Chapter Seven

Wil walked into Kettle's, wrinkling her nose at the hit of Lysol and coffee that permeated the used bookstore–slash–coffee shop, the mainstay of an awkward neighborhood between downtown and an industrial drag.

Kettle's had carved out a clientele in Green Bay as the default meeting place of the sixty-and-over set, as well as professionals who didn't want to run into anyone they knew, deal with ambient noise, or face a lot of choices about what to eat or drink.

There weren't any customers in the front area, and the ageless brown-haired barista who had worked at Kettle's since Wil used to walk here from East High after school when Beanie couldn't pick her up until five was sitting on a stool behind the counter reading what looked like the Bible, though Wil very sincerely hoped not.

As soon as Wil made it to the counter, she spied the reason she'd come—a couple of tables pushed together with four local attorneys gathered around, their heads bent, talking seriously to each other.

"What can I get you?" the barista asked, putting down her book.

"A coffee with room and… the chocolate chip cookies?" The one bright spot at Kettle's was their shrink-wrapped packages of three greasy chocolate chip cookies for a dollar. Most of the time, the cookies turned out to be hard, just tolerable when dipped in coffee, but every once in a while they were soft and falling apart with melted butter and completely worth it.

"Sure," the barista said. "I'll bring it right out."

She would not. No matter what you ordered at Kettle's, you would wait for it.

Wil took a deep breath and turned toward the table in the back.

Beanie was a paralegal, quietly but deeply integrated in the Green Bay legal world. In fact, if Wil's mother had any kind of secret power, it was that a raft of lawyers in the greater Northeast Wisconsin area would die for Beanie Greene, which meant that she could actually get away with capital crimes, corporate sabotage, or ecoterrorism if the mood struck her.

For years, Beanie had done paralegal work for Mike Jerry, the kingpin of legal empires and politics in Green Bay. A small, quiet, elderly white man, Mike was an emeritus partner in the firm he'd founded, housed right next to the courthouse, in probably the late 1800s.

Mike Jerry ruled over a secret cabal of other legal scions in Green Bay, and together, at a back table at Kettle's, they directed the fortunes of every J.D. within a hundred miles.

Careers were ended and made at these tables, according to Beanie.

Wil's mother had been trying to get her to talk to this group for at least a couple of years, convinced that if she did, she might identify a direction for her own career. Get unstuck.

Though being stuck wasn't exactly why Wil hadn't gone to Michigan Law. Beanie knew that, but "stuck" was what Wil and Beanie called the lifestyle consequences of Wil's guilt-shot mortal terror, which had only just begun to ease up and give her some room to breathe.

"Hey," she said. "I'm Wilifred Greene."

Mike Jerry looked up. He gave her a very small smile. His blue eyes were bright and a little terrifying. "I haven't seen you since you started at Michigan," he said. "Sit down. Let me introduce you."

Wil settled into the chair beside Mike. She already knew two of the other people at the table by reputation. One was Mary Lyddle, whose German and Belgian forebears had been lawyers in Green Bay since the first white men arrived and pretended not to understand that all the land belonged to the highly competent First Nations people who had literally guided them to the bay by canoe. Maybe in response to this craven colonization, Mary was notorious for upending Green Bay power legacies whose exclusionary practices held so many in the community back. Wil knew that Jasper had liked Mary very much.

The other was Cord Schiff, a Black man in his fifties who regularly offered criminal law perspectives on left-leaning national news networks.

"And this is Sam Rafferty," Mike said. "He went to East like you, but he's been practicing in Chicago until a few years ago."

Sam was a white guy who looked about forty, but in the way that a fully adult, grown, seriously fucking hot guy looked forty, with the eye crinkles and dark hair shot through with only the tiniest bit of silver at his temples.

Wil wondered if he would be interested in kissing her.

Coming up with two new people to kiss every week created a certain amount of pressure that had taught Wil not to look too hard at these impulses. She just arrowed herself straight at them and let the chips fall. But in this context, with the lawyers, she might need to exercise some discretion.

Sam solved this problem for her. "My girlfriend is obsessed with your TikTok channel." He had a little color in his cheeks. "I benefit from her obsession, so it's really nice to meet you. Don't let me forget to get your autograph before you go."

