“Sexy nurse?”
“Sexy Chester Cheetah.”
Charlotte nods approvingly. “Now that,” she says, turning the finished arrangement for Lilly’s inspection, “would kill on Tinder.”
***
Lilly leaves Charlotte to her prep work and heads back to Pemberly Grove, rolling down the windows of June’s Audi so it’s too loud to think. She feels pissed off and set up, though it’s not like she doesn’t understand why Charlotte did what she did: as far as free publicity for the restaurant goes, Charlie Bingley at Monday Night Supper Club pretty much guarantees they’ll be booked solid right through next spring.
She could just skip the whole thing, Lilly guesses, though the thought of it fills her with an immediate, visceral contrariness. She’s been going to Charlotte’s pop-ups since before Lodge even opened; she’s certainly not about to get chased out of the dining room by some so-called serious actor who probably only owns one pair of shoes. Let him feel awkward about it, if he even has human emotions under that brittle veneer of smug superiority. She didn’t do anything wrong.
Back at the house she opens her closet and stares frowning atits contents for a moment: the rows of jeans and heels and athleisure, the going-out clothes she hardly ever wears since Joe. Finally she sighs, then turns and pads barefoot down the long hallway to the guest room—or at least, it used to be the guest room. Now it’s stuffed close and claustrophobic with unopened cardboard boxes, half a dozen rolling racks, and enough felt hats for some haunted creature with ten thousand heads. In the center of it all Kit sits pretzel-legged on the carpet in her underwear, daintily embroidering what appears to be a curse word onto a vintage silk handkerchief. She’s the craftiest and most fashion-minded out of all of them, cares about things like color theory and diffusion lines and not just how her ass is going to look in a pair of pants; back when she and Olivia had their clothing line, Kit did most of the design work herself.
“Will Darcy is going to be at Supper Club tonight,” Lilly announces, crossing her arms and leaning against the doorjamb.
Kit looks up and raises one thick eyebrow, then sets the hanky down on the carpet and grins. “Step into my office,” she replies.
Chapter Six
Will
Charlotte Lucas’s restaurant is tucked away on a quiet, leafy side street in Silver Lake, the sky streaked pink and indigo through the dense, heavy branches of the mimosa trees overhead. Will is expecting some kind of echoing, gentrified macaroni factory but in fact Lodge is small and intimate and familiar in a good way, the walls painted a warm cream and votives flickering in tidy lines on the wide wooden tables. Out back is a courtyard, wisteria vining along the brick walls and tiny white lights strung up overhead. It reminds him of the kind of place you’d find hidden down at the end of a pee-smelling alley in the West Village back home, and for a moment he misses New York so much and so viscerally the inside of his head starts to roar.
Lilly and her sisters are already clustered around the bar when he and Charlie arrive, the five of them wielding champagne coupes like cudgels in their delicate, manicured hands. Will stops short at the sight of them, somehow startled even though Charlie explicitly told him they’d be here. Every time he thinks about the other night at Rebecca Barnes’s party—Lilly’s hair and her jaw and the sound of her laughter, the look on her face before she turned away—it’s like trying to hold his brain against a hot stove.
Charlie heads directly for June, the two of them peeling offfrom the group and disappearing in the direction of the patio. Will orders a drink from a passing waiter and leans back against a wall near the door. He glances at Lilly—watching in spite of himself as she runs a distracted finger around the rim of her glass, tilting her dark head close to Olivia’s—then glances away.
Glances back.
She catches him once, rolling her eyes a little before turning back to her sisters. When it happens a second time, she marches over like a nun in a Catholic school about to pinch his ear for masturbating under his desk.
“Look,” she announces, grabbing his arm and hustling him around a corner into the short hallway that leads to the bathroom, “enough. You can either apologize to me or you can fuck off, but stop brooding in my general direction like you’re Heathcliff on the fucking moors, will you? It’s weird.”
Will opens his mouth, then closes it again, heat flooding his face. “I’m notbrooding,” he protests finally.
“Oh no?” she asks, crossing her arms. She’s wearing a slinky black dress that hits midway down her calves and a pair of sandals with a million fiddly straps, her hair in a long, loose ponytail over one shoulder. “What would you call it, exactly?”
“Standing,” he says uselessly. “Minding my own business.”
“Well.” Lilly looks deeply dubious. “In that case, feel free to mind it elsewhere.” She gestures toward the dining room, and when he makes no move in that direction, his feet dumbly rooted to the floor, she sighs. “Can I ask you a question?” she says, then doesn’t wait for him to answer before she forges ahead. “Why are you even here?”
Will looks around at the warm bustle of the restaurant. “I... was invited?”
“Nothere,” she says impatiently. “Here. LA. Why come at all, if you hate it so much?”
For one preposterous second, Will almost tells her—about New York, aboutHamlet, about Georgia finding him curled unconscious on the bath mat in his apartment, his skin gone waxy and blue—before, thankfully, coming to his senses. “To work with Johnny Jones,” is all he says.
Lilly nods slowly, though he can tell she isn’t buying it. “Right,” she says. “Johnny Jones.”
Will grits his teeth. “Look,” he finally tells her, “about the other night at the party. I should apologize.”
“Okay,” she agrees. Then, when he doesn’t say anything quickly enough: “Wait, was that it? Because you realize that saying you should apologize isn’t actually—”
“Can you give me a minute?” he interrupts irritably. “Jesus.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “I’m sorry,” he tries. “I am. I handled that badly. I didn’t know who you were—”
“Wait a second.” She holds a hand up. “That’s what you’re sorry for? Not knowing I was—how did you so cleverly put it?—‘a reality show trash bag who—’”
“That’s not what I meant.”
