Chapter 22 Holly

Chapter 22

Holly

H olly found Cole dutifully getting dressed, adjusting the sleeves of his suit coat and fidgeting with his hair—fixing wave by individual wave with his very expensive curler/blow-dryer.

"Nicholas Fraser, are there lobsters embroidered on your suit? For a Jewish wedding?"

He grinned. "I asked Rabbi Ruth and they assured me it was hilarious."

Holly eyed him. "Is hilarious what you were going for?"

"Holly Siobhan Delaney, letting people think I'm hilarious is how I get away with everything. Also, it's fun ."

How did he know her middle name? She suddenly realized he'd probably run a full background check on her, to protect Tara, without telling either of them.

She didn't ask. Instead, she told him, "You're a beautiful blond, blue-eyed cis white man with millions of dollars, Cole. That's how you get away with everything."

"I mean, you're obviously not wrong, but—wait, we should definitely have a conversation about the ways in which the kyriarchy both enables and tightly restricts behavior, but not today! I have to go take pictures, and watch my BFF get married, and dance with my cute boyfriend." He picked up his blow-dryer again, and Holly took it out of his hands.

"Your hair looks perfect. As long as you were going for majestic surfer waves. If not, we need to start over."

He looked in the mirror. "Do you think there's time to start over?" he fretted.

" No. Put on your tie and let's get moving." She put the tie in question in his hands.

He snatched it up, twirled it around, and began to tie it around his neck with a deft hand. He had, apparently, done this a time or two. " So ," he said, "how are things going with you and Tara? Any inconvenient feelings developing?" He waggled his eyebrows at her.

"Look," she sighed, "it would be hard not to develop some romantic feelings for Tara. She's one of the most incredible people I've ever met."

Cole pumped his fist in the air. "Honestly, everyone who's not obsessed with her is wrong."

"It's not that simple, Nicholas. We're way too different for it to ever work."

He made a scoffing noise. "That's fake. Look at Sawyer and me. We're wildly different people. He's an upstanding local politician. I'm…" He trailed off, clearly trying to decide how much to say about what he actually did.

She smirked. "I hate to tell you this, but local politicians and criminals have been in bed together since time immemorial."

"But I love the ocean, and he loves the mountains! I'm an Episcopalian who almost went into the priesthood and he's an atheist! I want us to commit to forever, but he doesn't believe in marriage, and I would never invite the government into my sex life!"

Counting on her fingers, she countered, "You're very rich, so you have a sailboat on the coast and you go there whenever you want. You can have a nice Unitarian commitment ceremony with a humanist minister and never file a marriage license, everyone wins. You almost went into the priesthood ?!"

"Tara's also very rich, which I'm sure can solve several of your problems. We don't talk about the priesthood. If I look too closely at the call to ministry, it gets louder, so we pretend it's not there."

"You're a really odd duck," Holly told him. "Good, but odd."

"It's because I'm a swan," he said seriously, as if this made everything about him make sense. And, honestly, maybe it did. "Look, I'm not saying there's nothing standing between you and Tara. I know Tara. She self-sabotages like it's a full-time job. I don't know you well enough to know your fatal character flaws yet, but I'm sure you have them."

Holly gasped in mock indignation. "I'm practically perfect in every way."

She straightened his bow tie, patted him on the arm, and pulled him out the door. Once he was safely deposited with the photographer, she watched him pose with the brides and goof around with Tara. He said something to her that made her fold in half with laughter. She hadn't even known Tara's spine bent that way. Or that she was capable of laughing that hard. Holly wondered how Tara thought she could ever be happy living half a country away from Cole. Maybe the long-term separation would make her start to realize that there was nothing in Charleston that made her happy.

"She seems to fit here, doesn't she?" Elijah Green asked, coming to stand next to her.

"I wish I could convince her that she could be professionally and personally fulfilled here," Holly said. "Her family is slowly poisoning her, and I really like her, but I know if we got involved, it would poison me, too." She looked over at Elijah, who was listening politely. "Sorry, that's so much info I just dumped on you."

He raised one shoulder elegantly. "I wouldn't hang out with this group if I didn't sort of enjoy people dumping their drama on me. It's a hobby. Come to Carrigan's, make some popcorn, hear the mess."

"Aren't you, like, a very busy lawyer and a parent to young twins and a competitive Scrabble player in your spare time? Do you have time for other hobbies?" she asked him.

"You make time for what you love." He smiled. "But speaking of my children, I think it's time for them to join the photos. I'm going to make sure neither of them has gotten cookie crumbs on their clothes."