"You'd both be welcome to be on my channel." Wil raised one eyebrow.

Sam laughed. "Hold up. Can you say that again, but I'll record you this time? It would be entirely for points with Robin. I can't be on your channel, I have a minor child. Plus, if these three get their way, I'm headed for the bench. I have to keep myself squeaky clean."

"Aren't you suggesting, then, that my project will create problems for me, should I decide to pursue a career in the law?" Wil made it clear with her tone that she didn't take her own question seriously.

Mary laughed. "Honestly, I think it's adorable that Sam, a rich white man, thinks that kissing an attractive woman on the internet would in any way damage his electability in Wisconsin. Not to mention that his girlfriend is Robin Dahl, who's probably one of the sharpest political minds the Midwest, and especially Wisconsin, is going to see in this generation. If Robin wanted to kiss you, or Sam did, Robin could spin it into a win. Sam's just scared." Mary gave Sam a cutting look.

"I am. All true. Hiding behind my privilege."

"As usual," said Cord. He extended his hand for Wil to shake. "It's good to meet you. I've known your mother for years. Knew your dad, too, and liked him a lot. When he switched to consulting after he had to resign, he helped me out with preparing the VGL Corps fraud case on behalf of the county. My condolences to you and Beanie."

"Thanks. He liked you, too," Wil said. "When you first started doing TV commentary, he'd have me watch it with him. He told me I'd be good at that. I think he liked the idea of me someday verbally eviscerating the bad guys on network television."

There must have been something in the way she said it that betrayed Wil's doubts about that vision of her future, because Cord leaned back and put an ankle on his knee and started looking at Wil in a way that she was sure he had perfected in order to keep people from knowing what he was thinking. "What do you like the idea of?"

This meeting had gotten deep much faster than Wil had imagined it would.

Even at eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, she'd been perfectly aware that she was trying to be the best pre-law student the University of Michigan had ever seen mostly so that her dad—of course her dad, who else but her dad?—would know that she was absolutely going to thrive after he was gone.

When he thought of her, she'd wanted him to feel nothing but pride. Not worry about what might happen to her. Not regret that he wouldn't be around.

Wil had been determined that Jasper Greene know she was going to become what she'd told him she would be, which was essentially what he would have been if he'd never gotten sick. She would be Jasper Greene on a bigger stage than Green Bay, the kind of stage that was presidentially appointed and involved Beanie Greene wearing vintage Bob Mackie and Wil going to parties with senators' kids.

One of the first things Wil had been forced to grapple with after she got her genetic testing results, once the euphoria wore off, after she'd taken ibuprofen for the headache she'd gotten from crying, was the realization that now she could get back to going after her dream.

Except that she absolutely didn't want to.

She'd been right to avoid this meeting. She should stand up and walk right back out of Kettle's. She would, if it weren't for the fact that she had never been able to resist the challenge of being put on the spot by smart people asking probing questions.

In this way, at least, she was exactly like her father.

"Maybe I don't have precisely the same idea my dad did," she said.

Cord nodded. "Good." He didn't offer up anything else, not even a clear facial expression.

Okay, then.She was clearly here to prove her mettle to these oldsters. Wil rummaged around in her brain to see if she could pull out exactly what her mettle looked like. Or sounded like.

Mike Jerry cleared his throat. "What we have here, everyone," he said, "is a graduate of Michigan, summa cum laude in pre-law, one of the point-zero-one percent of undergraduates who had an article published in their law journal, who was admitted to Michigan Law, Stanford Law, and a large smattering of ranked-eleven-through-twenty schools, and is working as an insurance adjuster and entertainer."

"Wow," Wil said. "Jump right in, Mike."

"So goes Beanie, so goes my nation." Mike tipped his tea mug at Wil.

"Did you defer?" Sam asked.

"Sure. Eight years ago. Deferred again seven years ago. I think I still have some first-look consideration?"

Sam leaned back in his chair. He was not assessing her as an entertainer now. There was some brain there behind the hotness, and it was pointed at her. "Can I ask you a personal question?"

"I don't have the mutation." This wasn't information Wil would normally volunteer, but kissing so many people had made her more attuned to people's faces and the shifts in their expressions, and she could see that Sam Rafferty had big enough feelings about this question that she wanted to spare him having to ask it.

