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“Yes. I want you to. You know how to write?”
“I don’t write creatively, but I’m a good writer. All that pre-law, remember? And three years at the academic center as a writing peer figuring out firsthand that there are a lot of people with a lot to say who just never got the basics from anyone. Ideas into words. I can do that.”
“Tomorrow. You’ll help me?”
“Sure.” Wil wanted to help Katie. She wanted to keep seeing her. She wanted, if she was being honest with herself, to push this temporary connection further than was probably smart or self-preserving, and she wanted to do it in a way that meant it wasn’t only Katie who got vulnerable.
Back then, it wasn’t just Wil swooping in to rescue Katie and drive her around in the Bronco or introduce her to new friends. Katie had been Wil’s friend, too. She’d been the only friend Wil could talk to about the future, because Katie knew that every dream Wil had, every goal she made, came with an asterisk. She’d known Wil was terrified of losing her dad, and KatieknewWil’s dad, so she could talk about it without getting weird or running away.
It made Katie probably the only candidate to try where Beanie had failed.
“I will help you if you make me do one thing on my ‘Just Fucking Do It Already’ list,” Wil said. “Which, I admit, isn’t fair. As Beanie has already pointed out, making someone else make you do something so you can blame them if you don’t do it is classic asshattery. But when it comes to this list, I am already an asshat.”
“Wait, this is a real thing that exists? You made this list?” Katie stretched out her toes when Wil pressed her thumbs into the middle space beneath the ball of each foot.
“It is. Beanie helped me. She’s recently started to get after me about my languishing.”
Katie reached down for another Twizzler. She winked at Wil. “Text it to me when you get home.”
“I’ll text it to you now. I don’t want to get in trouble for texting after I drop you off. It’s already tomorrow.” She was in so much trouble already. She could almost feel her brain cheerfully compartmentalizing all of her new Katie Price feelings into tidy boxes she wouldn’t let herself ever open again after Katie left in a month.
But that was what she’d done last time.
Katie looked at her phone when it buzzed with Wil’s list, went quiet, reading, and then looked up at Wil with a smile. “Oh, we’re going to have so much fun.”
For a little while,Wil thought. She had no doubt they would.
They always had.
Chapter Six
Katie was looking at an upside-down Phil while Sue pushed theAll. Done. Mama.buttons over and over again.
“I am trying to get my yoga on, my babies. Sue, cool it. Phil, move.” Katie held the pose, breathing in through her nose. The hem of her T-shirt started slipping out from where she’d shoved it into the waistband of her underwear.
“And… scene.” Katie slowly curled out of the full inversion onto her feet, just as she flashed her cats, and put her hands in the air as if she had stuck a landing. “Now I can have coffee. And phone. And a half a foot of Mom’s coffee cake.”
Katie was feeling herself this morning. She’d only slept five hours, which was not great, but the reason she’d slept five hours was the best, best reason, and she woke up excited to tackle this Green Bay Thursday like it was her actual job.
Itwasher job. One of the perks to being Katie Price was that when she wasn’t in front of a camera, being Katie was her job. She was done with squandering this enormous privilege on self-doubt and frustrated backspacing. Wil Greene had never stopped being the smartest person Katie had ever met, and if Wil said thatit would be no problem for Katie to write this script, then it was no problem.
But first, before breakfast, she did her Katie Yoga, which was yoga, but only the poses she liked, performed in her underpants. Her feet were really fucking cold now because her parents turned down the sixty-two-degree thermostat to fifty-two at night as though they were personally responsible for defeating climate change, but the rest of Katie’s body felt amazing. Because,because,beyond her new confidence that she would write this script, and it would be as good as she wanted and needed it to be, there was also the fact that at some point between when Wil dropped her back off at the slider doors to her suite and when Trois jumped on her face at six in the morning, Katie had figured out she’d been in love with Wil Greene when she was eighteen.
It made her feel so good to know that. It meant that Ben wasnother first love and hadn’t been her only love.
Katie had sat straight up in bed when she’d figured this out, turning on the bedside lamp so that she could be sure she wasn’t dreaming. She’d taken a long drink of water and interrogated herself thoroughly.
It was true. She’d loved Wil. She hadn’t known.
Also, she had figured it out at what was an inconvenient moment, because now, now,now,Katie was attracted to Wil. ShewantedWil. She wanted to kiss her, she wanted to touch her all over, she wanted her own body to be touched by Wil all over, she wanted to figure out what she liked and didn’t like and really, really, really likedwithWil. And it was not a good idea to layer what she had realized about her girlhood self over a very grown-up emotion, which was horniness. That was how people got hurt.
That was how she could get hurt.
Still, Katie could not help but be fascinated by her ownattraction. She had never felt this way about anyone real. She’d felt this way about characters. She’d felt this way while she was playing a character, but it wasn’t the same, it turned out. Desire was much more insistent than Katie had thought. It did too good a job of making her feel invincible. It had a lot of very palpable suggestions that weren’t interested in reason.
But, all by herself, in this moment, with sweet coffee cake in her mouth, Katie didn’t have to make a plan. She wasn’t going to fuck anything up or say the wrong thing or be impulsive. She could just want Wil. Privately. Very much. With a lot of very good mental images.
Though, even logistics-wise, she was thirty-one years old, and thirty-one-year-old rich, professional, desirable women were permitted to meet their desires with a partner. It couldn’t be that hard. No one knew she was here yet except April and Madelynn. Possibly someone at the party would leak, although they had been asked not to. Her parents had been very clear, and the guests were people she and her parents had vetted, and there was a reason she’d joined the party completely as her most private self, reminding everyone that she deserved a private self. She deserved to be able to be Craig and Diana’s daughter, home for the holidays.