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’s reaching 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?”
“She once abandoned me with a cart full of groceries in the middle of the Whole Foods in Calabasas because she saw one of the guys from Supernatural buying tricolore pasta salad at the deli counter and followed him right out into the parking lot and all the way home,” Lilly recalls. “So, I suspect she’ll get over it.” She grins. “Do you need to get back to LA right away?”
Will shakes his head. “I can stay for a little bit,” he tells her. “They don’t need me on set until tonight. We’re in the home stretch, anyway. We’ve only got another couple of weeks ’til we wrap.”
Lilly hums. “And then?”
“Back to real life, I guess.” The realization is startling: all he’s wanted since he got here was to go the fuck home where he belongs, but now . . . He runs the pad of his thumb over the piping on the top sheet. “New York’s not so bad, you know.”
Lilly lifts an eyebrow. “It’s not, huh?”
He shakes his head. “Museums. Galleries. Plenty of places to write.”
“You realize we also have all those things in LA.”
“Seasons.”
“We have those here too, asshole,” she protests. “They’re called Hot and Fire. Get with the program.”
“Sorry, sorry.” Will grins. “I’m just saying, you ever want to come spend some time . . .”
“I might.”
“You should,” he says. “My place doesn’t have a guest room, but I could probably borrow a blow-up mattress from one of my neighbors, set you up in the hallway or something.”
Lilly laughs out loud. “Fuck you,” she says, clambering inelegantly on top of him. “Kiss me.”
Will does: gently at first and then a little bit deeper, licking his way into her mouth. Lilly kisses him back. She braces her hands against the mattress and drags herself along the length of him, her body hot and slick and ready; the tip of his cock catches, and both of them gasp.
“Hold that thought,” Will manages, reaching down and digging a condom out of his jeans pocket, nudging her onto her back. It’s like reading a new play for the first time, being with her: the possibilities unfolding in front of him, the thrill of not knowing what’s going to happen next. She makes him feel like he could do eight shows a week with no understudy. She makes him want to try Hamlet one more time.
They go slower than they did last night, his mouth on her neck and her ear and her sternum. He wants to learn everything she likes. Lilly makes a quiet, approving sound as he reaches down in between them, shifting her hips to take him deeper: “You’re better at sex than I thought you’d be,” she tells him, and Will coughs a short, nervous laugh.
“Uh.” He peers down at her for a moment, not sure exactly how to take that particular declaration. “Thank you?”
“You’re welcome.” Then, seeming to register his sarcasm a beat too late: “It was a compliment. It was!” she insists, off his dubious expression. Her smile is teasing and fond. “At the very least it means I thought about it.”
“Uh-huh,” Will says, but it doesn’t come out quite as dryly as he means for it to. Then, because she’s still looking at him, and because she’s blushing a little across the bridge of her nose, and because it’s not like it isn’t true: “I thought about it, too.”
Lilly likes that: “Oh yeah?” she asks, rolling her hips slow and deep underneath him. “What’d you think?”
“None of your business.” Will bites at her jaw.
“I mean, it’s a little bit my business,” she protests, raking her nails lightly over his rib cage. “Come on, tell me one thing.”
Will considers that for a moment. “Your hair,” he tells her finally, dropping his head to murmur low and quiet into her ear. “Your smile. Your shoulders. Your ass.”
Lilly eyes him, running the sole of one bare foot up and down the back of his calf. “Are you an ass guy?” she asks, sounding interested in spite of herself.
“Not really,” he admits. He feels shy all of a sudden, though not necessarily in a bad way. “Mostly just with you.”
Lilly grins and rolls them, bracing her palms on his chest and boosting herself upright.
She looks like the queen of an ancient civilization. She looks like a Renaissance painting in the Met. She looks like an old-fashioned movie star, but more than any of that she just looks like herself, and as soon as he thinks it Will feels something so surprising and unfamiliar and dangerous that he forgets to move for a second, hips stuttering as he loses the rhythm entirely.
Lilly’s eyes narrow. “Hey,” she says, reaching down and flicking his chest with two fingers, not especially gently. “Pay attention.”
“I am,” he promises, then rolls them one more time so he’s back on top. “I swear to god I am.”
He’s still buried inside her twenty minutes later when her phone buzzes on the nightstand, one quick shrill vibration. “Ignore it,” he advises, sucking a mark on the underside of her breast.
“That’s the plan,” she mumbles back, only a second later it buzzes again, and then again a moment after that, until finally it’s just one long frantic drone like a swarm of bees. “Okay,” Lilly says finally, pushing him gently off her. “Let me just—” She sits up and reaches for it, the morning sun golden along the planes of her back. Will reaches out to trace the knobs of her spine with one finger, and he can feel the moment when her entire body tenses.
“What?” he asks.
“I need to call my sister.”
Will frowns. “What’s wrong?” he asks again, but Lilly is already hitting the screen to dial, waving him off.
“Olivia and who?” she asks whoever answers—jamming the receiver between her neck and shoulder as she pulls on her underwear, digging around under the bed until she comes up with her bra. “Junie. Olivia and who?” Then she’s shutting herself in the bathroom where her voice is low and muffled, the door clicking tidily behind her.
