All at once, Will realized what this was about. “I’m fine, Charlie,” he promised, deeply and abruptly embarrassed. “I mean, I’m not like, great, maybe. But you don’t have to—I mean, this isn’t some big thing where I need to be supervised by an adul—”
“For fuck’s sake, Darce,” Charlie interrupted. There was a raggedness in his voice that Will didn’t want to examine too closely, that he did his best to pretend he didn’t hear. “Just come the fuck out here, will you?”
Will booked his ticket the following day.
The party is on the other side of the development, so they drive over in Caroline’s sporty little Mercedes, even though it’s probably only about the equivalent of a dozen New York City blocks. Back at home Will walked everywhere, and since he got here it’s like he can feel his muscles atrophying in real time, his entire body shriveling up like a California Raisin. “Go to the gym,” Charlie suggested when he mentioned it. Charlie spends two hours at thegym every morning, which means he looks like... well, like Major Fantastic; it’s not like Will needs help opening pickle jars, exactly, but something about living with a flesh-and-blood action figure makes him feel like maybe he ought to at least lift a couple of soup cans.
To drive through Pemberly Grove is to bear horrified witness to a long parade of architectural atrocities, fake Tudors next to faux Craftsman next to counterfeit Frank Lloyd Wrights, and the massive property they pull up in front of a few minutes later looks like something out of the English countryside—or, more accurately, like something out of the establishing shot of a moviesetin the English countryside, a comedy of manners about British aristocrats who are cheerfully oblivious to the plight of the help. Ivy crawls up the imposing stone façade, oil lamps flickering in the blue and purple twilight. The parking attendants are wearing breeches, each and every one.
“I love LA,” Caroline murmurs as they edge their way through the crowded foyer, cater waiters bustling by with trays of champagne and canapes while a string quartet saws inexplicably away at a cover of “Baker Street.” Everywhere Will looks is another surface covered in toile. Caroline takes his hand and squeezes, tugging him toward the bar in the living room like she can sense him getting ready to bolt. “Let’s get drunk.”
Charlie gets swallowed up into the crowd more or less immediately, photographers swarming, and Will drains two consecutive gin and tonics while Caroline and Lucy provide him with a quiet dossier on the various residents of Pemberly Grove: a gaggle of teenagers who got famous for making off-color videos on a social media platform he doesn’t understand and now all live together likeLord of the Flies, a set of extremely telegenic twin brothers whohave a show on the home and garden network about building extravagant treehouses in Alberta. “Somewhere on the internet is a website devoted exclusively to dirty fan fiction about them performing depraved sex acts on each other,” Caroline informs him.
“I mean,” Will admits, gazing at them across the room, their identical Canadian heads tipped close together in murmured conversation, “I kind of get it.”
Caroline grins, then waves at a willowy brunette in a stiff-looking black jumpsuit glumly nibbling a prawn. “Oh, good,” she murmurs in Will’s ear, “Anne Mulgrew is here. I think she’s going to be Charlie’s next girlfriend.”
Will snorts. “Does Charlie know?”
“Not yet,” Caroline admits. “But look at her. She’s beautiful. She’s a name, but not a bigger name than he is. And she’s brilliant—she only does absolutely boring art house movies, I literally fell asleep three times trying to get through that thing about the lesbian war widow on the wheat farm—which I think will help neutralize our big dumb superhero problem.”
Will frowns, unsure if the big dumb superhero in question is Major Fantastic or Charlie himself, but before he can ask he’s distracted by the rumble of rowdy laughter from across the room. He turns and catches sight of a woman holding court on the arm of a damask settee, her elegant hands flying as she talks. He knows better than to ask Caroline who she is, but he can’t help but watch her for a moment anyway, her slinky green dress and how sharp and canny her gaze is. Something about the way she’s holding her body reminds him of the ballerinas from back at school, how they looked like they were dancing even when they were just walking around in the hallways between classes. Her hair is long and thick and dark.
Will looks away like she’s caught him staring even though she hasn’t, biting back a deep, reflexive scowl. He always instinctively hates people who know how to be the center of attention, how easily things seem to come to them both at parties and in life; still, it isn’t a quality he particularly likes in himself, so he leaves Caroline talking to Lucy about a pair of former child stars who recently eloped to Las Vegas and gets himself another drink from the bar.
