Chapter Three

Wil piled her plate with German potato salad, some kind of sausage that was in an electric skillet on the buffet table with a lot of apples, those sliced cucumbers in the white dill dressing stuff, and three of Diana Price's giant soft rolls, which she dragged across a plate that held three sticks of room-temp butter rather than bothering to cut off a portion with the butter knife.

She was going to find a good spot and smash this food so hard.

Wil surveyed the Prices' truly ginormous living room. Katie had purchased this place for them several years ago in a tony new development on the east side of Green Bay. Wil worked for the agency that insured the Prices, so she had a good idea of what she was looking at. She'd actually recently come out here in her role as an adjuster to document where a tree branch had taken out a corner of their new LeafGuard gutters on the four-car garage.

There was a trio of forest-green oversized chairs by the front windows, and Wil went to claim one near her mother, snagging an overstuffed pillow to put on her thighs, drape her napkin over, and make a tray for her food so it would be closer to her mouth. She speared a piece of sausage, kabob'd it with a chunk of potato salad, and stuffed the whole thing in, closing her eyes. "Fuck, that is so good."

"Wil, Jesus Pete!" Beanie poked her hard in the shoulder. She was smaller and scrappier than Wil, but otherwise they were a mother-daughter copy-paste. "Try something other than pure Neanderthal. I'm not even asking for manners at this point, just basic human behavior." Beanie knifed and forked her own piece of sausage and took a bite. "Fuck. That is so good. What the hell does Diana put in this?"

"Even if you knew," Wil said, "you couldn't replicate it."

Beanie pointed her fork at Wil. "Don't I know it. And yet you grew to adulthood."

"God bless Marie Callender," Wil and her mother said in unison.

Wil surveyed the room. She knew a lot of the people, most of them old friends or work colleagues of the Prices. She'd been to a version of this event a lot of times as a kid. "So I've been meaning to ask you, what made Diana decide to get back in the holiday party game? With Katie visiting, I thought the policy was strictly no guests when Katie's home, forever and ever, amen."

"Mmm." Beanie finished chewing. "Katie's idea, apparently. She's hoping to be home for almost a month instead of a short visit. Diana didn't want so many people here, but I got the sense Katie gave her a guest list and insisted." Beanie looked at Wil significantly.

Wil applied herself to her plate, skipping her mom's scrutiny. If Beanie was implying that Katie had wanted Wil here, and wanted her here for some reason Wil had access to, in the hope that Wil would tell Beanie what that reason was, Wil could not help her mother.

Of course, if what Beanie wanted was for Wil to confess that she was glad she'd made Katie's guest list, and that she'd given herself goose bumps wondering if this meant she and Katie would talk to each other or somehow connect, Beanie would have to live without that satisfaction. Wil would never confess such a thing to Beanie, which Beanie must know, since she had known Wil from literal birth.

Wil looked around the room, considering each of the guests again from the angle of knowing Katie had requested their attendance. There was no one else even close to Wil's age. This was a room full of Diana and Craig Price's oldest friends and—judging by all the blond in the room—most trusted relatives. No one else Wil and Katie had known in high school. Just Wil.

She had been thinking about Katie noticing her at the Chicago event for days. Now she was finding out Katie had especially invited her tonight.

"You're thinking." Beanie softly kicked her. "You're making thinking face."

Thinking facewas what Beanie had called it when Wil's dad dropped into the depths of his own head, sometimes for long minutes at a time. The memory made Wil's throat catch, so she focused her attention on her dinner roll, refusing to blink until the threat of having feelings in front of her mom had subsided. "I'm eating and not talking. It doesn't mean I'm thinking."

Beanie laughed. "It's hilarious that you're still trying to dodge me like this, like I have just fallen off the turnip truck."

"I thought that saying involved a potato truck."

Beanie furrowed her brows like she was trying to remember, then kicked Wil again. "Don't distract me. Tell me what you're thinking about."

"Where's Katie?"

It was a question Wil had asked a million times when she was with Beanie, and Beanie was with Diana, and Wil—dying of boredom—was trying to figure out if she could play with Katie as a survival strategy.

Not that there was anything wrong with playing with Katie, it was more that Katie was always off doing her own thing. Reading a book in her room. At a voice lesson. Practicing piano.

Wil had played softball or volleyball or had cheer camp in the summer. She relentlessly pursued straight As and otherwise favored sedentary pursuits. Streaming shows, video games, computers, food, music.

They hadn't been, in any way, the same type of kid, which was why Beanie and Diana had given up matchmaking their friendship before they hit middle school.

