Chapter Two

"Good morning, tiny babies!" Katie Price clapped her hands together and surveyed her three cats. Cat breakfast was one of her favorite times of day.

"I think for this morning," Katie said, opening the cat cabinet, "we'll go with the mousse puree texture, in deference to Sue's adventure at the dentist. She seemed to struggle a bit with the shreds yesterday. What do the three of you think?"

Sue had her sleek brown-and-black back to Katie, which, fair. She had gone in for a tooth cleaning earlier in the week, and she hadn't looked Katie in the face since. She was enraged at the little shaved-off area around her leg from the IV, so Katie was giving her space for now.

Katie definitely understood how it felt to be betrayed.

Since none of the cats voiced an objection to puree, Katie rubbed their heads—asking Sue politely for permission first—lined up their bowls, and gave them their breakfast. She took a minute to listen to their wet eating purrs before she broached the subject she needed to talk with them about.

"So, my darling peanuts, while you eat, I have to tell you something." Katie walked over to the large array of buttons she had set up on a credenza outside the kitchen's cased opening. The credenza faced the wall of glass that looked out on the pool and the bird feeders she had installed to provide her indoor cats with enrichment.

The buttons were mounted to interlocking foam mats of the type preschoolers sat on for circle time. Each button was a plastic circle, about three inches across, that played back a brief recording when depressed.

Almost two years ago now, Katie had begun with one button—a recording of her own voice saying the word treat—and she had patiently and painstakingly trained the cats to associate the word with the action of getting a treat.

Then they'd learned to push the button themselves when they wanted a treat, which was, conveniently, always.

After that, it was easy. One by one, Katie had added more buttons to the array, known among speech therapists as an Augmentative and Alternative Communication board, until she had more than fifty concept-words that she could use to communicate with her cats.

And which her cats could—and did—use to communicate with her.

Katie pushed the large buttons while she said the words out loud. "Cats," she said as she pushed the Cats button. "Mama. News."

The cats looked back at her. Trois, a three-legged calico who was the most active and adventurous of Katie's cats, swished her tail in anticipation. Phil finished eating, stretched, and let out a long, multipitch report on his feelings.

Sue jumped down from the counter and leapt onto the credenza. She was often the spokescat for the rest of them. She was the chattiest on the AAC, and Phil complained the most.

"Mama. Trip. Cats. Trip." Katie pushed the three buttons, then surveyed the cats for reactions. Trois, naturally, looked excited. Phil dropped back into his loaf.

Sue approached the buttons. "No. Kennel. No."

Sure. They had been here before. Katie's work as an actress meant that she'd taken her cats on a lot of airplanes to a lot of different destinations—enough that they understood the significance of her announcement. Sue was not a big fan of having to spend time in her kennel, whether in a car, on the airplane, or visiting the vet.

"Yes," Katie said, pushing the button. "Cats. Kennel. Airplane." She rubbed Sue's head to soften the blow.

Sue pushed the buttons again. "Sue. Mad. Mad."

"I know you don't love the smaller airplane kennel, Sue. But it is a direct flight, on a chartered plane, so you'll be with me the whole time." Katie pushed the buttons. "Mama. Cats. Together. Plane. Your reward is that, just like I told you, none of you had to say good-bye to Nana Diana for long." She pushed the button for Nana Diana. "Because that is where we are going. You like it there, even at Christmastime when it's cold. You will be spoiled, and I will be with you the whole time! No meetings. No visitors you don't know. Just me and you. Because, as you are aware, I am supposed to be writing, and if I have to barricade myself in Green Bay with my mom's cooking to pull it off, I will."

Katie pressed her hand against her belly to head off the buzzy, cold shiver of nerves that hunted her whenever she thought about writing. Really doing the thing. The secret thing that she'd told five hundred super-smart film students was scary, that every one of them would give a vital organ to get to do, and so she better do it well, right?

Because the very last words that Honor Howell said to her, before she got inside a sleek navy car, were, We'll soon see if your script is better than the unpleasantness we suffered on that stage, Katelyn. I do wonder how ready you are for work out of the spotlight.

