creativity,” Travis said. “You know, jolt my brain into action. I don’t know if it worked. All I feel now is cold.”
Creativity? I gasped in a breath. “You’re writing music?”
“I am trying to write music,” he corrected me. “Specifically, I’m flogging my exhausted, out-of-shape brain into expressing itself in a way that isn’t completely self-pitying or self-destructive. The results are inconclusive as of yet.”
“You’re writing music.” I clapped my hands in excitement.
He shook his head, but a smile touched the corners of his mouth. “You wouldn’t be clapping if you heard what I’ve come up with so far.”
“My favorite Seven Dog Down song is ‘Four in the Morning,’” I said. “It’s sweet and a little sad, and your voice is so sexy in it.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Is it?”
I had said it without thinking, but I wasn’t embarrassed. “Yes it is, and you know it. If you wrote an album of songs that sounded like that one, I would buy it a thousand times over.”
His gaze had dropped down to my shoulders, where the spaghetti straps of my dress were visible in the frame. “I want to see your dress,” he said.
So I propped up my phone, then stood back so he could see all of it. It was a black knee-length cocktail dress, and the loose skirt had a light layer of tulle. It looked classy and flirty and—I thought—sexy at the same time.
I twirled, and Travis cleared his throat. “Yeah. Beautiful.”
“One of the production companies that produces my movies is throwing a cocktail party,” I explained. “I’m not looking forward to it, but I have to go.”
“Why don’t you want to go?”
“It’s boring. These events are networking events for the producers. The actors are invited to be stared at and to get our pictures taken. It makes me feel a bit like a dancing bear in a circus. Plus, I have to stand around awkwardly without a date.”
“That’s my job,” Travis protested. “I would have come to L.A. to go with you.”
I shook my head. “We’re not official yet. But once we are, you’ll be stuck going to these events with me, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t mind.” Of course he didn’t mind, because he would have gone to events with Sabrina Lowe. Though I didn’t remember seeing them out much together. It would be nice to have a boyfriend again to go to events with, even if it was a fake boyfriend. It really sucked going to these things alone.
“When are we official?” Travis asked. “How does that work?”
“We announce it on Instagram.”
“And when is that?”
“Whenever we decide is good. Wait a minute,” I said as a thought came to me. I walked closer to my phone again. “Do you own a suit?”
Travis shrugged. “Most of them were repossessed.” He grabbed a blanket from the back of the sofa and tucked it around him, making me sad when the tattoos on his arms disappeared.
“Send me your measurements,” I told him. “I’ll get my assistant Gwen and my stylist on it. We’ll get you suited up for events.”
“No way. I can get some good threads. Don’t worry about it.”
I couldn’t remember hearing anyone use the word threads in honest conversation, and I didn’t know why I thought it was charming. I was starting to suspect I had a crush on this man. “How do you plan to get designer clothes?”
“I know people. I’ll figure it out.”
Figuring things out on the fly seemed to be the way he lived life, which was the opposite of my approach. I was distracted from the thought when he ran a hand through his hair and I noticed the red welts on his fingertips. “What happened to your hand?”
He flexed his hand and looked at it, as if he’d forgotten. “Guitar,” he explained. “I’ll toughen up.”
He’d been playing guitar. It was crazy that I was about to go to a ritzy Hollywood cocktail party, and Travis was chilly and alone in a rainy apartment writing songs, and I would have given a lot of money to be where he was in that moment instead of where I was. I didn’t want to make nice with producers. I wanted to watch movies with Travis and hear him play music—anything at all.
“I’m almost done with my obligations here,” I said. “Then I’m coming back to Portland.”
He blinked his gorgeous blue eyes at the change of topic and seemed to sit up straighter. “Yeah? When?”
I calculated how quickly I could get out of town. “A few days.”
He smiled, one of his real smiles that made my insides melt. “Damn. I guess I’m getting kicked out of bed again.”
I stared at him, and all I wanted to say was, Then don’t leave the bed this time. Stay in it with me. Because I didn’t want to just watch movies with Travis, or just listen to him play music. I wanted to do a lot more than that.
Did he? He’d made an offer when we first met, but not since I turned him down—actually, after I told him to fuck off. Yeah, he might have gotten the message not to try again.
I tried to stay businesslike. “I think we should do our announcement once I’m back in Portland. That’s the best timing.”
“Okay,” he said.
“It won’t be through a PR company, just something you and I agree on together. A soft launch.”
Travis waggled his eyebrows. “When’s the hard launch? That’s what I’m interested in.”
It was like he was reading my mind, and suddenly I was awkward and mute, like a kid at her first middle-school dance. I should have something witty and seductive at the tip of my tongue. I was thirty-four years old, for God’s sake. I should be able to think of something.
But I had nothing. I sat silent for a moment too long, and Travis held up a hand, showing me his guitar injuries again.
“Forget I said that, sorry,” he said.
“No, wait.”
“I made it weird.”
“You didn’t.”
“Katie, it’s?—”
“Look, I meant?—”
“We should?—”
“Go to your event.” His voice was gentle. “Try to have fun. Send me your flight information when you have it. I’ll see you when you get here.”