Page 16

Kat

Kat felt expansive. That was the word that kept coming to mind. Like her insides were bigger than her body, pushing the boundaries of who she was and could be. Jude’s hand in hers made her skin spark, sending little race cars of electricity up and down her skin, leaving goosebumps in their dust.

“Where are we going?” Jude asked as Kat pulled her through the party.

“You’ll see.” Impulsively, Kat swiped a bottle of champagne off the bar as they passed. She pressed a finger to her lips as she looked over her shoulder at Jude, then led them up the spiral staircase, through the beautiful library, and out the glass door onto the balcony.

“Look,” she said.

Beyond the balcony’s brass railing, the back garden shone with fairy lights strung between the trees. Partygoers drifted underneath them, turned beautiful by the small shimmering lights.

“Wow,” Jude said. “This is gorgeous. I mean, mind-boggling that anyone has this amount of space in Manhattan, but gorgeous.”

“Will you do the honors?” Kat held out the bottle of champagne.

“I’d be delighted.” Jude twisted off the cork with a loud pop that made several people below look around wildly. “Cheers.” Jude lifted the bottle to her lips for a swig, but the liquid foamed up, exploding around her mouth. Kat laughed.

“You try! It’s hard!”

Kat took the bottle and raised it delicately, but it foamed up into her nose, making her sputter.

“Okay, lesson learned,” Kat said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Champagne is not easy to drink from the bottle.”

“Karma for being a bottle thief,” Jude said. “How did it go with the director?”

“ So well.” Kat spun in a little circle, just because she could. She was being silly. Kat was never silly. But she felt almost high on happiness and relief. “I think he likes me.”

“How could he not?” Jude said, and Kat ducked her mouth to the bottle to hide her blush.

“I’m just relieved. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to pull off impressing him. I mean, he writes these really smart plays, and I was worried he’d see right through me.”

“See right through what?”

“That I’m not very smart.”

“What makes you think you’re not smart?”

Kat shrugged. “I didn’t go to college. I didn’t even finish high school.

I paid some sketchy guy five hundred dollars when I took the GED test and he ensured that I would pass.

Lord knows what my actual score was. But the director of P.R.O.M.

told me to do it if I wanted to get hired—so I could work more hours, because I wouldn’t be legally mandated to have on-set tutoring. ”

Jude frowned. “That’s awful.”

Kat shrugged again. She leaned against the wall, looking out over the garden, and held the bottle out to Jude. “It was fine. But now I’m a little screwed. The lack of education kind of limits my non-acting job prospects.”

Jude leaned beside Kat. Their sides were touching. Kat’s veins felt pleasantly fizzy—was that the champagne? Or was it the heat of Jude’s body beside her?

“Not having a good education doesn’t mean you’re not smart,” Jude said.

“Yeah, but it’s intimidating when I try to talk to people like you.”

Jude snorted. “You find me intimidating?”

“Of course I do. You seem to have read every book ever, and you can talk about them so easily. You even understood Richard Gottlieb’s play, and that thing made no sense to me.”

“Okay, that play made no sense to anybody. Plus, using fancy words or bullshit critical analysis isn’t what’s important when you talk about books or plays. What’s important is how they make you feel. Those books I recommended—did you enjoy them? Did they make you feel something?”

“I loved them,” Kat said, and her voice came out oddly hushed. “I thought about Mrs. S for days. The way the narrator feels so out of place, so unsure, moving through a world with rigid rules. Full of longing for something else but not sure what it is they’re longing for…”

“That’s most people’s early queer experience, I think,” Jude said. “Knowing something is different about you. Knowing you want something besides what you see in front of you. But also being frustrated because you don’t really know what that is.”

“That’s how I feel,” Kat said. “I know I want something different from the life I’ve been living. I know I want to be different, more fully myself. But I don’t know who myself is, and I don’t know how to start figuring that out.”

“I think that’s a really good place to start, actually,” Jude said. “You have to recognize that you don’t know something before you can start learning it.”

Kat wanted to shake Jude by the shoulders and beg Jude to tell her how, exactly, she was supposed to start learning these things about herself. But that was too embarrassing. Instead, she took a big sip of champagne and asked, “How are you single?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I can’t believe you’re not already taken,” she said. “What’s your dating history like? Have you ever been in love?”

She felt Jude’s shoulders tense slightly against hers. “Once.”

“What happened?”

Jude picked up the champagne, managing to take a sip without foaming it over this time. She stared at the bottle, turning it in her hands.

“Her name was Becca,” she finally said. “We met in college. At Northwestern, in Chicago. We started dating junior year, but when my mom got cancer, I transferred back home. After graduation, Becca moved to New York. We were planning to move in together, but with my mom so sick, it just didn’t make sense.

And then, when my mom…” Jude’s voice cracked, and she let the end of the sentence fall away.

“Becca was there for me. She kept me from falling apart. And I thought that was it. I thought she was the one.”

Kat nodded, trying not to reveal the surprising amount of jealousy she felt, hearing Jude talk about the one .

“About a year after my mom died, Becca came by the store while I was working and said she needed to talk to me later. But I was so worried, I begged her to just tell me. So she did.” Jude let out a sound, something strained that sounded like she’d intended for it to be a chuckle.

