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She stopped herself. Wil had already said more than she would have ever guessed, and she still wasn’t sure what everything she said was headed toward. Going this deep wasn’t normally how she talked to people.
It was how she’d talked to Katie. Ever since the day at the beginning of senior year when she’d pulled up alongside Katie in the Bronco. Katie was walking away from the high school, in the opposite direction of anywhere Wil had been able to think she’d want to go, and when Wil slowed down to get her attention, she’d seen Katie wiping at her eyes.
So she pulled over, leaned across the seat to open the passenger door, and asked,You want to get in?
It was the beginning of what they’d had together that year.
“Also, what?” Katie sounded a little dreamy. She hadn’t taken her eyes off Wil the whole time Wil was silent, thinking.
“I’ve missed you.” Wil put her palms on her thighs. Breathed in, breathed out. “But I don’t want to make you feel any kind of way about that. It’s not to make you feel guilty. It’s just something I’m figuring out right now.”
Katie covered Wil’s hand with her own, just for a moment, and the contact pushed a shockwave of heat through the middle of Wil’s chest. “I was waiting in my publicist’s office flipping throughPeople,and there was one of those splash pages with a roundup of social media accounts to follow. Nothing I would ever typically stop on, but I recognized you in a grainy two-by-two-inch screenshot photo from one of your videos, Wil. And I stopped on the page, and I read the two hundred wordsPeoplemagazine had written about your account over and over until I just tore away the part of the page with you on it.” Katie leaned into the back cushion of the sofa and smiled at Wil. “I missed you, too.”
Hearing that was a big enough gift, it gave Wil the push she needed to ask her next question.
“Are you into girls?” Wil had no idea. Katie hadn’t dated in high school, and Katie also hadn’t dated since Ben Adelsward—or if she had, the press didn’t know, and Diana wasn’t talking about it. “To be clear, I’ll kiss you either way. But I’m curious.”
“I don’t know how to answer that. Are you?” Katie was leaning her side against the back of the sofa, and now she bent her long legs up, stretching her leggings tight over her knees. She hadn’t looked away from Wil even once.
“I haven’t met a gender I’mnotattracted to yet,” Wil confessed. “It used to be that I had to get to know someone, but the kissing thing has rearranged my brain on that. I think I could have a relationship or a fling or anything with almost anybody. There don’t seem to be any barriers there. The only barrier I’ve got—and I’ve challenged it with some very wonderful people a few times—is monogamy. I’m a pair-bonder. I blame my dad for that.”
Wil could feel the back of her neck get hot in a way that was a precursor to blushing, which surprised her. She’d talked aboutthis kind of thing a lot, with a lot of different people, but there was something about the way Katie was looking at her face.
Katie nodded. “I don’t know. I’ve only come with one partner, and I think even that was more about me than him. There hasn’t been a single one of your videos that hasn’t turned me on, but I haven’t looked at why. There’s something in me I don’t get yet, but to be honest, I’m not worried about it.”
God,Wil thought.God.This—what Katie was calling vulnerability, getting vulnerable—was, in fact, Wil’s kryptonite milkshake.
Katie looked like she knew it, too, or at least as though she was thoroughly pleased with Wil’s reaction. Wil resettled herself on the mallard sofa, looking wildly around the room to make sure none of the guests were paying attention to the unfolding drama between her and Katie.
They were not. This was a crowd of people who’d spent a lot of time ignoring Wil Greene and Katie Price and their various shenanigans.
“What do you… when you…?” Wil cleared her throat and wondered how she could possibly walk this back.
Or walk it forward much more quickly.
“When I masturbate?”
Wil needed to lie down. Maybe if she lay down on top of Katie, every part of herself matching up to every part of Katie, right on the mallard couch, it would resolve the problem she was having.
It would create some new problems, though, given the number of people present.
Katie had stopped looking at her and was nibbling on one fingernail. She pulled her hand away from her mouth and stared at her manicure, then caught Wil’s eyes again and suddenly—surprisingly—laughed. “That is not an interview question, Wil Greene. I wasnot prepared.” She fanned at her cheeks, but she wassmiling. “Sometimes I turn on music I love, really loud. Then it’s just all sensation. Sometimes I loop on a moment in a book or a movie or a play or something I see in public, not a sexy thing necessarily, it can be an awkward thing or a tender thing. Like a look. Like—”
“The first fifteen seconds of my videos,” Wil suggested.
That earned Wil another overwhelmed-Katie-ceiling-smile. “Yes.” She looked back at Wil. “Like that. Maybe more the last three secondsbeforethe next fifteen seconds.”
Oh.
The buildup.
The just-before.
The maybe-this-won’t-happen moment.
It was Wil’s favorite three seconds, too.
“What are your pronouns?” Wil felt like she was barely keeping up with this conversation and all of the urgent things she needed to know. It was not what she’d expected.