Page 74 of Everyone I Kissed Since You Got Famous

April’s eyes were red and wet. Katie had never seen her cry before. “Once you decide what day you’re coming back, tell me, and I’ll set up the trip for you. I’ll try to give the two of you privacy.”

“But not tohideWil.” Katie let her agent hear the warning in her voice. She would not be pushed around when it came to this. Wil was too important.

“Not to hide Wil, butforWil. For this chance for you, too.” April held both her hands up in a gesture of apology.

Katie was suddenly exhausted. “I love you,” she decided to say. Smiling, April swiped at her tears. “You’ll have to show me pictures from your bat mitzvah sometime.”

They laughed, and after talking about nothing in particular for a few minutes more, she and April said their good-byes and disconnected.

Katie’s gaze wandered to the tree that her mother had set up in the basement suite this morning. It had pink lights all over it. Her heart pinched.

She couldn’t stay for Christmas. It was too good of a chance to escape. The media would expect her to remain here. Would expect Wil to stay.

Katie closed her eyes and thought of her. Wil.

Hottest girl in school, valedictorian, cheerleader, softball player, orchestra, and, for a little while, Katie’s best friend.

And the first person who’d been able to command her attention long enough for Katie to fall in love with her.

She picked up her phone. She started to text Wil, but then, out of curiosity, she went to TikTok first. Her heart was racing. She didn’t log in to the Katie Price account—it would have so many notifications, it might not even load. She logged into her lurker account instead, her hands shaking.

Of course she’d filmed the kiss, edited it, watched it dozens of times. But it wasn’t hers anymore. It was the world’s. And that part, Katie hadn’t seen yet.

A lot of Wil’s videos went viral. Unsurprisingly, the Noel kiss had gone, well, mega-viral.

But there was lots of conversation, too. Lots of people stitching to it and making their own things, playing it in the background with commentary. Giving Noel some very excellent props, but also,also,really seeing Wil and what she was doing.

Everyone who watched Katie’s film understood, in many cases for the first time, that Wil was perceptive, commanding, generous, and saw people.

And maybe, well,absolutely,there were a lot of people talking about Katie’s technique. Adding to the video. Creating whole mini-movies and stories where what she and Wil had made was the beginning, or middle, or end of a whole other piece, story, or film.

She put the phone down and laughed.God.

Thenshe texted Wil.

Wil came over the same way she had the last time, through the secret back gate, still undiscovered by the media.

“Do you remember,” Wil asked, stomping her feet, “our last sleepover?” She shrugged off her leather jacket and unwrapped her scarf. Her cheeks were nearly red with cold. “Before you left for Chicago?”

She wore a soft flannel shirt with illegally tight jeans, and herhair spiked and waved around her ears and neck. Katie watched her run her fingers through it, the unbuttoned cuffs of her shirt flipped back, highlighting her new manicure. Her nails had been painted black, with pastel geometric patterns. Something about how she was moving, how the Christmas lights from the pink tree caught her jawline, the tight jeans, superimposed this Wil withthenWil, and for a speechless moment Katie was overwhelmed with what felt like a thousand feelings—all of them tender and hot and excited and familiar and new andwelcome.

“Yeah,” she finally said. “We told our moms we were going to pick up a pizza and got distracted. Didn’t have our phones. Came back three hours later after laughing so hard the whole time my scalp hurt, then got yelled at while we ate cold pizza.”

Wil grinned. “No. Not that one.”

Katie tried to push away all of her Wil feelings so she could focus, but it was impossible when Wil was standing right in front of her with so much cleavage giving that flannel a life it had never dreamed of when it was sitting on the shelves at L.L.Bean. “Um?”

“The sleepover wecalledthe last sleepover.”

“Oh!” Katie looked at Wil. “Oh.”

“Yeah.Oh.”

“The tent. After we swam in Lake Michigan.”

Wil laughed and stepped closer. “What were we up to?”

“I mean,” Katie said. “Nothinghappened.”

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