“She once abandoned me with a cart full of groceries in the middle of the Whole Foods in Calabasas because she saw one of the guys fromSupernaturalbuying tricolore pasta salad at the deli counter and followed him right out into the parking lot and all the way home,” Lilly recalls. “So, I suspect she’ll get over it.” She grins. “Do you need to get back to LA right away?”
Will shakes his head. “I can stay for a little bit,” he tells her. “They don’t need me on set until tonight. We’re in the home stretch, anyway. We’ve only got another couple of weeks ’til we wrap.”
Lilly hums. “And then?”
“Back to real life, I guess.” The realization is startling: all he’s wanted since he got here was to go the fuck home where he belongs, but now... He runs the pad of his thumb over the piping on the top sheet. “New York’s not so bad, you know.”
Lilly lifts an eyebrow. “It’s not, huh?”
He shakes his head. “Museums. Galleries. Plenty of places to write.”
“You realize we also have all those things in LA.”
“Seasons.”
“We have those here too, asshole,” she protests. “They’re called Hot and Fire. Get with the program.”
“Sorry, sorry.” Will grins. “I’m just saying, you ever want to come spend some time...”
“I might.”
“You should,” he says. “My place doesn’t have a guest room, but I could probably borrow a blow-up mattress from one of my neighbors, set you up in the hallway or something.”
Lilly laughs out loud. “Fuck you,” she says, clambering inelegantly on top of him. “Kiss me.”
Will does: gently at first and then a little bit deeper, licking his way into her mouth. Lilly kisses him back. She braces her hands against the mattress and drags herself along the length of him, her body hot and slick and ready; the tip of his cock catches, and both of them gasp.
“Hold that thought,” Will manages, reaching down and digging a condom out of his jeans pocket, nudging her onto her back. It’s like reading a new play for the first time, being with her: the possibilities unfolding in front of him, the thrill of not knowing what’s going to happen next. She makes him feel like he could do eight shows a week with no understudy. She makes him want to tryHamletone more time.
They go slower than they did last night, his mouth on her neck and her ear and her sternum. He wants to learn everything she likes. Lilly makes a quiet, approving sound as he reaches down in between them, shifting her hips to take him deeper: “You’re better at sex than I thought you’d be,” she tells him, and Will coughs a short, nervous laugh.
“Uh.” He peers down at her for a moment, not sure exactly how to take that particular declaration. “Thank you?”
“You’re welcome.” Then, seeming to register his sarcasm abeat too late: “It was a compliment. It was!” she insists, off his dubious expression. Her smile is teasing and fond. “At the very least it means I thought about it.”
“Uh-huh,” Will says, but it doesn’t come out quite as dryly as he means for it to. Then, because she’s still looking at him, and because she’s blushing a little across the bridge of her nose, and because it’s not like it isn’t true: “I thought about it, too.”
Lilly likes that: “Oh yeah?” she asks, rolling her hips slow and deep underneath him. “What’d you think?”
“None of your business.” Will bites at her jaw.
“I mean, it’s a little bit my business,” she protests, raking her nails lightly over his rib cage. “Come on, tell me one thing.”
Will considers that for a moment. “Your hair,” he tells her finally, dropping his head to murmur low and quiet into her ear. “Your smile. Your shoulders. Your ass.”
Lilly eyes him, running the sole of one bare foot up and down the back of his calf. “Are you an ass guy?” she asks, sounding interested in spite of herself.
“Not really,” he admits. He feels shy all of a sudden, though not necessarily in a bad way. “Mostly just with you.”
Lilly grins and rolls them, bracing her palms on his chest and boosting herself upright.
She looks like the queen of an ancient civilization. She looks like a Renaissance painting in the Met. She looks like an old-fashioned movie star, but more than any of that she just looks like herself, and as soon as he thinks it Will feels something so surprising and unfamiliar and dangerous that he forgets to move for a second, hips stuttering as he loses the rhythm entirely.
Lilly’s eyes narrow. “Hey,” she says, reaching down and flicking his chest with two fingers, not especially gently. “Pay attention.”
“I am,” he promises, then rolls them one more time so he’s back on top. “I swear to god I am.”
He’s still buried inside her twenty minutes later when her phone buzzes on the nightstand, one quick shrill vibration. “Ignore it,” he advises, sucking a mark on the underside of her breast.
