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“Never leave me,” Katie said, laughing, but then as soon as she said it, right against Wil’s neck where she had fallen over laughing,the words hit Wil’s skin and traveled over her whole body in a wave. Katie must have felt the strength of Wil’s reaction, because she stopped laughing, but she didn’t move her face from Wil’s neck or ease her body away.
“Katie.” It was the only word Wil could manage to say.
“I fought with my mom,” Katie whispered. “My agent flew in and surprised me, and I had to talk to her and my publicist without any warning, and my mom didn’t offer you anything to eat or drink.”
“I noticed that. It wasn’t afullMidwestern shun, though.” Wil was trying to keep it light with a joke, but she didn’t feel light.
“Because the thing is, Wil.” Katie had a grip on Wil’s sleeve, and she tightened it, then let go and smoothed down Wil’s bare arm. “I can’t. We can’t.”
“Yeah?” Wil tried to find some fucking purchase. God.
“Everything I do is connected to everything else. And there is no way for us to have this”—she smoothed her hand from Wil’s shoulder to her wrist, then touched her fingers to Wil’s—“that doesn’t also involve the whole entire world.”
Katie’s life with Ben was why they hadn’t talked to each other in thirteen years. That wasn’t what Katie had wanted. Or Wil. It was something that had happened to them.
What Wil had been avoiding thinking about—not now, not during this perfect, stolen handful of days and weeks when everything was so good—was if it was too late.
For them.
Both times.
Katie took a deep breath, and then the doorbell rang.
Wil tried to remember what it sounded like when Katie saidNever leave me,but it had already slipped away from her. “That’s Noel. Do you still want to film?”
“Yeah.” Katie smiled at Wil, her full Katie Price smile that Wilhad seen hundreds of times in magazines and ads and movies and on the internet. “Don’t answer the door until I get my wig.”
She scrambled over the bed, just like she had years ago, so many times when she realized how late it had gotten. Except instead of running home, she was putting on a disguise so no one would know who she was.
Wil reassured herself that no matter what, she wouldalwaysknow.
And maybe that would ache more than it ever had before, but that was okay.
It would be worth it.
Chapter Twelve
Katie felt like every visceral part of her body, her blood and bones and organs, were light and fizzy at the same time. She had retrieved her wig and hat from the coat tree. The wig today was lank, shoulder-length hair that had a very grown-out-looking pink and fading dye job.
“Ready?” Wil was at the door.
“Yes.”
She had traded an appearance in a small cameo role with an emerging independent director in exchange for Chichima’s agreeing to teach her techniques for filming with an iPhone. Katie hadn’t had plans for what she wanted to do with these skills other than the joy of learning and knowing something about them, but now she was grateful.
In the part of the living room where Wil had her photography backdrop, Katie set up a tripod with a miniature camera track that could move her phone steadily in four directions with a little joystick. She snapped on a magnetic wide-angle lens and checked the shot.
She did these things methodically, one after the next, the same way her mother sprayed and wiped down the kitchen countertopsafter she had a bicker-fight with Craig, because Katie’s head was stuck on the conversation upstairs.
It had always been easier for Katie to know how she felt than to put her feelings into words. Her feelings weren’t words. Her feelings right now were a whirl of relief mixed up with old shame, the hard pinch of grief beneath her ribs, and a crack through the middle of everything with light pouring through.
The light was Katie’s understanding that when she’d told Wil about Ben, what shedidn’tfeel was anything like worry that she might be telling it wrong, making Wil uncomfortable, or spinning the story in a way that wouldn’t play for the press. It wasn’t like talking to Madelynn or April, it wasn’t like trying—haltingly—to open up to Diana.
It was just Wil, listening.
It was just Katie and Wil, like it had always been Katie and Wil.
Rosy pillows. Someone who listened to her and heard nothing but what she said. Someone to come home to at the end of a long day who would only, always, be for her. Whose someone Katie could be.