Chapter 13 Tara

Chapter 13

Tara

H olly was killing her. She was wearing a long black sweater that hugged her body over fleece-lined leggings covered in little pink skulls, her hair caught in a low ponytail under a beanie. She was always incredibly hot, but Tara was finding that, when she wasn't dressing for work, Holly's personal style leaned into her emo girl roots, and it was irresistible. The more she dropped all the characters she was playing and let herself get a little messy, the more Tara wanted her.

She also did a thing that Tara was pretty sure she didn't know she was doing, which was whine a little in the back of her throat every time Tara exhibited any top energy. Which made Tara lean into it more. By the time they actually got to bed tonight, Tara was going to be a powder keg, and the only recourse she had was to light Holly on fire.

She was trying to stretch out the anticipation and cool them both down by insisting they make these snowmen, even though she was terrible at it and she hated to do things she was terrible at. She didn't expect either of them to try very hard, since obviously the returning Carrigan's guests were in it to win it.

Holly, however, was seriously gathering and piling up snow, and Tara's competitive streak immediately kicked in.

"Okay. Here's the thing about building a snowman when you're not skilled," Holly told her. "You don't want to build up. It takes too much time to get it stable. You want to do something close to the ground, like a… turtle."

They built a very mediocre turtle, in between sneaking snowballs down one another's shirts and sharing glances that should have melted all the snow in New York. Tara was deeply grateful for how distracting Holly was. This was the first time she'd been around Miriam and Noelle as a couple.

Tara and Miriam had been together for years, and in some ways, Miriam was still frozen in her memory that way. Enough that there was some cognitive dissonance at seeing her happily engaged to another woman. They were adorable together, in a way that made Tara's heart hurt. Not out of jealousy, but awareness that she didn't have that and, if she got the life she was planning for, she never would.

It helped that this Miriam, a year out, was so clearly different from the one who had left Charleston "for a week to sit shiva." She held her body more loosely, laughed more easily. She was less prone to disassociate in the middle of conversations, a little more frenetic. This was, Tara guessed, what she would have always been like, if not for her trauma.

There was something very unsettling about the idea that trauma had been what made Miriam a good match as a wife for Tara. Thankfully, she was saved from delving too deeply into this by Holly sticking an ice-cold hand up the back of her sweater.

"That's it!" Tara grabbed Holly's hand and dragged her toward a snowmobile. To Noelle she said, "I'm going to get Holly out of these wet clothes."

Noelle grinned knowingly. "Wouldn't want her to catch a cold, after all. Try to be back down for the cake, okay?"

"We'll try," Tara told her, though she had her doubts.

She thought she heard Noelle say something about the pond having magical Cupid powers but she had to be joking.

The two of them held hands and walk-ran through the near-empty inn. Mrs. Matthews poked her head through the kitchen door at the noise, but when she saw them, she just waved and winked. It wasn't clear who was pulling whom, and Tara wanted to stay in control, but she was willing to let herself be a part of this tug-of-war as long as it got them to a bed sooner.

Inside their room, Tara locked the door and began stalking, slowly, toward Holly. She was going to slow this down, take back control. Because it turned Holly on when she was bossy, and because she had made certain promises and she intended to keep them.

Holly launched herself, like a spider monkey, at Tara, and they tumbled to the floor in front of the fire, Holly's legs wrapping around Tara's waist. Their mouths fused together, hands going everywhere. Tara tried to strip Holly out of her sweater, but her hands began to wander once they met skin.

Holly was trying to unbutton Tara's jeans, the button stuck because of the cold and wet. "I want to undress you," Holly complained.

"I want to do the same, but I think it's going to take all night if we do it this way." Tara laughed, and sat up, pulling Holly with her so that she sat in Tara's lap. "Let's start with this sweater."

Slowly, one piece at a time, they peeled leggings and boots and socks off, leaving them in a damp pile on the floor that Tara was, for once in her life, too distracted to hang up in the bathroom so it wouldn't ruin the carpet. She watched Holly's long limbs come uncovered and ran her hands along the black and gray tattoo work that covered her thighs. Holly shivered under her touch.

It was almost too much, the tan where her work clothes didn't cover, one arm darker than the other from driving in the summer and fall, the pale, freckled redhead skin she usually kept covered. The scorpions and spiders, skulls pierced by knives and bottles of poison scattered across her torso and thighs. Tara wanted to catalog them all. Later.

Holly's eyes were on her, too, laser focused on her breasts as she unhooked her wet bra and peeled it off. This part… she always got off track at this part. The part where someone else had to see her, and she had to let herself be seen.

