Chapter Thirty-Two
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Will feeds me roasted sweet potatoes served over a homemade lemon garlic aioli, garnished with chile-and-honey-buttered pepitas. He got flour tortillas from Matt’s El Rancho, stuffed them full of fried cauliflower and guacamole. There’s a salad with three ingredients—leafy greens, lemon juice, olive oil—and it might be the best thing I’ve ever tasted. For dessert, he pulls chocolate chip cookies out of the oven, slathers homemade strawberry ice cream between two of them, and rolls the whole thing in coconut flakes. It’s more delicious than a home-cooked meal has any right to be, and when I say as much to Will, he rubs at his neck.
We eat the cookie sandwiches on his back porch, where the sun gleams into our eyes and melts the ice cream until it’s dripping down my hand. He polishes his dessert off and then sucks on my fingers, his hot eyes on mine the whole time.
“What’s the verdict?” he asks.
“I will eat all your leftovers.”
“Somebody’s got to.”
“I will buy sound machines and earplugs to block out your snores.”
“I’ll visit an ENT to see if there’s a surgery I can have,” he promises.
“I don’t mind the snoring,” I say. “It’s just a reminder I’m not alone.”
We sit on that porch even after the sun goes down. Will’s hands curl around my body, adjusting me until I can lie across him and fall halfway asleep while he tells me more stories about New York, cooking school, his secret double life as a line cook. All the places he wants to take me when we visit Manhattan together.
“Will we see Zoe?” I ask.
“Definitely,” Will says. “She’s already talked about having you over to her place on the Upper West Side.”
“Does she know you put in an offer on this place?”
Will’s lips curve up. “Zoe’s the one who sent me the listing.”
After a beat I admit, “Our relationship will always be different now. Hers and mine. I want to be her friend again, but I know it won’t be like it was before.”
He sits with this. One of my favorite things about Will is he never hurries to fill a silence during a loaded conversation. He speaks only when he’s sure of what he wants to say.
“Zoe’s different now. Just like you’re different. Just like I’m different,” Will says. “Of course it won’t be like before. It can’t be. But that doesn’t mean you two can’t have a friendship that’s new and special.”
I nod against his shoulder, silently agreeing.
My relationship with Camila will change, too, now that she’s leaving Austin. Maybe this is all just totally natural—important people weaving in and out of your life but never making a permanent exit.
I can hold on to my memories of me and Zoe—reading books side by side at the Sea Island beach, giggling in the back of a classroom, screaming in the bleachers during a football game, whispering our self-doubts to each other from a shared bed—and I can greet her as an adult with our mutual hurt long overturned and buried.
I’ll tell her I’m in love with her twin brother. But she meant the world to me, too, and that happened first. They are two independent facts.
I will tell Camila I’m going to miss her so much—that it will feel like a part of my soul has been sliced off to be carried with her—but I know it’s time for her and David to go.
I don’t realize I’m crying until Will wipes at my cheeks wordlessly, then carries me upstairs to his bedroom and holds me. Neither of us speaks a single word. We hardly even make a sound, as if the silence could be cracked into sharp pieces if it breaks.
When I start to kiss him, he pours his care into the way he kisses me back. With every shiver of my body, every movement of his hands exploring my skin, it’s like he’s sharing my big emotions, giving them another place to live for a while.
“You are my girlfriend,” Will whispers to me as the sun rises the next morning. Light spills through his gigantic windows, cloaking us in a hazy warmth.
“I promise not to have a baby with your best friend,” I whisper back. My index finger pushes in against his dimple, memorizing the shape of it. “And I promise not to dump you because you don’t drink enough.”
“I promise not to move to Canada to play hockey,” Will whispers.
“I think Clay lives in California now.”
“I’ve always hated California.”
“You are my boyfriend,” I whisper to him. And whether Will knows it or not, those four words are actually code for I’m-head-over-heels-in-love-with-you.
