“I don’t have Instagram.”
“I know you don’t,” she blurts without entirely meaning to.Then she shrugs. “Joe used to say that too, though. Like, ‘Come on, Lilly, who’s gonna believe in you if you don’t believe in yourself?’” She frowns, hearing it out loud; she hardly ever talks about Joe, especially without meaning to. “Sorry. Is that weird?”
Will raises an eyebrow. “That you somehow have not arrived at almost thirty years old with no romantic history whatsoever?” he asks. “I think I can give you a pass.”
Lilly makes a face. “To talk about him, I mean. When we’re—” She gestures between them.
“It’s not weird.” Will’s voice is quiet. “What was he like?”
“Really?”
He shrugs. “If you want to tell me.”
Lilly sits up on the mattress as she thinks about it, tucking the top sheet around her and drawing one knee up to her chest. She can hear the rumble and hum of the party spilling onto the patio outside, the sound of someone laughing. “He worked at the original Meatball King,” she says finally, “back in the Valley—he ran the fryer, did the prep work, that kind of thing. And by senior year I was the only one of us who was still going over there after school sometimes to see my dad. That’s how we met.” She remembers it now, noticing him—his muscles moving inside his T-shirt, the tiny burn marks speckling his arms all the way up past his elbows. He’d been nineteen at the time.
“I think about it sometimes,” she tells Will, “what would have happened to us if things had been normal. If I hadn’t been who I was. But right away, we were just... everywhere, you know? On the blogs, in magazines. We were photogenic, I don’t know.”
“You were,” Will agrees. “I can use Google.”
“So, then. You know what happened next.”
“The broad strokes, yeah.” Will nods. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Lilly says, and admittedly her voice doesn’t sound quite as casual as she’d like. “You didn’t give him the drugs. I didn’t give them to him, either, not that it made any difference in the end.” She shrugs. “It always made me so mad, you know? All those articles that came out after he died. Not because I didn’t think I deserved the blame—of course I deserve the blame—but because it made Joe sound like this oblivious dumbass who was too simpleminded not to be ruined by someone like me, like I dragged him down into some glamorous underworld full of fast cars and bottle service and cast a spell to keep him there. But he was smart, you know? He could argue LA politics with my father and fix an industrial range and smell bullshit from a mile away. He just... got sick, is all.”
“Yeah,” Will says. “I think that’s how it goes sometimes.”
“I didn’t know he had a problem. Or no, that’s a lie, of course I knew he had a problem, there was no way to miss the fact that he had a problem; I just didn’t realize I wasn’t going to be able to fix it before it killed him. I just... thought I had more time.” Lilly sighs. “Anyway,” she says, picking at a loose thread in the sheets. “I didn’t.”
“You couldn’t have,” Will says, reaching out and lacing their fingers together, squeezing once before letting go. “And you don’t, actually. Deserve the blame.”
“Well.” Lilly doesn’t believe him, not really, but she lies back down beside him anyway, her ankles brushing his under the covers. They’re quiet for a while, just the sound of his heart beating; she thinks she must drift off for a minute, but when she opens her eyes next he’s still awake, keeping watch, one arm tucked beneath the pillows. She looks again at the freckles on his nose.
“You,” he says, “are. Extraordinary.”
Lilly snorts, she can’t help it. “Are you trying to pick me up?” she asks. “Because frankly it’s a little late for—”
“Uh-huh.” Will cuts her off. “Just take the compliment, you fucking monster.”
Lilly thinks about it for a moment. “Okay,” she says eventually, and yawns.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Will
Lilly’s still sleeping when he wakes up the following morning. Will gazes at her in the warm light spilling in through the curtains, transfixed in spite of himself: her dark tangle of hair splayed all over the pillows and the long, graceful ladder of her backbone, one tan arm slung up over her head. At some point during the night she yanked all the covers off him and onto herself, and the artic blast from the A/C is blowing more or less directly onto his dick; still, to Will’s surprise, he finds he doesn’t actually want to wake her up by stealing them back.
After a moment she stirs, though, lean muscle moving underneath her smooth, unblemished skin. “It’s creepy to watch someone while they’re sleeping, weirdo,” she mumbles into the pillows.
Will startles, feeling himself blush. “How do you know I was watching you?” he asks, taking the opportunity to pull the sheet back up over his junk. He’s been hard since before he opened his eyes, her smell and her body and the heat of her lying here beside him; he’s never felt this helpless with a woman before, like she could take him apart with both hands.
“I could sense you hovering.” Her voice is gruff, but when she rolls over and pushes her hair out of her face she’s smiling. “Hi.”
“Hi yourself.” Will grins back, he can’t help it, only then she’sreaching down and wrapping her hand around him, squeezing roughly; he growls when she lets go again almost immediately, his head whoofing back against the pillows. “Cute,” he accuses.
“Thank you,” she replies sweetly, “I am.” She props herself up on one sharp elbow. “I’ll go get coffee in a minute,” she offers. “Tell Charlotte you’re here, apologize for bailing early on dinner.”
“Think she’ll forgive you?”