Although maybe that wasn't so much Wil's being hyperattuned to this guy's emotional landscape as it was her own reluctance to let anyone feel anything about the question of whether or not she had Huntington's.

When Wil was eighteen—the age it was recommended she get tested—her dad didn't have a lot of time left, and she couldn't imagine getting tested while Jasper Greene was dying. Having to tell him that what was killing him would kill her, too, eventually? No.

After he was gone, she still couldn't face those feelings. Even thinking about the person at the hospital or lab or office who'd have to call her up on the phone to give her the test result, she couldn't face their feelings.

Until Beanie pointed out to her, at Christmastime last year, that Wil was literally never going to be able to face the feelings. Beanie lost it a little, crying, and reminded Wil that after losing her husband and best friend, she would fucking like to prepare herself.

Then Wil stopped thinking about lab workers and started thinking about her mom. She scheduled her test for January.

She still didn't know what to make of the fact that the results surprised her.

Or of the fact that her mother's request had made Wil realize that Beanie was her best friend. Sticking around Green Bay so many years had meant that she'd spent a lot of time with her mom that they might not have otherwise had together. They'd done the hard things, like sorting through Jasper's possessions and clearing out his office. They'd invented their own traditions and rituals, like going to the Harry Houdini exhibit in Appleton every year and watching all of Katie's awards shows together.

She'd gotten to know Beanie as an adult, and what she'd realized was that she had a mind a lot more like her mom's than she'd ever understood. Where her dad took in the world in the broad, systemic strokes of a warrior, her mom was always looking closely at the minutiae for a way to solve a problem that everyone else had overlooked. It was why she was every attorney in Green Bay's secret weapon. She could find a single leaf on a tree that explained the whole fucking forest.

So could Wil. She just didn't know how to turn that into a future that felt like the right fit for her—and she also didn't know what any of that had to do with the fact that she'd spent the past year absorbed with her project of kissing strangers on the internet.

Although she was starting to have a few ideas about that.

"Do you like being an insurance adjuster?" Sam asked.

"I actually love it."

"Then tell me what you love about being an insurance adjuster."

Wil noticed herself sitting up straighter in response to these rapid-fire questions. She was definitely liking this. "I listen, document, solve complex problems simply, usually with money, and talk to different people every day, most of them interesting for some new way they're weird."

Sam grinned. "That's what I loved about criminal corporate law."

"You were a black elevator lawyer?"

That made him laugh.

"I don't get it," Mary said.

"You know," Wil said, turning to Mary, "how the evil, supervillain, super-rich types always have a Gotham-esque urban skyscraper lair with a private black elevator that probably also descends to hell?"

"Is that a thing?" Mary looked around the table.

"Our elevator was the blackest," Sam said. "I should say ‘is,' because I'm still a partner. I have defended some truly despicable but extremely interesting people. People whose decision-making, looked at head-on, is astonishing in the magnitude and breadth of its badness."

"Sam was telling us last week that he doesn't believe there's any such thing as bad people," Mary told Wil. "Just people who make bad decisions."

"Everyone deserves a defense," Mike Jerry said mildly.

"It's not just that," Sam said. "We know that somebody like you, Mike, or Cord here is going to bring absolutely everything you've got to the challenge of representing the case of someone who's been harmed. That's as it should be. But there's got to be expertise on the other side, too, making sure that whoever did the harming has been identified correctly and that the consequences are proportional. There's got to be someone like me who's the last stop as far as making a corporate defendant believe and fully comprehend their accountability, and, as Wil said, fix it with money, which is always going to hurt them more than their conscience will ever sting. I defend in order to redistribute."

"But," Wil said. "But, you haven't talked to Fox Valley car wreck people. Fox Valley car wreck people have made some life choices, Sam. You can't even begin to understand how dark the human soul can really be."

He laughed again. Wil liked his easy laugh. It was a shame this man and his girlfriend didn't want to kiss her. "What are you doing now that you're in Green Bay?" she asked him.

"Probate."

"So you can definitely sleep at night now. Probably sleep during the day, too."

Sam laughed again. "Please come to dinner sometime. You would make Robin so happy." He crossed his legs. "I've gathered, pretty easily, that you already know that law is for you." Now his voice was serious again.

