“He’s making noise about staying here through the winter,” Charlotte confides, hulling an avocado for guacamole as Edith Piaf bellows on the expensive sound system. It’s impossible todeny how at home Charlotte seems here, how very much herself—making complicated meals in the outdoor kitchen and padding around barefoot, her whole closet full of flowy white caftans. “Colin, I mean.”
Lilly raises her eyebrows; she can’t help it. “Would you stay with him?” she asks.
Charlotte tilts her head, considering. “I need to get back to the restaurant eventually,” she says. “But I’d stay for as long as I could.”
Lilly nods without comment. The truth is that since she’s been out here she can’t help but notice how Colin is with Charlotte: pulling her chair out and refilling her wineglass, exclaiming ebulliently over every bite of food he puts in his mouth. He kind of makes Lilly want to barf, though not in precisely the same way he usually does. She digs her phone out of her pocket, scrolls to Will’s name:Don’t you think the worst thing in the world is when someone you hate turns out to be sort of decent?she types, then abruptly remembers they aren’t doing this anymore and deletes the message letter by careful letter.
“You okay?” Charlotte asks, handing Lilly a bowl of tortilla chips and shooing her out in the direction of the patio.
“Never better,” Lilly lies in reply.
***
Colin invites some friends for a dinner party on Friday–including, he tells Lilly breathlessly, Caitriona de Bourgh—so Lilly tags along with Charlotte to the farmer’s market that morning, nibbling a corn muffin while Charlotte inspects greens and tomatoes with the keen-eyed intensity of a 1950s bride-to-be selecting a pattern for heirloom china. Back at the house she slips into a stretchyfloral dress that used to—or possibly does still—belong to June, then slicks on some mascara and heads across the yard to the main house, where Charlotte is mixing an enormous batch of palomas while Colin fusses with the turntable in the living room.
“How can I help?” Lilly asks—at least, she starts to, but she’s interrupted by the sound of a mechanical rumbling so loud and insistent it shakes the very plates on the counter, and she whirls around in sudden alarm. “What the fuck is that?”
“That,” Charlotte says, the tiniest smirk appearing on her round, catlike face as she rests her wooden spoon against the side of the pitcher, “is Caitriona de Bourgh.”
Lilly follows Charlotte out into the driveway, where a tall, lean woman in her forties is dismounting an enormous motorcycle. She’s sporting a leather jacket and combat boots and no helmet, plus the exact same pair of aviators Colin is always wearing. Lilly wonders, briefly, if she bought them for him and told him he had to wear them or else.
“Cait!” Colin calls, his voice cracking a bit as he darts out of the house behind them like a little kid spotting the ice cream man. “You made it!”
“I never pass up a chance to stretch this girl’s legs out in the desert,” Caitriona announces, stroking the chassis of the bike like it’s a beloved horse on an old episode ofDr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. “Collie. How the hell are you?”
Lilly misses his answer as the rest of the guests begin to arrive, a surprisingly eclectic mix of friends and neighbors: a woman who runs a gallery in Twentynine Palms and a lesbian couple who keep a hobby farm outside of Palm Springs, the actor who played the brother in Colin’s last movie and a trio of chefs Charlotte knows from back in LA. A fundamental truth about Lilly is that she bothlikes parties and is very, very good at them; it’s always come naturally to her, the call and response of a good conversation, the game of drawing someone out. She’s endlessly curious about other people. She’s happy to eat and drink and dance.
Tonight, though, her heart isn’t in it. It’s a lovely dinner, warm and raucous, chatter and candlelight bouncing off the white stucco walls; still, Lilly’s mind drifts. She misses her sisters. She misses Will. It’s not like her to be so lonely in a big group of people. It’s not like her to feel so ill at ease.
She’s finishing her panna cotta and telling herself not to be such an insufferable sad sack when Colin plucks the spoon from her hand and sets it on the table, even though she’s still got another bite left to go. “Gotta make sure two of the most creatively talented ladies in my life get a chance to talk to one another!” he announces, ignoring Lilly’s scowl as he tugs her across the living room to where Caitriona is smoking a cigar on the sofa, ashes burning a tiny hole into the white canvas arm. “My cousin Lilly is a screenwriter, as well.”
