It goes on like that for a while—his hips slotted against hers, rocking gently, her fingertips sneaking up underneath his shirt.Will’s blood thuds wildly in his ears. Exactly nobody would accuse him of being the kind of person who has ever been caught up in a moment, but still there’s something about this woman—her mouth, her smell, her heartbeat—that has him forgetting all about the party still clanging on the other side of the hedgerows. That has him forgetting about everything he’s lost. He’s reaching up underneath her skirt, fingertips just brushing the smooth, hot skin of her thigh, when someone rounds the leafy corner beside them and stops so short they nearly trip.
“Whoops!” the guy says. In the moment before he turns around and scurries back off the way he came Will vaguely recognizes him as the host of a morning game show Charlie used to watch sometimes when he was hungover. “Sorry!”
“Um,” Will calls after him, his voice sounding strangled, “just a second!”
Lilly starts laughing again then, her whole body shaking with silent giggles as her forehead drops down against his shoulder. “What?” Will asks, feeling himself flush.
“‘Just a second’?” she mimics, looking up at him fondly. “It’s not a bathroom.”
Will laughs, too, he can’t help it—one hand cupping the back of her neck, feeling her pulse tick underneath his fingertips. Her cheeks are warm and pink. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he replies, trying to maintain a single shred of dignity. “What should I have said, exactly?”
“I don’t know,” Lilly says, still smiling. “Not that.”
“No,” he agrees softly. “Not that.”
They look at each other, breathing. Will drops his hands to his sides. He wants to kiss her again, but he feels like maybe the moment is over. “Should we stagger our exits?” he asks finally, and hecan’t tell if the look that flickers across her face is disappointment or not.
“Oh, for sure,” she tells him seriously, plucking a twig from his hair and twirling the stem between two delicate fingers. “That’ll fool them.” She grins. “Nice to meet you, Will Darcy,” she tells him, then yanks his belt loop once, hard, before turning and disappearing into the darkness.
Will watches her go for a minute, dazed and dazzled, half expecting her to have left a glass slipper in her wake. He meant to get her phone number. He meant to ask her if she wanted to elope. It feels like he’s been underwater for the last three months and only just finally surfaced, stunned and gasping, the sun bone-bleachingly bright on his skin.
He does in fact get lost in the fucking hedge maze, a combination of lust and alcohol and a general inability to navigate any cartographic system that isn’t a grid. When he finally bursts back out into the garden he nearly crashes right into Caroline, who’s standing on the grass with a glass of white wine in her hand, mouth slightly agape. “Were you just in there with Lilly Benedetto?” she accuses, pointing at him with one manicured finger.
“I—no. Yes?” Will confesses before he can think better of it. His head is still swimming pleasantly, which is why it takes him a beat to register the dark, vaguely dangerous hilarity in her voice. “Why, who’s Lilly Benedetto?”
Caro laughs. “See, this is why I love you, William. You’re like a weird homeschooled child who reads the book of Revelation for fun and thinks the devil lives in his boom box.” Caroline grins. “The Benedettos are a bunch of reality show trash bags who got famous for being famous and now spend their one wild and precious life getting in drunken catfights at the openings ofnot-quite-exclusive nightclubs and shilling collagen powder on TikTok.”
Will feels the horror blooming like black mold inside him. “I—what?” he asks. “No.”
“Did I just hear something about Will fooling around with Lilly Benedetto in the hedge maze?” Lucy asks delightedly, hurrying up to them with a glass of champagne in one hand and Charlie at her heels.
“He didn’t know who she was,” Caro says, in his defense. “But now he’s going to go dunk his penis in bleach as a precautionary measure.”
“We didn’t—I mean—” Will sputters. “My penis is fine.”
“That’s a relief,” Lucy says. “Is Lilly the one who was married to the anti-vax football player for a week and then got an annulment? Or the one who had the skincare line and then all the products turned out to be made of ground-up animal bones from Mexico?”
“You guys are mean,” Charlie protests. “I just talked to June for like half an hour, and she’s a total sweetheart.”
“Oh,everyoneis meeting the Benedettos this fine evening, I see.” Caroline shakes her head. “June’s the one who threw the unironic Gatsby party where everyone got listeria and had to be hospitalized,” she reminds Lucy. “Lilly is the one who had the tacky boyfriend, the Pepperoni Pirate or whatever from the dad’s pizza place? The one who died from, like, doing whippets or eating Tide Pods?”
“Oh my god, I had forgotten all about that,” Lucy says, shaking her head. “Better watch yourself around common household chemicals, Will.”
Will bites back a grimace, but barely; if there’s one thing he truly hates, it’s drawing unnecessary attention to himself.In that case, you picked a weird line of work, Charlie always says, and Will never quite knows how to explain that for him acting is the opposite thing entirely, that the main appeal of the entire endeavor is disappearing into someone else—the knowledge that, if he does his job right, people will forget he exists altogether. The worst part of being in the hospital—besides all the other worst parts about being in the hospital—was the feeling of everyone looking at him all the time.
“Didn’t she give them to him or something?” Lucy is asking now, pulling her phone out of her purse to confirm. Charlie has already been absorbed back into the party, charming a pair of washed-up sitcom stars across the patio. Will wishes he could evaporate into thin air. “The Tide Pods? I’m trying to remember the story.”
“Did you guys have a chance to cover that during your time together in the hedge maze, Will?” Caroline asks teasingly. “Or were you otherwise engaged?”
Will scowls. “Can you lay off, please?” he asks, knowing he sounds peevish. His entire body feels like it’s on fire, his skin burning with shame and regret. “I can promise you I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near her if I had known she was a reality show trash bag who killed her boyfriend with Tide Pods.”
“It was heroin, actually,” says a pleasant voice behind him. “And he got it all on his own.”
Will feels the heat drain abruptly out of his body, his blood turning to seawater in his veins. When he turns around there’s Lilly with her shoulders back and feet planted on the bluestone,her expression haughty and regal and—oh, fuck him—possibly just the tiniest bit hurt. Her lips are swollen from kissing. Will can feel that his are, too.
“That’s not—” he begins, then completely fails to follow it up in any meaningful way. If he was ashamed of himself a minute ago it’s nothing compared to the way he feels now: the nearly irresistible urge to find the nearest luxury vehicle and lie down directly in front of it. “I didn’t—” He breaks off again. Lucy is staring down at the patio. Caroline clears her throat.
Lilly fixes them with a reality show smile that’s nothing short of luminous, warm and winning and profoundly insincere. “Welcome to Pemberly Grove, neighbors,” she tells them, then lifts her middle finger in their direction and stalks back into the house.
