“Look at this,” I admonished him as I combed out his thick mane. “When was the last time you brushed your hair? This is a rats’ nest, sir. It’s atrocious.”
Will sniffed, but kept his gaze pointed obediently at the floor. “I’ve been going for the mysterious mountain man look. It helps me play hard-to-get with the ladies.”
“I’m not sure your strategy is working,” I replied. “Look at what happened last night.”
He leered at me through the hair I’d combed flat on either side of his face. It was immensely unflattering, even for him.
“Maybe you should do it like this,” I said. “It’s brushed down, but with your hair in your face, you’re totally unfuckable.” It was a lie, but it was fun to rile him up.
Will sniffed and muttered something like, “More like unrecognizable.” But that didn’t make any sense.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he replied quickly. “Look, I actually like it long, all right? If you have to do this, keep it long enough to pull back. Nothing too short.”
I opened my mouth to argue that his cheekbones were dying to be shown off, and his hair kind of shrouded his good looks. But at the same time, I found that I agreed. Will’s hair was sort of synonymous with his character. It was impossible to imagine him with the short, average cut that most men would have.
“Just a trim and some shape,” I assured him as I continued combing out his waves, marveling at just how many shades of blond and brown there could be on one person’s head. His hair really was beautiful. I didn’t blame his vanity at all. “How about this?” I ran my hands over his beard, and Will hummed under my touch. “Would you ever let me shave this off?”
He twisted around, clearly appalled. “You don’t like the beard either?”
I hid a smile and shook my head. “No, it’s not that.” And it wasn’t. Though previously I’d never much liked men with facial hair, Will’s fit him. “I just…I want to see what you look like. I want to see your whole face.”
Slowly, Will and I were learning to bare ourselves to each other. I just wanted to see everything he was. I wanted to see his whole self, inside and out—whatever that was.
He blinked at me, then turned back around. “Maybe one day,” he said, though his tone wasn’t particularly optimistic. “But not today.”
I decided not to press my luck.
We remained comfortably silent while I snipped away at his hair. I hadn’t done it in years—not since college, when I used to cut boys’ hair in my dorm for extra cash. It was one of the skills Mama had given me, and not something I would forget easily, working meditatively through the layers.
“You all right down there?” I asked at one point, realizing it had been a good fifteen minutes since either of us had said a word.
“Yeah,” Will practically purred with a deep sigh. “Your touch just feels…good,” he murmured with closed eyes. “It feels…right.”
The word hovered in the air for a minute, but I was more shocked to discover how much I agreed with the sentiment than with the fact that he had said it. Will’s eyes opened, their green piercing through my confusion.
Hastily, I nodded. “Good,” I said, turning back to his hair. “Good.”
I continued snipping, letting my mind wander as I did. Not for the first time, I noticed just how nice his house really was. The paintings that scattered the walls were real, not cheap prints, and the mid-century modern furnishings were the kind that looked comfortable, but cost an arm and a leg in real life. I was no interior design whiz, but everything in the place seemed to be top-of-the-line. Which led me back to wondering just how he was able to afford it.
“Will?” I asked as I combed out another lock to cut.
“Hmmm?” His voice was thick with hazy contentment. He was really enjoying this, and I almost hated to ruin it.
“What did you do in New York?”
“Mmmm what?”
“For Benny Amaya,” I said as I snipped a few inches off the back. “You said you were a part of his team. What did you do for him?”
I couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders tensed visibly. “I…I was his assistant.”
I frowned. That made absolutely no sense. An assistant wouldn’t just take off the way Will had—not without throwing away an entire career. And he wouldn’t have had the means to live like this without a job for four years.
“Then how could you afford a place like this?” I pressed. “Why don’t you have to work?”
Will opened his eyes and twisted toward me. “What’s the likelihood that you’re going to let me be completely vague about this?”
I tapped the closed tips of the scissors on the heel of my palm, like I was thinking. “Oh…slim to none.”
I tried to keep it light, but the truth was, I needed him to be totally honest. Will shoved me out of his house last night because he couldn’t deal with opening up to me. I needed to know that wouldn’t happen again.
Will sighed and turned back around. “I helped Benny promote stuff. But the money for this place came from…a trust fund of sorts,” he said. “I decided to put it to good use.”
Oh. So…Will was rich. And his parents were rich. And his people were rich.
Well, it explained the nice furnishings, at least.
“So you took your trust fund and ran?” I asked before I could stop myself.
But really. It was one thing to hate your parents, enough even that you couldn’t comfort your mother when her husband died. In my own way, I could kind of understand that. I had had plenty of moments with my own mother where enough was enough. But it was a total other thing to do it while accepting their money.
“I never said I was a good man, Maggie,” said Will quietly. “In fact, I think I keep telling you the opposite.”
I paused. He said it so matter-of-factly, it about broke my heart, especially since I knew the opposite to be true. Will was a good man—a very good man. If only he’d let himself acknowledge it.
