Chapter 4 Holly

Chapter 4

Holly

C ole was right, which, in Holly's limited experience with him, was usually true. He might be a giant blond whirlwind of jokes, but he was surprisingly insightful.

She and Tara should, actually, date. In fact, she'd been trying to get Tara to ask her out for months, as soon as she realized that Tara wasn't devastated by her breakup with Miriam. Normally, Holly would have made the first move, but Tara was skittish and used to being in charge. If she could make dating seem like it had been Tara's idea all along, they were more likely to get somewhere.

It was not, on the surface, a great idea.

Tara was settled in Charleston and Holly was on her way out, sooner rather than later given the job situation. She'd already been here for three years, which was longer than she'd intended to stay. After she left home, she'd never stayed anywhere for long. There was a lot of world to see, and she was still in the middle of seeing it.

Not to mention Tara's crowd was stuffy, and they kind of sucked. Holly had no interest in playing the society girlfriend, brunching with drunk plantation owners while they complained about woke cancel culture or chatted about polo. But something about Tara was so incredibly sexy, so fascinating to Holly. The perfect hair, the Lilly Pulitzer wardrobe, the way she always smelled like magnolias—she projected this aura of impeccable Southern sweetness, but right under the surface was a prickly, ice-cold bitch who would take any prosecutor to the mat and who made Holly want to beg to be stepped on.

So yes, it would be a bad idea to get involved long-term, but dating didn't mean they were getting married, after all. Holly didn't do serious relationships. They tended to make her feel trapped, and then she got shitty and lashed out, hurting the other person to cut their ties. What she did do, though, was fun. She and Tara could have a hell of a lot of fun.

Tara hung up with Cole, and Holly pushed up from the booth. "I have to go back to work, but we should get dinner, somewhere that's not here, and talk about whether or not we want to do this, and if we do, plot logistics. Want to go for pizza?"

Tara sniffed. "I have a very good pizza oven at my house. Why don't you come over."

Holly noticed this was an order, not a request, and shivered a little. She smiled, making sure the dimple in her cheek popped, and let the waterfall of her red waves cascade over her shoulder, for added effect.

"Text me when," she said, and handed Tara the bill, with her number on the bottom.

This would be perfect. They'd get out of town, away from all the ties that bound Tara and creeped out Holly, and have an adventure. Tara would use her to avoid feeling left out and lonely with her friends. Holly would use Tara to avoid going home for the holidays so her mother could try to set her up with her ex. She didn't see why an expiration date should keep them from getting naked together. Actually, it was in the plus column. Everyone got orgasms, no one got hurt. Tied up but not tied down, as it were.

Which made her envision Tara tying her up, an excellent distraction from the rest of her shift.

When Tara texted her about dinner two days later, she was about ready to climb out of her skin. She was convinced that Tara was going to change her mind and that that's why she hadn't been into the cafe. This would be fine, Holly told herself. She didn't need to embark on fake-dating hijinks, either to avoid going home for the holidays or to get into Tara's pants, although she'd gotten her hopes up about both. Especially since her little brother had texted her several more times to try to guilt trip her about how sad their mom was.

She spent more time than she would have liked to admit picking out a bottle of wine to take over. She knew Tara had wine, probably much better wine than Holly could ever afford, but she'd been in the South long enough to know that you didn't show up to someone's house without a hostess gift.

Flowers seemed like they would send the wrong message, since she was trying to convince Tara that hooking up was her idea—Holly didn't want to seem like she was coming wooing. She could have baked something, she knew exactly what Tara liked, but that made it seem like they were still waitress and customer, instead of… friends? Partners in crime? Acquaintances who accidentally knew everything about each other?

Except that, while she knew a hell of a lot about Tara, Tara knew almost nothing about her. The inevitable power dynamic between server and regular.

Finally, wine in hand, hair looking amazing, heels a little too high, and nerves stuffed down, she rang the doorbell to Tara's Single House. Charleston had a booming business renovating these old colonial houses, built long and narrow so the air could go straight through from front to back, in the days before air-conditioning. Of course Tara lived in one. The perfect home for a daughter of Charleston's Old Money. It was painted the softest pale coral, with a wash of haint blue under the porch roof. The blue was meant to ward off evil spirits in the Gullah tradition, and Holly wondered if it kept Tara's parents from entering, like vampires who'd had their invitations revoked.

