“We texted,” Lilly’s mother is saying when the two of them make it out onto the patio. Marianne, Kit, and Olivia are all standing behind her, three obedient ducklings in a fairy tale. “Didn’t you get our texts?”
“I . . . guess I wasn’t looking at my phone,” Lilly says faintly. Her cheeks are still pink, her eyes bright and dazed-looking. Will had to adjust his dick on the way out.
“You could have let us know everyone was all right, Lilly sweetheart,” Mrs. Benedetto huffs. “We were all worried sick about poor June, and then we thought maybe something had happened to you, too, so we decided to come over and investigate for ourselves.”
“With wine?” Lilly asks, nodding at the bottle in her mother’s manicured hand.
“Well, I didn’t raise you all in a barn.” She smiles coquettishly at Charlie, holding it out in his direction. “And we never properly welcomed you to the neighborhood, honey.”
“Oh,” Caroline mutters, so quietly that only Will can hear her, “I wouldn’t say that.”
“Have a seat, all of you,” Charlie is saying now—getting up to pull extra chairs across the patio, every inch the gracious host. Back when he and Will lived together he used to keep a stash of chips under his bed—“In case we have guests!” he always reasoned, as if they might be called upon at any moment to throw an impromptu cocktail party, even though Will didn’t really have any friends other than Charlie and also no one at Juilliard ate chips.
For four people who committed criminal trespass on the pretext of making sure June wasn’t in distress, Will can’t help but notice that none of them seem particularly concerned with her well-being; in fact, they’re more or less only interested in Charlie, peppering him with questions about his workout regimen and his famous friends and how he’s enjoying the warm bosom of Pemberly Grove. “Don’t you have a movie coming out soon?” Kit wants to know, helping herself to a glass of vinho verde. From his deep dive into Meet the Benedettos Will knows she’s the edgy one, tattoos and CrossFit and a well-publicized DUI.
“I do,” Charlie says, shaking his head a little like he can’t quite believe it, either. “Couple of weeks.”
“You should invite us to the premiere,” Olivia advises.
“Olivia,” Lilly chides; Will can feel her wince from all the way across the table. “Jesus.”
“What?” Olivia asks with a shrug. “I’m just making a suggestion.”
“You definitely do not have to do that,” June protests quickly, but Charlie is already nodding.
“Why not?” he asks, and Will isn’t sure if he means it or if he’s just very, very drunk. “I’d love to have you guys.”
“And why wouldn’t you?” Mrs. Benedetto asks brightly. “The more beautiful, vivacious, well-educated girls at a party the better, that’s what I always say.”
It goes on like that, Olivia pressing Will for Johnny Jones’s phone number and Mrs. Benedetto casually inquiring how much Charlie’s paying in rent. The gaggle of them stay until well past midnight, ignoring Caroline’s unsubtle yawns and Lilly’s pointed attempts to get them all to pack it up and take off; once they finally say their lengthy goodbyes, Charlie and Will sink back down into the patio chairs like they’ve just run the New York City marathon without the benefit of any training.
“I cannot believe that just happened,” Caroline says, setting three fresh shot glasses down on the table and emptying the bottle of tequila. “Like, you watch these people on television and you think to yourself, surely they’re just edited in some hacky, ungenerous way that makes them seem like complete and utter clowns? But then you meet them in person and it’s real! It’s real.”
“I like them,” Charlie announces. He knocks back his tequila with nary a wince, his vowels loose and lazy. Will knows from a decade and a half of experience that they’ve got fifteen, maybe twenty minutes before he’s either asleep in the patio chair or singing Lerner and Loewe at the top of his lungs.
“You like everybody,” Caroline reminds him. “The point is, this is a cautionary tale. I invited June over here to try and get to know her better, and instead we wound up saddled with her whole ridiculous—”
“You invited June over here hoping she’d give you an excuse not to like her,” Charlie corrects, “but by all means, continue.”
“Can you blame me?” Caroline fires back. Will has to admit she’s got a point. Charlie’s taste in women has historically been nothing short of catastrophic: There was Alice, who cut off bits of his hair while he slept and sold them on the internet. Nikki, who lay down behind his car outside his condo when he tried to break things off. Lara, who conned him out of forty grand with some ginned-up story about opening a gallery, which turned out to be a small collection of erotic doodles tacked to the wall in the spare bedroom of her apartment in North Hollywood. He’s a bighearted guy, Charlie; it’s one of the things Will loves most about him. It also makes him an easy mark.
“Look,” Caroline says now, her own diction crisp as England even though Will is pretty sure she’s had just as much to drink as the rest of them, “this isn’t some cute thing where you’re going to do a couple of movies and maybe dabble in crypto and it’s fine if your girlfriend is a D-list party girl whose mother is going to drop your name when she’s trying to book late-night infomercials. You’re on the cusp of something enormous, Charlie. This is the most important moment of your entire career. And if you honestly like June enough to risk that—to chance everything you’ve been working for since you were eighteen—then that’s your business. But it’s my literal job, as both your agent and as your big sister, to ask you to think it through.” She turns in the moonlight, looking across the table. “Will agrees with me,” she says, her tone faintly accusatory. “Don’t you?”
Will almost chokes on his tequila. “I—” he says, then completely fails to follow it up in any meaningful way. On the one hand, of course he agrees with her. The Benedettos are a sideshow: insatiable for every last greasy morsel of celebrity, hungry gears in the same ravenous fame machine that gobbled both his parents. He doesn’t want Charlie anywhere near them. He doesn’t want to be anywhere near them himself.
On the other hand—
Well.
He’s saved from himself by a crash down at the other end of the table, the last dregs of the tequila seeping across the patio table. “Somebody dropped something,” Charlie says, smiling guiltily. Caroline rolls her eyes.