“Then I know you better than you know yourself,” I said, coming around to bend down in front of him. I pulled strands of his hair on both sides to compare their lengths. “Because I don’t believe that for a minute.”
He caught my hand and pulled it around to kiss the palm, keeping his face pressed into the sensitive skin for a moment longer than was necessarily. “And you have no idea how grateful I am for that.”
He released me, and I went back to cutting his hair in silence. I didn’t press him any more on his past, and he didn’t offer anything else either. In the end, maybe it didn’t matter anyway.
“All right,” I said sometime later. “You’re done.”
I brushed off the remainder of hair still on his towel, then pulled it off his shoulders and shook it onto the floor with the other clippings.
“I’m going to shower,” he said, shaking his head side to side like a dog. “How do I look?”
I perused his big body—the way his hair now fell in gentle layers just to his shoulders, making the clean lines of his collarbones stand out in high relief over the flat planes of muscle and stacked abdominals. Good Lord. What had I just done?
“You look good,” I said, my voice suddenly thick.
Will’s gaze traveled up and down my body, still clad in only my swimsuit. It was a typical sport one-piece—certainly nothing even close to the skimpy bikinis that would be out all over the lake by midday. But I knew without looking that everything I had was standing at attention, plain for him to see.
“You sure you don’t want to join me, Lil?” he said. His gaze lingering over my breasts for a moment before dragging back up to my face. “The water’s warm, remember?”
I should have laughed. That was a seriously corny line. But Will’s expression, suddenly free of the heavy curtains of hair, carried absolutely no humor in it—only lust.
I cleared my throat. “I—I’m good, thanks.”
His mouth curved in another half smile. One that brought out a shado
w of a dimple under his thick scruff.
“Shame,” he murmured as he turned toward the stairs. At the top, he stopped. “Before we go, I’ll give you a tour, all right?”
I looked up from where I was still trying to cool my rising body temperature. “Really?”
Will shrugged. “It’s the least I can do after kicking you out last night. I want you here, Lil. Everywhere.”
“Sounds good.”
I grinned, and when Will grinned back, I had to hold onto the counter to keep standing up straight. Maybe it was better the guy never smiled. He could do real damage with those pearly whites.
22
We meandered around the property for over an hour after Will loaned me a pair of old sweatpants and a t-shirt I could wear while my swimsuit dried on the deck. I needed to get back to the house. We had a lot of drywall to put up this week, and it wasn’t fair to leave it all to Lucas, who had probably shown up just after Will and I started swimming. But Will was finally opening up a little, and I wasn’t about to shut that down for a bit of home improvement. And maybe, if I was being honest, there was also a part of me that just didn’t want to go home and face my mother. Or my future. Or the fact that somewhere in the back of my mind, I suspected they were one and the same.
The lot was much bigger than I’d thought, extending past the road up to the top of the mountain and running down to the water. Will basically owned an entire compound that allowed him to exist off the grid. He informed me that on the mountain side of the property, he had installed a well, a septic system, and a small solar array that powered his house most of the year. Down at the bottom, he showed me the boathouse, in which he kept a canoe and a kayak, as well as a bunch of exercise equipment that basically looked like a CrossFit gym. Well, that explained his exemplary physique.
But it was the rest of the house that I was the most interested in, since it said the most about him. The upstairs was the plush, loft-like space with a bathroom. But the downstairs had three other rooms besides the bedroom, all of them with an entire wall of windows that looked through the trees to the lake, each of them containing surprises.
The first shocked the hell out of me. I had been expecting a tame office, or maybe a guest room (though a reclusive misanthrope like Will having a guest room was probably less likely than discovering the Cave of Wonders inside his house). Instead, we walked into a real, miniature movie theater with two rows of seats facing a massive projector screen, and an entire wall of DVDs opposite the picture window, which Will assured me could be covered to darken the room for viewings.
I gaped. “Wow,” I said as I perused the wall. “Bit of a movie buff, huh?”
Will shrugged, staying by the door. “A little. But there are some films you have to see on a big screen. It’s just not the same otherwise.”
“I guess. Wow, you must have every Cary Grant film ever made.” I pulled out a copy of His Girl Friday and waved it at him. “This one’s my favorite. Rosalind Russell is a badass.”
Will chuckled. “For sure.”
I continued perusing his collection, which was arranged alphabetically. “Whatever happened to ‘Netflix and chill,’ huh?”
Will didn’t smile though, just sagged in the doorway as he watched me moving around the room. “I don’t have internet access. Not to mention streaming quality on most films is shit. Come on. There’s more.”
We went to the next room, and I smiled, feeling a little like Goldilocks this time, trying out all the rooms. Will gestured into an office that was lined with built-in bookshelves, all of them stacked floor to ceiling with books.
“Holy smokes,” I murmured as I took in the books. While his library was small compared to something like a university, it was comprehensive. I stared at the titles, seeing everything from Shakespeare to Chinua Achebe. He had a propensity for post-war fiction—there was a complete set of well-thumbed Kerouac books near the desk, and a first edition of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on one shelf.
