“If I admit I have a crush, will you help me?”
Hanna stands in front of me inside Wilder headquarters a few days after the first Bear trip, arms crossed over one of her ubiquitous baggy sweatshirts. That woman has more baggy sweatshirts than a Walmart.
We’re the last two people left at headquarters tonight. I don’t know what she’s still doing here, but I’m finishing up some paperwork for Bear’s trip. Celebrities don’t have to do their own paperwork.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
“If I admit I have a crush on Bear Warden, will you help me get the guy?”
“I’m going to pinch myself right now, because if you’re asking me for help, I’m definitely dreaming.”
“You’re not dreaming,” she informs me. “But if you want me to pinch you—”
“Not necessary!” I say, jumping out of her reach. “But I would like you to say the humiliating part again. About how you have a terrible, mad, soul-wrenching crush—”
“I didn’t say any of that.”
“And only I, Easton Wilder, can help you win him over and live happily ever after.”
“Fine,” she says. “I have a terrible, mad, soul-wrenching crush, and only you, Easton Panty-Melter Wilder, have the expertise in lurrrrrvvvving to help me find my way to bliss.”
“That wasn’t quite as satisfying as I’d hoped,” I admit. In fact, the word bliss in conjunction with Bear makes me strangely itchy.
“Seriously, Easton, help me.”
“Help you what?”
“Woo Bear. Get laid.”
“That’s it? That’s your highest aspiration? From the way you were looking at him, I thought it was going to be more like a white wedding and four-point-five kids.”
“Why are kids always measured in halves? It’s so awful to contemplate. Which half would you get?”
“You’re deflecting.”
“True,” she admits.
“You want more than just to have sex with him.”
She scrunches up her whole face—oddly cute—and then relaxes it. “Look,” she says, pointing a finger at me. “I think you know I’ve been on a few dates this year.”
“Rumor had reached me, yes.”
“And that means you probably know that they haven’t been a rip-roaring success.”
In the interest of honesty, I say, “Um. Yeah.”
“Not to get into the nitty-gritty details, but they basically break down into two categories. People who are secretly married, and people who are totally and completely unacceptable for coffee and a sticky bun, let along marriage and procreation.”
“That sounds—unfun.”
“So. Un. Fun.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Here’s the thing. I like Bear. I like him a lot. He’s…”
She hesitates, and I’m a hundred percent sure I don’t want her to finish the sentence, although I’m not sure how I know.
“…really fucking hot.”
Yeah, didn’t need that sentence finished.
“But that’s not the main thing. The main thing is, he has a great job and a serious career, he loves the outdoors, and he’s got ambitions. And he knows how to treat a woman. He’s the whole package. And I’ve seen enough this year to know that when a guy who’s the whole package comes along, you don’t hang back and ‘see what happens next.’ You go for it.”
I’m not nearly as pleased about getting her to agree that she wants Bear for more than sex as I was expecting to be. In fact, I wish she’d stuck to her guns and insisted this was just an itch to be scratched.
Although, either way, it’s a terrible idea. I don’t think Bear is a bad person; I just think he’s a bit of an egotist. A camera ham. And Hanna deserves better than a man who’s treating her well for the sake of looking good to his audience and sponsors. And who’s also treating other women well at the same time, for the same reasons.
That said, I want her to be happy, especially if I quit working for Wilder and can’t look out for her on a daily basis.
Hanna would disembowel me with a blunt pencil if she knew I “looked out for her” but it’s true. I do. And fixing her up with Bear really doesn’t fit my idea of what it means to keep an eye on her well-being.
“What do you want me to do, exactly?” I ask, in lieu of explaining how I feel about her well-being, which will make Hanna squirmy. Hanna hates feelings—everyone else’s, definitely, but even more so, her own. “Are we talking, like, a makeover montage situation? Where you suddenly have long hair and lots of makeup and an evening gown, and he can’t stop staring at you from across the room?”
“I can’t suddenly have long hair,” Hanna points out. “I mean, unless I wear a wig, but that seems like it would have unintended consequences in a dating scenario.”
“You know what I mean. Changing yourself for a guy is a bad idea. Any guy who needs you to look different from how you look now doesn’t deserve you.”
“When I was little,” Hanna says, “my mom used to try to get me to wear dresses.”
This is intriguing. Hanna never talks about her mom. In fact, I literally don’t think she has mentioned her mother to me once since her death. So, for once, I don’t make a snide comment about what a low probability of success trying to get Hanna to wear a dress must have had.
Her eyes are a little dreamy, as if she’s remembering. “I would yell at her that anyone who didn’t like me the way I was didn’t deserve to see me at their party-slash-concert-slash-whatever. And she’d respond, It’s a costume, baby. It’s armor. It’s plumage. It doesn’t change who you are, it just lets you walk into battle your strongest self.”
I know better than to say anything. Hanna talks like this so infrequently that when it happens, I know just to listen.
“This is like that. I just want to gird myself. Fluff my feathers. Swirl my cape.” She sighs. “I want to get his undivided, off-camera attention—is that so wrong?”
It’s the sigh that gets to me. More than anything else in the world, I hate seeing Hanna defeated. All I can manage is, “No. But maybe I’m not the guy for this job, Han. What about your girls? They’d be all over this. They’d have you decked out for battle in a second.”
“No,” she says decisively. “No women. They’ll want to talk about feelings. They’ll want to analyze everything and scrutinize my facial expressions, and I’ll end up confessing I masturbate thinking about him.”
My mouth falls open. This is not a sentence I expected to come out of Hanna’s mouth, and I’ll admit, it catches me off guard. In the “it’s weird when your friend talks dirty unexpectedly” way. Like suddenly I’m thinking about Hanna, masturbating, which is, oddly, not a bad thought at all, although Hanna masturbating thinking about Bear Warden…
I don’t like that nearly as much.
But I digress.
“I don’t know, Han. I think me coaching you on how to get a guy? It’s a bad idea. On all fronts.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I thought you might say that. So… here’s the thing, Easton. I really didn’t want to have to do this, but…”
No good ever came of a sentence that started like that.
“…if you don’t want me to tell Gabe that you’re trying to get a job with Bear, you have to help me.”
She went there. She really went there.
“You’d do that? Betray me?”
“I’d so much rather not.” Her voice is apologetic.
I don’t have to think about it very long. How angry Gabe will be, how determined to change my mind. He’d rip me off the Bear trips and consign me to death-by-glare for months. It would definitely mean the end of my aspirations to find a new path for myself.
And all Hanna is really asking me to do is help her find a little happiness that she thoroughly deserves.
“I hate you,” I tell her.
“Yeah,” she says. “I know. Now. What do we do first?”
I sigh one of those sighs that comes up from your soul.
“Let’s start with clothes.”