KDBookOnline
Share Us
Katie let out a laugh that sounded fully and utterly like a woman’s laugh that Wil didn’t know yet. When she turned her head to Wil, there was hectic color on her cheeks. “I don’t want to, no. Then you’ll know much too much. Except there is the part of me that wants you to know everything no matter what happens. I’d say that I can’t decide what to do, but I would be lying. Should I pretend I’m watching it like I do at home?”
“How do you watch it at home?”
“Oh, don’t ask me that.” Katie put the whole side of her body against Wil’s, and Wil had to tell herself to relax, to stay cool. Like a fan hoping not to be like all the other fans.
“I did ask,” she said. “It happened. Can’t take it back.”
“Wow. All right. If you’re going to be that way, then I will tell you it depends. I’m only allowed to watch your movies one time. I try to pick the right time. Sometimes I watch at breakfast, especially Saturdays, but only if I have something good to eat, which is usually a burrito, and time to myself, and I can really savor it.”
“Do you eat the burrito or watch the video first?”
“First the burrito, then the video.”
“Other times?”
“Other times, I wait until it’s dark out and I’m in bed.” Katie put a bit of a rough edge to her voice when she said this and then laughed another one of her grown-up laughs.
“I can’t with you,” Wil said. “Is this how people are in Los Angeles, just casually devastating each other with sex conversation all the time? Because I have to tell you, here in Green Bay, everything has rolled along as you must remember it. A lot of repression and occasional meaningful glances.”
“But who is in the video with you today?” Katie was grinning. It was a version of her smile Wil had only seen in person, never on a screen—big and a little lopsided, sinking a deep dimple into one cheek. “They are from Green Bay, I assume, this person who you propositioned to kiss you. On camera. For an audience of millions.” Katie tapped the screen of Wil’s phone. “How many videos do you have now, Wil? Are there a hundred yet? Did you find a hundred repressed Green Bay people to exhibitionist-kiss you?”
Wil closed her eyes. There weren’tquitea hundred videos on there, because there had been more than a few times Wil had let a particularly viral video roll for a couple of weeks, but knowing there were so many and that Katie had watched them alone in her room—just one time each, because that was all she allowed herself—made Wil’s phone feel like a bomb in her hand.
Katie pressed her face into Wil’s shoulder again. “To answer your question, which I will since you areblushing,it is not Los Angeles. It’s me. I just like you. Play it now, before I self-immolate.”
Wil pushed play. Cleared her throat. “She’s my hairdresser.”
“That’s going to make things interesting next time you go in for a trim.”
The screen went from black to full color.Wil + Mandiappeared in the caption box, auto-read by the TikTok bot. She and Mandi sat opposite each other on the stools Wil kept on hand because some people felt uncomfortable about standing or couldn’t stand.
“Mandi is incredibly hot,” Katie said.
On the phone screen, Mandi smiled at Wil. She had a huge smile, teeth that had never been messed with by an orthodontist,which was Wil’s favorite thing to look at about Mandi, although Mandi offered a lot to look at. Hydrant-red and pink hair in soft waves to her waist, teased up on top into a half beehive. Winged eyeliner. Tattoos bright against the pale canvas of her skin, all across her generous chest, up her neck, covering her bare shoulders and arms.
Pretty eyes. Wil hadn’t noticed until she leaned close and put her hand at Mandi’s waist, the smell of her perfume everywhere, as sweet and pink as her hair. She wore black leggings, like Katie, but she filled them out differently, her body lush and big and such an inviting combination of hard and soft, her calves rounded, her belly rounded in a different way, her breasts, her waist, the strong arms she cut hair with, the flare of her hips.
That was what Wil had been thinking about when she caught Mandi’s face in her hand and put her mouth on her. Her body, and the way she smelled, and her glossy lipstick.
Katie sucked in a breath.
Wil let her arm come down around Katie before she’d even thought about it, holding her against her side. When they were girls they would often hold hands, put their arms around each other, give each other piggyback rides across the street while cars honked at them for being obnoxious. But she almost regretted the familiar impulse once her hand curled around Katie’s shoulder.
Eighteen-year-old Wil must have been much cooler than the Wil she was now.
The kiss was interesting, but not in a way Wil would’ve been able to talk about, something about how she could feel Mandi’s nervousness and her bravado fighting, how she knew Mandi had never kissed a woman before, how she tasted like the gum she’d been chewing when she came through the door.
It was the kind of kiss that made Wil want to take some time. Sit her down for a meal or watch a movie next to her, stroke herthigh or put her hand there and see if it led to more or didn’t. But one minute was the constraint.
One minute meant Wil didn’t always find out everything she wanted to know.
She found out that Mandi liked her long hair touched, fingers on her neck but not her face, that she didn’t want Wil’s hands on her body, that she liked Wil’s tongue in her mouth and wanted Wil to run the show. And that Mandi was relieved when it was over, not because she hadn’t liked it, more because she didn’t know what that meant, which made her nervous in a way that became palpable to Wil.
Wil knew things about people in every part of her life that she never would’ve known if she hadn’t kissed them.
After the screen went dark, Wil eased her arm from around Katie, realizing that she’d been holding her pretty tight. “Did you like that?”
Katie turned to Wil, flushed with color up the sides of her nose and blooming between her pretty eyebrows. She breathed in, and she must have been holding her breath, because when she took that breath, the hollow at the base of throat collapsed.