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It wasn’t about Mr. Cook.
Of course it wasn’t, because it had never been about Mr. Cook. Not for Katie, not for Wil. But also not for Cynthia and Jess, the two women who’d drawn Wil and Katie’s attention so long ago.
It was aboutthem. Their lives. Their big, important stories and how they wanted to live them.
Katie was sniffling. “Me, too! Crying. God.”
“I also cried,” Robin confirmed.
“And Andrew?” Wil asked.
“He’s never found out. He thinks he’s fucking James Bond.”
Sam came back into the room with another dessert for Wil and drink refills. “What did I miss?” He sat down beside Robin and squeezed her thigh. “Why are you all looking at me like that? Oh, no.”
“It’s nothing,” Robin told him. “I mean, it’s something amazing, but you wouldn’t immediately get why it’s amazing, you’d ask too many questions, and I don’t want to explain it to you.” She kissed his temple. “But I will tell you that you look very handsome tonight, if that makes you feel better.”
“It makes me feel like a sex toy, but I’m good with it.”
They talked for a while longer. Wil took the opportunity to grill Sam about her course selections for her second year at Pepperdine while Katie learned everything she could about Robin Dahl and her life story, probably so she could write someone like Robin into a movie.
Katie’s head was full of movies these days.
They stayed late at Sam and Robin’s, probably later than they should have, until Robin was yawning and apologizing, and Sam mentioned that she had to be up early to teach in the morning.
Katie and Wil held hands on the way to the Bronco, parked on the street across from the house.
“Drive me around, Wil.” Katie skipped ahead, then turned to face Wil and walk backward against the setting sun, so that Wil could see the outline of her body through her short floral dress. Wil had been wiggling into stiff, raw denim jeans that Beanie had bought her and were the exact brand and type Beanie had as ayoung wife. Wil had always thought those jeans were very cool in old photographs of her mother, how they were broken in by her mom’s body. It was a little warm to wear jeans, but she knew Katie liked the way she looked in them, and that was an incentive.
Wil got in, opened the door for Katie, who crawled in, her dress hiking up over her thighs.
“Do you want to park?” Wil asked. Becauseyes.
“I do. Don’t you feel like this Bronco hasn’t been properly christened? Like, there is all of this intenseenergyinside of it, but the energy is unconsummated. It needs to be consummated so that the Bronco will be comfy on its trailer being carried to our love nest in Los Angeles.”
Getting the Bronco out to LA was the last stage of Wil’s move. On earlier trips back to Green Bay, they’d packed up Wil’s things at her rental house, and Wil had said good-bye to her landlord—an unexpectedly tearful coffee meeting at Kettle’s, since Brenda had been accepting Wil’s rent checks for eight years, and it turned out they’d grown closer than either WilorBrenda had realized.
“I know a place.” Wil pointed the Bronco toward the bay, and they drove past their old high school, past the new mural in the area the city was trying to turn into an arts district, past the neighborhood where Diana and Craig used to live and Beanie still did, and to the new neighborhood where Diana and Craig had their big house. But instead of following the road to Katie’s parents’ driveway, Wil made a series of turns until she had to put the Bronco into a low gear to navigate driving it over a bumpy field that was well behind the house, though you could still see Diana’s kitchen lights were on.
A couple of big construction vehicles were parked near a square hole, not so big, really. Just big enough that with two stories, there could be a bedroom that looked over the patch of forest, and a main room downstairs to put the mallard sofa, a TV, and lots of cat trees.
Green Bay wasn’t Jackson Hole or Aspen. It wasn’t a ranch outside of Austin. But what it lacked in glamor, it made up for by belonging to them. This was where they’d met and grown up. This was where their families lived. Sometimes they came back and soaked in nostalgia. Other times, like tonight, they made new memories.
Big and messy and glorious memories.
“Oh!” Katie clapped her hands. “Look at what they got done today!” She peered out the windshield. “They moved around more piles of dirt!”
“I’m sure they are very important piles of dirt.” Wil couldn’t honestly tell if anyone had been here recently. But she was sure Craig had this project well in hand, since it was mostly what he talked about on the family group chat. A lot of long, dry texts about footers and when Brown County would be putting various lines in.
Wil smiled at Katie. “I love you.”
“Come here,” Katie said.
Wil pulled her legs up on the bench seat and crawled to Katie on her hands and knees, then kissed her neck.
Desire washed over Wil in a warm rush. She let Katie bite her a little, stroke her hands over Wil’s shoulders as she settled in next to her, and then Wil did what she’d wanted to do when she was in high school, more than once, even when she couldn’t admit it.
Which was kiss Katie Price.