Who They Really Are

three

Chapter 3
The bright sunlight shines through the window, and Kat reaches up to shade her eyes.

"What the hell?" she mumbles to herself and squints to look around. Her head is pounding extremely hard, and she feels like she may throw up. She doesn't recognize her surroundings, and for a second she's afraid she may be at a strangers house. The thought is a tiny bit sobering, and she sits up to assess the situation. She's got all of her clothes on, and she quickly realizes she's in Ciara's apartment.

She breathes a sigh of relief and reaches down and pats her pockets, finding her phone. It's dead, so she gets up and goes to the fridge to find a bottle of water to chug. The fridge is basically empty, so she drinks a little bit of water out of the tap and goes to find Ciara or Elissa to tell them she was going home.

She walks to the little guest bedroom and sees Elissa asleep in there. She walks up to the bed and gently shakes her. Nothing happens, so she shakes her a little harder but still Elissa is out.
Oh well, I'll just find Ciara, she thinks.

She walks down the rest of the hall to the main bedroom and pushes the door open. There's a big lump in the bed, so she pulls the covers back a little bit.

"Ahhhhhh!" she yells. She'd uncovered two big, manly feet next to two small feet. She wrinkles her nose and slowly backs out, the pair in the bed still sound asleep.

It's so like Ciara to bring a guy home, but seriously, sleeping with someone with Elissa and Kat out just down the hall?

Kat shakes her head and heads out to elevator. So much for letting someone know she was leaving. Not that Ciara would probably care since she was a bit.. preoccupied.

Kat takes the elevator down to the lobby and goes out and catches a cab to her apartment. She rubs a little color into her cheeks and runs her fingers through her hair as she makes her way to the door. Luckily she wouldn't have to face Harold, he'd surely be able to tell she'd been out drinking all night. The morning doorman wouldn't probably even batt an eye.

She slips past the front desk with her head down and takes the elevator up to her apartment, fishing the key out of her back pocket and unlocking her door.

She tosses the key on the counter and plugs her phone into the outlet she'd left her charger in yesterday afternoon. While she waited for it to power on she walks to her fridge and grabs a bottle of water, and chugs half the bottle. She hears a little ding as she grabs a banana, and she walks over to her phone and scrolls through the notifications.
What the...

There's a least a hundred texts on her phone, many from her mom, as well as a couple numbers she didn't recognize. She also has 10 missed calls from her mom and 5 from Martha.
She unlocks her phone and looks at her moms messages to see what all the panic is about. She just quickly scrolls through them since there's so many, but they basically all consist of the same question: what were you thinking?

Kat shakes her head, confused about what her mom is even talking about. She only had one text from Martha, so she decided to look there next. Her question was much more simple: why? Attached was a link.

Kat hesitantly touches the link, unsure of what it will lead to. It opens the Gossiper website, one of the stupid Gossip sites Kat hates the most. The page that is brought up has the headline "Drunk and searching for Mr. Dreamy: Kat Riley's night out".

Kat's heart rate starts to speed up as she skims the article, picking out specific lines like, "a source close to the model says she went out last night with the intent of getting drunk as quickly as possible and finding any guy who'd be willing to take her home", and "she was all over every single guy around her. She was acting desperate and just wanted one guy to pay attention to her."

Kat sets down her phone and rubs her temples. This was not good at all. With all the bad publicity lately she was just supposed to lay low this weekend, and here she was with the media saying she was drunk and desperate. Of course the drunk part was true, and Kat cringes as she realizes she really had no idea how truly desperate she had acted last night.

She picks up her phone again as it starts to ring, and she declines a call from her mom. There's no way she wanted to explain any of this to her. Martha she'd call back later after her hangover wore off, but she'd avoid her mother the best she could. She debated just turning her phone off completely, but as she scrolled through her other texts- mostly texts from random people at the club last night- she sees a text from her younger brother, Alex.

Alex: You okay?

Kat smiles at her phone, the fact that her brother only cared about her and not all the crap being said about her warming her heart.

She has two little brothers, twins, age 16 named Jake and Alex. They were both pretty into sports and played year-round, but Jake was more jocky where Alex was more quiet. He'd always had a knack for reading Kat and her moods.

Kat: I'm fine. Love you, bud. I'll call you later.

Alex: Good. Love you 2

•••••••••••
The rest of the day was spent relaxing, getting over her headache. She called Martha around lunchtime, and she was furious. They talked for over 30 minutes, all about the repercussions they could face, and how this could damage her chances with the Fashion Show.

She made Kat promise not to even leave her apartment the rest of the weekend, and made plans to pick her up from the airport Monday morning.

Kat also talked to Alex on the phone, talking about everything happening in both of their lives, avoiding talking about last night because Alex didn't care about those types of things. A call like that was just what she needed.

The rest of the weekend went the same way, which was exactly what Martha had wanted. Kat stayed in, not even going out for any food, and only went downstairs to the lobby once to talk to Harold.

She even made it to the airport and got on her flight to L.A. with perfect timing, hopefully showing Martha she really was a good girl deep down inside.