“She’d accepted a spot at a law school in California. She hadn’t even told me she’d applied.”

“I’m so sorry,” Kat said softly.

Jude’s voice had gone hard now. “I think that’s the worst thing you can do in a relationship. Hide things from each other. Because if you can’t communicate, then you can’t do anything.”

The champagne suddenly felt sour in Kat’s stomach. She’d been hiding things from Jude since their first date.

“So we broke up,” Jude said. “That was two years ago.”

“That’s awful.”

“It was really rough. Especially coming right after my mom died. It kind of…destabilized my world for a little bit.”

“Having someone you love treat you like that…I know how painful that is.” Kat reached out and put a hand on Jude’s arm. Jude leaned into her touch.

“What about you?” she said. “Have you ever been in love?”

Now it was Kat’s turn to reach for the champagne bottle. She took a long sip, buying herself time. Was she actually going to share this? It was definitely a bad idea. But Jude had just been so vulnerable…

“Once,” Kat said, her mouth making the decision before her brain had.

“With that guy from your show? The one you dated?”

“Frasier?” Kat snorted. “God, no. That guy is a piece of shit.”

Jude grinned. “I am not entirely surprised by that. Knowing literally nothing about him but how punchable his face is.”

“Ugh, right? He’s like a smarmy, smug Clark Kent.”

“No one with a jawline that pretty could also be a nice person. It would break the space-time continuum.”

Kat laughed. Then she leaned back against the wall. Waiting for the inevitable.

“So, if it wasn’t him, then…?” Jude trailed off. “You don’t have to tell me. If you don’t feel comfortable. I’m sure it’s complicated for you. Telling people things. But I promise I would never…anything you tell me stays with me.”

“Her name was Madelyn,” Kat said. “She played my sidekick in P.R.O.M.

From the very first chemistry read, she told me we were going to be friends.

I thought she was just sucking up to me, but she meant it.

Once filming started, she was always dropping by my trailer or asking if I wanted to get dinner.

And not just me, either. The whole cast.

“Honestly? It was magical.” Kat blinked hard, the fairy lights swimming in front of her eyes as she remembered those first few seasons.

“I hadn’t really had friends since I started acting.

Normal kids seemed so young to me. They didn’t have jobs.

They didn’t have responsibilities, or families waiting on their paychecks.

And other kid actors were my competition.

But on P.R.O.M …. Madelyn made all of us into a group.

She set this tone of friendship from the very beginning and found a way to make us watch out for one another, instead of compete.

We were all friends. But Madelyn was my best friend. ”

She glanced over to see if Jude understood what she was saying.

“It felt like such a relief to have a friend who got it. Who wouldn’t call me ungrateful for complaining about how sick I was of signing autographs.

Who was on the same crazy restrictive diet I was on.

Who I could go to and say, Hey, did that sound guy touch you too much when he was mic’ing you up?

and we could talk through whether we thought it was a problem or not.

“We started spending all our time together. Sometimes we would be together all day on set and then I’d call her as soon as I got home. It was the first time in years I didn’t feel lonely. I thought about her constantly. I wanted to know everything about her.”

Kat stopped to take a breath. She didn’t like remembering what their friendship had been like. It made her too sad.

“And then we kissed,” Kat said, pushing through. “Just once. But I told her I was straight. Even though I knew I liked her like that. I was too worried about people finding out.”

“I can imagine that was really stressful as a public figure.”

“And afterward—”

Kat cut herself off. What was she doing? She couldn’t tell Jude what had really happened with her and Madelyn. She was being reckless already by sharing this much. Telling the full story was a step too far.

“And then she stopped being my friend,” Kat finished abruptly. Another lie she’d told to Jude. She could add it to the quickly mounting tally.

“I’m so sorry,” Jude murmured.

Kat knew she had made the smart decision by not sharing the story’s real ending. So why did she feel so disappointed in herself?

She put the champagne down. These dates with Jude were supposed to be strictly business. But maybe she didn’t want this to be strictly business. There was just something…nice about Jude. Something sincere and open, something that made talking to her feel easy.

Maybe that was what motivated her to reach up and run her hand through Jude’s hair.

She’d wanted to touch those rumpled blond strands since the first time she saw Jude.

They were just as soft under her fingers as she’d imagined.

But she hadn’t imagined the way Jude’s gray-green eyes would widen as Kat’s hand made a slow arc toward the back of her head.

Or how Kat’s breath would catch in her throat as they leaned toward each other.

Slowly, Jude ghosted a hand over Kat’s arm.

She ran it upward until it settled behind Kat’s neck, pulling her closer.

Kat could still hear the murmur of partygoers chatting and laughing in the garden beneath them.

But they were alone, shielded from sight, surrounded by the cool night air.

She let Jude’s hand guide her forward until their lips found each other.

Jude tasted like champagne and smelled like cinnamon, and Kat’s head spun like she was ten times drunker than she actually was.

After a few seconds, she pulled back, feeling so giddy that she laughed. Jude laughed back, her eyes twinkling like the fairy lights in the garden below.

“We should probably head back downstairs,” Kat said reluctantly.

“Okay.” Jude led the way back inside. Kat took a second to steady herself before following Jude back down the spiral stairs.

The first girl she’d kissed had ruined her entire life. She could only hope the same didn’t happen with the second one.