Meet the Benedettos by Katie Cotugno

Author:Katie Cotugno
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Will

As soon as the movie premieres Charlie has about ten thousand places he needs to be in rapid succession: New York and London and Tokyo and Beijing. Will gets back from set close to midnight and finds him packing a suitcase the size of a conversion van, listening to a guided meditation on his phone. “Shouldn’t you get an assistant to do this kind of thing for you?” Will asks, standing in his bedroom doorway eating a bowl of ice cream while Matthew McConaughey gently encourages them to imagine themselves as trees.

Charlie dumps an armful of socks into the bag. “I had one,” he says mournfully, “but then all my underwear started disappearing one pair at a time.”

“Fair enough.” Will stands there for another moment, shifting his weight uncomfortably. Caroline cornered him in the bathroom this morning, waving her phone in his face: “Literally every piece of press about this movie mentions June Benedetto in the first paragraph,” she seethed, sleek blond hair beginning to frizz a bit around her temples. “Every single article, William! You need to talk to him.”

“I need to talk to him?” Will spat a mouthful of toothpaste into the sink. “Why me?”

“You know why,” Caroline shot back immediately. “You’re his best friend. He trusts you. It sounds different when you say it.” She shrugged. “Also, he’s mad at me for sending those flowers to Anne Mulgrew and signing his name to the card.”

Will wiped her mouth with the back of his hand. “Can’t imagine why.”

“I’m serious!” Caroline wailed. “If there’s one thing those women know how to do, it’s bottom-feed. Her mother is already on the Sinclair doing that winking, purposely coy no-comment bullshit. It’s tacky. It makes Charlie look tacky.” She caught his gaze in the mirror then, lifted her sharp, elegant chin. “He’s better than that, don’t you think?”

Now Will grits his teeth, watching as Charlie packs his jeans and his running shoes, the expensive vintage watch he bought when he booked Major Fantastic and then ruined in the pool by mistake. He still wears it, the thing winking uselessly on his wrist in the pages of People and Us Weekly and In Touch. If he needs to know the time he checks his phone. “Look,” he begins, “about June.”

Right away, Charlie shakes his head. “Don’t,” he says, turning his attention to the half dozen bottles of cologne on the dresser. “Seriously, dude—”

“I’m not!” Will protests immediately. “I’m not. But if I was . . .” He thinks of Cinta Benedetto plotting her reality show comeback across the development. He thinks of Lilly’s face as she turned away from him at the premiere. He thinks of New York and of Hamlet, of letting himself want something—letting himself believe he could have it, even—only to realize the joke was on him the entire time. “It isn’t worth it, man.”

Charlie smirks at that. “What,” he asks, “love?”

Will shrugs. “I don’t know,” he answers honestly, and it comes out a lot quieter than he means for it to.

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