We say it back and forth over the next couple of weeks as Will puts in his notice, transitions his clients to their new leads, and packs up his apartment to move to Austin. Every day, it means a little more. Because it usually comes at the beginning or end of a very real conversation about our grandmothers, our most embarrassing moments, our thoughts on Austin’s mayor, the pros and cons of living in Zilker versus East. My casual mention that I got on birth control. The embarrassment of our high school mascot in Nashville, Humboldt the Honeybear.
One day, the director of social media approaches me at work and says, “Does Will Grant still work for us?”
“Yes,” I say nervously. “Why?”
She holds out her phone. “He’s been DM’ing the Revenant account with, like, dog videos and food porn and something called the soft life aesthetic? Like, the type of stuff you’d send to your best friend or your significant other.”
I scroll through the messages, resisting a smile. “What’s the password?”
Marianne groans. “You can’t use the business account as your personal Instagram, Jo! Are you dating him?”
“That wouldn’t be advisable.”
“I’m not giving you the password,” Marianne threatens, grabbing her phone back.
“Why not?”
“Because the last time you logged on to the account you accidentally reposted a meme about hot delivery men.”
I blush, remembering that meme, then burst out laughing.
“Make a personal Instagram, dammit!” Marianne shouts at me as she walks away.
Josie: Marianne won’t give me the insta password. Can we look at all your DMs together the next time I see you?
Will: That is going to take at least forty-five minutes.
Josie: You sent forty-five minutes’ worth of posts to a business account? Fetish much?
Will: brO MAKE A PERSONAL ACCOUNT. I WOULD FUCKING LOVE AN EXCUSE TO STARE AT PICTURES OF YOU
Later that night I download the app and create an account under the username @picturesofjosie. I take one selfie—my hair in a high bun, a hole in the collar of my T-shirt, smile wide, and a big thumbs-up—then post it. I easily find and follow Will, whose Instagram is about as stale as the accounts of most men in their late twenties. But I scroll through his photos anyway. Pictures from college, from sports games, with family members. There’s one photo of him and Zoe in Washington Square Park.
She’s beautiful. Always was, but she’s grown into herself now. In the photo, she’s wearing a red power lip she positively rocks.
I get the notification that he followed me back and bite on a smile.
willGrant27: More.
picturesofjosie: 1 per day.
willGrant27: fine. can you at least make the account private? I don’t want anyone seeing these but me.
picturesofjosie: why, because they’re so scandalous?
willGrant27: because I don’t want to share presents from my girlfriend
Will moves to Austin toward the end of August, with one more week left at Ellis, totally remote, and one client project pending (mine). I wish I could road-trip with him from New York to Texas, but I can’t manage the time off from work. Still, I show up to help him unpack with a box full of wine and a plastic bag of medicine from Walgreens. Brooks stops by with little Marshall, a six-pack of beer, and a big, fat smile on his face. So does one of Will’s old clients—the guy Will cycles with, whom he considers a friend now.
He gets to know David better when we go on a double date with him and Camila. Now that their move is out in the open, it’s the bulk of what we talk about. The wedding coming up and then a brand-new chapter of their lives, as a married couple.
Later at my house when we’re lying in bed, I ask him if he’d ever want to pursue a career like David’s.
“Working in a kitchen is just as stressful as working on Wall Street,” he muses. “I’m glad I got that experience, and hats off to David for making a career out of it, but I don’t know if it’s what I’d want to do.”
“What, then?” I ask.
“I have an idea percolating with Brooks,” he says. “Can I tell you when it’s ready?”
“Sure. Whatever you want.”
Will pulls me against him and I rest my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. “I should have known,” he says to the ceiling, absently.
I tilt my chin up. “Known what?”
“That finding you would be the thing to finally set me right again.”
My rib cage isn’t big enough anymore.
I sit up, and Will pulls himself upright, too.
“I want to tell you something about me,” I whisper. “I just don’t know if I’m going to say it as eloquently as you.”
Will lifts me so I’m straddling him. “I’ll parse it,” he promises.