Wil let the seriousness of it sink in, and the way all three of these people were looking at her, which was with a lot of intelligent intensity. It was much more comfortable than she would have thought. She couldn't feel anywhere inside her body if she wanted to go to law school, but she could feel that she liked being at this table with these four smart people looking at her.

That kind of thing—not just knowing what felt good but knowing why, and being able to start wondering what it might mean—had been easier and easier since Wil started her kissing project.

Katie appeared in Wil's mind's eye then. Her big eyes, her perfect eyebrows ever so slightly raised as she shrugged that flannel shirt off her shoulder.

Wil had been able to see, on the bright screen of her phone, how fast Katie was breathing.

Katie made that seem so attractive. Doing something different. Being afraid.

"It's December," Sam said. "Application season. All four of us have contacts and expertise that could help you figure out how to get yourself into school this coming fall. If that's what you want to do."

"Wow," Wil said. "I expected so much more beating around the bush from a bunch of lawyers."

Sam crossed his arms. "Do you want it?"

"How long—" Wil's throat had a dry catch in it. "How long do I have to think about it?"

Sam looked at the other people at the table.

"It's the holidays," Mary said. "Maybe a couple weeks for someplace like Yale. They decide early. Michigan's got a bigger window, so you have a bit longer there."

Cord nodded. "The California schools are the ones I know the most about. Pepperdine, Loyola, UCLA. They'll take applications into February, but they stop looking at them about a week into January."

Mike shrugged and looked at Wil. "Two weeks. Give me a call. We know what you need to know to make this happen, and we can introduce you to anyone else you're going to have to figure out how to impress."

"I know Donna at Yale," Mary said. "We went to school together."

"I've got people at all those California schools. It's how I got introduced to all the TV folks," Cord said. "And Sam, don't you have a friend at Harvard?"

Sam smiled. "William English," he affirmed. "There was someone close to him who was in the category of very bad decision- maker, and William was grateful for my assistance in directing him toward redemption."

"Pretty razor-thin deadline," Wil said. Her leg muscles were shaking, even as she tried to joke.

"Sure," Sam said. "Welcome aboard."

"Good on Beanie for figuring out how to get you here," Cord said. "I like a toothy mother."

"She is the toothiest," Wil agreed.

But she wondered what would happen to the conversation at the table if she told them the person who'd made her come today was Katie Price. Or what Katie had done over FaceTime to offer Wil an incentive.

The barista interrupted with what Wil assumed was going to be her coffee but was actually a warmed-up cinnamon roll for Mike, and the conversation slid away from her future to Mike's sweet tooth and Sam's nephew, who Wil gathered was some kind of debate powerhouse whose rapid-fire wins had turned all of the attorneys at the table into high school debate nerds.

By the time Wil's coffee and cookies showed up, Mary had already left, and Sam kept checking his watch. "I need to run to the high school." He dug around in his wallet until he found a business card and handed it to Wil. "It was great to meet you. That's my cell number on the back. If you do want dinner and to meet Robin, give me a call or text anytime. I promise not to make it weird."

"I'm fine with weird," Wil said. "I'm actually really good at weird."

He laughed and talked to Mike and Cord for a minute, and then they were all standing up to go, so Wil asked for a paper cup to put her coffee in. It was almost three. She texted Katie.

Just done at Kettle's, too late to get anything done if I go back to work

Okay if I come over?

The three dots popped up, then were replaced with Katie's response.

Yes! but to pick me up bc i'm restless

need chocolate covered almonds and want to go to costco

i have a whole system wont be recognized

youve got it omw

Wil slid her phone into her pocket and pointed the Bronco toward the Prices' neighborhood.

She sipped her coffee and thought about how it could get addictive, driving to pick up Katie. Wil liked how it layered over the way it used to be with how it was now, the high-end neighborhood and the long driveway and Katie coming out of the house in a huge, puffy winter coat, boots, and a dark wig.

Wil leaned over and pulled the handle and shoved the door open for Katie to climb in. Her entire body was singing, just because Katie was getting into her truck.

"Wil!" Katie hopped on the bench. Immediately, she slipped out of the coat and wrestled it into the wheel well. "Why are coats? I try, but I can't. Why?"

Wil put the Bronco into gear. "Probably because it's thirty degrees?"

