Lilly wakes up deeply hungover, mouth dry and a headache pulsing angrily behind her eyeballs. When she counts on her fingers she realizes she drank more or less a full bottle of wine last night, plus the tequila, which she never does anymore. She stands under the shower for a long time, scrubbing her fingers roughly through her hair and trying not to think about Will—the warm authority of his kisses, his narrow body slotted against hers.
She yanks a towel off the rack, shrugging into a robe and shuffling back into her bedroom. When she finally clomps downstairs she finds her mother standing in the foyer like a master of ceremonies at Barnum & Bailey, hollering directions at the cleaners in a way that makes Lilly cringe. “Who’s coming over?” she asks, suspicious. Her mother only ever notices mess when she’s trying to impress someone.
Cinta stares at her for a moment, like possibly she has no idea who Lilly is or what she might be doing here. Then she blinks and locks back in. “Didn’t I tell you?” she asks airily. “Colin’s flying in from Vancouver.”
Right away, Lilly’s entire body fills with annoyance and dread. “Colin?” she repeats, fully aware she sounds about thirteen years old. “Why?”
Her mother smiles at her with syrupy forbearance. “Because I invited him, Lilly. He’s going to Joshua Tree to finish up his new screenplay, but his rental doesn’t start until New Year’s.”
Lilly resists the urge to stamp her foot, but barely. Her cousin Colin once made her watch Donnie Darko twice, back-to-back when they were in high school; his sophomore effort, some masturbatory snorefest about an alcoholic lobsterman and his mean dad, got nominated for best screenplay last year. Lilly told herself the queasy feeling she had as she watched him walk the red carpet in a purple velvet tuxedo was revulsion, not jealousy, though if she’s being honest with herself she knows it was probably a mixture of both.
“Did you know Colin was coming?” she asks June, who’s padding down the stairs in ripped jeans and a loose-knit sweater, looking fresh as a newly picked lemon. Lilly doesn’t know why she’s the only one who seems to be hungover this fine morning.
“I . . .” June hesitates. “Might have heard something about it?”
“And you didn’t say anything?” Lilly asks. “Or, you know, light the house on fire to collect the insurance money?”
“That would be a good solution to the mortgage thing, actually,” Kit offers, coming in from the kitchen; Tony trails like a basset hound behind her, lugging a ring light in one arm. “You should mention it to Dad.”
“I don’t know what your problem is,” Cinta puts in, poking one of the cleaners in the back with one finger and motioning to a smudge on the mirror. “Colin’s a very successful screenwriter. I would think you of all people would be grateful for the chance to talk to him about your craft.”
Lilly sighs. Sometimes she has a hard time reconciling this mother with the same one who used to get down on the floor with them to play Barbies when they were little, who held their hair back over the second-floor toilet in the little house in the Valley when they got sick. “Tell us your best story, Lilly-girl,” she used to say, Lilly nestled into the crook of her arm at bedtime. “I’m listening.”
Colin shows up in the late afternoon driving a Porsche and wearing a pair of aviators that make him look like a badly behaved detective on a spin-off of a spin-off of a police procedural that takes place in metro Houston. “Lil,” he says, as if they’re friends, which they aren’t, and as if that’s a thing her friends call her, which it is not. When he bends to kiss her on both cheeks he smells like a national park by way of Abercrombie & Fitch.
“Colin!” Kit and Olivia come thundering down the stairs, flinging themselves at him with the enthusiasm of puppies. Right away, Colin’s ears turn pink. When they were kids he was always terminally awkward, dressed in cargo shorts and Star Wars T-shirts and deeply afraid of girls in general and her sisters in particular. From the look on his face Lilly is pretty sure he’s still afraid of them.
“Since when are you guys pals?” Lilly mutters, grabbing Kit’s elbow as they troop out to the yard.
“Since he got invited to Cannes,” Kit says plainly.
They have dinner out on the patio, Colin tucking into the macrobiotic feast Cinta ordered him specially from a pop-up called the Grainforest and holding forth about his various successes, how he’s working with Caitriona de Bourgh on his next film. “You all know Caitriona, right?” he asks.
“I think I might have heard of her,” June says innocently. Lilly stifles a laugh. Caitriona de Bourgh is arguably the second-most-famous director in Hollywood, one of those women who is perpetually wearing a leather jacket and making movies full of unspeakable carnage just to prove that she can. She’s famous for zipping around LA on a motorcycle, spewing a cloud of exhaust in her wake.
Colin turns to Lilly. “What about you, cugina?” he asks her. Colin isn’t related on the Italian side of their family, not that it ever stops him. “How’s the writing these days?”