"She's here somewhere," Beanie said. "She got in Saturday night. She had to get her cats settled into the suite downstairs."

"There's a reason to have a shitload of money. I could take Almond Butter anywhere." Wil's cat was sixteen and the primary recipient of Wil's expendable income in the form of consistent, high-quality geriatric vet care.

"You have plenty of money," Beanie said. "Enough that you could buy yourself a place like a grown-up. Hell, you could buy the place you live in now and keep the housemates. Or get a new car. Your dad would roll over in his grave if he knew you were still driving that Bronco."

Wil's Bronco was the secondary recipient of her expendable income. Her dad had willed it to her, mostly as a joke. He'd died when Wil was in college after battling Huntington's his whole adult life. They had been very close, and Wil had learned how to drive on the Bronco shortly after her first lesson, when she dropped its transmission.

She loved that truck.

"I love you, Mom," Wil said, and leaned over and kissed her mother's cheek.

"I do know that. I just feel it's my duty to occasionally say important mom things like ‘Don't drive a 1984 Bronco' or ‘Maybe stop kissing people on the internet.'" Beanie grinned at her. It was a smile that said, I know you're thinking about your dad. I would so much like to hear what you're thinking. And feeling. Tell me about your heart, Wil, I'm your only mother.

"I take it all under advisement." Wil had to wrinkle her nose, just a little bit, to keep the sting from traveling to her eyes. "I am well advised."

Now that the parenting part of her evening out with Beanie was over, Wil ate her delicious food and wondered if she'd only see Katie from afar or if she'd actually have a chance to talk to her.

She'd just let her third roll dissolve in her mouth, swiping her finger through a pool of melted butter and dill dressing, when there was excitement by the huge granite breakfast bar that poked into the living room. The excitement was Katie, in black leggings and a black T-shirt with no bra, and a lot of cat hair, visible even from across the room. She was talking and smiling with a woman Diana was introducing her to.

Katie looked good. Wil was grateful for her outfit, actually. Her outfit helped. If Katie had come into the room as Hollywood Katie, Wil wasn't sure she'd have been able to talk to her. Katie in interviews and talk shows was a creature so lovely, she was hard to understand as human. Her long limbs, awkward and too much in high school, turned out to be made to occupy drapes of precious fabric in impossible configurations under bright lights. The angles and planes of Katie's facial structure—Upper Midwest by way of Norwegian immigrants—had always seemed, in person, back then, a little strange, but the camera caressed Katie's face like it had been looking for those cheekbones and shadows its whole life.

But here, in the living room, with more than a dozen years between then and now, Wil could see that Katie's body was seriously hot, and Katie had learned how to use it so that it looked like something gleaming and soft, and she knew how to wear leggings—even covered in cat hair—like they were a gift of joy from the baby Jesus.

She had the same layered, shaggy, casually expensive blond-brown hair as in her photographs, but without styling, the track lights caught the halo of shorter, unruly hairs frizzed through it, and without makeup, Katie's face was a fascinating kaleidoscope of Katie then and Katie now, shifting as she laughed and talked.

Wil couldn't stop looking at her.

"Go say hi," Beanie said. "Everyone else here is old. And get me a piece of the coconut cake."

"Okey-doke." Wil stood, determinedly not fixing her hair or otherwise preening such that Beanie would know exactly what she'd been thinking. "I assume you also want ‘just a teeny slice' of the chess pie."

"The teeniest. But not too teeny."

"Got it. A regular slice of chess pie."

Beanie winked at her.

Wil started across the huge room, arrowing toward Katie, who'd begun slowly making her way to the buffet. She was curious to find out where this would lead. Curious to notice just how curious she felt, considering the circumstances.

She wasn't someone who had a problem approaching people. It was her ease with new people, combined with her lack of long-term romantic prospects, that had made one of her housemates say that Wil would never be able to really be with a person, even if she made out with a hundred people.

That had gotten Wil's attention.

Probably someone else would have followed up on that observation in a different way, like reading self-help or scheduling counseling, for example, but Wil felt that her housemate had set out a very clear proposal for how to look at this issue, and the proposal intrigued her. She'd actually always loved kissing.

So she'd started the kissing TikToks as kind of a lark. A year into it, however, Wil was starting to understand that the project was doing something to her. Probably the kissing TikToks were why she'd said yes when Beanie invited her to Chicago to watch Katie.

All of which meant that as Wil made her way to the buffet, she felt like something new was happening, something important, but she wasn't afraid. Not exactly. She was searching for how to let Katie know that she'd been thinking about her for a long time—more very recently—without suggesting that Katie should have been doing the same.

