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“Wil,” Katie said, opening the suite’s door and pulling her inside.
Wil moved in front of her once Katie had closed the door on the dim suite. Katie glanced at her babies to try to dilute the feeling with a semblance of domestic habit. Trois was grooming Phil’s head, and Sue was probably on Katie’s bed, sleeping hard. This time of evening was in the middle of her big sleep.
She didn’t care, she didn’t care, she didn’t care.
God.She leaned toward Wil, who smelled like something familiar and good. What was it?Oh.ChapStick. Regular ChapStick. Pale pink in a black-and-white tube.
Then Katie thought about kissing it off, rough.
Wil touched her arm. She was studying Katie, and she looked as though she knew Katie was thinking about kissing her, which made sense, because Wil had a lot of experience with knowing when people wanted to kiss her. She was a high-level expert in kissing.
Knowing this made Katie unbearably, unsurvivably, recklessly hornier.
“Tell me,” Wil said.
Katie closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I want you. Understatement.” She opened her eyes.
Wil looked all around her face. “Me, too. Not me, you.”
Katie let herself put her fingertips on Wil’s mouth. The blood bounded in her wrists. “Unfortunately, we have no confirmation on our bet, even after confusing every doorbell camera on Mr. Cook’s street. So I cannot kiss you. It isn’t permitted.”
“That’s not the only reason why.” Wil reached up and gently dragged Katie’s fingers from her mouth.
Why was that so hot? Jesus.
“Because you only do that on Wednesdays and Saturdays.” Katie tried to get this to sound flippant, but her inability to kiss Wil was making her want to smash something, and her voice betrayed her frustration.
Wil shook her head. “No. I would kiss anyone I wanted to on any day.”
“Oh. That’s really good to hear, Wil.”
Wil’s brows pushed together just a little in the tiniest frown. “But if I ever kissed someone Iwanted,who wasn’t for the channel, who I was kissing entirely for myself, I would never kiss anyone for the channel again. It would mean I was done with that. It wouldmeanmore than a conversation with a few million people about kissing and intimacy and vulnerability. I told you. About my pair bonding. That’s a true thing.” Wil’s voice was low, and Katie could almost taste her, their faces were so close.
“I can’t be on your channel. I can’t mess up your life that way.”
Or mine.Katie thought of Honor Howell. The Honor Howell who’d wondered aloud if Katie was truly interested in more than the spotlight would not be convinced otherwise by Katie kissing Wil for an audience of millions.
“Yeah,” Wil said. “I figured that out. But I don’t think you would come on my channel even if it wouldn’t cause a circus.”
Katie shook her head. “If I kiss you.” She couldn’t help it. She hooked her hand in Wil’s belt. There wasn’t a way to tug her closer, but she didn’t want her to get away, either. “It would be for the same reason you kissed me.”
“Which is?” Wil said this to the side of Katie’s mouth, and Katie knew exactly,exactlywhy in scripts, in these moments, one of the lovers would growl. She could feel that growl right at the base of her throat, where her clitoris had tossed it angrily.
“I think we could only kiss each other for the reasons we would’ve kissed each other under the bridge.”
“What if we had? What if we’d kissed?” Wil’s voice was low and sexy. Katie felt a tug by her hip and realized Wil had a handful of her flannel. The parts of her body that held her in a standing position threatened to buckle, while other parts that were usually soft came to instant, throbbing attention.
“I wouldn’t have stopped,” Katie said, without thinking at all. She kept not thinking. “Ever. I’d still be kissing you. Right now, we’d be in some three-bedroom in Ann Arbor, making out in front of the TV after you’d come home from the firm downtown and I had wrapped up rehearsal at a painfully cool local theater.”
“Katie.” Wil’s tone held the teeniest, tiniest bit of warning.
Because what Katie had let herself say was an acknowledgment of how much bigger this was than either of them had a handle on, and of how much, exactly, they both had to lose.
Even in her feverish, blurting imagination, Katie hadn’t been able to imagine a world where she and Wil were together and both of them had what they’d wanted. Instead, she’d imagined a world in which shewasn’t Katie Price. She was a small-time actress in local theater. Wil was someone who’d stayed in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and become an Ann Arbor lawyer, which was a dream of Wil’s life without texture or ambition or even creativity.
And still, Katie didn’t want to let go of this fantasy, because shecouldimagine the part where they were together at the end of the day. The part where they came home to each other. The part where every day was the biggest day she could imagine for herselfasherself, as Katie Price, and still, still, still, the best part of her day was Wil Greene.
She just couldn’t imagine being allowed to have it. Her life didn’t belong to her enough for that to be possible. She had to be safe, she had to be correct, she had to be trustworthy, and even ifthere were a way for her to be all of those things and still have Wil, being part of Katie Price’s life would mean Wil never got to have her own.