The fire in Holly's eyes went a long way toward vanquishing that fear, but nothing could make it go away completely. No matter how badly she wanted to be naked with this woman—and she wasn't sure she'd ever wanted to be naked with anyone more—she still wished they could do this in darkness, hands and tongues making perfection out of flawed human flesh.

Not that Holly was flawed. Holly, naked, was life-altering. Jesus Fucking Christ.

Holly raised her eyebrows as if to say, Your move , and Tara pushed her back onto the floor, taking control and taking her brain out of the equation.

She'd promised Holly the sex of her life, and she was intent on delivering.

Reaching up, she grabbed a pillow off the bed and wedged it under Holly's hips. Smirking, she began kissing down Holly's body, spending as much time as she wanted on every part that caught her attention. She did love the curve of a woman's hip. Her gaze, then her fingers, then her tongue moved lower, until she was where she intended to spend the next several hours.

They didn't make it down for cake.

When Tara checked her phone, her texts were full of filthy emojis from her friends and smirks from Cole.

She wanted to tell Cole that she and Holly still weren't dating, just friends doing each other favors that involved orgasms, but she was worried Miriam or Hannah would read his texts over his shoulder. Besides, if he'd decided that because he was living his own love story she must be as well, she wouldn't be able to convince him otherwise. He would have to see it to believe it.

From inside the tangle of their bodies, Tara ran her fingers lightly down Holly's spine. "We should make an appearance before everyone goes to bed."

Holly peeked up at her through a curtain of hair. "You don't think us very obviously disappearing for sex is going to convince people that we're dating?"

"Oh no, I do think they're convinced about that," Tara said. "I also think it's rude that we're here for a wedding but missing the wedding events."

Holly groaned but rolled over to start finding her clothes. "I'm only leaving this bed because I adore your Carrigan's friends, and I hate your Charleston friends, and I want you to consider abandoning them to move here."

"You don't even know my Charleston friends," Tara protested. Not very convincingly.

Holly looked up at her while pulling her jeans up. "Are they not terrible?"

They weren't all terrible. She was friendly with queer activists and community organizers, and other people doing the work to try to reform—or deconstruct—the South Carolina legal system. Admittedly, she mostly socialized with people she hated, and it wore on her.

It wore even more on the people she dated.

"I'm never moving to Carrigan's," Tara said instead of answering. "I may love these weirdos, but there's no way in hell I'm leaving my beautiful port city for the snow and woods and nothingness."

She couldn't figure out why everyone suddenly seemed to think that she, a dyed-in-the-wool Southern belle, from her perfectly pedicured toes up to her blond highlights, might want to leave a place so deeply ingrained in her identity. Carrigan's was the polar opposite of her life, practically a mirror universe. It wasn't for her.

Holly stared at her for a long moment, and Tara tried not to get distracted by her in her lacy bralette. "Even if Cole stays here for good?"

Tara sighed, her heart constricting.

It was ridiculous to think she couldn't live without Cole. No one couldn't live without their childhood best friend. Except Hannah, maybe, but she'd fallen in love with hers. Tara had been fine the year she'd gone to boarding school, and the months that Cole was in New Zealand and off the grid. Sure, she'd come back from school with some self-destructive habits. And she'd been an absolute fucking mess while Cole was gone, but that was because she was in the middle of a breakup.

Cole could live without her just fine, and she wasn't going to need him more than he needed her. So, she would survive.

"I'm not throwing away my whole life plan because Cole fell in love."

Holly made a noise in her throat but didn't say anything else. Instead, she pulled on a hoodie, and Tara was finally able to look away and start putting on her own clothes.

"Okay!" she said. "Let's go put on another show."

"I don't really get why you're pretending," Holly said. "Or, I guess, why we are. I don't see your friends as the kind of people who would judge you for coming solo."

Tara blew out a breath as she tried to tame the hair that had gotten frizzy when she pulled her sweater over it. "I know, I shouldn't have panicked to begin with, but now that we're here and they're being so damn nice, and working so hard to make me feel welcome… I can't tell them I lied to them. They would be so disappointed. Please, I can't face that. They can never know."

The only thing more humiliating than coming to her ex's wedding single would be her friends finding out she'd faked a relationship. If she became a problem they felt they needed to fix, at best they would pity her, and at worst… they would decide she was too much work. She already wasn't good enough for her friends; she didn't need to also be a burden.

"Okay," Holly said, shrugging like she didn't agree, but this wasn't her life. It was Tara's. "They'll never know."