“Oh, you know,” Lilly says, biting back a grimace, swallowing down a weird rush of shame. “It’s going.”
Colin nods indulgently. “Let me know if you ever want me to take a look at some pages,” he offers. “I’d be happy to let you pick my brain.”
“That’s tempting,” she says, as politely as she can manage. “It’s not really ready for that.”
Cinta clucks. “Don’t listen to her, Colin,” she chides. “My daughter has been pecking away at that computer night and day for ages. I keep telling her that if she’s not going to let anyone see what she’s working on she should at least look into a brand partnership.”
By the time Lilly wakes up the next morning and makes it downstairs Colin has already set up shop at the patio table, a vintage typewriter in front of him and no fewer than four different beverages at his side. He’s halfway through what, from the sound of it, is an incredibly detailed, granular story about the time Ben Affleck asked him for a stick of gum outside a Sally Beauty in Santa Monica.
“Lilly!” her father exclaims. He’s sitting across the table in his bathrobe, his voice sharp with the bright desperation of a sailor held captive by particularly garrulous pirates. “You’re here!”
Lilly hides a smile, but barely. “I’m here,” she agrees.
“Colin here is an early riser,” Dominic reports. “He caught me on my way to my workout and we have just been . . . talking ever since.”
“That sounds lovely,” Lilly says. “I’m sorry I can’t stay and join you, but I’ve got—” What? A lobotomy? A Pap smear? “—another engagement.”
Her father jumps up and takes her arm as she makes her escape back into the kitchen, lowering his voice to a mutter. “I am begging you, Elisabetta. Get this person out of my house. Take him to a horse race. Go shopping on Rodeo Drive. Bind his hands and feet, roll him up in a carpet, and leave him in an alley, it’s entirely up to you. But he’s gotta go.”
In the end she rounds up her sisters—well, all of her sisters except Mari, who claimed to be attending an exorcism in Mulholland Heights—and Charlotte and they go to brunch at a vegan place near the development, splitting a bucket of champagne on the patio while Colin delivers a lengthy monologue about the death of the author and what he keeps describing, in earnest, as the Annie Hall Problem. Lilly is considering ordering a vodka tonic or possibly a gun when a couple of guys in extremely tight pants stop by the table.
“Olivia Benedetto,” the taller one says. Lilly vaguely recognizes him as one of her sister’s exes, all prominent cheekbones and a vaguely goth sensibility. Olivia’s boyfriends always look like supporting werewolves on a CW show about a haunted town in the Midwest; usually they’re deejays or club promoters or British pop stars with one hit that borrows heavily from the work of Black artists. “How you doing?”
“Oh, you know,” Olivia says coyly, tonguing the straw in her green juice. “No complaints.” She gestures around the table. “You remember my sisters.”
“Of course,” Tyler says with a smile. “How could anyone forget?” He nods at the guy next to him, who’s nice-looking in a slightly scruffy kind of way, a chambray shirt rolled to the elbows and a tangle of bracelets looped around one elegant wrist. “This is my buddy Nick.”
In the end they push the tables together, ordering another round of drinks while Colin lectures Charlotte on the benefits of intermittent fasting and Lilly eyes Nick across the table. “Are you a promoter, too?” she asks.
“Tyler is an entrepreneur,” Olivia corrects huffily. “He just launched a bespoke women’s lingerie disruptor.”
“That sounds fascinating,” Lilly lies.
Nick is a bartender downtown, though when Lilly asks him where he works he shakes his head bashfully. “You’re definitely not going to have heard of it,” he tells her, and sure enough she hasn’t. Still, he says, “You guys should come by.”
Tyler laughs out loud, not entirely nicely. “The Benedetto girls don’t go to dive bars,” he says.
“Fuck you!” Lilly says, though it’s not like he’s wrong. They went to one once on the show, but it was actually a new bar made to look old, with kitschy lamps repurposed from a Pizza Hut hung over all the tables and a palpable sense of smug superiority. The plot of the episode was Kit trying to convince the bartender to make her an Aperol spritz.
“Dude, I love a dive bar,” Colin puts in. “So real, you know? Like, authentic.”
She’s just about to ask Nick if he likes working there when she spies Will and Charlie out on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, Ranger pulling happily at his leash. Charlie spots them at the same time, his handsome face breaking open into a grin at the sight of her sister. “Hey, June,” he calls, trotting over, seemingly oblivious to the stares from other tables, the way people reach for their phones. Will trails behind him, an expression on his face like he’s being made to walk a plank with a sword at his back.
“William,” she says, taking a sip of her cocktail.
