“It’s not a magic cure,” I mumbled defensively. Which was true—even on its own, my narcolepsy medicine wasn’t perfect at keeping me awake, but treating narcolepsy was also about insomnia and fractured sleep cycles and hypnagogic hallucinations so scary that even the idea of sleep sounded terrifying and miserable.
At any rate, I hadn’t taken my medicine for the last few weeks, because every time I tried to swallow the gigantic and very bitter pill, I’d gag. I needed to go to a compounding pharmacy and have them mix it into a foam that tasted like something yummy. Maybe a pizza... or the maple sugar candy from my Edelweiss Inn gift basket, which was about the only thing that sounded good to me these days.
“Okay, well, I’m about half a second away from making you a narcolepsy-medicine-cream cold brew and funneling it down your throat, because youhave to get up. Someone’s here for you.”
My heart—my ridiculous, traitorous heart—surged, pumping several hard, urgent beats in rapid succession. I was officially awake.
“Who?” I managed to ask, forcing open my eyes to see Addison looking at me with a soft expression.
“Not him,” she said. Her voice was gentle. “Not Kallum. I’m sorry.”
My heart deflated. It felt as flat and flimsy as a raw flank steak in my chest. I closed my eyes again.
“You could text him, you know,” Addison suggested. “Before you watched that YouTube video about tech-detoxing and turned off your phone, he was texting and calling nonstop.”
I remembered the long text he’d sent me the day I got home, telling me about a fire at his restaurant and how his nephew wound up in the hospital. I’d responded and told him I was sad to hear about the fire, but glad his nephew was okay. I’d saidnothing else after that, and he must have sensed that there was something deeper to my silence, because then the never-ending waterfall of texts and calls had commenced.
“I have nothing to say to him,” I said. “We were just an on-set thing. We’re off set now, and it’s over, and that’s all. The end.”
“Winnie,” Addison said, “you know I support your choices—even when you do completely unhinged things like star in a sexy Santa Claus biopic—but can it really hurt to hear what he has to say? At the very least, you have to turn your phone back on. You’ve missed, like, twenty Wordles, and it’s really stressing me out.”
I made a noncommittal noise. It wasn’t just Kallum I wanted to avoid. Michael had been trying to call too, and I didn’t have the energy to tell him to back offagain.
I didn’t have the energy for anything, really, which was why I would’ve loved to go back to sleep right about now...
“Anyway, your manager is in my living room,” Addison said, giving my cheek a Glossier-sticky kiss and levering herself off me. “And there’s only so much stalling I can do and still keep it profesh, so you need to get dressed and come see her.”
“Steph ishere?” I asked. My heart thumped again—half in fear, half in hope. Either she was here to fire me for being bad at fake sex, or she was here to give me another job. Which I couldn’t afford to say no to at this point—mySanta, Babypaycheck andTreasures in Heavenresiduals only went so far—and eventually, I had to stop trading on Addison’s goodwill and get my own place.
With a noise like an awakening bear, I crawled out of bed and staggered to the bathroom to brush my teeth.
Steph stood in Addison’s living room, her eyes on her phone as her thumbs moved rapidly across the screen. She looked up as I walked in and flashed me a quick smile with an unnerving amount of teeth.
“Winnie Baker,” she said. “You haven’t been answering my calls.”
“I’m so sorry—my phone was off,” I said, sinking down onto one of Addison’s modern farmhouse chic couches. “I’ve been... under the weather.”
I didn’t like lying, but it seemed like an easier explanation thanMy hot costar made me feel like a joke, and so now I’m hiding from him and the rest of the world. Plus, it wasn’t completely untrue; I had been feeling crappy lately. My narcolepsy was the worst I could ever remember it being, and I’d been feeling so groggy and gross that the only things I could choke down were peanut butter sandwiches and the green smoothies I sometimes begged off Addison’s personal assistant.
“Well, it’s time to get over the weather,” Steph said crisply, “because people are asking for a piece of that sexy Winnie Baker pie.”
I stared. “Really?”
“Really. And they’re willing to pay good money for each gooey slice. Haven’t you seen Gretchen’sVogueinterview?”
I shook my head wordlessly, and Steph heaved a dramatic sigh. She handed me her phone after a few impatient taps, and I scrolled through the article while Addison read over my shoulder from behind the couch.
“She talks about how amazing and unsung you are, yadda yadda, but what really matters is that this is just the beginning,”Steph went on. “As the buzz builds forSanta, Babyand then after it releases, people will wake up to what they’re missing, and we want to make sure we have some projects in the queue before that happens. So I have a few scripts for you here, some proposals...”
But I was barely listening by this point. Becauseoh my GodGretchen Young said in this article that I was good in the movie!
More than good—incredible. Sexy. Provocative!
And maybe she was lying to protect the future ofSanta, Baby, but Gretchen struck me more as thediplomatic sidesteprather than theoutright lietype when it came to this sort of thing.
Which meant she probably believed it.
Which meant that I hadn’t been a total disaster on the set ofSanta, Baby, and Kallum and Teddy were wrong about me, those facial-haired jerkwads.