"Not enough degrees, but I feel like there should be a solution. Like an implant that creates a microclimate around my body. Wait! Stop the Bronco."

Wil put the truck in park at the end of the Prices' drive. "I'm stopped. Do you need me to go back?"

"No. I need us to touch." Katie smiled, but it wasn't her flirting or enjoying the moment, or even relishing a little drama. "Need was the wrong word. May we? Or we can pretend I didn't make you stop the truck and ask for a pet like a cat at three a.m."

"How?"

Katie had the same flannel shirt on that she'd been wearing on FaceTime, which made it difficult for Wil to think about anything except what had happened on FaceTime, and how the flannel had slid over Katie's bare shoulder, revealing her collarbone, then a glimpse of bare skin and Katie's unadorned body that had made Wil feel like she couldn't catch her breath.

Katie's wig, under a plain stocking cap, was a very convincing brown bob. She'd done something with her makeup Wil had never seen in any picture of her that made her age undefinable. The coat, close up, had been around the block, and the boots had dried salt soaked into the bond between the sole and the quilted purple nylon. Unless you were studying her and were some kind of a superfan, you'd think Katie was a young Green Bay mom, or—at the most glamorous—a stay-at-home spouse.

"Let me back up," Katie said. "A hug. May I have a hug? Maybe a little over-the-clothes?" She scootched closer.

Wil laughed. "A hug would be really nice, thank you."

Katie opened her arms, and Wil reached for her. Katie wrapped her arms around Wil's shoulders but snaked a hand up through the back of her hair, giving Wil pleasant shivers.

Wil hugged Katie tight, spreading her hands over her back so she could feel how her ribs connected to her backbone, feel her breathing.

"People should hug more," Wil said. "This is so good."

"Right?"

Wil inhaled against Katie's neck, pressing her nose into warm skin, smelling whatever Katie's soap and shampoo were perfumed with. When Katie wiggled closer, Wil let her arms band around her so she could feel Katie pressed against her everywhere.

All of the stress melted out of Wil's body. The only muscles engaged were the ones she needed to keep holding Katie, which meant her brain shifted all of its awareness to skin, and warmth, and Katie's cheek against her ear, and how Wil's lips were resting, now, against the spot where Katie's neck curved into her shoulder.

"God," Wil said against Katie's neck. "That feels…"

Katie scratched with all of her nails, lightly, from the back of Wil's scalp down her neck. "You like it?"

"The things my body is feeling right now don't belong in the ‘like' file." Wil couldn't help it, she kissed, just a little, Katie's neck. Talking against it with her mouth was practically kissing anyway.

Katie's hands stilled in Wil's hair. "Do that again, but ten percent dirtier."

Wil's heart stilled. She hadn't really, exactly, meant to make a move. Part of the pleasure of the hug was sense memory. They had hugged all the time back then. This hug had swept away the last cobwebs obscuring their old intimacy.

But Wil made her brain stop thinking about it so she could get away with kissing Katie's neck, just in case Katie was thinking too much, also. Only the tiniest bit of her tongue.

Katie moaned, actually moaned like they were in bed together already, but then eased back, running her hands over Wil's arms as she did. They were still only a few inches apart.

Wil loved this part of kissing people, how she could look at them close in, look at how kissing changed their face. Katie's mouth was soft and relaxed. Her eyes looked different, not so alert, just calm and present. It made Wil unexpectedly tender.

But they weren't kissing.

Katie's face shifted again. She smiled, her eyebrows raised. "Whatcha doing?"

Wil breathed in and breathed out a laugh. "It's just that it comes to me so naturally at this point. You're there, three inches away. I'm here, extremely on board and dedicated. I can tell that you wanted to, which tells me we've been driving in that direction."

"Kissing, you mean." Katie looked highly amused. "Tell me something."

"Sure." Wil was not sure.

"When did we start driving toward this particular moment, Wilifred? Give me the rough date."

"Well." Wil eased the rest of the way apart from Katie, checked her parking brake, and leaned back in her seat. "Not when we talked about it at the party. That's implied. If we had to make a bet to ensure you wouldn't come on my TikTok and kiss me, it's fair to say we'd both entertained thoughts."

Katie smiled. "So many thoughts."