But also, Wil had seen Katie's smile after she spotted Wil in Chicago, so she couldn't believe this would go entirely unfavorably.

Katie had arrived at the buffet now. She had a platter in her hand, not a plate—like the kind of platter you put on your wedding registry to put a whole turkey on—which made a surprised smile break across Wil's face, because what kind of courage did that take? For Katie Price, Hollywood movie star, to tell Diana after all these years to throw one of her old-school holiday parties, then to show up in casual clothes, no makeup, and pile up a whole platter full of food. It was such a move.

It said, Look at me. I'm still me.

It said, Don't treat me any differently than you used to. Don't sell me out.

Plus, Katie Price with a big platter of food was delightfully familiar. Diana was probably the best cook Wil had ever met, and she never cooked on a small scale. All the Prices could eat. Their buffets were the only buffets Wil had ever been to that had platters.

Just as Wil was close enough to Katie that she couldn't plausibly pretend she'd only been approaching the buffet to get dessert, Katie looked up and saw her.

This time, Katie's gaze didn't move away.

They made eye contact. In a single heartbeat, Wil knew that she hadn't been invited to this party as an afterthought. It was no coincidence she was the only person here who was Katie's age. She was the only person at this party for Katie. Everyone else on the guest list was for Craig and Diana.

Then, like thirteen years had never happened, neither one of them could stop smiling.

"Guess what?" Wil stepped into the spot next to Katie at the buffet and picked up two dessert plates, conscious of the fact that standing next to Katie Price at her parents' holiday party and pretending like thirteen years had never happened was the best feeling she'd had inside her body in a really long time.

Katie put down the serving spoon in the big tureen that held German potato salad and turned to face Wil. They were nearly the same height.

She was right there, and Wil was right here.

Wil watched as Katie looked her up and down. It was a surprise. The look was not guarded, it was appraising, and slow enough that Wil had to remind herself to hold still and take it. God knew that plenty of people looked at Katie.

Katie set her platter down. "What?" she asked. "Tell me."

Well, that was hot. Wil looked more closely at Katie. She was so interesting to look at with her wide-spaced eyes and her full mouth. She was breathing a little fast, her lips slightly parted. Wil couldn't remember what she'd thought she was going to say before, because she couldn't think past this moment, right now, standing with Katie, conscious all at once of how much she'd fucking missed her.

But she had to say something, so she said the first thing she thought of when she thought of senior year Wil-and-Katie, what they'd talked about obsessively, cracking each other up in the front seat of the Bronco until Wil's cheeks were bright red and Katie had to wrap both arms around her stomach against the ache of it.

"I saw Andrew Cook at Java! Java! with Brunette on Monday. Before you think I've been stalking him since we were in high school, let me say this is the first time I've seen him since then. He was whispering in Brunette's ear."

"You're serious."

"As an AP exam."

First semester of their senior year, Wil and Katie had both found themselves in Mr. Andrew Cook's U.S. Government class. Mr. Cook was young and relatively new to teaching, but he already had a reputation around East High as a teacher who sliced students down with negging, passive-aggressive bullshit, and unfair grading.

Katie had been a bit scared, because she needed the A to get some part of her scholarship package approved for her school in North Carolina.

Wil had been pissed because she just hated bullies like Mr. Cook.

Katie lifted an eyebrow and gave Wil a look that was wide-eyed and almost incorruptible, except that the arching eyebrow made it a little dirty. "Did his mouth touch her ear when he whispered, or was it polite, we're-in-a-theater whispering to anyone?"

The low and conspiratorial way Katie spoke made Wil's middle finally relax, her chest and neck go warm, and her personal space disappear. Like it always had. "Lips to lobe, Katie. And she turned and smiled at him after."

Katie wrinkled her nose. No one had liked Mr. Cook, but Katie least of all. "Okay. Go on."

It only took the first day of class to establish that Mr. Cook was a bully. He'd pretended not to know about accommodations for Jen Diver's IEP when everyone in senior year knew exactly what Jen needed in class and also loved Jen. Mr. Cook actually sent her out of the classroom instead of teaching her.

That had led to Wil calling him out for ADA violations and Mr. Cook implying that Wil didn't have brains because tits and blond hair leached them from the cranial region of a woman's body. He hadn't said the last part, but he'd said something similar enough that the class had started to make noise, and Wil was ready to shit-kick her 4.0 to the curb.