Holly looked around. "There are cookies?"

"Where Mrs. Matthews is, cookies also are," Elijah informed her.

She went off in search of Mrs. Matthews, who gave her pfeffernuesse and left Holly alone with her thoughts so that she, too, could join the pictures. Everyone, it seemed, was being photographed as part of the wedding, except for Holly. She was pretty sure they hadn't asked her to be in the photos because, even if they believed she and Tara were dating, they didn't believe she'd be around long enough to have her in the pictures.

The buzz of an incoming call pulled her out of staring forlornly at the blue delft kitchen tiles, mouth full of cookie, feeling sorry for herself that she couldn't grow old with someone like Tara. Holly twisted on the kitchen stool to fish her phone out of her purse, which she'd dumped unceremoniously on the floor beneath her.

"Fucking dress," she mumbled, falling off the stool and landing, hard, on her ass as she managed to snag the phone, only to find an unknown number calling. Because she was still flustered from falling off a chair onto the Carrigan's kitchen floor in her most expensive outfit, she answered instead of sending it to voicemail.

"Holly Delaney speaking."

"Miss Delaney. This is Mrs. Chadwick." On the surface, Tara's mother sounded a great deal like her daughter. Polished old money accent, familiar cadence. People who didn't know Tara well would have trouble telling them apart. Holly didn't. Tara's voice had a million facets underneath the top layer of ice.

Her mother's voice was ice all the way down, and Holly was pretty sure Mrs. Chadwick was calling to try to freeze her out of Tara's life.

"I hear from my dear friend Cricket that you are attending an event with my daughter. Naturally, since Tara told me nothing about this, I found myself curious and looked you up. Your Instagram seems to suggest that you may be more than friends. This is, of course, unacceptable. You will stop seeing her immediately, or I will make you unemployable anywhere in South Carolina."

The call ended before Holly could respond or fully process what Mrs. Chadwick had said. It was like waking up in the middle of an earthquake and wondering why the floor was shaking, only to put the pieces together once the rumbling had stopped. Which was, Holly thought, not a bad metaphor, since Tara's mom was the equivalent of a natural disaster. She pushed the phone across the floor, instinctively backing away like it was a coiled snake. God, her butt was going to bruise so bad.

Had she just been daydreaming about a world where she and Tara could be together? How had she let herself forget that Tara's world, the world she'd chosen, would poison Holly? Not slowly and accidentally, but swiftly, intentionally, with malice. Unless Tara agreed to become estranged from her family and leave her law practice, them being together would always be a daydream.

Holly rested her head back against the island and closed her eyes. Yep.

She'd met a girl who made her want to try for the real thing again, after all this time, but she couldn't have her. Fucking amazing.

Her phone buzzed again and she reached for it, finding a text from her own mother.

Mom: OMG Caitlin showed me more pictures of your new lady! Why aren't you bringing her home for Christmas, again?

Leaving aside the important questions of whether she was going to kill her sister and who needed to pay for teaching her mom to say OMG (probably Caitlin, so yes, either murder or glitter through the mail), she didn't have the energy for this. She dropped her head onto her knees, trying not to mess up the makeup she'd spent an hour on. The door swung open, and she looked up to find Tara sitting down in front of her. In her beautiful, outrageously expensive vintage dress. On the kitchen floor.

"Hey. You okay?" Tara's voice, so often sharp as a knife, was so soft. Holly wanted to tell her the truth about the phone call from Tara's mom, and how torn up inside she was about it.

About them.

But Tara was here to be part of an event that mattered to her, and she didn't need to go nuclear on her mom right beforehand. And maybe a small part of Holly was afraid that if Tara heard that her mother knew they were dating (fake as it was), she would freak out and cut off their dalliance early.

So Holly did what she'd been training at for a decade, and what she'd promised Tara she wouldn't do as long as they were together: she put on her mask.

Smiling, she put a hand in Tara's.

"It's so embarrassing! I tried to grab my phone and fell right over! And now I'm stuck, because I can't get up in this dress. Help?" She forced herself to make her voice light, to laugh, to make it a joke.

Tara must have been distracted because she bought it. She tugged on Holly's hand, hauling her up. They ended up pressed against each other, and their eyes caught. The ice blue in Tara's was so warm, Holly didn't want to look away. She flushed, heat pooling between her legs but also, worryingly, in her heart. Finally, Tara pressed their foreheads together, only for an instant, then pulled back.

"Ready to go watch these goofballs become wives?"