“Elisabetta.” She’s surprised to hear him use her full name. It sends a weird little shiver through her, though she couldn’t say exactly why. She thinks of his thumbs ghosting over her hip bones. She thinks of his lips grazing over her throat. She smiles—she can’t help it—but to her small surprise Will doesn’t smile back; in fact, he’s barely looking at her at all, staring instead across the table at Nick, whose own expression is suddenly a little bit seasick. Lilly has no idea why they’d know each other—Will also does not strike her as a regular at a dive bar in DTLA—but they certainly seem to. Lilly files the question away in her pocket to consider at a later date.
In the meantime she takes Will’s arm, tugging him over to the far side of the patio. “Look,” she says quietly, “about the other night at Charlie’s.”
But Will only looks at her blankly. “We got it out of our systems, didn’t we?” he asks. “Just like you said?”
Lilly blinks. “I mean, sure,” she says, trying not to feel stung. It’s not like she was about to suggest they shack up for the weekend in Malibu; still, she’d be lying if she said she’d been expecting to be brushed off quite so hard. “I guess we did.”
“Okay,” he says, nodding distractedly. It still feels like she’s only got a sliver of his attention, that he’s looking at something or someone over her shoulder. “So, I guess that’s all there is to talk about, then.”
“Um, yup,” Lilly agrees crisply. Her whole body feels like it’s on fire. “I guess so.”
She follows him back to the table, ignoring June’s quizzical expression; Will and Charlie take off not long after, Charlie waving gamely at the paparazzi who’ve materialized outside. Lilly asks their waiter for the check, praying that Colin will pick it up and feeling both miserable and furious without quite knowing why or in which direction. She wants to punch someone in the face and go to bed. She can’t believe she’d actually started to like him, Will Darcy with his boring hair and neutral wardrobe. She can’t believe she let herself be charmed.
“So what’s the verdict?” Nick asks as they’re leaving, and for a moment Lilly honestly hasn’t the faintest idea what he’s talking about. It must be obvious, too, because he grins. “About drinks later. You guys going to come hang out with me tonight?”
“Oh!” She looks in the direction Will and Charlie took off in. She looks back at Nick’s open, curious face. “Tonight,” she says with a grin. “We’ll see.”
* * *
Nick’s bar is in fact an actual dive, all warped linoleum floors and fraying leather booths and a neon Budweiser sign glowing like a beacon in the tiny front window. The smell of mildew hangs faintly, though certainly not imperceptibly, in the air. Lilly spent the better part of an hour after dinner trying to decide on an outfit before finally settling on ripped jeans and a tank top Kit designed, sheer and mostly backless; at the very last minute she added a pair of sky-high heels—you can take the girl out of Calabasas, et cetera—the soles of which are now sticking ever so slightly to the tile.
Still, the whole scene is significantly less grim than she expected it to be when she bullied her sisters into coming with her: Kit and Olivia are playing the naked photo hunt game in the corner. Mari is posted up at the pool table, where by all appearances she’s taking Colin for everything he’s worth. And Junie is perched on a stool at the corner of the bar, sipping a bottle of Amstel Light and, judging by the small, secret smile on her face, texting with Charlie. Nobody in here seems to give a shit about them one way or the other, and if Lilly has never quite been able to decide whether she wants that kind of anonymity or she doesn’t, for tonight at the very least it’s nice to just be herself.
She sits back on her barstool, nursing a vodka and water as Nick dumps a five-gallon bucket of ice into the cooler. She’d be lying if she said she was completely uninterested—his shaggy hair and the dimple in his chin and his plaid shirt rolled to his elbows, his scarred-up, capable-looking hands. He did an actual double take when they all strolled through the door earlier tonight, then threw his head back and laughed a shocked, booming laugh, visibly delighted at the sight of them. “I underestimated you, clearly,” he told her when she bellied up to the bar, shaking his head in bashful amusement. “I won’t make that mistake again.”
Lilly raised an eyebrow, sliding onto a stool and nodding at the dusty bottle of Ketel behind him. “See that you don’t,” she said primly, then grinned.
Now it’s an hour later and she’s pleasantly buzzed, her whole body warm and loose and humming. She watches as Nick opens a couple of Heinekens for a pair of grizzled guys in Dodgers caps down at the end of the bar, then pours two shots of Jameson and sets one down in front of her. “What’s this?” Lilly asks, lips quirking in a smile.
“Just, you know.” Nick winks at her. “Token of my esteem.”
Lilly nods seriously, running her thumb around the edge of the glass. “That your love language?”
“Cheap alcohol?” Nick shoots back. “Absolutely.”