Sue gave a short, huffy meow and jumped down from the credenza.

"I love you, Sue," Katie said.

She cleaned up the cats' dishes and then got out the truly massive breakfast burrito she'd ordered on Uber Eats the night before to have now, slathered with warmed-up white queso and covered with an avocado from her tree in the conservatory. It didn't matter that Katie had lived in Los Angeles for almost thirteen years, her Wisconsin soul would never, ever get over that she could grow her own avocados in her sunroom—in December!—and how good the breakfast burritos were here. Ever.

Katie loved breakfast burritos. There had been no such thing growing up in Green Bay unless you counted the ones at McDonald's, which were emergency breakfast burritos only.

She'd fixed her burrito and pulled out her phone, wiggling in her dining room chair with delight at her chance to have burrito-and-phone time, when a FaceTime request came through from Madelynn, her primary publicist.

Katie gave a very, very tiny sigh. Madelynn was tremendously talented, but publicists were such that even if you got the best ones, if you had any scruples at all, you'd end up running through them. Madelynn was Katie's fifth publicist.

She was Katie's publicist forever, her last publicist, because she listened when Katie told her that she didn't want anyone manufacturing anything that wasn't true, and she wanted 99 percent of the publicity focused on her projects.

Also, Madelynn would never make Katie talk about Ben. In fact, Madelynn had quietly released a few dozen photos of Katie in Chicago in her serious director outfit, some of them with smart pull quotes that Katie almost couldn't believe she'd said. There was a fat series of shots of Katie posing with or talking to film students with bright, interested faces, and even some of Honor Howell looking at Katie with interest and a smile.

But if Madelynn was calling her early on a Saturday morning, this was a call about something Katie didn't want to talk about.

"Hi, Madelynn!" Katie said. Then she put a very big bite of burrito in her mouth. Pointedly.

"Katie, good morning." Madelynn Soh was forty, with one of those pixie cuts that made everyone ask their stylist for a pixie cut. She had a whole wardrobe of glasses. Today, they were orange frames with little fried eggs where the jewels would go. "I'm calling about your secret project. Specifically, I am calling about the fact that the existence of your secret project leaked to Ben Adelsward, thereby fucking up your appearance in Chicago."

Madelynn never beat around the bush, which Katie appreciated.

"It's perplexing, for sure." Katie dabbed her mouth with her napkin. "Have you googled ‘secret'?"

"I have. A secret is information no one else but your publicist knows. That's from Merriam-Webster's." Madelynn raised one of her eyebrows, so sharp they could noiselessly bifurcate a tabloid rumor with the slightest contact.

"So obviously there are no secrets"—Katie made an expansive gesture with her hand—"because it turns out everyone knows about my project, somehow." Katie sighed over the tight pinch in her stomach. "What did my mother bribe you with to keep you off my back for a week?"

"She sent me a basket of peanut butter meltaways from Seroogy's."

"Damn. That is a good bribe." Seroogy's was a candy store, local to the Green Bay area, particularly well-loved for their meltaways. Katie took another huge bite of burrito. Sue jumped up onto the table and inserted herself in the frame.

"Katie."

"Mm-hmm." Katie chewed. She offered Sue an opportunity to investigate the burrito, but Sue was more interested in the queso, which she licked delicately from the edge of Katie's plate. Madelynn shuddered at Sue's proximity to Katie's burrito.

Madelynn did not feel the same way about cats that Katie did. It was hard to find a Madelynn who also loved cats.

It was hard to find a Madelynn, period.

Katie put another bite of burrito in her mouth, because she knew there was no way to have this conversation with Madelynn without talking about Ben Adelsward, and she was not interested in doing that. It had been enough for her, more than enough, to spend three years dating the twelve-years-older, tall, dark, and handsome leading man who'd swept her up and moved her to Hollywood and "given" her a career.

He had also given her an STI, a broken heart, and a lot of trauma that she'd been diligently working on with her therapist every Tuesday for almost a decade.