She’s in there for a long time. Will stays in bed for a while, then finally gets dressed because he doesn’t know what else to do—he doesn’t know what’s happening in there, but he has a feeling that whatever it is he’s not going to want to confront it with his dick hanging out. He’s just scooping his T-shirt off the floor when the door to the bathroom opens and Lilly comes out, the expression on her face sincerely rattled for the very first time since he’s known her. All at once Will thinks of the night the police showed up at the house to tell Georgia and him about their parents: he remembers focusing on the raindrops on the younger officer’s uniformed shoulders, counting them to avoid doing anything else. “What?” he asks again, and it sounds a lot more like pleading than he means for it to.
Lilly sits down on the edge of the bed. “There’s a video,” she says slowly, “of Olivia at Moon Landing. With Nick Harlow.”
The sound in Will’s head is the rushing of water. The feeling in his chest is pure dread. “Olivia with Nick Harlow doing what, exactly?”
Lilly shrugs, but barely. “All the things you might expect.”
“And she . . . she released it?”
“What?” Right away she’s on her feet again, whirling on him like a boxer. “Of course not. Nick sold it to the Sinclair.”
“I—right.” Will nods. It’s like he’s trying to hear her from the other side of the freeway. “I—of course. Right.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Lilly demands, pacing like a lioness across the carpet. She’s still in her bra and underwear, wrenching open a dresser drawer and pulling out a pair of jeans. “You think she would sell a video of herself—”
“I don’t,” he backpedals quickly. “Of course I don’t.” He twists the T-shirt into a rope with both hands, guilt and dread blooming inside him like the algae on the pond back in Pemberly Grove. “Lilly,” he says, and oh, already he knows he is going to regret this. Already he knows this is going to be bad. “About what happened between me and Nick.”
* * *
She’s still as the desert at night the whole time he’s telling it, Georgia and the Polaroids and Orpheus Descending. Then all at once she’s nothing but motion. “Are you kidding me?” she demands, sitting down hard and then immediately jumping up again, wrenching open the closet door. “I mean—how can you possibly have—are you kidding me?”
Will flinches. “Lilly—”
“I asked you,” she interrupts, her eyes glowing coal-dark with fury as she flings her empty suitcase onto the bed, nearly hitting him square in the chest. “I fully asked you what the deal was with that guy and you called me cheap for wanting to know. You let me send my baby sister off to that stupid fucking festival with a literal sex predator—”
“You never told me he was taking her to a festival—”
“I didn’t know!” Lilly explodes. “I didn’t know, because I didn’t think to ask, because I didn’t know he was someone I needed to protect her from. Because you didn’t tell me.”
“I explicitly said he wasn’t a good guy!” Will protests. “I’m sorry I didn’t provide you with the salacious detail you so obviously require—”
“Oh, right,” Lilly says, stalking over to the dresser and yanking open the middle drawer. “When it was your family he was messing with he deserved a beatdown in an alley, but when it’s my family it’s just, ‘Eh, I don’t like him, can’t tell you why, but odds are good it’s just because I’m a giant fucking snob who hates everybody—’”
“It had nothing to do with me being a snob!”
“How the fuck was I supposed to know that?” Lilly demands. She flings an armful of clothes into the suitcase, then bangs into the bathroom, returning a moment later with an armful of expensive-looking cosmetics. “You let me be a target, Will. You let my sister be a target.”
“Wait a second.” Will blinks. “Are you saying this is my fault?”
“I mean.” She dumps the makeup into her bag with a noisy clatter. “It’s not not your fault, that’s for sure.”
“That’s insane,” Will counters, his mouth falling open at the unfairness of it. “That’s insane! I warned you, Lilly. I warned you, and I’m not about to take responsibility for your shitty taste in guys, and I’m definitely not about to take responsibility for your sister’s shitty taste in guys. Like, not to put too fine a point on it, but this kind of thing is, like, pretty on-brand for her, isn’t it?”
All at once, Lilly stops moving, her sudden stillness taking his breath away. “I’m sorry,” she says, and her voice is dangerously quiet. “What?”
Right away, he realizes that was exactly the wrong thing to say. “I didn’t mean—” he starts, then completely fails to follow it up in any meaningful way. “I’m only making the point that—”
“It’s on-brand for my sister to have an incredibly personal, private, vulnerable moment broadcast all over the internet without her consent?”
Her voice is calm and deadly. Will scrubs his hands through his hair. “Of course not,” he tries. “That’s not what I’m—”
Lilly shakes her head. “This was a mistake,” she says, leaning hard on the suitcase as she struggles to zip it shut. “I mean, of course it was a mistake, I knew it was a mistake from the literal first time we met when you were objectively very rude to me, but—”
“Lilly—”
“I need to go be with my family right now,” she announces sharply. She turns a frantic circle around the bedroom, yanking at the bedsheets and tossing throw pillows onto the floor until she finally finds her phone sitting on the edge of the dresser. She stuffs it hastily into her pocket, then heaves the suitcase up with two hands even though it’s a roller and clomps awkwardly toward the door. “I’ll catch up with you later. Or . . . not, I guess. I mean.” She drops the suitcase, yanking at the handle until it extends. “Probably not.”
“What does that mean?” Will asks. “Lilly, you can’t just—at least let me help you—”
But Lilly is already gone.