“I don’t care how good he is with animals, I don’t want him around MissCrumpets when she’s visiting you!” he was yelling into the phone. “And you owe it to me after you stole my lube dispenser from my bedside table, and don’t lie and say you didn’t, because my sistersawyou, and you know it’s emotionally mine after spending the last two years cleaning lube off the floor because you didn’t know how to use it right, and that stuffstains, Levi!”
“—out there,” Don finished heavily. “He’s a little out there.”
For the first time, the intimacy coordinator seemed to notice that he wasn’t alone in the hallway, his blue-green eyes narrowing at us. From the end of his phone, someone was yelling back at him, but he ignored them and used his ugly dog’s paw to point at me. “You. Winnie Baker. I’ll be back for you and Kallum when I’m done with this.” And then he was pushing past us to the door outside, the dog wriggling in excitement the whole way.
Don cleared his throat in the ensuing silence. “Should I show you to the meeting room?”
He didn’t need to show me—I’d shivered through enough AC-blasted meetings in these offices that I could have probably drawn the building’s vent schematics from memory—but I still let him take my elbow and lead me into the room, which was empty save for us, the furniture, and a pink plastic box on the meeting room table.
No Kallum. Not yet. I took in a sudden breath and realized I’d been holding it all this time.
Okay. Okay, I could do this. I’d white-knuckled my way through narcoleptic episodes, through diets so brutal that gallons of coffee were the only way to stop my stomach from chewing itself apart, through long dinners with Michael where he never tore his eyes away from his phone to talk to me. If I’d made myself uncomfortable for him, for my parents, for my old agent, then why couldn’t I make myself uncomfortable formyself? For something that I wanted to do?
The new Winnie Baker had herself undercontrol. The new Winnie Baker had her shittogether. And she was going to make a sexy Santa movie and show the world that she was here on her own terms, dang it.
A smalldingchimed next to me, and Don glanced at his smartwatch. His face paled as he read the message. “Oh crapping heck,” he mumbled.
“Everything okay?”
“A snowstorm just hit a set in Georgia, and now a ten-thousand-dollar-a-day machine for making fake snow is stuck in the real snow. Excuse me, I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Don ducked out, already pulling his phone free, and then it was just me in the room. Just me and the vents keeping the room at the approximate temperature of a meat locker.
I didn’t sit, still needing to force myself back into Winnie Baker Has Her Shit Together mode. Instead, I paced around the table and dragged my fingers over the surface, stopping when I got to the pink plastic box, which was none other than a vintage Barbie-branded Caboodle.
Anunlatchedvintage Barbie-branded Caboodle, and even though I knew it wasn’t polite to snoop, I lifted the lid anyway and then stared at the contents inside, unable to piece together why they were all in the same place. Body tape, thin pieces of foam that reminded me of the shells stuffed inside bra cups, kneepads, baby oil. I picked up a flesh-colored piece of fabric that was sewn into the shape of a pouch and then stared at it for a moment.
“That would be my pickle pouch,” came a deep, cheerful voice from behind me, and I startled, dropping the pouch as the lid to the Caboodle lightly clunked back down. I turned around to see Kallum Lieberman standing only a few feet away—and then had to tilt my head back in order to keep seeing him, because oh my God, had he always been that tall?
Tall andbig. Like big enough to be throwing logs at one of those Scottish competitions made up entirely of burly men in kilts. His head practically scraped the ceiling, and his shoulders were broad enough to cast a shadow over me. The graphic T-shirt he wore under his denim jacket clung to the outward curve of his stomach, and his big, sturdy thighs pushed against his jeans.
And his hands! They were massive! Surely they couldn’t have been that big when we were younger? Because I’d never seen hands like that, hands the size of dinner plates, and they looked so impossibly strong, like he could wrap his fingers around my arms and lift me bodily off the ground without so much as a grunt.
Somehow, totally unbidden, the image of those hands on my waist floated to the surface of my mind. Stroking my hips.Pressing into my skin. Searching out my navel and the little dents at the small of my back.
With a flush, I realized that I’d been staring at his hands. His hands, which were down by his thighs, and it must have looked like I was staring at his—
“Making sure the pouch will fit?” Kallum asked with a giant grin. Through the dark blond of his beard, a dimple pulled, and then something in my stomach felt like it was falling all the way down to the floor.
“Because I already told Jack he’ll need to find something larger,” Kallum added. “Like a sock hat. Or a sleeping bag.”
He laughed, and it was deep and happy, like he didn’t have a care in the world. And maybe he didn’t. Maybe he walked around oblivious to everything, leaving a trail of dropped surfboards and sleeping Winnie Baker pictures behind him.
I stuck out my hand and pasted on the biggest smile I could. “Winnie Baker,” I said. “It’s lovely to meet you in person.”
His smile faded a little, the dimple disappearing under the beard. “You don’t remember meeting me before?” he asked. “At the Teen Choice Awards? I’m Surfboard Guy, remember?”
“I thought it was more polite not to mention it,” I said delicately, and then the dimple reappeared.
“You don’t ever have to be polite with me,” he said, finally taking my hand, and my stomach did the falling thing again as his hand practically swallowed mine in the handshake. It was shockingly warm in the cold room, and maybe the rest of him was that warm too. Maybe if he hugged me, it would feel like slipping into a hot bath. “I’m the kind of guy you can be yourself with.”
It could have been a sound bite, like something that would have been printed under a giant, glossy picture of his face inTiger Beatmagazine, but it didn’t sound fake or rehearsed at all. It sounded like he meant it.
“And I’m sorry for the surfboard thing,” he added, his thick brows pulling together. “I get clumsy when I’m nervous. Well, unless I’m dancing. Which doesn’t make sense, because I’ve been plenty nervous performing before, but if I’m dancing, it never seems to matter.”
I thought I knew what he was saying. “It makes sense to me. All the moves are choreographed ahead of time. You don’t have to think or make decisions or wonder if you’re doing the right thing or if people will be upset with you. All you have to do is follow the plan.”
“Yeah,” he said, although the line between his brows didn’t disappear. “Something like that.”
“And it’s totally okay about the Teen Choice Awards,” I said. “It’s all surfboards under the bridge.”