Wil grinned and then couldn't hold Katie's gaze, which was too much with her smile and the heat racing up Wil's neck as memories fitted themselves into place, one after another, to make a picture she'd never really let herself see before. "There's one moment I can remember." She managed to keep her voice teasing, but she was sure the color in her face gave her away.

"Tell me, and I'll stop you if I remember it, too."

"We took that super long walk toward Luxemburg because you wanted to try out your new digital camcorder."

Katie laughed. "Stop."

"If I stop, who's going to finish the story?"

"Hmm. I'm not sure, because I have this feeling neither one of us has told this story, maybe even to ourselves."

"Of course not. You were my good friend Katie Price who I had never remembered not knowing, including the time you barfed Kool-Aid onto your birthday cake in kindergarten."

"So keep going." Katie circled her index fingers around each other and grinned.

"Fuck. Okay. So we're walking to Luxemburg along that skinny county road next to the barbed-wire fences that keep the cows in—you filmed a lot of cows, I seem to remember—and I had just gotten Beanie to capitulate on buying me a Roxy puffy vest, which I insisted on wearing with a shirt instead of a coat, so I was freezing."

Katie had leaned back against her passenger door and was smiling at the ceiling of the truck. "I still have that footage. It isn't terrible."

"You noticed one of those railroad bridges with trusses underneath, a little one, over a frozen creek."

"I did."

"You wanted to head toward it, but I didn't want to because we'd have to cut through one of the cow pastures with all the frozen mud and tall grass. Plus, I hate frozen bodies of water. They're creepy, and I have intrusive thoughts about falling through the ice and getting sucked away from the hole by a current."

"God." Katie looked at her. "You didn't tell me that."

"I couldn't. It was only a bitty creek, and I was wearing a cropped puffy vest from the mall with a long-sleeved T-shirt in twenty-degree weather. Obviously I care most about being cool."

"But you did walk with me through the pasture to the creek."

"I did."

"And when I wanted to climb up on that cement culvert and onto the trusses, you followed me."

"Cool people aren't afraid to die, Katie."

"So there we were, sitting side by side under the railroad bridge on a wooden truss, and we could hear the water under the ice. I have footage of that, too, figuring out the zoom."

Wil imagined Katie at home in Los Angeles, playing the old video. It made her feel a pang, nostalgia or loss. They'd missed out on knowing each other for such a long time. "After I stopped being privately freaked, I realized I wasn't cold anymore. I remember it was really pretty. And I was a little bit in awe, in that jealous way that's easy to be when you're a teenager, that you had seen how beautiful it was going to be from all the way across the pasture on the road."

"Is that why you moved my hair out of my face?" Katie had turned toward her. "Because you were jealous of me?"

Here was where it got tricky for Wil, this memory. The moments right after it, she'd quickly covered up with jokes and self-denial because she wasn't… enough to let happen what had almost happened, or to let it mean what it would have meant. It was as if Wil's instant, total, white-hot flash of self-denial had packed up this memory in layers of paper and sealed the box shut. That meant that opening it, looking at it right now, she had to feel all the feelings she hadn't let herself surrender to then.

"I moved your hair out of your face because I wanted to see your face." Wil had to stop and clear her throat. "And because I wanted you to look at me."

"I did look at you," Katie whispered.

"You did. I think I knew how close together we'd be, sitting on that truss, if you looked at me. It didn't seem like we were anywhere, you know? We were somewhere neither one of us had ever been. It was so pretty and cold, it was like nothing was real, and so something I didn't realize I had wanted to do was suddenly taking the chance."

"And that something was…?"

"Kissing you."

Wil kept trying to find the moment, but even now, she mostly remembered when she'd realized her hand was over one of Katie's knees, and that she could feel Katie's breath against her mouth. She had laughed and clumsily dropped her body onto the culvert, turning her ankle but ignoring it, making a joke about movie magic.

The real moment—the moment they had leaned into each other, knowing they were going to kiss, the inevitability of that happening—Wil had lost.

"I had already had my first kiss." Katie sounded farther away than usual. "In a production of Brigadoon. I didn't like the actor who I had to kiss. I'd been in shows with him before, and I knew they would cast him and I would have to kiss him. But he was the only person I'd kissed. I remember thinking if you kissed me, I would have wanted you to." She smiled. "That's how convoluted it was in my head. Like, it would be okay for you to kiss me, the thing I really wanted to happen, because I had already, technically, been kissed by someone I found abhorrent." Katie laughed. "I never want to be eighteen again."

