Chapter 20 Holly

Chapter 20

Holly

T he cakes were assembled, frosted, and safely chilling. Cole had been banned from setting foot back in the kitchen.

Now everyone was gathered in the dining and great rooms in a celebratory combination of a rehearsal dinner for the wedding and an anniversary party for all the couples who'd gotten engaged at Carrigan's over the years. Holly and Tara were seated with Sawyer and Cole, Elijah and Jason Green, Esther Matthews, and an ancient, terrifying woman named Annie who Holly was certain was actually a primeval magical force disguised as an antiques dealer.

As the salad course was served, Holly went to reach across the table for dressing. Her arm brushed against Tara's, and she saw Tara's eyes spark. "Do you need this, darlin?" she asked, passing Holly the silver boat full of Mrs. Matthews's famous vinaigrette.

Holly flushed with embarrassment. "I should have asked instead of reaching. I have those wrong-side-of-the-tracks manners, you know?" She tried to make it a joke.

Tara stopped in the process of passing the dressing to Holly and put down the boat. She took Holly's hand and squeezed, holding on to it instead of letting go. "Your manners are lovely. Those rules are a scam made up by people in power to keep others out of their little club," Tara said. "I know this for sure because I was born into the club." She picked up their clasped hands and kissed Holly's fingers.

Esther smiled at them both. "You two are very cute together."

"We are," Holly agreed, looking at Tara with those heart eyes she'd promised.

"And you kept it a secret from the Carrigan's crew?" Esther said. "That was probably for the best. They get nosy."

As she said this, her eyes tracked to Gavi, who was checking on guest needs.

"Nosy?!" Cole protested. "Us? We would never meddle!"

Everyone turned to look at him, and he grinned unapologetically while stuffing a forkful of salad into his mouth.

"We wanted to have some time to get used to it, time that was just ours," Tara said.

Holly remembered the two of them, singing at the top of their lungs in the car, and how she'd wished for more time exactly like that. In their little bubble, where neither of them was faking or wearing a mask, where they were two people drawn like magnets to each other with no complications. No matter how much she was coming to love this group, if they ever really dated, they would have to figure out a way to carve out some space that was just theirs.

Of course, they wouldn't date.

Tara released her hand to run a finger down Holly's cheek. "Some things don't have to be a group experience," she said, dropping a featherlight kiss on Holly's mouth.

"It's a bit ironic," Annie said to Tara over the next course, "that we never met for all the years you and Miri were engaged, but now here we are, meeting at her wedding to another woman."

Sawyer looked at Annie, and then around the room. "How do you know Miriam, again? And how does she know… all of the rest of these people?"

Annie laughed. "Don't you know about Miri's Old Ladies? We're all junk shop dealers across the country, and she's like our daughter. She checks in on us, makes sure we get to our doctors' appointments, that all our legal affairs are in order, and such. There are many people in this room who would not be in business, or even alive, if not for Miriam Blum."

"But she's based here now, taking care of Carrigan's, isn't she?" Sawyer asked.

Annie waved this off. "Oh, sure, but Noelle and Hannah both knew going in that Miriam came along with the Old Ladies and that she would have to build in time not only to make art but also to travel to all the shops. There was never any question of her abandoning her old friends for her new ones."

The way that all of the team here, not just Noelle and Miriam as a couple, had put their needs on the table and come up with a solution that fit all of them—without sacrificing anyone's happiness or asking anyone to make themselves smaller—was eye-opening. Every part of the life they'd all built here was based on that, not what was expected or what they feared.

"Lawrence!" Elijah called out, hailing a man walking past. He was average height but built stocky, with wide shoulders under his dress shirt. He had brown skin and a black ponytail, and Holly noticed that his knuckles had tattoos that read "Chef" and "Life."

He hugged the Greens and Esther and shook hands with everyone else. "The infamous Tara Chadwick!" he declared. "Cole talks about you incessantly. I'm glad to finally meet you."