Katie hadn't dated anyone since Ben, seen anyone, fallen in love with anyone, fucked anyone. It felt right to her to take this time, and lately she and her therapist had been talking through some super-interesting ideas about gender and sexuality that were helping Katie get a bead on why that was.

But Entertainment Weekly was not a fan. The entire Hollywood gossip complex had spent Katie's ten years on break from romance flipping back and forth between "Katie's still in love with Ben!!!!" and "Katie's a freak and the reason Ben has been dating eighteen-year-olds ever since!!!!"

Meanwhile, no matter how often she changed her number, the cockhead kept texting her. He did it every time Katie was nominated for or won an award or got a project with a salary north of $15 million.

Hey, Katie.

She was always tempted to text him back something cutting, but she did not do that. She blocked and walked.

Yet even when Katie did everything she was supposed to do to take care of herself, Ben Adelsward inserted himself into her story. He'd told the press she was starting a production company—information that Katie and her agent, April Feinstein, had controlled as tightly as they could—and his decision to do so had derailed Katie's event in Chicago.

Leaks were inevitable, no matter how trustworthy her inner circle was. But the fact that Ben had managed to get his hands on this particular news and release it at a moment that Katie had expected to be hers left her feeling deflated, unimportant, and trapped.

That was his goal.

Ben had brought her all the way to Hollywood and put her in front of everything she had planned on earning for herself, and then when she did get those things, earning them despite him, despite all of it, he wouldn't stop reminding her that it was really because of him. Even now, a decade later, he wanted her to feel like she could never get away from him. He wanted her to feel like everything she had, she had because he'd given it to her.

That was Ben's thing. It was what made him feel like a Hollywood god.

The worst part was that he'd caught her up in this bullshit when she was eighteen and barely knew who she was. When all of her experiences, despite being a legal adult (Ben's point), were those of a child. Katie had managed to win herself a spot in an elite summer stock program outside of Chicago before she was supposed to go to the University of North Carolina's School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. All of it was already a big deal for someone who'd never even left the band of states around the Great Lakes, and then there was Ben, so yes. She'd fallen for him, their acting teacher. She'd fallen for what he said about how mature she was, with all the authority of a thirty-year-old A-list actor who "still did independent projects."

His self-effacing humor. His charming patter, as though he were always sitting with one ankle crossed over his knee, a mug of coffee in his hand, exchanging quips with a talk-show host in a careless display of male whiteness. His broody dark eyes, his three-days-of-stubble beard, his pouty mouth and full head of dark hair that looked like he'd just raked his fingers through it.

To Katie, Ben Adelsward had seemed like someone who knew everything she was so desperate to learn, and at first, what she'd fallen for was what he told her about herself.

She hadn't known the difference between his grooming and her own awareness that she had something special. Ben singling her out for attention, praise, had felt, at first, like confirmation. Katie had it. Ben said so.

But then, gradually, there had been a shift in what Ben told her about herself. He'd started to say she would be such a beauty one day, that she had the ungerminated seeds of potential talent, if only she would learn how to use it. She did so many things wrong. But lucky for Katie, Ben was generous and brave enough to tell her the bald truth that no one else would say.

Lucky, lucky Katie Price.

She didn't judge the girl she'd been with Ben. Not anymore. There had been some difficult years of panic attacks and waves of shaky shame when Katie couldn't convince herself, some days, that she was truly real. When she felt like a body moving through space, a character to be dressed and pushed out under the footlights.

The work had saved her. She kept making movies, kept reaching inside herself to find a way to feel and think and talk like another woman, and doing that reminded her of what it meant to be human.

She never judged the characters she played. She couldn't judge herself.

But Ben Adelsward simply wouldn't go away.

Also, she'd once accidentally left something very sentimental to her by a soap dish in his apartment in New York when she was washing her hands, and he'd never returned it.

Katie sighed. As much as she wanted to, she couldn't avoid this conversation with Madelynn. Business was business. "How bad is it?"

"I'm a publicist. Nothing is bad, everything is simply a pivot." Madelynn smiled. "Our plan was a good one. Get you behind the camera? Check. You helped make that even better by winning that Emmy. Then option one of the best-selling novels in America for you to adapt? Check, check. Get you in front of the camera again, this time with the fire of a live audience licking at your heels, and oh! my! Is that Honor Howell who happens to be on set, watching the birth of the best auteur of your generation? Yes. Yes it is. What a wonderful coincidence!"