“How long have you been a bartender?”
“Since before I was old enough to drink,” he confesses. “My uncle owned a couple of Irish pubs in New Haven back when I was growing up. I used to stock the coolers and sneak shots of Fireball next to the dumpsters in the alley with my cousins.”
“Charming.”
“Well.” He grins. “We can’t all be as terminally fancy as your buddy Will Darcy.”
Lilly feels herself perk up like a prairie dog at the Los Angeles Zoo, holding up one finger to stop him. “A,” she says immediately, “he’s not my buddy. And B, can I ask you something? What the fuck was going on with you guys at brunch today?”
Nick makes a face at that, lets out a sheepish sigh. “You noticed that, huh?”
Lilly laughs. “The two of you grilling each other like a pair of prize golden doodles about to go at it over a Milk-Bone?” she asks. “You were not what I would call subtle, no.”
Nick clutches his heart in mock outrage. “Is that the vibe I give off to you?” he asks, leaning over so his elbows rest on the bar and his head is tipped close to hers. He smells like beer and drugstore aftershave, piney and sharp. “Golden doodle?”
Lilly smiles sweetly. “Prize golden doodle,” she corrects him.
Nick smirks, straightening up again. “We knew each other back in New York, a little. We were . . . also not buddies.”
“You’re kidding.” Lilly picks up her shot, daring him to say more. A swig of disgusting whiskey feels like a small price to pay for the chance to listen to someone else shit all over Will Darcy. “Care to elaborate?”
Nick hesitates. “I don’t know,” he says, crinkling his nose up in a way that makes him look like a little kid confronted with a heaping plate of broccoli. “I don’t want to talk smack about a guy when he’s not here to, like, defend himself.”
Lilly rolls her eyes. “A little bit you do,” she counters, and Nick grins guiltily.
“Fine,” he agrees, lifting his shot glass and clinking it gently against hers. “Twist my arm.”
They drink; Lilly winces at the burn of it in her throat and sternum, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth. “Back in New York,” Nick begins, “when Darcy was at ballet school or whatever the fuck, he and his artsy-fartsy buddies used to be regulars at this bar I worked at on the Upper West Side. And, like, they were fine, or whatever—I mean, they didn’t tip for shit, but you get used to that—but one night, I don’t know if he didn’t get the lead in the school play or what, but he was hammered. Just belligerent as all hell. Grabby with my waitresses, rude to the other customers, you name it.”
“Seriously?” Lilly frowns. Will is a douchebag, 100 percent, but he’s never struck her as a handsy drunk—and if there’s a tiny voice in her head that reminds her that possibly that’s because she’s usually the one drunkenly groping him, well, that’s nobody’s business but her own.
“Yeah.” Nick grimaces. “Anyway, I cut him off and told him he had to go home, and he definitely wasn’t happy about it, but that’s what bouncers are for, right? So he left, and I’m thinking that’s that, but the next day when I showed up for my shift, my manager said that one of our regulars had come to him and told him he’d seen me take a handful of cash from the register. And the guy fired me right there, no questions asked.”
Lilly’s eyes go wide. “Are you kidding me?” she asks. “Will did that?”
Nick shrugs. “I mean, I can’t prove it,” he concedes. “But it’s one hell of a coincidence, if not.” He reaches for the bottle of Jameson, pours them each another shot. “Anyway, some friends of mine were moving out here around then and asked me to tag along, so it’s not like I didn’t land on my feet in the end. But I definitely wasn’t expecting to run into him three thousand miles away.”
Lilly’s mouth drops open. “What an absolute schmuck,” she says quietly, every single rude, obnoxious detail of Will’s shitty personality suddenly thrown into searing relief. Not for nothing, but he’s got a lot of nerve to accuse other people of being trash bags. She’s hit with the nearly physical urge to call him up and tell him so. “I mean, just like, the entitlement alone! And don’t get me wrong, I am saying this as a deeply entitled person.” She shakes her head. “I am really, really sorry that happened to you.”
“Yeah, well.” Nick’s full mouth twists, like What can you do? “Like I said, it all turned out okay. Led me here, didn’t it?” His smile changes then—warm and slow and private, the intent in his expression unmistakable. “I don’t want to talk about Will Darcy anymore.”
Lilly tilts her head to the side, a feeling like a desert flower blooming deep inside her chest. “Oh no?” she asks as casually as she can muster, reaching out and grazing one finger delicately over his knuckles. “What do you want to talk about?”
“I don’t know, Lilly Benedetto.” Nick turns his hand over on the bar top, laces his fingers through hers. “You tell me.”