Her fencepost had the traditional pineapple embellishment. It was the perfect symbol of the mask Tara was always wearing—the emblem of Charleston's white settler-colonial roots guarding the entrance to the home of a woman who gave every impression of hating the whole system built on those roots. She wondered, not for the first time, how Tara balanced that juxtaposition without breaking. Holly itched to help her let off some of the tension she must be constantly under.

The door swung open, and Tara stood there in a cotton tunic, barefoot. Her toes were painted a gray-blue that matched the Atlantic on a cloudy morning, and Holly almost swallowed her tongue. It wasn't that she'd never seen Tara casual, or in sandals. They lived in a swamp, and sometimes the only way to leave the house in the summer was in as little clothing as possible. But she'd never seen her this comfortably undone.

"I brought wine," she managed. "It's probably not very good."

Tara's smile blossomed. "And here I thought you were a mannerless Yank." She moved forward to hug Holly, but hesitated. Her smell, magnolias and star jasmine, like a steamy garden party, drifted forward and pulled Holly in, until she completed the hug.

She kicked off her shoes in the foyer, unwilling to risk Tara's perfect heart pine floors with her heels. Tara led her back, through a showcase of a living room, toward the kitchen. Like most homes of the type (or at least, so Holly had gleaned from reading back issues of Southern Living ), there was ornate crown molding and hand-painted wallpaper, but unlike many people who layered intense patterns and dark colors, Tara had opted for washes of pale yellow against white, washed out greens in the plush carpets, varieties of cream in the china she displayed in the antique cabinet, white embroidery on white pillows piled up on her chaise. It should look sterile, compared to the careful clutter of many of her peers' homes, but Holly loved it immediately. Although she was very worried she was going to spill something on a throw pillow.

"I hope you don't mind that I ordered in," Tara drawled, her voice sounding even more South Carolinian in this quintessential Charleston setting. "I have to admit that I can't cook at all, fancy pizza oven or not. My mother despairs of me, but I never learned."

Her ears got red when she said this, and Holly stored away the knowledge that ice queen Tara could blush. And also that Tara deflected criticism by preemptively acknowledging any perceived faults, with a breezy self-deprecating shrug that made it seem as if being imperfect didn't bother her.

"Please, there's no shame in a woman not being able to cook, even a perfect Southern belle. You're highly accomplished enough."

Tara's hands twitched where they were folded on the marble countertop, and Holly could tell she was digging her nails into her skin. Apparently there was some shame in it, if you were a Chadwick. Maybe it made Tara uncomfortable to be told she didn't have to be good at everything.

Food arrived, a selection from Hank's because of course, when Tara ordered, she ordered the best seafood in the city. Tara arranged it impeccably on plates that probably cost more than Holly had ever made in a month. It was the most beautifully displayed platter of shrimp she'd ever seen. She immediately bit one of the little sea bug's heads off. You didn't waste good shrimp where she came from—hell, you never even got good shrimp where she came from.

"I think we should drive," Holly said, and watched Tara freeze.

"To New York?" she said, her voice appalled.

"It's only a couple of days," Holly pointed out, dunking another shrimp in sauce. "It will give us an opportunity to go over our story, make sure we know what we're telling people. Memorize important details. Miriam will notice if I don't know anything about your family except what I can Google, even if she is distracted by the wedding. Besides, there's some beautiful country up there. We could drive up the whole coast!" And make out the whole time.

Tara's shoulders were up by her ears. Oh, sweet Jesus, Holly wanted to make this woman come apart at the seams. Preferably all over Holly's face. She should probably get her thirstiness under control.

Tara bit her lip, and Holly imagined biting it for her.

She would definitely get her thirstiness under control… at some point.

"I'm already expected to be up there for days, missing work to do a bunch of random pre-wedding crap," Tara said, lining up objects on her granite counters in a gesture Holly suspected was nervous, though Tara kept her face completely calm. "I don't think I can add any more days away to that. I have too much work. We should fly. We have a couple of weeks before we have to leave—we can get our stories straight then."