I breathe deeply. “I have felt like an imposter my whole life. I never believed about myself what other people made of me. My high school classmates thought I was aspirational, but really, I was an insecure wreck who found validation in the wrong places. Likes, follows, shopping expeditions, smiles from senior boys. Then I was this inventive college kid with a viral side hustle, but nobody knew how hard I had to work to scrape out the same grades it took other people zero effort to achieve. Nobody knew I was just lucky with my brand, that it isn’t a unique concept, that I was simply single-minded, hyper-fixated, and that’s how I managed it. And now, I’m a CEO, which is just, like, this hilarious fucking joke. Who the hell would sign up to work for me ? It boggles my mind every day. If I showed up to work tomorrow and the whole office had quit, I think I’d say to myself About time. ”
Will says nothing, only rubs a hand up and down my back.
“Then you,” I go on, pushing through my hesitation. “If anyone could have spotted the fraud in me, it would have been you. I was worried that’s exactly what had happened when you told me you’d declined working with me. I was so bitter during that presentation, so adamant about B Corp, because I didn’t want you to think I was an imposter. If you had, I would have believed it, too.”
“It was never about that,” Will whispers. “I was only scared of hurting you more.”
“I know that now,” I say quickly. “And ultimately, you showed me that very first day how much you believed in me.”
“Of course I believed in you,” he says, tucking my hair behind my ear. “It’s impossible not to.”
“The point is, Will. If you don’t think I’m a fraud,” I say, gripping his arms, “then maybe I’m not one. You were the first man to see every messy part of who I am and believe in me anyway.”
Will pulls back just enough to show me his irises, burning firelight blue with understanding. “I want your messy parts.”
“I want yours, too. I want your list of worst things and I want your biggest regrets. I want your bad days. You’re not just a good person, you’re a good-for-me person. And you make—” I break my stride for a deep breath. “You make me feel like I’m worth something more valuable than my actual net worth.”
“Josie,” Will murmurs, his hands on my neck, in my hair, lips on my collarbone. “I love you. I am head over heels in love with you.”
“I love you, too,” I say back, just before he kisses me. We’re helpless.
It came out so simply. His call, my response. I love you.
In this bed—in this city—we found and claimed each other. My heart feels like it’s transforming into something different—bigger and more vulnerable, easily punctured, but better for Will to hold.
He kisses me deeply. Our chests thud in a silent rhythm.
Will’s thumb passes back and forth over my breast. His mouth catches mine on a tiny gasp while my body arches toward him. Quickly, he divests me of my T-shirt, kisses and sucks along my cleavage. It’s just as electrifying as the first time. A month ago, now.
A month of this. A lifetime, if we can earn it.
I tug at his waistband and feel his erection beneath my hand. He groans into my mouth and pushes me back against the mattress, crawling up my body with the stealth of a jungle cat. Using all the familiarity of two people in love, he pulls down my underwear and pushes into my body, quick and seamless and intimate. We both sigh at the feeling, too exquisite to name. Somehow, it gets better every time.
His elbows land on either side of my face. Will’s body starts to move—gentle but firm thrusts I meet as best as I can—and he continues to murmur, “I love you, I love you.” It’s almost inaudible, incredibly disjointed. But the words send me to the edge. I come before him, as always, and he huffs an incredulous laugh, as always, and adds a fucking in the middle of his next I love you. Twice.
I fucking love you, he says. And then, after a few more seconds while his speed picks up: I love fucking you.
I struggle to keep my eyes open, so enveloped by the feel of his body pushing mine to the brink again, but he’s watching my face like it’s the most fascinating thing he’s ever seen, his eyelashes framing his beautiful blue eyes. I try to keep hold of them.
My hands pull against the planes of his chest as my body starts to lose control. It’s in Will’s hands now. Part of my control has been in his hands since that first day. We rock against each other, his hips working hard now, broken I love yous on each of our tongues, and just before my body contracts around him, I think to myself, This is the happiest I’ve ever been.
That’s the exact moment I should have remembered: something still needed to give.