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Katie had leaned back against her passenger door and was smiling at the ceiling of the truck. “I still have that footage. It isn’t terrible.”
“You noticed one of those railroad bridges with trusses underneath, a little one, over a frozen creek.”
“I did.”
“You wanted to head toward it, but I didn’t want to because we’d have to cut through one of the cow pastures with all the frozen mud and tall grass. Plus, I hate frozen bodies of water. They’recreepy, and I have intrusive thoughts about falling through the ice and getting sucked away from the hole by a current.”
“God.” Katie looked at her. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“I couldn’t. It was only a bitty creek, and I was wearing a cropped puffy vest from the mall with a long-sleeved T-shirt in twenty-degree weather. Obviously I care most about being cool.”
“But you did walk with me through the pasture to the creek.”
“I did.”
“And when I wanted to climb up on that cement culvert and onto the trusses, you followed me.”
“Cool people aren’t afraid to die, Katie.”
“So there we were, sitting side by side under the railroad bridge on a wooden truss, and we could hear the water under the ice. I have footage of that, too, figuring out the zoom.”
Wil imagined Katie at home in Los Angeles, playing the old video. It made her feel a pang, nostalgia or loss. They’d missed out on knowing each other for such a long time. “After I stopped being privately freaked, I realized I wasn’t cold anymore. I remember it was really pretty. And I was a little bit in awe, in that jealous way that’s easy to be when you’re a teenager, that you had seen how beautiful it was going to be from all the way across the pasture on the road.”
“Is that why you moved my hair out of my face?” Katie had turned toward her. “Because you were jealous of me?”
Here was where it got tricky for Wil, this memory. The moments right after it, she’d quickly covered up with jokes and self-denial because she wasn’t…enoughto let happen what had almost happened, or to let it mean what it would have meant. It was as if Wil’s instant, total, white-hot flash of self-denial had packed up this memory in layers of paper and sealed the box shut. That meant that opening it, looking at it right now, she had to feel all the feelings she hadn’t let herself surrender to then.
“I moved your hair out of your face because I wanted to see your face.” Wil had to stop and clear her throat. “And because I wanted you to look at me.”
“I did look at you,” Katie whispered.
“You did. I think I knew how close together we’d be, sitting on that truss, if you looked at me. It didn’t seem like we wereanywhere,you know? We were somewhere neither one of us had ever been. It was so pretty and cold, it was like nothing was real, and so something I didn’t realize I had wanted to do was suddenly taking the chance.”
“And that something was…?”
“Kissing you.”
Wil kept trying to find the moment, but even now, she mostly remembered when she’d realized her hand was over one of Katie’s knees, and that she could feel Katie’s breath against her mouth. She had laughed and clumsily dropped her body onto the culvert, turning her ankle but ignoring it, making a joke about movie magic.
The real moment—the moment they had leaned into each other, knowing they were going to kiss, the inevitability of that happening—Wil had lost.
“I had already had my first kiss.” Katie sounded farther away than usual. “In a production ofBrigadoon. I didn’t like the actor who I had to kiss. I’d been in shows with him before, and I knew they would cast him and I would have to kiss him. But he was the only person I’d kissed. I remember thinking if you kissed me, I would have wanted you to.” She smiled. “That’s how convoluted it was in my head. Like, it would be okay for you to kiss me, the thing I really wanted to happen, because I had already, technically, been kissed by someone I found abhorrent.” Katie laughed. “I never want to be eighteen again.”
“So what happened just now?” Wil asked.
“A much better almost-kiss, I would say.” Katie nodded. “You didn’t hurl yourself away from me, for example.”
“I’m suddenly wondering if I started my TikTok to redeem myself.”
“If that was your mission, then consider it accomplished.” Katie settled herself back into her own seat again and cracked the window to keep the glass from fogging, which made Wil curious about how much of this was getting picked up by Craig’s security cameras and how long they could talk at the end of the drive with the taillights pointed toward the house before Diana walked down with an excuse to get the mail in order to see what they were doing.
“Did you know that a perfect way to make an audience understand desire is to have one of the characters kiss the other’s neck?” Katie asked. “A kiss on someone’s neck tells the audience that the character wants,needs,the other character in a way that can’t be satisfied except with intimacy. With sex. It’s often more powerful to witness than even a very explicit kiss.”
“I am, as of right now, convinced.” Wil smiled. “Are you ready to do this mission?”
“Yes.”
Wil got them onto the road. “Tell me more about what you were saying about getting the audience to understand desire. I feel like there was something technical there.”