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“That seems too simple.” Wil was flushed, her blue eyes liquid, the patch of freckles under one eye darker than it usually looked.
“Because maybe the very biggest decisions usually are,” Katie whispered.
Then she pulled off Wil’s vest, because she’d reassured Wil with something she didn’t believe in for herself.
Only for Wil.
The buttons on Wil’s white button-down weren’t buttoned under the vest. They’d slipped from the placket, and Katie could see Wil’s sheer pale nude bra and bright pink blotches painted over her skin.
“Katie,” Wil breathed.
She leaned down and kissed Wil’s throat, her neck, her collarbones, every kiss lasting longer, getting closer to Wil’s mouth by traveling up her jaw, over her cheekbones. Wil’s hands had moved to thread through Katie’s hair and thumb over the sides of her neck, a precursor that meant Katie could feel the ache of what Wil’s mouth on hers would be like. She wanted it. She wanted it utterly. She wanted to kiss Wil and for Wil to kiss her and for it to mean everything that it would mean, and for that to be exactly, exactly what made both of them happy, always.
It was this thought that made Katie press her lips against Wil’s forehead, her thumb already on Wil’s lower lip, so that she would stop.
Becauseshewas not in a win-win situation. There were wrong decisions in front of Katie. Her life, her celebrity, meant that it waspossible at every moment, every day, to make the wrong decision and hurt someone.
Katie eased back. “I’m getting a box of tools FedEx’d to me tomorrow to film your kiss.” She said it to remind Wil, to remind herself, that Wil still kissed other people. “It’s going to be a step up from your usual production values, so you should prepare yourself.”
Wil shook her head as Katie eased herself off her lap, then followed Katie with her body until Wil’s face was in her hair and her arm around her, making Katie melt and despair. “I didn’t prepare for you,” Wil said, her voice still low, unguarded enough that Katie knew she was confused, at least a little hurt, but here. Right here.
Katie huffed out a laugh and squeezed her eyes shut.
You couldn’t have prepared for me,Katie thought.You can’t.
But her heart still insisted it was simple.
Chapter Eleven
Wil stood up from the creaky leather chair in Sam’s office, unable to sit there for one more second waiting for Sam and Cord to finish reading her law school file.
Cord laughed. He leaned forward to put his copy of the file down on Sam’s desk. “You want to know what we think of these application materials.”
“Yes.” Wil had moved around to the back of the chair so she had something to hold on to. “Please.”
Cord crossed his ankle over his knee and settled back with a particularly loud creak. “I think if I’d had your chances when I graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a transcript you had to squint at to see the potential, I would’ve been ordering rounds for my friends. But you look like most people do when they’re coming to deal with a dead relative’s probate.”
Wil squeezed the chair again so she wouldn’t sigh or roll her eyes. Or run away. It was difficult to subject herself to this kind of scrutiny. It had been extremely difficult to call Sam and Cord to ask for this meeting—to take up their time on a Saturday, to accept the help they’d generously offered.
But she was trying to find her way out of the tangle she’d gottenherself into, and she understood that she was going to need other people’s assistance to beat a path through the overgrown mess of it.
She made herself say the thing that was bothering her the most. “I’ve talked to four people from as many law schools in three different states in the last twenty-four hours.” Wil’s chest was tight. “It turns out thatallof them knew my dad, even though he’d spent all but three years of his career here in Green Bay, Wisconsin.” Wil picked up her folder from the corner of Sam’s desk and tucked it into her bag beside her laptop. “It’s a lot.”
“Sure.” Cord nodded. “But you’re not on this earth to replace your dad one-to-one.”
Now it was Wil’s turn to nod as though she knew this.
She did know. Knowing it wasn’t the same thing as feeling it, it turned out.
“What’s interesting,” Cord went on, “is you and Jasper have both told me the same thing. You said it in this draft of an application essay—that people will always ask for less for themselves than what they’ll ask for on behalf of someone else. That it’s easier to fight someone else’s fight, and it feelsgoodto fight a good fight. That the law solves problems other institutions can’t, so you better get there first with a worthwhile problem before someone uses it to do harm.”
Wil blinked. She hadn’t understood herself to be saying any of that, but on the other hand, it sounded correct. It was why she’d once spent a long weekend poring over the TikTok terms of service—because she wanted to be in a position of knowing what she had and what she could ask for.
“Your paper,” Sam broke in. “The one you wrote as an undergraduate and waspublishedin Michigan’s law journal? I’ve never seen better thinking about NDAs, and I’m a corporate law partner.” He smiled. “I’ve bookmarked it.”
Wil cleared her throat. “My dad wasn’t sure about that paper. He never said so. He didn’t say anything but how proud he was,but I could tell. But it’s strange for me to look at it now, to look at all of this”—Wil indicated the folder Sam was holding—“and think about how much I put aside. I feel almost ashamed. Like I’m not up to the person I was then.”
“But you liked talking to everyone, I’ve gathered. Delilah at Pepperdine called me to tell me how much she enjoyed talking toyou.” Cord’s phone buzzed where he’d set it on Sam’s desk, and Wil watched him pick it up, glance at the notification, and set it back down.