The tradition lived on.
Chapter Three
Winnie
The Hope Channel office was a glass and granite nightmare in Studio City, lined with boxy bushes and with absolutely no visitor parking.
Addison pulled her G-Wagon up to the curb, put it in park, and then chirped, “Home sweet reliable paycheck home!”
I looked down at my trembling hands, wondering if it was my narcolepsy medication making me jittery. With my type of narcolepsy, I didn’t have to worry about sudden losses of muscle tone, only extreme sleepiness during the day and screwed-up sleep at night. The medicine helped a lot, but it wasn’t perfect, and sometimes it made me feel a little fried during the day, like a long-haul trucker on his seventh cup of coffee white-knuckling the steering wheel.
Then again, this might just be good, old-fashioned about-to-make-a-sexy-Santa-movie nerves. It had been two weeks since I told Steph I’d take the role, and for every hour of those two weeks, I’d doubted my decision, because:
I wasn’t sure if I even knew how to be sultry on-screen, given that I wasn’t even sure if I’d ever been sultry inreal life. Michael certainly claimed I’d never been—one of the reasons for his infidelity, he said.
After the divorce, I’d finally stopped living on the edge of starvation in order to maintain the “right” image, and my body had changed. My tummy was softer, my hips were rounder. My thighs were not runway-model thighs. And that was all going to be on camera. (And then on Hopeflix, where viewers could easily grab as many unflattering screenshots as they liked.)
Kallum Lieberman was my costar. The same Kallum Lieberman who took the infamous Chateau Marmont picture... the catalyst for my life being turned upside down.
Could Santa even be sexy? What about smelly reindeer and a velvet capsule wardrobe could possibly be sexy???
Addison faced me and took a long slurp from her iced beet juice. “It’s just an intimacy coordination meeting,” she said. “Everything will be supersafe and slow today, I promise.”
“Have you even done one before?”
“Well, no, but I watched anSNLskit about them once. So chillax, sweetie, it’s going to be great.”
“Is it obvious I’m nervous?”
“Girl, you’re turning that heated seat into a vibrating seat with how much you’re shaking. Take a deep breath—and maybe an edible—and then go show the world what I already know: that you’re a sexy narcoleptic flower just waiting to blossom.”
“I don’t have any edibles,” I pointed out, but I did take a deep breath.
“I have some in my purse,obvi,” Addison said, but I was already waving her off and unbuckling my seat belt.
“Thank you for dropping me off,” I said, sliding out of the car.
“No worries! I’ll be nearby in a Wishes meeting, so just call when you’re done. And, Winnie?”
I shut the car door and looked back at my friend through the rolled-down window, knowing she was about to say something kind and empowering, and that it would fill me with confidence and courage, and that I would use her words to draw strength from for the rest of theSanta, Babyproduction schedule. “Yes, Addy?”
“Let me know if Kallum’s actually packing or if those were just good camera angles in his video, okay? I have a bet with my spray tan girl.”
And then she sucked down another two inches of beet juice and took off, tires screeching on the asphalt.
“. . . and you’re going to love coming back to Christmas Notch,” Don was saying to me. “Hopeflix is sparing no moneybringing Hope After Dark to life, and we’re even building custom sets. Just wait until you see the sleigh where Santa first seduces your character! No spoilers, but the gold carriage the British monarchy trots out for parades has nothing on this. Except for the actual gold, maybe.”
Don Dilly was a Hope Channel producer—one I’d worked with several times before—and I got the distinct impression from his bright chatter and constant gesturing that he’d been told to hype up the project and hypemeup as well, probably to reassure me that I was firmly back in the Hope Channel’s embrace. Unfortunately for him, no number of monarchy-topping sleighs was going to settle the metallic panic currently roiling in my chest. And it didn’t help that the hallway we were walking down was lined with framed Hope Channel movie posters—several of which hadmeon them. Me smiling or me with a face full of Christmas wonder or me looking beatifically up at a bland man in a sweater.
Seeing all these past Winnies—happy, slender, blank—was beyond disorienting.
I wasn’theranymore.
So why was Ihere?
“Now the intimacy coordinator is a hoot, a real hoot,” Don was saying, and for the first time, I detected some nervousness under his otherwise chipper tone. “Quite the character, very different from people we usually have on set—well,Duke the Hallsbeing the exception. Anyway, Hope After Dark is a really exciting direction for Hope Media at large, and we think some out of the box thinking is warranted in who we partner with, but that being said, he is a little—”
The door at the end of the hallway crashed open, revealing a white man about my age with blond hair, a beach-ready suntan, and the face of a Ken doll. One hand held a phone in front of his face, and the other hand held the ugliest dog I’d ever seen in my entire life.