Holly wondered how Tara felt about being on the receiving end of so many people who'd heard about her.

"I actually wanted to introduce you to Tara's girlfriend, Holly," Elijah said. "Holly is an experienced waitress and short-order cook, and a fantastic baker. I know you said you might be looking for a pastry chef. Maybe we could lure them both up here?"

Lawrence snagged an empty chair from a nearby table and pulled it up next to her.

"I have actually heard about you," she told him.

He grinned. "All bad things, I assume."

"Ernie said you were the hot chef, between you and Levi," Holly said, and watched his eyes widen. "And she asked me to find out if you were single."

"Oh, I love you. I do not, however, need a pastry chef. I'm focused on staffing my camp for Mohawk kids right now, and I prioritize Native applicants for that."

"As you should!" Holly agreed. "What a rad project."

"Lawrence worked at Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, we should mention," Jason Green told her. "If he's not hiring, Chef Harlow is around somewhere. She has the only Michelin-starred restaurant in the area."

From a table over, a giant red-haired man with an equally giant beard said, in a deep baritone, "A baker and a waitress? I own a cafe, and I would love to chat. Look at our hair, we're basically siblings."

Esther cleared her throat. "Actually, Shoshana Rosenstein offered her a job earlier today, along with culinary school tuition."

"No, no, no, she can't go to Iowa!" Elijah argued. "They both clearly belong in Advent!"

Jason elbowed him. "You want Tara on your trivia team, full-time."

"I need a lawyer friend," Elijah pouted. "No one will be nerdy about the law with me."

Tara raised an eyebrow, and said in that perfect drawl, "As much as I would love to get nerdy about the law with you, I would not flourish above the Mason-Dixon line. I am a delicate hothouse flower, and I can only blossom in climes where the air itself is a weighted blanket."

"We're never visiting Charleston, honey," Sawyer said, his mustache ends turned down in disgust. "Sorry."

Cole shrugged. "Tara's the only person I love there, anyway, and if she won't move here, I'm going to force her to vacation with me in increasingly remote locations without access to electricity for her flat iron until she agrees to leave that horrid place and live somewhere that doesn't suck."

"In Charleston's defense," Holly said, "it's a very lovely city, considering its origins, but there's a certain class of rich person there that's objectively awful, and everyone Cole knows is part of that circle."

"What about Atlanta?" Jason asked. "Still the South, gay as hell, tons of killer activism happening."

"The humidity is still disgusting, so it technically meets your requirements," Cole pointed out.

Holly watched Tara's face, trying to read the tiny twitches in her jaw. Atlanta actually would be a good compromise for Tara. The reach of the Chadwick name extended far enough that it would still open doors for her, allow her into spaces that most activists didn't have access to. She would still be working against the system her relatives had helped build for centuries, from which Tara had so unfairly benefited when she'd gotten into trouble. The problem was, Holly wasn't sure Tara was ready to hear all the different possibilities that would both fit in with what she felt she needed to do and give her some much-needed distance from her family. And allow them to be together for real, since they obviously never could while Tara was still in Charleston.

When Tara finally spoke, her voice was placating, although if you didn't know her well, you probably wouldn't catch it. Putting her arm around Holly's shoulders, she said, "Well, if I'm going to consider any kind of move, I'll have to consult Holly, although it clearly won't be hard for her to find work."

Tara was looking at Lawrence, so she couldn't see Cole's face over her shoulder, but Holly could, and she watched it fall. He knew, like she did, that Tara had no intention of going anywhere.

She was thinking about excusing herself to go back to their room and cry in the bathroom about wanting a woman who would never be right for her when Miriam and Noelle came over to their table and squished an extra chair in. Miriam perched her tiny elven self on Noelle's knee and clapped.

"How did all my favorite people end up at one table?!" she exclaimed.

Annie smiled enigmatically. "I have very powerful magic that attracts people to me."

