3
CELEBRITIES: THEY’RE JUST LIKE US!
Gretchen
I have seen Teddy Knight naked. I have seen Teddy Knight naked. I have seen Teddy Knight naked.
The refrain looped through my mind as I stepped onto Teddy’s porch and knocked on his door. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who was good at setting alarms, and I didn’t want him to miss sunrise circle.
Well, no, LOL, that was a lie. I wanted to yank him abruptly from a peaceful slumber because I was so sick of smug, entitled, self-impressed men that I wasn’t behaving rationally.
Or maybe I was rational for the first time in my life.
It did occur to me—after I knocked—that since I was at Wild Arts to take a break from men, the best way to do that was probably to… take a break from men. As in, not let the first one I saw get me riled up enough that I started plotting ways to annoy him.
What were the odds? To think that Teddy Knight had likely been nearby in the Hyatt when I’d taken the unheard-of step ofrejecting his bandmate. Honestly, if I believed in fate or any of that woo-woo bullshit, I would say that landing at Wild Arts with a member of Concrete Temple meant something. But I didn’t, so the most my atheist self would allow was that the randomness of the universe could be pretty funny sometimes. And not ha-ha funny, but fuck-me funny.
I knocked again, louder, my fist thudding on the door bringing to mind the thud in my gut when I’d googled Teddy Knight early yesterday morning after reading Marion’s email to both of us with instructions on what to do at the airport. Tennyson “Teddy” Knight, bassist for Concrete Temple. Or maybe I should say ex-bassist, as Google had informed me that the band had broken up after the last stop on its tour the previous week.
I’d told myself to give Teddy the benefit of the doubt. He was going to be my colleague at Wild Arts, and it wasn’t fair to lump him in with Scott. For all I knew they’d broken up due to personality differences. And Ihadgiven him the benefit of the doubt—for all of ten seconds, until I clicked on a TMZ post reporting that the band had broken up because Teddy had thrown a tantrum and trashed a hotel room.
And the way he acted when I tried to introduce myself at the airport: sheesh. I’d just been going to say,Hey, I think we’re both late additions to the Wild Arts faculty. I’d been able to google him, but there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of Gretchen Millers in Minnesota. There’s also the part where I’m not famous. But OK, message received. At least, unlike with my Tinder dudes, I hadn’t wasted any time dating him or any vulnerability sleeping with him. No, that was the job of his Instagram-influencer girlfriend, Karlie Carroll, God bless her.
I sent myself back to last night. After getting settled intomy cabin, I’d walked across the road to check out the lake. I’d been standing there, staring at the dark water, thinking about whether I would be the kind of crone who cursed men or if I’d take it up a notch and be the kind of crone who cursed men andalsolured stupid young women to the forest and ruined their lives, when Teddy appeared. He was carrying his lit-up phone, he was stomping across the beach—he passed maybe ten feet in front of me—and he was stark, raving naked. He was holding the phone at waist level, and I could see all the goods. I mean, I could also see a hint of some abs and some tattoos—when it came to rock star torsos, Teddy Knight’s was very on the nose—but can you blame me for focusing on the goods? They weren’t anything extraordinary, just your basic penis and balls at rest in a thatch of dark hair, but it was weird to be seeing a dude’s junk in a nonsexual context.
But maybe also a little gross? He didn’t know I was there; he had the reasonable assumption of privacy. I forced my gaze up—even assholes deserved privacy—and took in more tattoos and inexplicably attractive shoulders.
I needed to cut it out with the stealth ogling. I was turning out to be as bad as the men of Tinder when it came to basic human decency. I transferred my attention to the public, above-the-neck region of Teddy Knight and had to stifle a sigh. He had thick, lustrous, mahogany hair pulled back into a hefty bun my ballet girls would have killed for, a sharp, angular jaw, and a few days’ worth of beard scruff. I tried to tell myself that anyone would look good in shadows like this. It was a lie. Even in the harsh overhead light of baggage claim back at the airport, Teddy Knight had been gorgeous. It didn’t seem fair that someone with such a pretty face should also look like a Greek god. Or maybe a Greek god’s tattooed, black-sheep, waywardbrother—though come to think of it, they probably had Greek gods who fit that bill.
No wonder he was such a jerk. If someone that beautiful was also a nice person, it would probably violate some rule of the universe. Tinder Lesson #1 was that the hot guys were the worst.
But the not-hot guys were also the worst, so I wasn’t sure how much stock to put in Lesson #1.
But it didn’t matter because I was on my way to being a post-Tinder crone.
Teddy’s stomping became more pronounced when he hit the dock.Bam, bam, bam, bam.After he passed me, I got a view of his butt.
He barely broke stride as he approached the end of the dock, just paused momentarily to set down his phone before walking off the edge. He slipped into the still water without a splash.
It had been interesting to appreciate him from afar. To admire his admittedly smoking self with my mind, with no attachment to theideaof him, no eye toward a possible future, no worries about if I’d groomed sufficiently or had enough funny anecdotes on deck to make for good conversation. Setting aside the fact that I don’t sleep with known jerks—no, I just sleep with guys wholaterturn out to be jerks—I wasn’t here for that.
Under no circumstances was I going to have sex with Teddy Knight. It was never going to happen. So I’d been able to watch him with an air of detachment. That, in turn, made me realize how much I normally didn’t, or couldn’t, do that. I evaluated every man I met through the pathetic lens ofCould he love me? Could I love him?
Gah. Gross.
Here, with me actioning Pillar Two on the whole Midlife Crisis: Averted project, everything was different.
Teddy Knight was never going to love me, and I was never going to love Teddy Knight. I found that oddly freeing.
So I would like it stated for the record that myI have seen Teddy Knight nakedearworm wasnotabout the fact that he was famous. It was merely that Teddy Knight was a human male I had seen naked and wasnotgoing to sleep with. It was another one of those the-universe-has-a-sense-of-humor moments: Here I was, day one of my naked-human-male moratorium, and what was the first noteworthy thing I saw? A naked human male. A naked human male formerly of the same band as Scott fucking Collier. All you could do was laugh.
Iwaslaughing, in fact, when Teddy yanked open his door and growled, “What?”
Right. Because I was standing on his porch, where I’d pounded on his door purely to provoke him. Which was something I was going to knock off. I had a feeling that neither Teddy nor I was our best self around the other.
He was still naked. Mostly. He was holding a strategically placed pillow over his junk. Which I had already seen.
I still felt guilty about that.
