I thought back to biting Sunny’s thigh under the table, and then I thought further back to the Roman orgy of Capri-Suns in the drawing room, and then to Steph saying a lot of boring words while I’d thought about Brooklyn being dead.
“Ohhhh.Okay, I remember now.”
“You remember?”
I pushed myself upright, disturbing what turned out to be a cat Superman-stretched between my legs. Mr.Tumnus gave me a hiss that would make any opossum proud and leapt off the bed to aggressively head-butt Sunny’s ankles.
“Yeah, they needed a place for a Duke the Halls scene, and I said they could use the mansion.” I peeled back the layers of quilts and duvets and winced. Fuck, it was cold. “I didn’t realize it was going to mean I had todo something.Like get out of bed.”
No good deed, as they say.
“Oh!” Sunny said, her breath puffing on the glass. “I see Krysta!”
I perked up a little. I’d downsized my security team to zero when I’d moved to Christmas Notch, not anticipating a need for security here in northern Vermont—opossums notwithstanding—but I’d been sad to let Krysta go. She’d been with me since the end of my INK days, throughout my solo career, and had stuck around through the bleakest of the post-Brooklyn times. “Why is she here, do you think?” I asked as I bravely left the bed and went to my closet.
“Um, earth to Isaac Kelly. Addison Hayes is starring in this one. It’s a huge deal because it’s the first Hope Channel thing she’s done since she came out, and it’s been all over BiTok, HopeTok, all the Toks. Ooh, let’s go say hi.” Sunny bounced as I walked back out from the closet wearing the warmest, fleeciest things I could find in black.
I enjoyed Sunny’s naked bouncing for a minute before I responded. “Fine, but after that, we should hide.”
“Hide?” she asked. “From what?”
I could feel my eyebrows pinch up into a confused furrow. “From the people. People are bad and we have to hide from them, Sunny. Didn’t you readWatership Down?”
Sunny had clearly never hid from anyone in her life, because she was looking at me with an equally confused expression.
“We’ll have to talk to them,” I explained carefully. “And then they’ll talk to us. And then we’ll try to leave, but they’ll keep talking. Do you see it now? The horror?”
She walked up to me and patted my shoulder. She was still completely naked, so the shoulder-patting did have the effect of making me feel better. “I don’t see, but we should probably build up your people-tolerance over time. We’ll find Krysta and say hi, and then we’ll hide.”
“In here?” I asked hopefully, looking at her nipple piercings.
Sunny looked past me and eyed my bed with the troubled gaze of a prophet. “Maybe we should hide somewhere else. Without a bed.”
Somewhere else. Like the ski resort restaurant. Like Sunny’s pink cunt on display on the bathroom counter, our muffled grunts echoing off the tile.
“Somewhere else,” I agreed huskily.
Ieventually let the horrible people into my house, and Sunny—now dressed in a giant sweater, leggings, and twin messy buns—wasted no time inserting herself into the chaos. She was high-fiving someone named Tall Ron and giving Cammy, the overworked PA, a comforting hug and letting Gretchen Young and Pearl Purkiss pluck fuzzies off her sweater while she chattered at them.
It was strange, I almost didn’t hate being around all these might-as-well-be-strangers while Sunny was here. Despite her mega-stardom, Brooklyn had been just as introverted as me, and so any amount of socializing or schmoozing had been painful for us both—but Sunny was so at ease, so funny and friendly, that she almost made “people” seem not so bad.
From a distance. While she did all the work.
And extra strange? It didn’t hurt so much anymore to think of how things used to be with Brooklyn. It also didn’t hurt so much to enjoy things about someone else.
I turned that last thought over for a moment, had nowhere to put it, and so promptly shoved it down into the pit where I kept everything that wasn’t related to sex or reality TV.
“If you don’t take your eyes off her, people are going to thinkyou’rethe bodyguard,” came an amused voice.
I didn’t have to look over to know it was Krysta. No one else here was as tall, as blond, and as unimpressed by me as her. “She’s my roommate. I’m watching her for roommate reasons.”
“Uh-huh,” Krysta said.
In typical Krysta fashion, theuh-huhspoke volumes.
“It’s not like that,” I protested. “Sunny and I are just—”
But I stopped. Because we were justwhat? I didn’t know.