Katie laughed. Madelynn enjoyed putting on the occasional show. "I'm with you."

"Enter Marisol Gonzales," Madelynn said. "She's an auteur in her own right, and she has a script everyone wants. But Marisol has something no one else in this town has, which are values. So she's shopping. Marisol talks to Honor. Honor mentions you. The word is put out by a discreet and extremely fancy source—courtesy of me—that you and your longtime agent, April Feinstein, are starting a production company. You're shaking off the scales of the dinosaurs of Hollywood for something real, inclusive, hot. It's going to be amazing."

"It is," Katie agreed.

"Of course it is. So Marisol talks to you. Oh! Interesting. She suggests the world might need to start to learn a little about your vision. Calls are made. Chicago is booked. It's just a small appearance, but it conveys a serious, important message. Honor Howell interviewing. There are pearls and eyeglasses and trousers. An elite but fun-funky collection of press are on hand. It's all ripe for a small but intriguing mention at the best places. Did you hear Marisol Gonzales is working with Katie Price's new production company? No! But oh, yes. Honor and Katie? Hmm… hmm! All of it setting the stage, after Honor reads your script and loves it, for a big fat check signed by Ms. Hollywood herself, and an announcement in the form of a long-form profile in Hollywood Reporter accompanied by another pearls-and-trousers glamor shot of you in a director's chair." Madelynn sighed. "It was such a lovely, lovely dream."

Katie put her fork down. "But now, pivot."

"Indeed," Madelynn snarled. "I wonder who booked him that sham of an interview in Variety? It was Variety online, mind you, so it must have been some hasty work. All so Ben could run with the leak of your project." Madelynn brightened and smiled. "Doesn't matter. Pivot."

Katie nodded and started cutting her burrito into bite-sized pieces. Her eyes were burning a little bit, because it felt as though Madelynn had just delivered the funeral requiem for Katie's dream. Or, at least, the version of Katie's dream that Ben Adelsward had no part in.

But they could pivot. They had to, because Katie wanted this. She wanted it all the way down. She wanted to write the script and direct it. She wanted Honor Howell to back her production company. She wanted Marisol Gonzales to knock on her door. She wanted the Hollywood Reporter profile and the pearls.

What Katie really wanted, most of all, was to make something that was hers. That was her. She wanted something she wasn't even sure she could do. "What's your new plan?"

"You won't like it, but the only way out is through."

"No." Katie knew what was coming. She and Madelynn had been here before.

Madelynn rubbed her eyes under her glasses. "The fuck of it is, Katie, I like you, and I don't like anyone I work with. I'm a sanitation worker. I pick up the garbage. But you don't make me do that. You either don't produce garbage or you're composting everything, I don't even know, but you're a pleasure to work for, mainly because work is all you do. But my liking you so much means that it is especially egregious to have to deal with the same fucking story over and over again forever, especially when that story is, at this point, an impediment to you getting what you want. I have a dartboard with Ben's face on it. I actually throw darts at it."

Katie looked down at her breakfast. She reminded herself to keep her shoulders loose, her jaw relaxed. She pressed her feet into the rough wool of the rug under her dining room table.

Madelynn leaned back. "Listen. I want this not to be a thing. I want you to let me salt it out of your fields forever so you can do some coy project when you're fifty and look like a goddamned icon while also subtweeting him so hard, and then everyone notices his neck has fallen so far that you can't see his bow tie anymore."

"Wow," Katie said. "Don't hold back."

Her sarcasm fell flat. Probably because of the cold fear rising up her spine.

"Greta Gerwig thinks you're a burgeoning directing genius."

"Did Greta say that? Tell me word for word."

"She said, ‘Katie Price was born to see the world from behind the camera, even though there's a good reason the world loves her in front of it.'" Madelynn had a convenient eidetic memory, both a bad thing and a good thing in a publicist.

