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Wil felt as though she was mostly handling the reality of Cy Newhouse and Angela Goossens on this plane, but she couldn’t quite make herself look straight on at Joel-not-Joe Starr. His celebrity, combined with his extraordinary sandy-haired, full-lipped prettiness, like a young Robert Redford, was proving difficult for Wil to accommodate.
It did help that he kept getting out of his seat to kneel on the floor and talk to Katie’s cats inside their cat carriers, poking his long fingers through the grates to pet their tiny faces. Joel was famously an animal lover.
When Almond Butter yowled from her carrier, Joel laughed and withdrew his finger. “All right,” he said gently. “I was only being friendly.”
“That’s Almond Butter,” Wil made herself tell him. “She’s sixteen, and she’s never been on a plane. I couldn’t decide if I should sedate her? The vet and I decided no, not unless she started to seem distressed. But I’m a little bit freaking out.”
“She’s a beautiful cat for sixteen. She looks like she has a lot of years in her still.”
“I hope so.” Wil looked away for a moment. “I’m supposed to be planning for the end of her life, but I get mad when I try to. My dad got her for me. He died when I was in college.”
Joel nodded solemnly. “It’s very loving to plan for the golden years of our animals. It helps them feel like they still have a role, even if they don’t get around the same way or like the same things.” He spoke deliberately, with a beautiful honey-laced Southern accent. “I have a donkey who’s quite elderly, Marianne, and she used to act as a guard for a group of goats that lived on a farm in Elmhurst. Marianne has arthritis and can’t work like that anymore, but with medicine anda very warm stall, she’s comfortable, and she’s found that she loves treat puzzles. So I devise new puzzles for her every day and make it seem like it’s very important for her to solve them. It means we both have something new to do and something new to learn about ourselves.” He glanced at Wil a little bit sideways. While he spoke, he’d been looking at Almond Butter.
Because, Wil understood suddenly,shemadehimnervous. “That’s an incredibly helpful perspective,” she said. “I’m going to give that some thought.”
“All right. What does she like?” he asked, eyes back on Almond Butter. “Not having her chin scratched.”
Wil cleared her throat against how this conversation was making her tearful and tender and overwhelmed with the goodness of life. “If you hold out your finger, she’ll rub against it if she’s interested in claiming you as her own.”
Wil knelt down next to Joel and showed him, and just like that, Joel Starr,Joe Starr,was making friends with Almond Butter, making kissing noises at her, telling her she was a good girl, and looking at Wil with delight.
Wil’s heart lurched again. Not because Joel was gorgeous, or for how close she was to him, or because she’d looked over and seen Katie and Angela were sharing one chair, their legs hooked over each other, Angela touching Katie’s hair, or because Cy was flirting with Mace so hard that Mace had just reached out to touch the placket on Cy’s shirt and Wil realized that the two of them had some kind of history that was pleasant for them both.
Her heart was thudding and skipping because she liked how vulnerability had inveigled itself into new parts of her life since she’d connected with Katie.
And because these were Katie’s friends. This was Katie’s real life, a tiny slice of what Katie’s life was like asKatie Price, Hollywood Triple Threat. And Willikedit.
The part of her that was Jasper Greene couldn’t be more thrilled to meet and talk to these fascinating new people.
The part of her that was Beanie Greene loved the idea of learning the ins and outs of a completely new way of life, synthesizing everything she learned, and filing it away, ready to deploy when the moment was right.
Mostly, though, it was the mostWilpart of Wil Greene that loved sitting on the carpeted floor of a luxury jet, talking to Joel Starr about her cat. Because she’d gotten herself to here. Her life had. Her experiences. Her kissing project, even, for how it had taught her to meet new people exactly where they were at.
And Katie. Wil wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Katie. It was talking to Katie,beingwith Katie, that had given Wil the gift of all this curiosity about her own life.
All of this hope.
“I hate to break up the party,” Mace said, guiding Cy’s hand from their waist to their hand and squeezing it. “But if you’re not flying to LA, you’ll have to say good-bye for now.” Mace looked at Cy and winked.
By the time the flight took off, it was dark, with only a slash of sunset in the distance that the plane continuously chased. Katie was quiet once her friends left, and a rule-follower on the plane, and so was seat-belted properly into a wide leather chair next to Wil, obviously lost in her thoughts.
Wil kept putting her fingers on the window where that fading strip of pink and orange light wouldn’t quite go, their westerly flight literally carrying them into the past. She imagined that if the plane could fly a little faster, and then even faster than that, it could spin the whole world around until she could hug her dad again.
Or take her back to the last night in the tent by the lake before Katie left for summer stock.
Wil had almost kissed her that night. It was the second timeshe’d almost kissed Katie, the first time she’d known what she was about to do.
They’d had a golden day together. They took a long swim in the lake as the sun began to set, the pinks and oranges of the sunset making Katie’s skin glow, the gathering dark making her teeth flash extra white when she smiled wide at one of Wil’s jokes.
A stiff breeze had come up off the lake, and they’d thrown their bodies out of the water, squealing with cold, their feet squishing in the sand mixed with fishy-smelling lake mud right at the shore. They’d sprinted to the outdoor rinsing station to blast the lake off their bodies with freezing water, exaggerating all of their reactions until someone at a campsite yelled into the twilight for them toshut up, already! Jeez!
Which had made them laugh more.
They made s’mores over a little spirit stove, too tired to try to figure out how to start a fire with the campfire wood bundle they’d bought at a Kwik Trip on the way, and then they’d collapsed into the tent. Wil could still remember the exact color of the air inside the yellow tent, how it mixed with the deep purple sunset and the cheap camp lantern to make their skin glow blue and the shadows go black.
Their swimsuits had dried, and in the cramped quarters of the tent, they didn’t bother to really change, just hiked on their sweatpants and T-shirts and dove into their sleeping bags to talk.
Wil could still see Katie’s face through the dim light when she’d turned off the lantern, and all she could hear in that sharp, crystalline, time-stopped moment was Katie’s breath and the waves hitting the shore.