Page 13 of Hers for the Weekend

“Does Miriam need anything?” she finally settled on. “We’re driving through a whole bunch of country, and I can pick something up or have something shipped. I know y’all have limited options in that backwater.”

There. That was good. It made her look like she was totally over Miriam leaving her for a lumberjack and was eager to help make the wedding a success.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Holly give her a thumbs-up.

“Nah, Ziva is going full Mother of the Bride and making sure every tiny detail is taken care of. Which is making Hannah, the actual wedding planner, blow a fuse.”

“What an interesting choice, considering that Ziva was barely a mother to the bride,” Tara said icily.

Like Tara, Miriam had terrible parents, something that had always connected them. However, now that Miriam’s mom was divorcing her shitweasel of a dad, she’d decided to try to be a good parent. Tara assumed that pigs would fly out of Satan’s asshole before her own mother ever considered altering her parenting style.

“I thought that, too!” Cole agreed. “Anyway, if you have anything to distract overbearing mothers trying to make up for a lifetime of neglect by micromanaging their child’s wedding, please bring it! Otherwise, just bring your beautiful selves. Drive safe, babycakes! I love you!”

He hung up.

“Why do you think that man doesn’t like you?” Holly teased. “Is it the part where he sounds genuinely thrilled to hear from you? Makes sure to tell you to be safe? Tells you he loves you?”

Tara sighed. “I don’t doubt that he loves me. I’m like a… branch on the tree of his life that he’s always had and wouldn’t know how to keep growing without.” She could feel Holly’s disbelieving eyes on her, but damn it, she was right about this. “I said I wasn’t sure he likes me. Cole is basically a golden retriever, if golden retrievers hacked world governments for fun, so he’s always thrilled to see everyone. But he’s never had to decide if he would choose to have me around.”

Holly made a huffing noise that Tara couldn’t interpret.

“Do you like him?” she asked.

“He’s my favorite person I’ve ever met,” Tara groaned. “Never tell him I said that; it would make him insufferable.”

She didn’t like to think about the fact that she loved Cole best, while Cole loved Miriam best. Cole was her best friend, and she was Cole’s… obligation. It would be unconscionable to admit that she was jealous of his having other friends.

So she pretended she was barely putting up with him, most of the time.

It was complicated.

Since knowing the depths of Tara’s insecurity wouldn’t help make Holly a better fake girlfriend, and they had limited time, she skated over that chasm. “What about you?” she asked. “Any dark secrets I should know?”

Holly gave her a sidelong glance. “I don’t think it’s dark secret time. I think it’s lunchtime! There’s a truck stop up here. You can buy me a burger.”

This wasn’t where Tara had planned to stop for lunch.

She didn’t like to go anywhere she hadn’t vetted. She could pass for straight—in fact, she usually did, whether she wanted to or not—but she could feel her stomach drop when she walked into the kind of roadside place that sold bumper stickers with the Punisher logo overlaid with the Blue Lives Matter flag, the oppressive, coiled violence waiting to erupt. It wasn’t just that she didn’t like to give money to places where many queer people would never feel safe stepping foot.

It was that she knew, if the owners could see inside her heart, they would want her dead, and only her mask was keeping her alive.

Still, if they stopped to use the bathroom and it wasn’t okay, she would simply tell Holly they needed to go. Holly would obviously understand. She didn’t seem like the kind of girl to happily spend her hard-earned money on assholes. Although she might call Tara a hypocrite, considering how many genteel bigots Tara put up with in her daily life. That didn’t mean she had to deal with them on vacation, or when she wasn’t using them.

They wandered the aisles of the truck stop, and Holly cajoled her into trying on bedazzled cowboy hats. Tara took a selfie in one and texted it to Miriam, who immediately asked her to buy it. There were no Confederate flags in sight, and Tara slowly relaxed.

Holly turned to her, wearing a pair of giant sunglasses. “You thought this place was going to be real homophobic, huh?”

“It crossed my mind,” Tara admitted grudgingly.

Twirling, Holly replaced the sunglasses and picked up a purse embroidered with a saguaro cactus in neon green. Tara tried not to ogle her ass. This place might not be homophobic, but they were still in public.

She was only marginally successful. Her hormones didn’t care that they were in a truck stop; they hadn’t cared about anything since seeing Holly in a towel this morning.

“I would never bring you to a place like that,” Holly was assuring her while Tara was trying to shake the mental image of the towel out of her head. “Also, they have, genuinely, the best fries I’ve ever eaten in my life.”

“Well,” Tara said, taking the glasses Holly had set down and placing them on her own face, “what are we waiting for?” Taking Holly’s hand, she tugged her toward the cafe tables in the back. Holly laced their fingers together, and Tara didn’t pull away.

“I recommend anything but the salad,” Holly said as they read the menu. “They make everything fresh in-house, but the produce tends to be, uh, a little wilted.”

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