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It was what she should have expected. Wil had forgotten what it was like to have Katie Price’s full attention.
Now she remembered.
She remembered, too, what a revelation it had been in high school when she’d picked Katie up in the Bronco and driven her around, and they’d talked more that first night than they’d talked to each other in all the seventeen years before.
“Professionally, right now, my pronouns are she and her,” Katie said. “For just myself, privately, I’m not sure. I don’t think I care. I don’t mean that in a flippant way, or a way that would ever dismiss or stand in for something that others have fought hard for. I mean, I guess, that when I reach into that, it’s sunbeams. Oxygen.” Katie made a series of gestures that looked like dancing, watching Wil until Wil laughed, but also completely understood what she was trying to say. “What are yours?”
“She and her.”
“Why? I’m sorry if that’s rude.” Katie waved her hands in front of her face like she was trying to stop herself or slow herself down, but her voice was too delighted-sounding to make her attempt serious.
Wil shook her head, smiling. “We’re in it now, Katie. No apologies. I guess it’s becausesheandhermake sense to how I feel about sex with myself and with other people. For me, even though it’s not necessarily true for others, my gender and how I feel about sex are twisted together.”
Every time Wil said the wordsexout loud to Katie Price on the mallard sofa, in the middle of a room full of people, she felt a fraction more reckless, as though at any moment she might grab Katie by the hand and pull her out of here into the nearest dark room with a door that locked.
Katie drew a small circle over Wil’s denim-covered knee. Wil felt that fingertip in every cell of her body until she ached everywhere. “To get back to this bet we are pretending is serious, and its spoils, I think it’s all a pretext for Bronco time.”
“Right.” She looked at Katie, considering. She should put down this bet right now, because Katie was right. Theywereplaying a game.
Except she’d never played at anything with Katie.
And she didn’t want to put this bet down.
Katie’s warnings were an attempt to make it clear that her celebrity made regular things, even fun things like a bet, kind of impossible. A gamble. Loss. Temporary. A little unreal.
Still. Wil wanted the chance to kiss Katie the way Katie had been watching her kiss other people.Andshe wanted the chance to see what would happen between them if the bet stayed in place—if they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, kiss until Katie lost. After all, Wil’s TikTok was forfirstkisses.
It was also foronetimekisses with near-strangers.
Katie wasn’t a stranger. If Wil kissed her, it would be because she wanted to kiss her more than once. Also, Wil had already made it clear to Katie that she was monogamous.
What that meant was that if Wil somehow, in the next month that Katie was in town, got all the way to kissing her, she wouldn’t be making TikToks anymore.
She would be exploding her life just as she was seeing what the pieces of it actually were.
“Oh, no,” Katie said, her expression caught somewhere between excitement and fondness. “I just watched you think through something with your whole brain. You made the face. Whenever you did that in high school, what happened after was always so, so good. We are getting somewhere here.”
“I’m not sure where.”
“I’m not sure either, but”—Katie stood up, her eyes bright and daring—“definitely,definitelypick me up at eleven.”
Wil blew out a breath.
When this inevitably fell apart and Katie went home to Los Angeles, Wil hoped she would have some good memories to tide her over through the next thirteen years.
She should probably be much, much more worried than she could make herself be.
Chapter Four
“I’m loving the comedy for you, and Kennenbear is hot, hot, hot. He has three upcoming joints.” April, her agent, flipped through a script. Katie could see her Persian cat behind her, sitting on a cat tower, and another tail just off-screen.
“Are we saying that, for real? ‘Joints’? It’s so dudeish, it makes my back teeth ache.”
“Why your back teeth?” April leaned so close to the camera that Katie could make out the dusting of freckles across her milk-pale skin. April had her bright-red, super-coily hair piled up on her head, and she wore a bear onesie over her plus-size, six-foot-tall, screamingly hot body.
Sometimes it was hard to believe that everyone in Hollywood listened to April Feinstein, but they did. Katie knew for a fact that April scared people, though her reputation was that she was funny, warm, and scrupulously kind. Equitable. But no one fucked with her.
April was the agent Katie had found after she left Ben and had to fire the agent she shared with him. April had been such a boon, too, directing Katie to projects that had gotten her awards, challenged her, kept her out of harm’s way, and made money.