The desk itself was piled high with papers—two stacks of crooked white packets that framed a laptop computer and a small printer on one side. It was a desk where someone spent a lot of time. The work was scattered, and there were a few old coffee cups in one corner.
I turned around. “I thought you said you didn’t have internet access.”
Will shook his head. “I don’t. I did before, but even then, I mostly used it to type. The internet is…a distraction. I fucking hate it.”
I put a pin in that. He spoke with a lot of vitriol for something that was so ordinary to most people our age. What was the point in hating the internet? It was everywhere.
“So…what did you type?” I asked instead, looking back at the stacks of papers.
“Well…” Will traced the edge of the desk with one finger. “I actually went to school for a while online and got my degree. And my MFA.”
My eyes bugged even further. “What?” Up until now I had mostly just imagined Will roaming the countryside with an ax like some kind of demented woodsman. Not studying. Not reading books.
He grabbed his knot of hair meditatively, squeezing it like a stress ball before his hand drifted down to massage his neck. “I…had a bit of time on my hands since moving out here. I figured I’d do something productive for once in my life.”
I looked back at the room. I didn’t know why I assumed that Will had no intellectual education. He must have if he had gone into marketing, but I wasn’t expecting such refined taste on his part. Maybe he had washboard abs and lived like an ascetic lumberjack, but he was also well spoken and intelligent, and as I looked around, clearly very well read.
For once in my life. What was he talking about? Drugs, maybe? Working in the entertainment industry? Advertising?
Something didn’t quite match up.
“What was the MFA in?” I asked, looking sideways at the stacks of papers again.
Will worried his mouth a little. It made me want to kiss him. “Screenwriting, actually. It’s, um, sort of a hobby now. In my spare time. Which is most of my time. So I have a lot of them.”
He gestured shyly at the papers, which I then realize were clipped into separate files about a half inch thick.
“Fletcher’s Creek,” I read sideways. “‘One man’s journey through the heart of America.’”
“That one’s junk,” Will said quickly, swiping the screenplay off the desk and tossing it in the trash. “It’s just a rip-off of Into the Wild. I’ve done much better since.”
I glanced over at the others, but couldn’t read any other titles as quickly. “Can I read one?”
Will frowned. “They’re not any good. I don’t really show them to anyone.”
I tipped my head to the side, trying to make out the words on a screenplay on the other side of the desk. “You’ll never know unless you put it out there.”
He pressed his lips together and stared at his hands as a light flush ran up his neck. For some reason, the suggestion obviously made him very uncomfortable.
“Tell you what,” he said finally. “I’ll let you read one if you let me record you in the studio.”
My head jerked up from the papers. “The what now?”
The sly half smile returned. “Come on, Lil. There’s one more room down here.”
He took my hand and guided me out of the office and down the hall to the final room at the end. When we entered, my eyes practically popped out of my head.
“What. Is. This?”
Next to me, Will chuckled. “You like it?”
I turned to him. “This is a recording studio. A real recording studio. Why in the world do you have a recording studio in your house?” A thought chilled me. No. It couldn’t be. “You didn’t…you didn’t put this in here for me, did you?”
As soon as I said it, I realized how ridiculous it sounded. Will and I had known each other for a matter of weeks. It would have taken much longer to install something like this in his house, much less underneath my nose.
Will snorted.
“Considering I didn’t know you when I moved here four years ago, and it would be pretty impossible to do something like this in the time since we met, no, Lil. This isn’t for you. But I’m flattered, you narcissist.”
I socked him on the arm, and he chuckled more as he slung an arm over my shoulder and pulled me in for a kiss—the kind that made me stop thinking about mysterious screenplays and movie theaters. The wide smile on his face cheered. Even if it was at my expense, one day I was going to make Will Baker laugh for real. I could feel it.
He released me, and I turned back to the small room, walking around the calm, simple space. Unlike the previous two rooms, this one had no window, to keep the sound confined. The walls were padded with brown leather, and several instruments were set up on the rug beside the sound equipment: a bunch of guitars, a set of keys, and a drum set. All of them were pristine, top-of-the-line pieces. Through a small glass window I could see a tiny control room with space enough for maybe two people to sit comfortably behind the mixing console.
I fingered the cord hanging off a microphone. “So, why do you have all of this? Are you a musician too?”
For some reason—I couldn’t tell you why—the idea hurt. Music was my thing, one of the only parts in my life that ever defined me in a good way. It started when I was little, playing on my friends’ pianos. One of their parents had been a music teacher who had taken pity on me—the poor kid with a mess for a mother—and had given me lessons once a week. But it wasn’t until I got my first guitar, the Yamaha Mama found without strings at a yard sale, that I really found my passion for it. I saved up for some strings and learned to play simple chords from YouTube tutorials on the school computers, but it didn’t take long before I was sounding out songs by myself, and eventually writing my own. I wasn’t well trained, as more than one professor at NYU had informed me, but I did have raw talent. This I’d always known.
Vote Then Read: Volume I Page 193