That's when Katie had stepped in, affecting a persona that Wil could only describe as "oldest girl in the one-room Wisconsin prairie schoolhouse attempts to affiance the country teacher." To everyone's shock, it worked. Katie's bottomless, generous, approving attention mellowed Mr. Cook right out. From then on, in that class, he did whatever Katie implied would make her happy. Or make her willing to be his bride? It was a bit confusing. But Katie had saved that class for everyone. It was one of her best roles, really, and only fifteen people ever saw the performance.

Outside of Mr. Cook's class, Katie, that last semester of their senior year, had her first light schedule since she started tap in the first grade, so they'd partnered on a project.

They hadn't been able to see it through to the end, though.

Wil had almost forgotten all about it until she saw Mr. Cook canoodling with Brunette at the coffee shop, and it brought the memories of their senior-year deep dive into Mr. Cook's personal life back in vivid detail.

"So I took in the vibe," Wil said. "This was not a platonic vibe."

Katie nodded. "You must have googled, right?"

"Absolutely I did. He's still in the school directory, but they shut down the details now. You can't see anything but a name and what subject he teaches. If you want to send an email, they won't even give you the address. You have to fill out a form. So, naturally, I dug around, and I found a Facebook for his wife."

"When you say you found his wife's Facebook, you mean Official Wife?" Katie hadn't taken her eyes off Wil. It was starting to make Wil's heart race in a way that was pleasantly familiar, but also confusing, because what was this? Flirting?

Werethey flirting right now?

Wil wasn't used to being confused by flirting. For the past year, she'd talked two strangers a week into kissing her on camera. Flirting was pretty familiar ground.

Katie was pretty familiar ground, too, but Wil hadn't really thought about the way she used to talk to Katie about Mr. Cook as flirting.

She decided to throw caution to the wind. Worst-case scenario, she wouldn't get invited to next year's holiday party. Best-case, she got to see what happened if she brought her fullest, most charismatic game to the project of flirting with one of the hottest people in America.

"Yes, Official Wife, and on her Facebook, she's got recent pictures with him. Still blond. Same woman. Their kids are thirteen years older. No Brunette in sight."

Katie looked up at the ceiling. She was thinking. Her leggings had a hole in them by the hipbone. Wil thought it was probably from a cat claw. Up close, she looked a little tired, but her skin was like a fucking Rembrandt. Spilling light.

At some point, someone had fixed the tiny chip in the corner of her front tooth, which was too bad.

Then Katie put the rest of the potato salad on her platter, and sausage, and took the three rolls that Wil handed her, and wrinkled her nose at the cucumbers. "What's your plan?"

"Don't have one." Wil smiled. "We agreed not to investigate on our own. That's where we left it back then. That's where it stands today."

"Make a plan," Katie said. "I'm here for a month. Though, you know"—Katie stepped into Wil's undefended personal space—"I was never actually sure if our investigation of Mr. Cook was an investigation so much as it was a way to spice up hanging out in your Bronco."

Wil grinned, almost laughed. "Did hanging out in my Bronco need to be spicier?"

Katie didn't answer that question, but she did give Wil a smile not unlike the one Wil had seen on the stage in Chicago. "My original objection still stands."

"Your original objection being there's no evidence this is a second family. It could be an affair. Now well into its second decade without being discovered by Official Wife."

"That's my position. Although I suppose they could be polyamorous." Katie put a slice of coconut cake next to the potato salad. Her platter was going to start groaning. "A little unconventional for Green Bay, but we've seen more of the world, haven't we, Wil? So we can come at this from a new angle and apply the benefit of our extensive experience."

The look she gave Wil very unexpectedly made Wil go hot all over.

But Wil recovered, because she was Wil Greene. "I still have the Bronco."

Katie's eyes widened in genuine surprise, forgetting she was cage-match-flirting with Wil. "Like, it runs?"

"Smooth as an old lawnmower, Katie."

Katie grabbed a fork and looked at the ceiling again, grinning, just like she used to when Wil said something that enormously pleased her and she had to take a moment to feel her big feeling inside herself. "Pick me up where the driveway goes around to the back at eleven. Bring supplies."

"Tonight?" But Wil wasn't seriously incredulous. She was getting what she wanted, what she'd figured out she could want when she made eye contact with Katie at the buffet and they both broke out in smiles.

Katie was home for a month, and Wil was going to make the most of it.

"Time's a-wasting," Katie said. "What? We're going to let this affair go on for another thirteen years without interference or violating an entire family's privacy?"

"What you mean is, we're going to find out once and for all that Mr. Cook has two families. Right here in Green Bay. And not in the sister wives way, but in the traveling salesman or sailor way."

