All at once he feels Lilly get very still beside him. “How many more?” she asks.
Will shrugs, looking out at the traffic one more time. He thinks for a moment about people who commute to office jobs, people who drive monster trucks and enter bake-offs and live completely normal, healthy, theaterless lives. He wonders how they do it. He wishes he could be more like them.
“I wasn’t trying to... whatever,” he says finally, and taps his foot twice on the bumper. “I don’t think. Not really. But when you wake up in the ICU of Lenox Hill on a seventy-two-hour psychhold, it’s sort of hard to convince them you were just trying to catch some Z’s.”
Lilly nods slowly, her face impassive. “I can see how that might be the case.”
“Anyway,” Will continues, “I had already turned down the offer from Johnny by that point, but after everything happened, the idea of staying in the city started to feel kind of... untenable? On top of which it’s not like a bunch of producers and directors were exactly banging down my door. So I called him back to see if the part was still available, and here I am.”
“Here you are,” Lilly echoes. They’re quiet for a long time, watching the line of traffic snake by. “I’m glad, for what it’s worth. Not that you wound up in the hospital, obviously. But that you wound up in the hospital instead of...” She trails off.
“The probable alternative?”
Lilly laughs at that, low and quiet. “Yeah.”
“Yeah.” Will looks at her in the quickly falling darkness. There’s a spray of coppery freckles across her cheekbones, just faint ones. You’d have to be looking to notice, which he guesses he is. “Is that the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me?”
“What, ‘I’m glad you didn’t die from an accidental-or-not overdose of sleeping pills’? It might be,” Lilly concedes. “You should be sure to write it down in your journal.”
“Joke’s on you,” Will says, “I don’t keep a journal.” He taps the side of his head. “Store it all right up here.”
Lilly nods, then doesn’t say anything for a long moment, leaning back against the hood of the Honda and exposing the long, graceful line of her neck. Will doesn’t say anything, either. He’s thinking he’d be happy to stay here in silence with her all night, the lights of the city blinking like neon stars in the distance, whenall of a sudden she clears her throat. “The car was Joe’s,” she tells him quietly. “My ex—my fiancé.” She frowns, sitting up a little straighter. “Is it an ex if he dies? I can never figure out what to call him.”
Right away, Will has never felt more like an ass. “I’m sorry,” he tells her. “When I said—I didn’t realize.”
“Of course you didn’t.” Lilly shrugs. “I never talk about it. Anyway, I got it after he died because nobody else wanted it, and it’s not like I don’t know it’s a piece of shit. It breaks down more or less constantly. The A/C hasn’t worked in a full year. And it’s clearly not doing a whole lot for my personal brand, which any of my sisters would be happy to tell you. But I can’t make myself give it up, either.”
Will thinks about what it must have been like for her, to lose someone like that with neither warning nor privacy. He thinks about the night his parents died. He thinks about all the different ways the past bleeds into the present, and finally he leans over on the hood of the Honda and nudges her denim-covered knee with his. “I’m sorry about that day at the restaurant,” he says. “I was a weirdo. I’m a weirdo sometimes, clearly. What I said to you, about getting it out of our systems... that wasn’t what I wanted to say.”
That gets her attention. “Oh no?” she asks. “What did you want to say, exactly?”
Will gazes at her for a moment, their pinkies just barely brushing. Lilly’s lips part. Will is about to lean in closer when all at once a tow truck clanks up behind them, a gruff-looking lady driver hopping down out of the cab. “Somebody call for a tow?” she asks.
Lilly jumps down off the hood of the car like it’s on fire. “Me!” she calls, waving madly. “I did.”
The driver nods, then turns to Will. “That your car?” she asks, nodding at Charlie’s Land Rover. “You’re in the way.”
Will nods. “Often,” he confirms grimly.
Lilly smiles. “I think I can probably handle myself from here,” she says. “Thanks for the company.”
“Anytime,” he tells her, and he’s surprised to find he means it. Then, before he has time to think it through: “Text me when you make it home, will you?”
She looks at him archly. “If you want my phone number, you could just ask for it.”
Will blanches, embarrassed. “I— That’s not—”
Lilly rolls her eyes. “I’m teasing you, William.” She holds her hand out for his phone, nimble fingers skipping across the screen. “No pictures of your penis, all right?” she says as she hands it back. “I get enough of those as it is.”
“That’s just for my OnlyFans,” he says. “Exclusively paying customers.”
“He doesn’t know basic reality television, but he knows OnlyFans.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“So I am beginning to understand.” She lifts her hand in a wave. “Nice running into you, Will Darcy.”
“Nice running into you, Lilly Benedetto.”
