Chapter 31
THIRTY-ONE
Katie, Two Years Later
The house was a mess.
Parked cars overflowed from our driveway and lined the street. Music played on both sound systems, the one inside and the second one in the backyard. Voices and laughter rang from the kitchen. Lawn chairs and coolers littered the back yard surrounding the pool. Flip-flops, towels, and bottles of sunscreen were scattered on the pool’s edge, all of it soaked with water. Someone downstairs made a loud call on a speakerphone. A baby cried.
Pure chaos.
I loved it.
I opened the bedroom door and came down the hall, twisting my hair up. It was a hot summer day, one of Portland’s most beautiful days of the year, and I had changed out of my shorts and into a light sundress to keep cool. Pregnancy was sweaty.
Something dropped on the floor in the kitchen, and there was more laughter. “Oh, shit, you’re in trouble,” someone said. Someone else asked, “Where is she? We’re ready.”
As I came to the top of the stairs, Travis appeared at the bottom. My husband-to-be was as golden as ever, his tanned arms wound with ink, his burnished hair tousled. His blue eyes lit up when he looked up at me.
“There you are,” he said. “Where did you go? Everyone’s waiting.”
“I’m coming,” I said, starting down the stairs. “I just had to change.”
“This is your party, babe.” Travis met me halfway up the stairs, where he bent and gave my belly a brisk kiss. “Your day of glory. Come and bask.”
“I’m basking, I’m basking.” I tried unsuccessfully to wave him away as he took my arm. “Travis, I’m only five months along.”
“You could trip,” he pointed out. He steadied me, his warm hand on the small of my back. I stopped resisting. “I got you a chair. Come and put your feet up. I’ll get you some lemonade. The party’s in full swing.”
Our house was big, and right now it was full. “She’s here!” Travis shouted as we came down the hall, and applause went up. The first person to fling her arms around me in a hug was Ariana Waters, the nineteen-year-old star of Loser Academy.
Loser Academy , which I had written, produced, and directed. The movie that was the number one movie in the country for the third week in a row, making it a big summer hit.
I had finished the script while on the road with Travis’s tour. Since I had an unexpected gap in my work schedule after telling Edgar Pinsent to shove it, I had gone house shopping with Travis in Portland, and then I had gone on tour with him instead of missing him. We had seen twenty cities in the USA and ten in Europe, having a blast. While he was in sound checks and performing, I wrote. I wrote on airplanes and buses and hotel rooms. I loved the script I wrote, and I banked everything on it. When it was finished and we were back home, I got it into production.
I got a lot of help from Travis’s newly formed production company, which he’d created when his lawsuits started to settle. He put funds into getting Loser Academy made, though creatively he stayed away from it, saying that this was my project, not his.
Making Loser Academy was challenging—even hard. It made me rethink what I was capable of and what I wanted. I loved the final film, and more importantly, it was funny. At least, I thought so.
Now here we were. The movie had taken off immediately and was the hit of the summer. It was exciting and gratifying. So naturally, Travis and I threw a party.
We didn’t throw parties often, but we had a beautiful house with a pool. We had lots of friends. We had something to celebrate. After finishing Loser Academy and the tour, Travis and I had started a new project—a baby. So far, the new project was going great.
Edgar Pinsent had made his movie, of course. It was serious and boring, and someone else played the skinny dead girl. It won Oscars. I didn’t care, because I had made my own movie, and now I was throwing a party celebrating its success.
Aside from Arianna, most of the cast of Loser Academy was here, along with some of the production and the crew. The Road Kings had come with their wives. Finn and Juliet were here with their baby daughter. Will Hale and his wife, Luna. Andy Rockweller had come from L.A. with Elena, who he had finally married for the second time. Being Travis’s go-to stylist had revived Elena’s career, and she was elegantly lounging in the pool at the moment, wearing a ten thousand dollar swimsuit and looking like a queen.
As I walked to the kitchen, greeting everyone, I felt someone’s arm loop through mine. From the smell of perfume, I immediately knew who it was. “We need to talk,” Stella said confidentially in my ear. “The scripts are piling up. When you’re done with this—” she motioned vaguely to my baby bump—“you’ll be able to take your pick of projects.”
“I’m not going to be done with this for a while,” I said, motioning in turn to my baby bump. “And you know I’m writing another script.”
“Which is wonderful, honey, just wonderful,” she said soothingly. “I’m sure your next project will be a hit. But you need a backup plan, and we need to think long term. We need a strategy.”
“Not today,” I said with a laugh. “It’s a party. Go have fun with your husband. Have a snack and a drink. Swim.”
“Fun is not what we have,” Stella said. She and Jonathan had gotten married in Maui three months ago, to no one’s surprise. Travis and I kept getting phone calls in which they were suspiciously together and knew too much about each other. Apparently they thought they were being discreet.
“I think Jonathan is going swimming,” I said to Stella. “Which means he’s wearing a bathing suit.”
“Fine, I’ll go watch,” she said, letting go and vanishing toward the backyard.
An arm slung loosely around my shoulders. It was Denver Gilchrist, the lead singer of the Road Kings.
I suppressed a happy little shiver and tried to look cool about it. I had met the Road Kings often at their studio while Travis worked on his second album. RKS was like a second home, if your second home was full of talented, unreasonably hot men. It was hard not to get giddy when Denver Gilchrist—dark-haired, gray-eyed, gorgeous, and dreamy—slung his arm around your shoulders like an old friend.
“Great party, Katie,” he said in that beautiful voice of his. “There’s a seat of honor for you over here. We set it up so you don’t have to do anything at this party. Just relax and soak it in.” He leaned down and said in a flirty voice, “Has anyone ever told you that you look especially beautiful pregnant?”
“You do,” said Axel de Vries, who was setting up a tray of snacks on the kitchen counter. He winked at me. “You really do.”
I knew what this was. I did look beautiful pregnant—that was true. But the guys were flirting with me to piss off Travis. I turned to look at Travis and saw that it was working. He was giving us a narrow-eyed laser stare.
I elbowed Denver in the ribs. “Knock it off. Could you not be rivals, just for a day? You’ve worked together for two years now.”
“It’s so fun to make him mad, though.” Denver sighed and dropped his arm from my shoulders. That made me sad, so I sat in the chair they had reserved for me and ate some chips. Denver handed me a glass of cold lemonade. And as instructed, I soaked it in.
It was a great party. Neal Watts’s toddler son, Sam, splashed in the pool with his teenaged big sister, Amber, and the other Loser Academy girls. Gwen—who had agreed to work for me full time, which was a big commitment for her—sat at the edge of the pool in a vintage-style bathing suit that of course she pulled off. Stella and Jonathan talked business with the Road Kings’ agent, Angie.
I watched Travis and Finn sip beers and make each other laugh at an inside joke. Those two had become like brothers over the last two years, working on each other’s albums and writing songs. They not only wrote songs for their own projects, but for other artists, too. Lately they’d been on a creative streak, and apparently when they collaborated, they knew how to write hits, because bigger and bigger artists were coming to them for songwriting work.
As the party wound down, Travis stepped behind me and gently rubbed my shoulders, his talented hands working into the muscles. I groaned in pleasure.
He let go and leaned down, putting his arms around me from behind in an unapologetic hug. I soaked in the warmth of his familiar body, his scent. This man I trusted more than anything, who I had built a life with, who I was building a family with. This man who had become everything to me without even trying.
He kissed the side of my neck. “Hey,” he said softly to me. “I love you.”
I leaned back, soaking it in.
“I love you, too,” I told him. “For real.”