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“He did. Told me he was happily married. I get turned down a lot. But that’s important, too, right? Asking the question and being okay with hearing no.”
Busy leaned close and grabbed Wil’s arm. “I’m just going to say before I lose my nerve that I would not turn you down, Wil Greene.”
“Let’s put a pin in that,” Wil said, because that’s what they had planned on her saying when Busy told her she wanted Wil to kiss her.
With Busy so close, though, Wil did take the opportunity to really look at her. Not like a famous person, but to connect with her.
She had really good eyes. There was a lot ofBusyin her eyes, and a steely kind of centeredness that told Wil the woman sitting beside her was more than on board for the places this conversation would go.
That felt good.
“Okay,” Busy said, smiling again. “Because there might actually be someone who hasn’t seen what you do—though I’m guessing there are a bunch of people who are on their phones right this minute trying to get a peek—we do have a couple of your videos to share. Wil, can you tell me about this one?”
While soft transition music played, Wil and Busy turned theirbodies toward an oversized screen on the set. One of the PAs near the cameras in front of them blinked a small light to cue that the video was starting. The position of the lights meant that Wil couldn’t see what was on the screen, but a prompter played the video next to the camera, where she had been told to look.
It was comforting to see Molly on the prompter screen in the familiar video. It grounded Wil in the moment.
“This is Molly,” Wil said. “She’s a vet tech who specializes in elderly cats, and she does checkups for my Almond Butter, who’s sixteen.”
A picture of Almond Butter flashed up on a different screen right behind Busy, and the audience gave Almond Butter her due.
“Molly had seen what I was doing with the TikTok, and she’d just gone through a breakup, and she told me she wanted to remember that she knew how to feel something.”
“That’s kind of amazing,” Busy said. This part wasn’t scripted. Busy hadn’t wanted it to be. She’d wanted her reactions to the video and what Wil said about it to be a surprise to her so that it could elicit genuine emotion. “I love that. I love that this could be that for her, because it can be so hard to identify what you need when you go through something like that. Okay. Let’s watch.”
There had been an argument about how much of the video would be aired, because a minute was a long clip for live television, but Madelynn had been very firm, and ultimately Busy’s team agreed that it would be worthwhile to show the whole thing, in part because of how it began. Which was with Wil and Molly sitting across from each other on stools, and Almond Butter in Molly’s arms, and Wil telling her, smiling,You have to let go of Almond Butter now.
Molly glanced at Wil from beneath her full eyelashes. She was a tall woman with broad shoulders, brown hair, and brown eyes, one of these Germanic Wisconsin white women who was built to survive the woods and the prairie. She had blunt-cut bangs andhuge eyes and those unfair eyelashes that Wil had thought were fake, but up close she’d seen that they weren’t.
But she’s doing such a good job of protecting me from what I’ve gotten myself into,Molly said.
You don’t have to kiss me if you don’t want to, Wil told her.There’s no point at which it’s too late to say no. Even with the video rolling, you can say no. You can always say no.
She’d waited until Molly met her eyes.
Do you want to say no, Molly?
But by that time, she hadn’t meant the question seriously, and you could hear it in the video and see Molly’s gaze lock with Wil’s, and the way her lips parted just a little bit, and she leaned closer and set Almond Butter gently on the floor. Wil’s cat trotted obediently out of the frame.
Then, when Molly sat back up, she grabbed the stool between her own legs and yanked it closer to Wil’s, and put her hands on Wil’s shoulders, smoothing her palms down Wil’s arms.
I want you to show me how you do this,Molly said.
Like I’m teaching you?Wil put her finger on Molly’s knee.
Molly shook her head.Like you’re—like you’re seducing me.
That was what the rest of the film showed. Wil figuring out what seduction looked like, felt like, sounded like to Molly. How she wanted to be touched. How she liked to be kissed. The way she hummed her approval, her hand at the base of Wil’s throat, her head tipped to the side, her eyes closed, and her knees locked onto either side of Wil’s thigh.
It was a good kiss. It had felt good, but mostly Wil remembered it had made Molly feel good, which was why she’d picked it for Busy’s show.
Wil had also picked it because she remembered that on the morning when she filmed herself kissing Molly after breakfast, before she had to go to work, she’d understood for the first timethat something was happening with her project that she hadn’t expected, and she liked it.
“Um. So. Wow,” Busy said, as music played as an outro when the video faded to black and the audience reacted. “I mean, of course it’s sexy, right? But really, I’m thinking that it’s powerful. Tell me why you decided to do this project, this channel, this thing.”
She and Busy had also talked about this question, and Wil felt like it was incredibly generous of Busy to throw herself under the bus by asking it.
“There isn’t awhy,and there doesn’t have to be,” Wil said. “I had an idea, and it was obviously a good one, because millions of people have seen these videos. It’s powerful because good ideas are powerful, and because I’m real, I’m a real person, doing something vulnerable and real that happened to be a fuc—an effing good idea.”