"I believe it." Noelle laughed. "Are we all ready for tomorrow?"

"Are you ready, is the question," Lawrence asked.

Elijah answered in Noelle's place. "This one's been a wife guy since minute one. I'm shocked it took them a year to get married."

"Hey!" Noelle protested. "My best friend and Miri's best friend were having a big melodramatic Shenanigan and then they had to get married. We were just giving them space."

"Levi does take up a lot of space when he's got his drama pants on," Lawrence confirmed.

Sawyer leaned toward the brides. "What made you decide to get married? I think if I had to guess, I'd have put money on you all being the kind of queer liberationists who think marriage is heteronormative assimilation."

Miriam mirrored his stance. "You ever heard of a pogrom, Sawyer?" she said, sounding like she was ready to give a lecture.

"It's something that happened in Eastern Europe, right, before World War II? Riots that massacred Jews?"

She nodded. "Our Rosenstein ancestor, the one who came from Ukraine to start the bakery, came from a part of the world where once we weren't allowed to live or travel outside of certain places, our vote didn't count for a whole person, and our ability to marry was tightly restricted. I'll never voluntarily hand back a basic human right that my people were once violently denied."

Noelle added, "Besides, marriage equality didn't come from nowhere, as a fight. It came because so many of our own died alone in hospital beds, unable to be with the loves of their lives, who couldn't gain access."

Elijah snapped his fingers in agreement. "And then lost the homes they'd spent their lives in, because they had no legal right to inherit." When everyone looked at him, he shrugged. "I'm an estate lawyer for a reason. And I didn't marry solely for love, either. My ancestors weren't allowed to marry. They can pry marriage from my cold, dead hands."

"Taking the human rights you are due is not assimilation," Miriam said firmly. "We couldn't assimilate if we wanted to."

"And we don't!" Jason exclaimed.

Miriam nodded in agreement. "We don't. Queerness is an extraordinary blessing, and we are gifted to be free of heteronormative patriarchy if we choose to be."

"There was a reason queer people tried to become respectable after the AIDS epidemic," Elijah said gravely. "Because if we could be like them, maybe they would see we were human and they wouldn't let us die next time. It came out of grief and desperation. But there's no amount of normalizing that will make them not hate us. We could be just like them in every way, and they would still let us die. Or kill us."

"There are a lot of great reasons to opt out of the government institution of marriage!" Cole objected.

Miriam conceded this with a nod. "There are, and a lot of brilliant queer theorists have argued against participating in it. For me, I just think… We don't have to re-create straight marriages, we can make ours into any damn thing we want, and it's reasonable to not want a legal marriage, but we're not giving it back. We never give anything back."

Holly stared at Miriam, her giant head of curls practically electric with righteous energy. "Was she always this scary?" she whispered to Tara.

Tara shook her head. "She used to be scared. This is better."

Holly wondered how this new, more radical Miri would have held up to the scrutiny of Charleston high society, or if, in the alternate reality where she'd married Tara, she would have stayed small.

Holly wondered if there was any version of reality where she was with Tara and didn't make herself small.

That night, back in their room, Tara talked excitedly about all the job opportunities Holly had received.

"I know Shoshana offered you a job first, but would working for the Rosensteins be the best path? Imagine how many doors would open with a Michelin-starred restaurant on your CV? You could work in any bakery in the country."

She doesn't hear herself. She can't turn it off.

Instead of trying to tell Tara, again, that she didn't want to work at the best bakeries in the country, she kissed her and dragged her to bed.

Holly tried to be present, knowing how little time they had left, but there was a weight on her heart. If Tara wanted them to be together, she wouldn't be jumping to push Holly off to the Adirondacks, or the Quad Cities. Not that Tara had ever said she wanted them to try a real relationship when all of this was over. That was a dream Holly had conjured up all on her own. And she was going to un-dream it, silently, so Tara would never know.