Smiling, Katie put her head down on the table next to her burrito. "Can you text that to me?"

"No. I won't. I won't because no matter what Greta Gerwig says, it won't mean what you need it to mean until no one fucking cares what Ben Adelsward says."

"Madelynn."

"Listen to me. I have never seen the kind of organic buzz like you got after that live episode aired. Never. My people's people were Korean immigrants with big ideas. They ended up in Hollywood so they could collaborate on the first movies alongside Jewish optometrists from Manhattan who were running cameras they'd bought on payments from the lens equipment man. Which is just to say, I have been in this business my whole life, so I know. You made that buzz, and you're going to have to build a new shelf to hold all of the awards your live episode is going to generate. It was the work of a moment to get that Chicago Studio City gig for you so that you could talk about what you did and what it meant to you and what the world should prepare for, from your perspective. Everyone wanted to hear what you wanted to say."

Katie swallowed over the burn in her throat. It took all of her training to hold onto the tears caused by her heart swelling big and tight in her chest.

The smallest, smallest hint of feeling what it might be to get what she wanted.

"Three out of four people in this town are fucked up, but mostly in a delightful way," Madelynn said. "Ben is the other kind of fucked up, the kind who weaponizes absolutely everything he does so that he stays at the top by virtue of the bodies under his feet. I told you again and again that it's my job to remove any impediment to you getting what you want, and I am telling you that ignoring Ben, holding our breath until his next move, exhausting yourself with this ridiculous business of creating a pristine image, is not sustainable. Also, it's not how you can possibly build a production company, make a mark as an auteur, or meet any of the goals that it's my job to help you accomplish. Big goals require big risks. You have to give yourself some fucking margin for mistakes. Right now, the only room you are giving yourself is for silent perfection, and honestly, if that's all you're ever going to do, you don't need me."

Startled, Katie met Madelynn's eyes, and Madelynn smiled.

"Please. Going after what you want will feel a whole fuck of a lot safer if you will let me obliterate Ben Adelsward like a bad ghost floating through a cloud of sage."

Katie laughed, an involuntary sound that came from her heart, where Madelynn's vision of what Katie could have had released a surge of warm, bright hope.

But Katie had to press her palms flat against the surface of the table to keep them from shaking.

Every day this week, she'd sat at this table with her laptop open in front of her while her assistants and staff operated in hush mode, keeping their footsteps soft and their interruptions to a minimum. She'd downloaded a program that blocked the internet and filled the whole screen with a Zen-like blank field while playing soothing music.

Katie didn't have a single word saved. She'd written a hundred different versions of the opening scene—the stage direction, the establishing shot, the first lines of dialogue—and then highlighted them and pressed delete.

It wasn't just Ben. Her secret project was also scary because she didn't know if she could pull it off.

I do wonder how ready you are for work out of the spotlight.

"I love your passion," she told Madelynn. "But you and I both know that the last time Honor Howell agreed to back an actor's production company, it collapsed in a MeToo-fueled meltdown over the actor's bad behavior. Honor wants the people she works with to center the work and keep their personal lives utterly out of the public eye. The only reason she's interested in working with me is that I talk about my cats and my work and literally nothing else."

Madelynn pursed her lips. "Honor Howell knows you have a life. She isn't asking you not to, but she does need to know if your life belongs to you. She needs to know if, behind the scenes, maybe you're the one who's manufacturing leaks, amplifying the story of your connection to Ben Adelsward every chance you get, even as you pretend to be over him."

Katie clenched her hands and then released them, her heart racing.

Madelynn must have seen something in Katie's face, because she sighed and said, "I can handle Honor Howell."

"I haven't asked you to," Katie said much more tartly than she felt. "So here is what I've got, as far as the pivot. The inside scoop, Madelynn. Next steps. What I'm doing. What you're doing. Are you ready?"

"So ready."

"In a few hours, I'm flying to Green Bay with my three cats to stay at my parents' house and write an Oscar-winning script when the last thing I wrote was a paper in high school about the pros and cons of solar panels. I'll probably eat a lot of bratwurst. We will open presents on Christmas Day, not Christmas Eve—that is for monsters. I've purchased a number of beautiful things for my babies, but I'm still on the lookout for something extra special for Trois, here. I will bring the AAC board so my children and I can keep working on expanding the horizons of human-animal communication."