"So what happened just now?" Wil asked.

"A much better almost-kiss, I would say." Katie nodded. "You didn't hurl yourself away from me, for example."

"I'm suddenly wondering if I started my TikTok to redeem myself."

"If that was your mission, then consider it accomplished." Katie settled herself back into her own seat again and cracked the window to keep the glass from fogging, which made Wil curious about how much of this was getting picked up by Craig's security cameras and how long they could talk at the end of the drive with the taillights pointed toward the house before Diana walked down with an excuse to get the mail in order to see what they were doing.

"Did you know that a perfect way to make an audience understand desire is to have one of the characters kiss the other's neck?" Katie asked. "A kiss on someone's neck tells the audience that the character wants, needs, the other character in a way that can't be satisfied except with intimacy. With sex. It's often more powerful to witness than even a very explicit kiss."

"I am, as of right now, convinced." Wil smiled. "Are you ready to do this mission?"

"Yes."

Wil got them onto the road. "Tell me more about what you were saying about getting the audience to understand desire. I feel like there was something technical there."

Katie readjusted her hat and wig after their hug. "I took a workshop from this amazing acting teacher that was about intimate scenes. Screen and stage kisses and sex."

"They have workshops for that?"

"They have workshops for everything. What I'm talking about are intimacy workshops. Blocking intimate scenes, establishing boundaries, understanding the work of convincing an audience of intimacy. Our teacher's big point was that who we were being intimate with, as actors, was not the other actor in the scene, it was the audience. Every decision we made was about how we made the audience feel, because it's the audience who needs to be convinced. It's the audience who all of the feelings are for. And that's the same thing you're doing." Katie turned to look at Wil, her eyes big, smiling. "You're kissing all these different people," she said, "but the audience is there for you. They want to see you kiss a new person every time. They experience the kiss by witnessing how you react to it."

"But I'm not thinking about the audience."

Was that true, though? Didn't Wil think of the audience when she and the person she was going to kiss positioned the camera? Wasn't the audience a script that was running in the background the whole time, an awareness in Wil's body of how everything that happened between her and this person would look, how it would make people feel?

It wasn't as though she'd ever considered keeping the kissing videos private. The idea had always been, from the minute Wil decided to accept her housemate's comment as a dare, to film and edit and share them. Show them to people. Talk about them and listen to other people talking about them.

The point had been to find things out. At first, about herself, because of the housemate's suggestion that Wil was too casual with relationships and too shallow with her feelings. But it wasn't long before Wil was finding out a lot of interesting things about people that made her realize how much of herself she had locked away as soon as her dad had his diagnosis. Wil couldn't fail to see her feelings when she was working so hard to make someone else comfortable, to try to help them get something they needed out of an experience.

The more people she'd kissed, the more she'd shared of herself. For an audience of millions of people. Wil had made her feelings as big as she could, maybe so she could finally understand them. So she would be able to really see them.

"No. I'm wrong," Wil said. "You're right." Without the last year of kissing, she wouldn't have had access to what she'd felt today with that table of lawyers.

Or to what she felt for Katie.

She hadn't let herself think deeply, carefully, about her feelings for Katie until today. Until the last long minutes at the end of Craig and Diana's driveway. And if what Wil had felt in high school wasn't the same thing she was feeling lately about Katie, it was definitely connected over all these years—their lives rushing past that moment in time, waiting for them to return to it.

It made Wil want to change something, one thing that would let her figure out more about what she wanted and how it might connect up the different parts of her life. Because Wil did understand that all the parts of her life were connected, and that she was what connected them.

She wanted the part of her that couldn't stop thinking about Katie—Katie's body, Katie's smile, Katie's mind and how it worked—to talk to the part that was kissing people for TikTok and the part that had just talked to scary-powerful Green Bay attorneys at Kettle's because Katie Price asked her to.

"Katie."

"Yes."

Wil glanced over. Katie was looking right at her. "Will you film my kiss on Saturday?"

At the next stoplight, Katie leaned over and kissed Wil's neck.