Because this had been the debate. They agreed 100 percent that Mr. Cook was the absolute worst kind of human. Where they differed was on the question of whether they'd inadvertently discovered he was committing straightforward adultery—Katie's position—or whether he was actually a bigamist.

There had been a fantasy, shared between them, of figuring out the truth so they could tell both women and free them from their disastrous attachment to the terrible human they mutually seemed to love.

"I never bought the two families thing. Still don't." Katie took a big bite of potatoes. "Oh my fucking God. No one cooks like my mom."

"No one does. I would take a bath in the potato salad."

"Would you?" Katie stabbed a sausage. "Would you actually? Would you fill even an average-sized bathtub up with my mother's German potato salad and then take off all of your clothes and, like"—Katie mimed, incredibly well, squishing into a bathtub full of wet potatoes—"into the potato salad?"

"You've only made it more attractive." Wil said this with her best smile, the one she'd been accused of deploying for nefarious purposes, and then watched Katie's eyes widen a fraction. "Now I'm not going to be able to stop thinking about it. I knew a woman once who'd filled a tub with Doritos. It was a whole thing for her. I can't say that it sounded bad."

"German potato salad tub is weirdly hot, now that I really commit," Katie said. "Like Roman hedonism meets capitalist excess. Midwest German–style."

Wil gave herself a minute to thoroughly stare at Katie Price.

Katie stared right back at her, spearing her fork into a bite of potato salad and eating it without taking her eyes off Wil.

There was an element here that Wil didn't understand. An under-the-surface thing coming from Katie, not from her. Wil wasn't much of an under-the-surface person.

Whatever it was, it felt good. She liked it.

"So now that we do have more experience, as you say, maybe we raise the stakes of this investigation." Wil started filling the dessert plates.

"You mean a bet." Katie raised an eyebrow. "To pile on the spicy."

Wil laughed. "Right. I mean, it has to be interesting."

"Well, to be interesting, we both have to get vulnerable." Katie put half a roll in her mouth. "This is what I've learned from acting. Only human vulnerability is interesting and creates stakes. Everything else is dull."

Wil had a million TikTok followers who agreed with Katie 100 percent. But probably Katie didn't know about her TikTok.

This didn't seem like the moment to mention it.

"Where do you want to hash this out?" Wil asked.

"Come sit with me on the sofa with the mallards on it. It's really fucking comfortable."

Wil gave Beanie her desserts and accepted her compliments for entertaining Katie, and then she took her own giant piece of pie and peanut butter cookie and sat beside Katie on the mallard sofa.

Wil remembered this sofa from the Prices' old house. They'd moved it to the new house, probably because it was the best sofa Wil had ever sat on. It made her want to slide underneath it and write her name on some part of the framing so that, when the Prices wore it out and carried it to the curb to donate, they'd see Wil's dibs and give her a call to pick it up.

Katie pulled her legs up into crisscross applesauce and turned completely sideways to face Wil. "I have a confession."

"Good. What could it be, famous actress Katie Price who I haven't seen in thirteen years, that you have to confess to me?"

Wil's wry tone made Katie look up from her plate, her mouth almost smiling in a way that put Wil on alert. "I've seen your TikTok."

Wil closed her eyes. Yeah. Yeah, that was a good confession. She liked that. "When you say you've seen it…"

"I mean I look at it twice a week. Every time you post."

Good goddamn. "That makes it so easy for me to know what I want to bet."

Katie was looking right at Wil, making perfect eye contact, her cheeks almost red and her eyes incredibly soft. "I'm willing to put that on the line."

Wil did not, for one moment, believe that Katie meant what she was saying. But it didn't matter. This, like their plan to ride around in the Bronco later, was all for fun. Part of what made it fun was knowing there weren't any real stakes.

Wil told herself.

And tried to believe.

"You would come on my TikTok and be my Wednesday. Or Saturday." Wil could not let herself think too hard about this proposition right now, on the mallard sofa, in the middle of Diana and Craig Price's holiday party. She was going to have to save it for when she was alone in her bedroom.

The thing that Katie probably didn't understand—or maybe she did, but Wil really did, in every part of her body—was how long a minute lasted when you were kissing someone for the first time.

"I would if I lost," Katie clarified. "If I'm wrong about Mr. Cook, and he's not just having an affair, because he has a whole second family." Katie's voice was a little rough. She hadn't stopped looking at Wil. "But you know this would explode your entire life."

"Maybe my life needs exploding." Wil meant for this to be a line—the kind of thing she might say to catch someone's attention—but it didn't sound like that, and she was tuned in enough to Katie's changes of expression to watch Katie's gaze sharpen as the words landed.

