“Okay, okay,” I mumbled, and squinted around the room. There was a bathroom, a heart-shaped Jacuzzi that for some reasonwasn’tin the bathroom, and a closet with an ironing board and dusty children’s skis. “I’m not sure where to—”
Bee was shoving at me, rolling me onto my side. “Hurry,” she pleaded.
“Wait, Bee, wait—” I was tangled in the blanket and couldn’t sit up all the way, and my legs were trussed together with the fluffy duvet. Then she pushed me again, and I fell right off the bed.
“Ow,” I said into the carpet.
“Stay there,” she whispered, all bossy and hot, and so I stayed on the floor, hidden between the bed and the wall, as she got to her feet and went to the door.
“Finally,” Teddy said as she opened the door. “You’re alone, right?”
“Obviously, I’m alone,” Bee huffed.
“Well, then you won’t mind if I come in,” Teddy said, walking into the room.
I knew I was hidden from view unless he walked to the far wall and peered at the slice of floor between the edge of the bed and the window, but I still did my bestLaw & Orderdead body impression, staying extra still and trying not to breathe. Because now that I was awake, the stakes of getting caught in Bee’s room by Teddy the producer were very clear.
He might tell Steph. Steph might kill me.
Then she will fire my corpse and Maddie and Mom will have to fight the Medicaid people with only Barb and Snapple to help them.
Shit.
And to think this was after an evening of innocence too! We hadn’t even done anything X-rated last night! Ahhhh, the injustice of it all.
“You look like you slept in your clothes,” Teddy said to Bee suspiciously.
Why does he care?This seemed well outside a producer’sbusiness, and I was ready to jump to my feet and defend Bee’s boundaries and stuff when she answered, sounding bored and not at all like a producer was being creepy with her.
“I did,” Bee replied. “So what? The rules on the Chili’s menu didn’t say anything about no hangovers.”
Chili’s menu?
“You’re young,” Teddy said. “Just wait until you’re forty-six and your adult children make you do a bicycle bar for their birthdays, and then you wake up puking, with your hamstrings cinched like strips of rawhide left out in the sun.Thenyou’ll know what a real hangover is.”
“Teddy, why are you here?”
“It’s ten in the morning, Bee. I get to this schlocky hellhole, learn you’re supposed to be meeting with some horse trainer in thirty minutes and that you’re nowhere to be found.”
“So you came here to yell at me?”
“Yes!” Teddy said. He sounded like he was waving his arms, and I couldn’t help it, I needed to get a better look, mostly to make sure Bee was doing okay. I slithered a little closer to the foot of the bed and peered around the edge to see a tall, stocky man wearing a Hawaiian shirt, snow pants, and sandals, all while carrying a white plastic bag in one hand. He had a big, scruffy beard, and the hair above his upper lip was longer than the rest, like he’d been sporting a mustache initially and then had forgotten to shave the rest of his face for a month.
Or a year.
And he was indeed waving his arms at Bee, but in a hapless Muppet sort of way.
“We have to be above reproach for this!” he told Bee, theplastic bag bouncing up and down. “If you’re late, then people will wonder why. If they wonder why, they might start poking around your past. And if they start poking around your past—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bee said. It was hilarious, because even though she was a grown-up woman who’d done very grown-up things in the last forty-eight hours, she resembled nothing more than a sullen teenager right now. She even scowled at the floor as she kicked at the carpet with her bare feet. “Iknow. Above reproach and all that.”
“I mean it,” Teddy said. “I have to make this work for Angel and Astrid, and you have to make this work for you. Isn’t this what you’ve been wanting? A chance to make a brand outside of Bianca?”
Bianca.So he knew about her other career.
Bee’s shoulders fell. “Yeah,” she said, suddenly sounding very small. “It is.”
Teddy lowered his arms. His mustache moved. Then he said, “I brought you breakfast.”
