Page 14 of Hers for the Weekend

“How do you know so much about this place?” Tara asked, distracted, because she’d been planning on the salad and now she had to scramble for a second choice. She always ordered a chicken Caesar. While she read, she arranged the Sweet’N Low packets into a perfect line and tried not to touch the sticky yellow floral tablecloth.

Holly sipped her water through a bendy straw. It was cute, and made Tara think about her lips. Nope! We’re at a diner, Sloane. “I worked here for a couple of weeks once when I was out of gas money. That’s how I knew they were good people.”

The waitress arrived with a plate of fries they hadn’t ordered and fawned over Holly. Tara gave her order of eggs over easy—with absolutely no goopy white, but with the yolk still runny—bacon, and hash browns extra crispy (this was why she always got the salad, because she hated being Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally), then peered at Holly over her sunglasses.

“She sounds like she hasn’t heard from you since you drove away,” Tara observed.

Holly stared down at her plate, pushing fries around with her fork. “Yeah, I’m not great at maintaining friendships once I leave for somewhere else. I like her, and a lot of people I’ve known over the years, but once I start to feel obligated… I don’t know, it’s like a part of my brain gets resentful, and I start picking at them until they go away and don’t expect anything from me. If I ghost them, they can remember me more kindly.”

Tara couldn’t imagine not having obligations to anyone. Sometimes it felt like all she had were obligations. Maybe that’s why she was always kind of a bitch.

Instead of digging more deeply into what Holly had said or how it made her feel, Tara steered the conversation back to the things they needed to know to lie to her friends. “So. Secrets. Spill.”

“Well, as I said, I’m an open book,” Holly repeated, but Tara was trained to know when people were lying to her, and it was as plain as the nose on her face that Holly was in fact the opposite of an open book. “So what do you want to know? I told you about jobs, family, school.”

“Any significant exes? Best friends?” Tara asked, because she’d finally figured out what Holly had been actively avoiding bringing up. “You know all about mine.”

Holly flicked her bendy straw, staring at it as if it held the secrets of the universe. “I think we can save that story for a later chapter.”

Open book, my ass.

Tipping her head and stealing a french fry (She should have ordered fries. How were they this good?), Tara decided not to argue. Instead she said, “We should get back on the road if we’re going to make good time to the bed-and-breakfast.”

Tara needed to be back in the car, where she could focus on the road, because sitting across from Holly, watching her close her eyes in ecstasy every time she dangled a dripping, ranch-covered fry into her mouth, was the sort of pornographic dream Tara would have said she definitely didn’t have.

She didn’t even like ranch.

They arrived at the B&B that Holly’s friend’s aunt’s college roommate, or whoever it was, owned just before dark. (Honestly the connection was very vague, but Tara was Southern, and having connections based on a tenuous someone-knew-someone link was baked into her DNA.) It was not understated, posh, or “the opposite of Carrigan’s,” as Holly had promised. Instead, it was like Carrigan’s had been taken over by a hostile Laura Ashley regime.

The B&B was just as full of vintage kitsch, but instead of parrots, everything was pastels and lace and dolls.

Tara had developed a very high tolerance for creepy antique dolls while living with Miriam, who tended to collect them for her art, but the sheer number of them watching her from every corner now was unnerving.

“I almost miss the parrots,” she muttered. Holly looked confused. Tara shook her head to say it was nothing. “This is not what I was led to expect.”

Holly winced. “Yeah, so, I haven’t been here for a few years and it seems the owner has, uh, had a pretty drastic change of heart vis-à-vis home decor.”

They were booked for a two-bedroom suite with a shared living room. As soon as the door closed, Holly began stripping off layers. She kicked off her shoes at the door and began hopping on one foot so she could pull off the sock on the other.

“I’m going to shower and take a nap before dinner!” she said, and headed toward the bathroom, leaving a trail of socks, a sweatshirt, and a ponytail holder behind her.

Tara watched her go, blinking against a combination of confusion and lust. She had to physically stop herself from picking up and neatly folding each piece of clothing. “I’m going to, uh, turn some of the dolls to face the wall, I think.”

“They would make a great wedding present for Miriam,” Holly called from the bathroom, the door still open. Before she could look away, Tara saw she was now down to a bra and underwear. “You could smuggle several out in a suitcase for her to glitter glue, and the owner would never notice.”

It wasn’t only that Miri loved haunted dolls and anything macabre that she could bedazzle—though she did; it was that she thrived on maximalism and whimsy and creativity, which were all things Tara had tried to exorcise from her life. In fact, when Miri had lived with her, Tara had never let her keep her art in the Single House.

Maybe they would have stayed together if Tara had let some of Miriam’s whimsy in, instead of trying to separate the artist from the artistic temperament, but she’d been too focused on her mission, and how Miriam could aid it. She wasn’t sorry they’d split up, but she regretted trying to clip Miriam’s wings.

Improbably, Tara’s ex-fiancée, and Tara’s failures in that relationship, seemed like an emotionally safer subject than the beautiful half-naked woman in her hotel room. You have got to reexamine your life choices, Sloane.

Finally, she retreated to her room, making an excuse about having to change out of her sweaty travel clothes for dinner. She sent up a prayer of forgiveness to her poor grandmother, who must be yelling at her from heaven that a debutante never admitted she could sweat. She could if she spent several hours next to a smoking hot woman in a car with the heater turned up!

Could a debutante pass out from lust? She might be about to find out.

Dinner, they’d been informed, was a mandatory social affair for all guests. Tara felt firmly that this was not how bed-and-breakfasts operated, being a place to enjoy a bed, and then a breakfast, but she also didn’t want to go out for a nice dinner alone with Holly. How many lustful thoughts, after all, could she have while drowning in dust and lace and dining on (she checked the laminated menu they’d been given, which had certainly been printed on a dot matrix) duchess potatoes and roast goose, in honor of the holiday season?

Amazingly, she could have a lot of lustful thoughts, even while three children—the offspring of, apparently, the only other guests—screamed at the top of their lungs.

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