Maybe my life needs exploding.

Of course her life needed exploding. Wil wasn't even meant to be here.

Katie had left for Chicago, bound from there to Asheville to Los Angeles with a possible stop-off in New York City, and Wil had gone to Michigan. She was supposed to have gone to law school after that. She was supposed to have clerked for the Supreme Court.

She was supposed to be somewhere else, doing something else. Something big.

But her dad had died, just like they'd always known he would, and Wil had stayed in Green Bay, even though that was never the plan.

It was just what had happened to her, somehow, in the years since Katie got famous.

Katie leaned forward. "I have to tell you something else." Her voice was low. Soft. "I didn't mean to not see you after your dad died. I thought I would. There was a reason I didn't make it back for the funeral, a reason I didn't have control over, but I've regretted it. I regret that I didn't make it." She blinked. Her eyes were shiny. "I really liked your dad. He was the only grown-up who would ever do karaoke with me. He had such a beautiful natural tenor."

Wil nodded. She couldn't think what to say. She looked down at Katie's plate and noticed the hole by her hipbone was all stretched out. She could see a teal elastic from what had to be very small underwear.

She cleared her throat. "I didn't hold it against you."

Katie nodded. She reached out one finger and tapped it against Wil's knee, and that tap echoed through Wil like Katie was knocking on a door, asking Wil to let her in. "Tell me more, then. Tell me why your life needs exploding."

Well, that was easy. Wil conjured up her mother's list. "I rent. I still live with housemates. I still drive the Bronco, like, as my full-time ride. But not because of money. I could afford better."

"What do you do for work?"

"I'm an insurance adjuster. I came up for a promotion two years ago that would put me in charge of all the adjusters for my company in the Fox Valley, but I'd have to change to another office, so I haven't taken it. They ask me every eight weeks like clockwork. I don't know." Wil shook her head. "There's probably something with Almond Butter, too."

"You still have Almond Butter?! Oh my God! I love Almond Butter! Do you have a picture? Gimme." Katie held out her hand, so Wil fished her phone out of her pocket, unlocked it, found a picture of Almond Butter, and handed it over.

"Oh, she looks so good! I can't believe how good she looks! What would she be, sixteen? Seventeen? I forget her birthday." Katie was swiping through Wil's photos, one after the next, and it was true most of them were pictures of Almond Butter, but it wasn't a photo set. It was Wil's whole camera roll. There was other stuff. Random shots of things like receipts or her health insurance card she'd had to upload for a medical appointment.

Also, pictures from kissing sessions. Some stuff that had happened after kissing sessions a few times.

Katie swiped, and one of those pictures filled the screen of Wil's phone as though Wil had conjured it with her thoughts. Katie's perfect eyebrows shot up. "God." She looked at Wil. "I remember him."

"Them."

Katie nodded. "Sure. I remember them. That was a good one. Holy shit."

Her finger hovered over the screen of Wil's phone as though she wanted to keep swiping, to flip through a slideshow of what had happened between Wil and Emory after they finished filming the TikTok.

"That's the only picture." Wil took a bite of peanut butter cookie, because she couldn't think past the heat in her cheeks and between her legs.

Katie put the phone to sleep and handed it back to Wil. "Okay. So, I am very sorry for invading your privacy. I get excited about cats, but that is not an excuse, just an explanation."

"No worries."

"All right." She did an exaggerated nod, her whole torso bouncing up and down with her head. There was no food left on her platter. Wil wasn't sure where she'd put it. Or when. "Hammering this out, then. If I win, you do adulting things. Fix your renting and housemate situation, buy a real car, take the promotion, maybe make an end-of-life plan for Almond Butter?" She looked at Wil with a question in her eyes.

"Yeah. The vet suggested this might be a good idea."

"And if I lose, which I won't, because there's no way a teacher at East High has carried on a double life in a town of a hundred thousand souls for a dozenish years, I will go on your TikTok. I should warn you that if that happens, it's not going to be a small event in your life. It will be everything that happened before you kissed Katie Price on TikTok"—she gestured to the left of her body—"and the aftermath"—she gestured to the right.

Then Katie went still, frowned, and blew out a long breath that let Wil see the tiredness around her eyes again. "Actually, even if you don't kiss me on TikTok," she said. "Even if someone takes our picture when we're out in public together. It could be a lot of things, and they'd all mean exposure, the kind of exposure that's not in your control."

