I looked over to Donner and Cupid who were both hanging upside down by their knees from their poles. They made it look so easy.
Without much thought as to how, I shimmied up the pole, and let go so that my proud belly would be on full display.
Except gravity had different plans... and before I knew it, my body hit the edge of the stage.
Face-first.
Oh God.
I landed with a crunchingthud. My head immediately began to spin and my mouth was full of coppery warmth.
With a groan, I rolled over onto my back to find two topless dancers hovering above me and Winnie rushing the edge of the stage.
“Kallum!” she said as she gripped my shoulders. “Kallum, are you okay? What day is it? Can you spell your name? Or count back from ten to zero?”
I sat up slowly as the rest of the cast and crew surrounded us. Nothing actually hurt, which meant I’d probably feel like a train wreck in the morning. “C-A-L-L-U-M. Uhhhh, Tuesday or maybe Wednesday, depending on how late it is, and ten, nine, eight—”
Winnie flung her arms around my neck. “You doofus, you can’t even spell your own name now!”
I pulled her even closer and buried my bloody face in her hair even though I didn’t want to get her dirty. “I wasn’t kidding when I said that was all for you.”
“Well, it was not Winnie approv—” Her grip around my neck tightened for a brief moment and then she pedaled back. “I need—I’ll be right back.”
“Winnie, what’s wrong?” I asked as I stood up and immediately stumbled back onto the stage, Nolan steadying my grip.
The group of concerned faces closed in on me as the house lights came up and Winnie disappeared.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Winnie
“Winnie?” Sunny’s voice called through the bathroom door. “No,youget back,” she said, presumably to someone next to her. “I was here first.”
“Well, Nolan deputizedmeto figure out what was going on,” I heard Bee say, “and it doesn’t matter how hot you are, I’m the sheriff of Bathroom Town now.”
“If anyone is the sheriff of this town, it’s me,” announced Steph’s no-nonsense voice. Then there was a sharp, hard rap on the very hollow door of the North Pole’s single-stall women’s bathroom. “Winnie? Are you okay?”
I was most definitely not okay. I was sitting on the toilet, my Ralph Lauren dress hiked up to my waist and my panties around my knees. I was staring at something that only four months agowould have been completely normal, so utterly mundane: a wet bloom of blood on my panties. Crimson. Shining in the yellowish light of the bathroom.
Had I just been laughing? Cheering Kallum on? I couldn’t believe it; I couldn’t believe there was any version of myself that wasn’t this one: staring at bloody panties with my hands shaking and my breath coming in short, arrhythmic bursts.
But I did everything right, was all I could think.I did everything right.
“Is Winnie okay?” came a gruff voice through the door. Even Teddy’s voice sounded like it had a mustache, which made no sense, but what did make sense right now? Nothing. Nothing made sense.
But I didn’t want to be a problem, that much I still knew. Narcoleptic messes only got so many second chances, and I couldn’t have my producer thinking I was a constant catastrophe.
“I’m fine,” I called through the door. I hoped they couldn’t hear how thin my voice was. How much it shook. “Teddy, I’m fine, I promise. You can go!”
“Teddy’s good in a pinch,” Sunny informed me in a comforting tone. “One time when I was on set, a performer started bleeding from her butthole during a scene, and Teddy didn’t miss a beat! He draped a towel over the seat of his Chrysler Town & Country and got her to an emergency room ASAP.”
Her butthole??? Holy heck. “Was she okay?”
“Oh yeah,” Sunny said. “Turns out she wasn’t bleeding at all, she’d just eaten a lot of beets the day before. Anyway, my point is that Teddy is a good man to have in a crisis, aren’t you, Ted?”
Teddy ignored Sunny and told me through the door, “Winnie, I’m right here if you need anything. Can you tell me what’s wrong? Do we need to go back to the hotel? Is there someone I can get to help?”
There was something so bluntly fatherlike in his tone that I felt my face start to crumple.
