“Okay, can we just—” Will blows a breath out. He’s stunned by her, truthfully, her skin and her scowl and the proud, delicate set of her jawline. Every single time, she somehow catches him up short. “Hello,” he tries again, his voice coming out fake and formal. “Sorry to see you’re having trouble. I can give you a ride home, if you want.”
Right away, Lilly shakes her head. “Thank you for the offer,” she says primly, “but I’ll be fine.”
Will nods. “I’m sure you will be,” he says, sounding mostly like himself again, then sits down beside her to wait.
Lilly sighs loudly, but she doesn’t tell him to go fuck himself, which is probably about as close as he’s going to get to a letterpressed invitation. They listen to the roar of the traffic for a moment, though it’s not quite enough to drown out the weird, thick silence between them. “How’s the movie going?” she finally asks.
“It’s fine,” Will says half a beat too quickly, surprised that she broke first. Even through the car exhaust and asphalt she smells the same as she did the first night they met, like citrus and herbs and manifest destiny. Like the state of California itself. “I mean, I’m lying. It’s kind of a disaster.”
“Really?” Lilly perks up visibly at that, turning to him with interest in the hazy pink twilight. “Say more.”
Will snorts. “I don’t think I will, actually.”
“Oh, come on,” she prods, nudging him in the rib cage. “Don’t be withholding. If there’s one thing I’ve been clear about in the time that we’ve known each other, I hope it’s that I’m always absolutely dying to hear any story about you embarrassing yourself or doing poorly in any way.”
That makes him laugh. “Yeah, you’ve been pretty forthcoming on that front,” he agrees, rubbing a hand over his face. “I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like I have a ton to compare it to, right? Maybe all film sets are wildly dysfunctional. But I had it in my head that coming out here and doing this movie was a way to like, try and reset my life after the whole—” He waves a hand. “You know.”
“I don’t, actually.” Lilly lifts an eyebrow. “After the whole what?”
Will hesitates. He’s always weirdly surprised when there are people in the world who don’t already know about this, though of course it’s not like he’s famous or even really known at all outside an extremely specific niche group of East Coast theatergoers. Sometimes he forgets the entire universe isn’t New York. “I had kind of a... situation,” he says finally, looking down at his hands. “Back at home.”
“Public urination?” Lilly guesses immediately. “Jerking off in a subway car. Flashing a bunch of little old ladies attending an afternoon lecture on Basquiat at the 92nd Street Y.”
“Can I ask you something?” Will glances at her sidelong. “Is there any particular reason I have my dick out in front of strangers in all of these scenarios?”
Lilly smiles sweetly. “Just spitballing.”
“Uh-huh.” He gazes out at the horizon for a moment, trying to decide how honest he wants to be here. Trying to decide if he trusts her or not. “I played Hamlet on Broadway last spring,” he finally begins. “Which was, like... a big part.”
“Oh!” She nods earnestly. “Is he the star?”
“Fuck you,” Will replies with a smirk. “You know what I mean. It’s a lot of pressure, that’s all. It’s such a famous play, it’s been done so many times, on top of which there were a couple of real names in the cast, people from out here, so. It was getting a lot more attention than something like that might ordinarily get.” He shrugs. “TheNew Yorkersent a writer to do this whole long process story about rehearsals. We were on the front page of the Arts Preview in theTimes.”
Lilly nods. “Okay,” she says again, though he can tell it’s taking significant effort for her not to repeat the wordsArts Previewback at him in a mocking tone of voice. “And?”
“And...” He trails off, watching a hawk turn lazy circles in the distance. He wants to tell her about New York at the beginning of March, everything cold and wet and stained with salt from late-season snowstorms. He wants to tell her about the backbreaking grind of rehearsing for a play. He wants to tell her about the hours he spent lost inside the lush green hedge maze of the language, and he wants to tell her about the moment he realized he couldn’t get out.
“I started dreaming about my dad,” is where he begins.
Lilly’s eyebrows lift, infinitesimal. “Ah.”
“Yeah.” Will swallows at the remembering of it, a taste like copper and panic at the back of his mouth. It was only a couple of times at first—violent, twisting nightmares that left him sweaty and shaking, gasping awake in the dark. Sometimes his mom was there; sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes Will was trying to stop the accident. Sometimes he was the one driving the car.
By the time they got to tech it was happening every night, Will avoiding his bedroom like a crime scene, like the bloody final act of the show. He meditated. He stopped eating gluten. He saw a doctor, who wrote him a prescription for sleeping pills, and when that didn’t work he just... stopped sleeping altogether. He got lost on the way home from his final dress rehearsal. By the time the show opened he’d lost eighteen pounds.
“I should have talked to somebody about it, probably,” he says now, elbows on his knees and head bent toward the pavement. “But—and I’m sure this will come as a deep shock to you—that kind of thing can be sort of a nonstarter for me.”
“Really?” Lilly murmurs. “I’m floored.”
“Instead I just kind of... kept going. Which—again, earth-shattering, can’t imagine anything that would have been more of a surprise—didn’t work out so well in the end, for me or for the show.”
“How bad was it?”
Will sits up. “Bad,” he tells her honestly. He’s never said any of this out loud before and the telling of it makes him feel light-headed and untethered, like he might come flying off the face of the Earth entirely and wind up drifting outside of gravity for all eternity. “Opening night, I just... choked. I couldn’t remember my lines or my blocking or what I was doing up there to begin with. The reviews were eviscerating. The whole thing closed up shop after six performances. And it was... entirely my fault.”
Lilly wrinkles her nose. “Yikes.”
“Yikes,” Will agrees. “It wasn’t great.” He flexes his fingers, scrubs a hand over the hair at the back of his head. “Anyway. I got back to my apartment the night after the last show, and I was so fucking tired. I took a couple of Ambien, and I waited like half an hour and I was still awake, and I was really kind of freaking out by that point, so. I took some more.”