And maybe I'll see Wil,Katie thought.

She'd never run into Wil on any of her earlier trips home. There were the years with Ben, when Katie didn't go home because Ben didn't want her to, and she didn't want to do anything Ben didn't want. Then, the years after that, when Katie had needed her parents to be simply, completely hers. She'd needed to go home and be fed, be talked to and fussed over by people who knew her and loved her only as Katie, their daughter.

But recently, Wil's TikTok, which she published under the handle Wil-You-Or-Won't-You, had done something to Katie's memories about her last year living in Green Bay. Namely, reminded Katie that the year she was eighteen hadn't been all about Ben.

Then, in Chicago, looking for her mom and Beanie in the VIP rows, she'd seen Wil. Her impossible white-blond hair gleaming in the light, curling against her neck. A flash of black leather. Her smooth skin, on first glance just as white-girl ordinary as Katie's, but with a secret golden undertone that could ripen to a tan that looked perfect against tank tops and in a cheerleader's uniform. Her serious, plugged-in expression, which Katie had spent months of their senior year of high school actively soliciting by talking to Wil about absolutely everything she could think of, because the experience of Wil listening to her thoughts, considering her ideas, taking her seriously, had felt so good as to be addictive.

To realize that it was all coming at her again, in that moment on the stage in Chicago, being Katie—well. She'd been seriously disappointed not to see Wil at the meet and greet after the event.

Madelynn narrowed her eyes. "I can't make a story out of any of that. Maybe ‘Christmas with the Prices,' and I could send a photographer to take a picture of all of you, sans cats, in front of the tree with a few pull quotes about Midwest Christmas comfort foods, but I'd leave out ‘bratwurst.'" Before Katie could laugh, Madelynn narrowed her eyes more. "But there's something else. About going home. Just now, I saw it. Something you're not telling me."

Katie schooled her features. "Is this what you wanted to do when you were little, Madelynn? Contemplate how ‘bratwurst' plays in the media?"

"You're hiding it from me even as you speak." Madelynn sighed. "But to answer your diverting question with the same utter honesty I would like to receive from you, what I wanted when I was little was to be a spy." Madelynn said this with the smallest hint of a dimple that told Katie she had decided to let Katie off the hook. For now.

"Really?" Katie looked at Madelynn carefully. "Are you a spy?" she whispered.

"Torture me with one more cat headline, and maybe I'll give myself up."

Katie laughed, Madelynn signed off, and Katie looked out through the French doors toward her pool. Her house was quieter than usual, her staff already gone for the holidays in anticipation of Katie's flight later today. It was nice to have the place completely to herself. It gave Katie the space to find her breath, center herself after the phone call with Madelynn, and let her mind drift.

All three of the cats had settled into favorite spots, Trois and Phil cuddled together in a bed that caught a beam of early morning sunlight and Sue deep inside the wool pod at the very top of the cat tree in the corner, where no one could get at her unawares, but she could see everything.

Katie had often thought how pleasant it would be to have a cat tower of her own, with a wool pod to hide inside.

She finished her burrito, stacking avocado on top of every bite, savoring the taste, which she'd miss in Wisconsin. When she'd pushed her plate aside, she picked up her phone and swiped through her social media—not her real-name accounts, but the accounts she'd created for her own private enjoyment, where she could leave a "like" on an ad for a cat toy or a post by the person who'd inspired her to set up AAC buttons for Sue, Trois, and Phil without setting off a maelstrom of weird effects.

She saved TikTok for last.

There was only one account she followed on TikTok. It posted Wednesdays and Saturdays. No fixed time.

Wil's TikTok.

She let herself wonder, just a little, like she did every time she opened the app to Wil's channel, if Wil wondered if Katie watched her videos.

Because, because, what a completely ambrosial thought. Wil, posting, watching hearts come in, wondering if one of them was hers.