The kind of exposure, Wil assumed, that would throw her name into the morass of speculation around Katie's love life and her breakup with Ben Adelsward.

Because Katie's press, when it wasn't about her current project or her cats, was always about Ben. Wil had never, on any level, understood the appeal, but she'd figured at the time he swooped Katie away to LA that if Ben Adelsward made Katie happy, that was good.

It had been intimated over the years between Diana and Beanie, however, that this was not the case.

"Maybe we should walk this back," Katie said. "It's fun for me to see you, but I don't want to get carried away and cause problems for you."

Wil looked across the room. Beanie was still by the front window, talking to Diana and a man with a mustache. There was Christmas music playing quietly in the background.

Katie was the one who lived in Los Angeles, but Wil couldn't help thinking she was the one who wasn't supposed to be here. At Diana's for a holiday party with Katie Price. In Green Bay.

Healthy and whole, with her whole life in front of her.

"I don't want to minimize," Wil said. "I know that it's not anything in my experience to have literally everyone on the globe not only watching you but also talking about you, having their lives changed by your work, thinking about what you made them feel. But I will say that there are ways my own life didn't even start until recently. I don't know what to do with it yet, but what I have done, so far, is let a lot of people look at me. And I don't mind telling you that I haven't stopped letting them, and it's not because of the passive creator income stream from TikTok. Also—"

She stopped herself. Wil had already said more than she would have ever guessed, and she still wasn't sure what everything she said was headed toward. Going this deep wasn't normally how she talked to people.

It was how she'd talked to Katie. Ever since the day at the beginning of senior year when she'd pulled up alongside Katie in the Bronco. Katie was walking away from the high school, in the opposite direction of anywhere Wil had been able to think she'd want to go, and when Wil slowed down to get her attention, she'd seen Katie wiping at her eyes.

So she pulled over, leaned across the seat to open the passenger door, and asked, You want to get in?

It was the beginning of what they'd had together that year.

"Also, what?" Katie sounded a little dreamy. She hadn't taken her eyes off Wil the whole time Wil was silent, thinking.

"I've missed you." Wil put her palms on her thighs. Breathed in, breathed out. "But I don't want to make you feel any kind of way about that. It's not to make you feel guilty. It's just something I'm figuring out right now."

Katie covered Wil's hand with her own, just for a moment, and the contact pushed a shockwave of heat through the middle of Wil's chest. "I was waiting in my publicist's office flipping through People, and there was one of those splash pages with a roundup of social media accounts to follow. Nothing I would ever typically stop on, but I recognized you in a grainy two-by-two-inch screenshot photo from one of your videos, Wil. And I stopped on the page, and I read the two hundred words People magazine had written about your account over and over until I just tore away the part of the page with you on it." Katie leaned into the back cushion of the sofa and smiled at Wil. "I missed you, too."

Hearing that was a big enough gift, it gave Wil the push she needed to ask her next question.

"Are you into girls?" Wil had no idea. Katie hadn't dated in high school, and Katie also hadn't dated since Ben Adelsward—or if she had, the press didn't know, and Diana wasn't talking about it. "To be clear, I'll kiss you either way. But I'm curious."

"I don't know how to answer that. Are you?" Katie was leaning her side against the back of the sofa, and now she bent her long legs up, stretching her leggings tight over her knees. She hadn't looked away from Wil even once.

"I haven't met a gender I'm not attracted to yet," Wil confessed. "It used to be that I had to get to know someone, but the kissing thing has rearranged my brain on that. I think I could have a relationship or a fling or anything with almost anybody. There don't seem to be any barriers there. The only barrier I've got—and I've challenged it with some very wonderful people a few times—is monogamy. I'm a pair-bonder. I blame my dad for that."

Wil could feel the back of her neck get hot in a way that was a precursor to blushing, which surprised her. She'd talked about this kind of thing a lot, with a lot of different people, but there was something about the way Katie was looking at her face.

Katie nodded. "I don't know. I've only come with one partner, and I think even that was more about me than him. There hasn't been a single one of your videos that hasn't turned me on, but I haven't looked at why. There's something in me I don't get yet, but to be honest, I'm not worried about it."

God,Wil thought. God. This—what Katie was calling vulnerability, getting vulnerable—was, in fact, Wil's kryptonite milkshake.

Katie looked like she knew it, too, or at least as though she was thoroughly pleased with Wil's reaction. Wil resettled herself on the mallard sofa, looking wildly around the room to make sure none of the guests were paying attention to the unfolding drama between her and Katie.

They were not. This was a crowd of people who'd spent a lot of time ignoring Wil Greene and Katie Price and their various shenanigans.

