KDBookOnline
Share Us
Katie readjusted her hat and wig after their hug. “I took a workshop from this amazing acting teacher that was about intimate scenes. Screen and stage kisses and sex.”
“They have workshops for that?”
“They have workshops for everything. What I’m talking about are intimacy workshops. Blocking intimate scenes, establishing boundaries, understanding the work of convincing an audience of intimacy. Our teacher’s big point was that who we were being intimate with, as actors, was not the other actor in the scene, it wasthe audience. Every decision we made was about how we made theaudiencefeel, because it’s the audience who needs to be convinced. It’s the audience who all of the feelings arefor. And that’s the same thing you’re doing.” Katie turned to look at Wil, her eyes big, smiling. “You’re kissing all these different people,” she said, “but the audience is there for you. They want to seeyoukiss a new person every time. They experience the kiss by witnessing how you react to it.”
“But I’m not thinking about the audience.”
Was that true, though? Didn’t Wil think of the audience when she and the person she was going to kiss positioned the camera? Wasn’t the audience a script that was running in the background the whole time, an awareness in Wil’s body of how everything that happened between her and this person would look, how it would make people feel?
It wasn’t as though she’d ever considered keeping the kissing videos private. The idea had always been, from the minute Wil decided to accept her housemate’s comment as a dare, to film and edit and share them. Show them to people. Talk about them and listen to other people talking about them.
The point had been to find things out. At first, about herself, because of the housemate’s suggestion that Wil was too casual with relationships and too shallow with her feelings. But it wasn’t long before Wil was finding out a lot of interesting things about people that made her realize how much of herself she had locked away as soon as her dad had his diagnosis. Wil couldn’t fail to see her feelings when she was working so hard to make someone else comfortable, to try to help them get something they needed out of an experience.
The more people she’d kissed, the more she’d shared of herself. For an audience of millions of people. Wil had made her feelings as big as she could, maybe so she could finally understand them. So she would be able to really see them.
“No. I’m wrong,” Wil said. “You’re right.” Without the last year of kissing, she wouldn’t have had access to what she’d felt today with that table of lawyers.
Or to what she felt for Katie.
She hadn’t let herself think deeply, carefully, about her feelings for Katie until today. Until the last long minutes at the end of Craig and Diana’s driveway. And if what Wil had felt in high school wasn’t the same thing she was feeling lately about Katie, it was definitely connected over all these years—their lives rushing past that moment in time, waiting for them to return to it.
It made Wil want to change something, one thing that would let her figure out more about what she wanted and how it might connect up the different parts of her life. Because Wil did understand that all the parts of her lifewereconnected, and that she was what connected them.
She wanted the part of her that couldn’t stop thinking about Katie—Katie’s body, Katie’s smile, Katie’s mind and how it worked—to talk to the part that was kissing people for TikTok and the part that had just talked to scary-powerful Green Bay attorneys at Kettle’s because Katie Price asked her to.
“Katie.”
“Yes.”
Wil glanced over. Katie was looking right at her. “Will you film my kiss on Saturday?”
At the next stoplight, Katie leaned over and kissed Wil’s neck.
Chapter Eight
Katie looked at Wil behind the wheel of the Bronco and ate another chocolate-covered almond from the giant plastic container they had purchased at Costco.
Wil was quiet. Even while they had giggled their way through Costco, she kept retreating to her thoughts. Now they were sitting in the parking lot. No plan yet. No conversation happening.
Katie liked it, actually. Not very many people she regularly spent time with were thoughtful. Intelligent, definitely. Gifted, yes. But her work attracted the kind of people who processed their feelings outside of their minds and their bodies, which included Katie.
She loved how it felt to be near Wil when she was obviously working on something. Her awareness of Katie would surface with her attention for just a few moments because she’d registered something funny Katie had said, or because Katie had deliberately bid for Wil’s attention, and then Wil would slide back into herself, her energy curling around some piece of brain grit she was obviously trying to make smooth.
Katie ate a few more almonds, a little bit drunk with anticipation, maybe, waiting for the next time she would get to be Wil’s object of contemplation.
“Sorry,” Wil suddenly said, her fingers finally curling around a handful of Chicago-style popcorn and pulling it from the bag. “I wandered off there.”
“Tell me about your meeting. Don’t leave anything out. Especially your feelings.”
Wil laughed. “See, if you hadn’t said that, I would’ve told you about the meeting as briefly as possible. Or I would’ve told you about the secret power dynamics, which were pretty fucking intense, actually. But you want to knowespeciallyabout my feelings, which is the version of my meeting I’m least likely to tell anyone about, ever.”
Katie pushed her hands beneath her own thighs. Wil hadn’t worn work slacks with her blue sweater. She’d worn dark jeans, the heavy denim tight over her long legs. Katie was dead of Wil’s jeans. “Obviously, this is why I asked.”
“Obviously.” Wil ate some popcorn. “I’m pretty sure the reason I haven’t gone to law school is because I knew I’d end up making decisions that felt disloyal to my dad. I could already feel that whatever was going to happen next in my life, it wouldn’t be what I’d told him it would. I knew my dreams were going to change, but he’s not here anymore to tell me what he thinks of my new dreams. He’s not here to say it’s okay to be the kind of lawyer I want to be, not the kind of lawyer he would’ve wanted me to be. So I stayed put.”
Wil spoke slowly, taking long breaks to stare out the window, making Katie want nothing more than to gather her up in her arms and pet her hair and the sides of her neck. She told Katie this devastating thing the way she’d always told Katie things when she’d thought about them as much as she needed to, tumbling them over and around inside her head until her thoughts were polished and smooth, perfectly synthesized, and true.
“Tell me more about that,” Katie said.