Katie knew, of course, that Wil had seen her movies. Everyone saw her movies. Diana liked to tell her what people said, and a few times she'd mentioned Beanie and Wil in the same breath in the context of what they thought of one of Katie's movies, and Katie had imagined asking her mother a million breathless questions about exactly, exactly what Wil had said, but she never did.

It was more fun to imagine Wil watching. So many times, in so many audiences, Wil had been there, watching Katie.

Then, in Chicago, Wil was right there, and Katie had basked in the familiar feeling—right up until she got the first question about Ben. Then, Katie hated that Wil was there. Wil did not belong in a world that Ben had corrupted.

Wil belonged in her own sparkly world.

But this past year, for the first time, Wil had been sharing a part of her world with everyone else, which meant that Katie got to be a part of her audience.

Twice a week, Wil kissed someone. Never the same person twice. The camerawork, from a directorial perspective, left something to be desired. It would be close up and never pull back, or it would be six feet away and never zoom in. Katie assumed there was no one operating the camera, just a cell phone on a tripod, probably, set up wherever Wil and the person she was kissing today decided they wanted to put it.

There were no captions but Wil + blank, with the other person's name in the blank, followed by the person's pronouns. There was no music.

There was sound, though.

The videos were edited into four fifteen-second segments that told the story of the kiss, beginning, always, with the before. Lingering in the moment where Wil and the person she would be kissing had to confront what was happening.

Today it was Danya, she/her. Danya was small, a white woman with short frizzy dark hair and big dark eyes.

The people Wil kissed were not introduced. They just appeared, sitting across from Wil on one of two wooden stools or standing facing her, always in front of the same wrinkled white studio backdrop.

They looked at Wil, or they didn't look at Wil, or they tried to figure out whether to look at Wil or not. Sometimes they held hands. Some of them talked.

I'm so nervous, do we just do this? How do we do this?

You tell me. Tell me what to do.

Are you filming?

Is this happening?

Today, Danya didn't say anything. She put her hand at Wil's waist, splaying her fingers over the soft blue of Wil's T-shirt, and stepped close enough that Wil had to bend down. Wil was tall, at least a foot taller than this woman, whose face she cupped in her hand.

Then it just started. Their mouths met. Katie watched Wil's fingers flex against Danya's face—an involuntary reaction, surprise, or pleasure—and the intensity of the kiss shifted.

Katie felt heat race up her chest and neck.

The film cut. Now Wil's fingers were in Danya's hair, spread out over her nape, and Danya's arms had come up to wrap around Wil. Wil's blond hair had fallen down over her eyes. Her body curved around Danya's, one knee bent, and Katie couldn't figure out what to look at, it was all so good. Wil's hair and jeans and motorcycle boots, Danya's short skirt rucked up a little bit, her top coming away at the waistband, her hands roaming like she couldn't figure out what to do with them, what she wanted, what was next.

Another fifteen seconds, the same. The tension made Katie's heart race. She'd never been able to watch porn, there was too much choreography and something she couldn't put her finger on that felt like violence, but she'd had to make a rule for herself that she could only watch these videos one time, or else watching these videos would be the only thing she ever, ever did.

So she tried to memorize them. How Danya went up on her tiptoes and gripped the fabric of Wil's T-shirt across her shoulder blades, pulling her closer. How Wil adjusted the angle of the kiss, took it deeper, until Danya made a muffled noise, and then the energy shifted again.

Katie was pretty sure Wil had a timer in her head that told her how long sixty seconds were. Because there was always this part—this part where she stroked her hand down the person's head, or eased her hips back, or pulled away to smile, her nose against the person's nose, her forehead on theirs, and maybe laugh.

There was always the last fifteen seconds, when they figured out how to pull away. How to go back to who they'd been before they started kissing someone they'd never kissed before, someone they didn't know, or barely knew, or had never known like this.

It was the part Katie liked best of all. Watching two people figure out what they needed in the moment. Watching Wil tuck someone's hair behind their ear, or run her hand over their shoulder, letting them know that everything would be okay.

They stepped apart.

Katie let out a breath.

The video faded to black.