"What do you… when you…?" Wil cleared her throat and wondered how she could possibly walk this back.

Or walk it forward much more quickly.

"When I masturbate?"

Wil needed to lie down. Maybe if she lay down on top of Katie, every part of herself matching up to every part of Katie, right on the mallard couch, it would resolve the problem she was having.

It would create some new problems, though, given the number of people present.

Katie had stopped looking at her and was nibbling on one fingernail. She pulled her hand away from her mouth and stared at her manicure, then caught Wil's eyes again and suddenly—surprisingly—laughed. "That is not an interview question, Wil Greene. I was not prepared." She fanned at her cheeks, but she was smiling. "Sometimes I turn on music I love, really loud. Then it's just all sensation. Sometimes I loop on a moment in a book or a movie or a play or something I see in public, not a sexy thing necessarily, it can be an awkward thing or a tender thing. Like a look. Like—"

"The first fifteen seconds of my videos," Wil suggested.

That earned Wil another overwhelmed-Katie-ceiling-smile. "Yes." She looked back at Wil. "Like that. Maybe more the last three seconds before the next fifteen seconds."

Oh.

The buildup.

The just-before.

The maybe-this-won't-happen moment.

It was Wil's favorite three seconds, too.

"What are your pronouns?" Wil felt like she was barely keeping up with this conversation and all of the urgent things she needed to know. It was not what she'd expected.

It was what she should have expected. Wil had forgotten what it was like to have Katie Price's full attention.

Now she remembered.

She remembered, too, what a revelation it had been in high school when she'd picked Katie up in the Bronco and driven her around, and they'd talked more that first night than they'd talked to each other in all the seventeen years before.

"Professionally, right now, my pronouns are she and her," Katie said. "For just myself, privately, I'm not sure. I don't think I care. I don't mean that in a flippant way, or a way that would ever dismiss or stand in for something that others have fought hard for. I mean, I guess, that when I reach into that, it's sunbeams. Oxygen." Katie made a series of gestures that looked like dancing, watching Wil until Wil laughed, but also completely understood what she was trying to say. "What are yours?"

"She and her."

"Why? I'm sorry if that's rude." Katie waved her hands in front of her face like she was trying to stop herself or slow herself down, but her voice was too delighted-sounding to make her attempt serious.

Wil shook her head, smiling. "We're in it now, Katie. No apologies. I guess it's because she and her make sense to how I feel about sex with myself and with other people. For me, even though it's not necessarily true for others, my gender and how I feel about sex are twisted together."

Every time Wil said the word sex out loud to Katie Price on the mallard sofa, in the middle of a room full of people, she felt a fraction more reckless, as though at any moment she might grab Katie by the hand and pull her out of here into the nearest dark room with a door that locked.

Katie drew a small circle over Wil's denim-covered knee. Wil felt that fingertip in every cell of her body until she ached everywhere. "To get back to this bet we are pretending is serious, and its spoils, I think it's all a pretext for Bronco time."

"Right." She looked at Katie, considering. She should put down this bet right now, because Katie was right. They were playing a game.

Except she'd never played at anything with Katie.

And she didn't want to put this bet down.

Katie's warnings were an attempt to make it clear that her celebrity made regular things, even fun things like a bet, kind of impossible. A gamble. Loss. Temporary. A little unreal.

Still. Wil wanted the chance to kiss Katie the way Katie had been watching her kiss other people. And she wanted the chance to see what would happen between them if the bet stayed in place—if they couldn't, or wouldn't, kiss until Katie lost. After all, Wil's TikTok was for first kisses.

It was also for onetime kisses with near-strangers.

Katie wasn't a stranger. If Wil kissed her, it would be because she wanted to kiss her more than once. Also, Wil had already made it clear to Katie that she was monogamous.

What that meant was that if Wil somehow, in the next month that Katie was in town, got all the way to kissing her, she wouldn't be making TikToks anymore.

She would be exploding her life just as she was seeing what the pieces of it actually were.

"Oh, no," Katie said, her expression caught somewhere between excitement and fondness. "I just watched you think through something with your whole brain. You made the face. Whenever you did that in high school, what happened after was always so, so good. We are getting somewhere here."

"I'm not sure where."

"I'm not sure either, but"—Katie stood up, her eyes bright and daring—"definitely, definitely pick me up at eleven."

Wil blew out a breath.

When this inevitably fell apart and Katie went home to Los Angeles, Wil hoped she would have some good memories to tide her over through the next thirteen years.

She should probably be much, much more worried than she could make herself be.