She speeds south toward Joshua Tree the following afternoon, salty and seething: At Charlie Bingley, who was photographed canoodling with Sera Foye at a club last night in Paris. At Olivia, who’s on her way to Moon Landing in stubborn defiance of all good sense and judgment. At her parents, for every financial decision they’ve made since 1994.
At Will most of all.
Lilly lay in bed all night replaying their argument over and over, something about it snagging like a pair of cheap tights in the very back of her brain. He was wrong that she showed up at his place sniffing around for gossip. He was wrong that she didn’t want anything more.
Charlotte comes running out of the house as Lilly pulls the brake at the end of the long, winding driveway, her red hair streaming behind her like a flag. “You’re here!” she hollers delightedly, and when they hug Lilly kind of forgets all the weirdness that’s been calcifying between them lately, the feeling of squeezing into shapewear a full size too small. “Thank you for coming.”
“Of course I came,” Lilly says, breathing in the vanilla-jasmine smell of the same shampoo Charlotte has been using since high school and feeling 100 percent like a jerk. So what if Charlotte is dating someone Lilly herself finds deeply irritating? If she’s happy—and, god love her, she keeps saying she is—isn’t that all that matters? Lilly wants to be the kind of friend Charlotte can count on. She wants to be the kind of friend Charlotte deserves.
Then Colin comes strolling out the side door in a pair of skinny jeans and an oversized, short-sleeve button-down shirt screenprinted with a neon rendering of the Notorious B.I.G., clutching a Karl Ove Knausgård novel in one pale hand, and Lilly has to give herself the entire fucking pep talk all over again.
“Lil!” he says, opening his arms magnanimously. “Welcome to our humble abode.”
Lilly plasters a smile onto her face. “Thanks for having me, cugino.”
Charlotte beams at them. “Come on,” she says, swinging an arm around Lilly’s shoulders and steering her across the driveway. “Let me give you the tour.”
Colin’s got a work deadline, and he makes himself gratifyingly scarce while Lilly and Charlotte spend the better part of the next two days lying by the pool, gossiping and reading magazines like they did back when they were teenagers. The property is incredible: the trees and the garden and the mountains soaring high in the distance, the sky clear and blue and enormous overhead. Lilly is staying in a tiny guest cottage that’s connected to the main house by a covered breezeway, the bright white walls hung with neon posters advertising the Rolling Stones at the Greek and Stevie Nicks at the Hollywood Bowl. The whole place smells like oranges and sandalwood, the tile baked warm under Lilly’s feet.
“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 to deny 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 stretchy floral 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 of Dr. 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 both likes 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 this moment 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.
“Fuck,” she says when she’s finished—the last dregs of the orgasm still buzzing through her, her legs water-wobbly and weak. She curls her hand around Will’s shoulder for balance, scratching through his shirt as she yanks him unsteadily to his feet. “Okay, okay, come up here.”
In the bedroom she fishes a condom out of her suitcase, pushing him backward toward the mattress: She wants to make this good for him, suddenly. Wants to be the best he’s ever had. “I missed you,” he admits, his voice barely more than a whisper. It’s the first thing he’s said since he showed up.
“Yeah,” Lilly says, and tilts her face up to kiss him. “I missed you, too.”
It’s surprising at first, the size and the stretch of him. She hasn’t done this in a very long time. Lilly shifts her hips against the mattress, looking for a better angle; right away Will frowns, his body stilling on top of her. “No?”
“You’re fine,” she promises, using her knee to nudge him in the side. “Don’t stop.”
“Bullshit,” he says. “What can I—?”
“I mean it,” she says. She feels keyed up and a little hysterical, all these stops and starts. “Keep going.”
But Will shakes his head, almost imperceptible. “Lilly,” he says quietly, “tell me how to make this good.”
Lilly sighs, squeezing her eyes shut and then opening them again. “Switch,” she tells him finally, pushing gently at his shoulders. “Let me—”
Will’s eyes widen. “Yeah,” he says, pulling out of her so carefully. “Of course.”
As soon as she gets up there she can tell it’s going to work like this, him flat on his back underneath her: “Touch me,” she says once she’s settled, bracing herself against the solid planes of his chest.
Will doesn’t move. “Show me how.”
Oh, she thinks, abruptly getting it. Her stomach swoops low and dangerous. “Give me your hands,” she instructs, pressing one of them down between her legs and dragging the other one up her body, sucking two of his fingers into her mouth. Right away, Will pulls back.
“Can’t do that,” he says, shaking his head urgently, his whole body gone tense underneath her. “You can’t—”
“Or what?” she asks with a grin, rocking herself against his hand. “Sorry, just—what’s going to happen if I—?”
Will scowls. “You know what,” he says. “I don’t wanna—I mean, you gotta let me—” He takes a breath. “We’re only gonna do this the first time once, all right?”
Lilly swallows hard. “Well then,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “Do something else.”
Will’s eyes darken but he takes the direction, catching both her breasts in his free hand, working one nipple between his thumb and index finger. Lilly gasps. “Better?” he asks.
“Good,” she allows, her head dropping forward. Will’s grin is sharp and bright in the dark.
It doesn’t take long like that. It happens for them more or less simultaneously, Will’s face going vulnerable and open just as the orgasm crests inside her. Of course, Lilly thinks, and then for a moment or two she doesn’t think a single thought at all.
“I’m sorry about the other night,” he tells her later, the two of them lying there in the darkness; she texted Charlotte to say she’s got a headache, grabbed a couple of beers from the guesthouse fridge. “I didn’t mean—”
But Lilly shakes her head, pressing the chilly bottle against the bare skin of his side to cut him off. “I don’t want to talk about the other night.”
Will looks at her for a long moment, like he’s debating something. “Fair enough,” he finally agrees, lying back against the pillows. “How’s it going with your cousin?”
“Fine,” Lilly admits, “although he keeps asking if I want to get up at five a.m. to do morning pages.”
“Five a.m. is the best time to walk the spiritual path to higher creativity,” Will says, and for a moment Lilly is completely unsure if he’s kidding. “And the book?”
“It’s good.” Lilly ducks her head, trying not to smile. The truth is it’s been going so well she’s been almost afraid to talk about it, the words pouring out of her from an inside deeper than she knew she had. “I mean, nothing’s going to come of it, but . . .”
Will frowns. “You don’t know that.”
“I do know that.”
“You seem like the kind of person who’s harder on herself than anyone else is.”
“You seem like the kind of person who’s never read the comments on Instagram.”
“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.