He weaves his way through the dense, teeming crowd, slightly dizzy with the heat and the noise and the cloying smell of perfume, trying to shake off the feeling that he wandered onto the wrong stage by accident and wishing he’d stayed home to work like he planned. He was lying when he told Charlie he didn’t know his lines yet—of course he knows his lines, it’sAntony andfuckingCleopatra—but he’d also be lying if he said he wasn’t scared to death to screw it up and make a total fool of himself in a brand-new medium. He has no business being on this coast in the first place, let alone wandering around this ridiculous simulacrum of a manor house. He should have just stayed in New York.
Even if his career there is pretty much over.
As soon as Will lets himself think it he knows he needs to get out of here, the panic rising inside him like high tide rushing into a hole in the sand. He glances around for the closest exit, passing Charlie talking to a pretty blond who is definitely not Anne Mulgrew of lesbian wheat farmer fame and the social media kids doing what he’s pretty sure is Molly before ducking out an unattended set of French doors at the rear of the house. When he steps onto the wide, capacious stone balcony, two things become immediately apparent: one, that this backyard is enormous, the acreage butting up against the rise of the hills in the distance, and two, that the bulk of it is filled with what appears to be a—a—
“You’re not hallucinating,” says a wry voice behind him. “It’s a hedge maze.”
Will turns around. The dark-haired woman from inside is leaning against the house with her ankles crossed, a strong-looking cocktail in one hand. “I... see that,” he manages to reply. The thing is half the size of a football field, dense and green and impossibly labyrinthine. Just looking at it gives him the creeps.
“Rebecca had a couple of landscape architects come out from Yorkshire to install it for her after her second husband died,” the woman explains, pushing herself off the exterior wall and coming to stand beside him. She smells like mandarins and basil, expensive and faint. “At least, that’s the story she tells everybody? It’s possible the guy is actually still just wandering around in there, drinking rainwater and eating small birds.” She smiles; she has a good smile, warm and intimate and slightly mischievous. Her teeth are television-star straight. “Anyway, if you’re trying to Irish goodbye, you’re better off going through the kitchen.”
Will frowns, weirdly offended. “I wasn’t trying to Irish goodbye,” he lies.
“Weren’t you?” the woman asks, tilting her head to the side. “Because the way you darted out here like your underwear was full of beetles and you didn’t want anyone to notice kind of suggests otherwise.”
Will huffs a breath, feeling his face flame. There are two,maybethree people in this world by whom he can bear to be teased, and this random, garrulous stranger is emphatically not one of them, no matter how long-limbed and arresting. “I wasn’t,” he insists. “But also, excuse me for not wanting to spend a perfectly good Saturday night wandering around the set of a PBS miniseries about a scullery maid trying to get an abortion.”
That makes her laugh, a surprised, full-throated cackle. Before he knows it, Will is laughing, too. “I’m sorry,” he says belatedly, scrubbing a hand over his face as something loosens up deep inside him. “Your city does this to me. It’s like I got off the plane and immediately turned into George Costanza. My second day here, I literally got heat rash. I had to lie in a cool room with a cloth on my forehead like a Victorian consumptive while I waited for my body temperature to regulate.”
“I fell asleep in a tanning bed once when I was a teenager,” the woman confides. Her eyes are an intelligent, complicated hazel. “I’m actually lucky I didn’t burn alive. It took me all summer to recover.”
Will is horrified. “No one came to get you?”
“They all thought I was going for, like, an especially deep bronze.” She wrinkles her nose. “I used to go tanning kind of a lot.”
“It’s not good for your skin,” he advises. “It can cause cancer.”
The brunette looks at him curiously. “Shit, can it?” she asks. “I never knew.” She grins at him again, like they’re in on something together. “How do you know Rebecca?”
“Oh, I don’t,” Will says immediately. It feels important to clarify. “I’m staying with a friend in the neighborhood, and she invited him. He just moved here, so—”
“Oh!” The woman cuts him off, pointing with one accusing finger. “You’re Charlie Bingley’s hot boyfriend.”