"You want to fly into JFK that close to Christmas, get on a train for five hours, then take a shuttle to Carrigan's?" Holly made a gagging face. She'd researched how to get to Carrigan's so that she would have ammunition for this argument. "We'll lose an entire day each way, it will be miserably stuffed with holiday travelers, and you won't be able to get any work done. Driving, it will be two comfortable days in a car. You can sit in the passenger seat with your laptop. Billable hours, Chadwick. I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist. If we do this, we do it as a road trip."

"We haven't even agreed for sure that we're going to pretend to be dating," Tara hedged, dragging her shrimp slowly through a puddle of butter on her plate, like she was painting with it instead of eating it.

Holly piled fried seafood high on her plate. Could she get a to-go box? she wondered. "You keep talking about dating and a girlfriend, but couldn't we just be, like, sleeping together and keeping each other company on a long weekend in the mountains? We could even really sleep together. You know. For veracity." She winked.

Tara didn't respond to this offer. Instead she said, "We need to be seriously dating because I only date seriously. I would never sleep with someone I wasn't considering marrying, much less bring them to a wedding at Carrigan's."

There had to be quite a story there.

"Anyway," Tara continued, "what would be in it for you? I feel like I'm taking advantage of your goodwill."

Holly laughed. "Hey, you're really not. You're taking me along on an adventure, something I desperately need, you're paying for a vacation, and I'm going to have a great time. Besides, my mom is putting on the pressure hard for me to come home for the holidays, because she's decided to set me up with my ex. Having a wedding to go to, and a fake girlfriend to go with, would solve several problems for me. If it makes you feel better, you can upgrade my hotel rooms to the best suites on the road."

Tara studied her, and Holly thought she was going to call the whole thing off, but instead she poured them both a little more of her much-better wine and motioned Holly over to the couch, where they settled on opposite ends, looking at each other.

"If we're going to consider doing this, believably, I need to know as much about you as you do about me. Maybe more." Tara managed to gesture with a glass of red wine over a pale pink velvet pillow without ever threatening to spill it.

It was very impressive, but Holly set her own glass down on a coaster on the coffee table, out of the way of her arms in case she gesticulated. She tucked her legs beneath her.

"I'm an open book," she said, spreading her arms wide. "What do you want to know?"

"Where are you from? Do you have any siblings? What did you study in college? Anything! I don't know anything about you." Tara's diction got more monied and her posture got more stiff the more uncomfortable she was. Holly knew other people thought she was an insufferable snob, but Holly personally thought she was a very charming, socially awkward snob.

"I'm from Iowa, the Quad Cities area. I'm a middle child between an older sister and a much younger brother, my sister and I are close, while my brother… he's still figuring out being human. I didn't go to university. I went to welding school because I thought it sounded like good money, but I kind of hated it. Lotta dudes not thrilled to share professional space with me."

"Oh!" Tara exclaimed, somehow managing to sit up even straighter. "I shouldn't have assumed about college."

As much fun as it was to ruffle Tara's feathers, Holly realized she was supposed to be putting Tara at ease about this whole situation, so Tara would agree to take her. How do you put a generations-deep Southern belle at ease about a girl who grew up in the Midwest on food stamps?

"You're so smart, though. Is there anything you'd want to go back to school for? There are lots of scholarships for returning students, opportunities to finish at your own pace…"

Now Holly's back was up. No matter how nonchalantly she mentioned not having gone to college, or how totally unfazed she appeared to be about waitressing, eventually people tried to save her from herself.

She smiled, a little brittlely. This, at least, had thrown ice water over her lust. "I don't have any interest in college. I've discovered, as I get older, that I'm pretty content to be a career waitress. I love that I can get a job in any city, that I can pack up and move on to the next thing. You can't take that for granted, growing up poor. Ironically, our mobile home wasn't mobile. I love that I get to give people food all day, that the worst work disaster I ever have is an angry patron, and I only ever work at places where the owners have my back. When I'm off the clock, I'm done. I never take any bullshit home with me to stress over. And I get free meals, which means I never go hungry and I never have to eat government cheese again, unless I want to because it makes great nachos."

She watched Tara shift her weight on the couch, obviously trying to process the words career waitress , mobile home , and government cheese . This was a well-rehearsed speech, one Holly could give in her sleep, but this time it meant more for some reason. She wanted Tara to believe her, to understand that she wasn't miserable—she was fulfilled and living the life she'd chosen.