Caitriona looks at Lilly archly. Her hair has a certain overprocessed coarseness to it, her skin turned slightly leathery from years of shooting on location in various American deserts filtered yellow to look like the Middle East. She smells like leather and like hemp. “Are you?” she asks.
But Lilly shakes her head. “I’m trying something else right now, actually,” she admits. “A novel.”
“You are?” Colin asks, sounding genuinely interested; Lilly remembers what he said back at her parents’ pool that morning,if there’s something you’d rather be writing. “You know, I’ve got a friend who’s an agent in New York—”
“I hate working with women screenwriters,” Caitriona announces, ashing her cigar into one of Charlotte’s Diptyque candles. “Of course, god forbid you say that now, you’ll get run out of town with a pitchfork, but the reality is they’re just so fucking sensitive. When I was coming up, at the very least we could recognize that sometimes you just have to hold your nose and suck a—”
“Caitriona!” interrupts Charlotte politely, popping up bright and sudden as a spring tulip. “Come on into the kitchen and I’ll grab you another drink.”
Lilly slips outside for some air as Charlotte leads Caitriona in the direction of the bar, Caitriona regaling her with a long, convoluted story about playing Russian roulette with Ryan Gosling in the parking lot behind a Dollar General in a suburb of Tucson, Arizona. The evening is still and cool and blue. The stars are wild out here, a million more than you ever see back in the city; every single night since she’s been here Lilly has snapped a picture to send to Junie, and every single morning when she’s scrolled through her camera roll it’s all just looked blurry and vague.
She imagines going back inside the house and pitching her book to Caitriona. She imagines getting in her car and driving home to Pemberly Grove. She imagines tromping out into the middle of the wilderness and screaming as loud as she can for as long as she can manage, but when she glances over at the driveway Will Darcy is standing there in jeans and a soft-looking T-shirt, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, and for a moment she can’t imagine anything else at all.
“Oh my god.” Lilly stops so fast she almost trips—gaping at him in the moonlight as her wineglass slips from her fingers, the sheer mathematical impossibility of him here in this place in thismoment turning her shaky and shrill. She feels like she took peyote when she wasn’t paying attention. She feels like her knees might give. “Are you—I mean. What are you doing here?”
Will kisses her instead of answering, crossing the distance between them in two big steps and wrapping a hand around the back of her neck, pulling her flush against him. Lilly gasps into his mouth. She kisses him back, though, arms winding around his neck and fingertips sifting through his hair, quick and frantic. She’s never been more relieved to see someone in her entire life.
“Okay,” she manages finally, even as she’s tilting her head back so he can nip at the thin skin underneath the hinge of her jaw, sharp teeth and the warm slick of his tongue over the bitten place. “Okay, okay, stop, I just—”
Will lets go of her immediately—too fast, if Lilly’s being honest. Her whole body is aching with want. He’s breathing hard, his eyes wide and startled, like possibly he drove here in his sleep and is only just waking up right this minute. He takes a wild, unsteady step back.
“No, don’t—” Lilly shakes her head, frustrated, fingernails zipping along the fabric of his T-shirt as she yanks him back against her. His chest is always more solid than she expects. “Just—come with me.” She turns him around and shoves him in the direction of the guesthouse, sliding her hand down the front of his jeans as they go; Will sklonks his ankle hard on the doorframe, and Lilly laughs. “Careful,” she chides, shutting the door behind them. “Winding up with a grievous bodily injury while fooling around with a Benedetto sister at a party in Palm Desert is exactly how a person winds up on the Sinclair.”
Will ignores her, rucking her dress up; his hands are warm and enormous, touching her stomach and her rib cage, reaching back behind her to cup and squeeze her ass. He drops to his knees in the hallway, hooking his fingers in the elastic of her underwear and looking up at her for permission. Lilly’s head thunks back against the wall.
It doesn’t take long for him to get her there, his hands and his mouth and how long his eyelashes look from this angle, her whole body blooming bright and sudden as a desert flower. Will reaches up and takes her hand.
