Page 30 of Hers for the Weekend

Taking a deep breath, Tara looked around the table, obviously assessing her audience. “Holly is a waitress at my neighborhood cafe, and I went there a lot for cake and coffee, and to talk to the beautiful redhead. I know it’s cheesy to have a crush on someone who’s paid to smile at you, but what can I say? She was so snarky, and funny, and she bakes a killer pastry. I couldn’t stop thinking about her.”

“What Tara’s not telling you,” Holly interrupted, “is that she was far too honorable to flirt with someone who was paid to smile at her, so I kept mooning over her, bringing her pastries, and desperately trying to get her to ask me out, for months.”

The husband clasped his hands to his heart. “So what happened? How did you break the stalemate and get together?”

Under the table, Holly kicked Tara, urging her to finish the story. This was the part where reality diverged from make-believe.

“Well, one night I was leaving as Holly was getting off work, and she asked where I was headed. I said home, to open a bottle of wine and watch a Bravo marathon, and she asked if I wanted some company,” Tara said, winking at Holly.

“I do love Vanderpump Rules.” Holly nodded.

The wife laughed. “So you invited yourself over to Netflix and chill, and the rest is history? That’s fantastic.”

It did sound fantastic, Holly thought. A little bit of her wished it had happened that way.

They stayed close all through dinner, Holly leaning against Tara while they waited for dessert, Tara leaning over to whisper in Holly’s ear when coffee came. It didn’t seem to affect Tara at all, this dance they were putting on for her friends. Apparently, she’d been right that she didn’t need practice—she was an absolute natural at having a fake girlfriend. Every time their skin brushed, a bolt of lust shot through Holly. She studiously ignored how much she didn’t hate the handholding, either.

This is make-believe. Keep your head on straight. You don’t even like all this stuff—your goal is short-term, hot sex.

As she thought this, Tara reached over to push a curl off her forehead and then “lovingly” caressed Holly’s ear. Their eyes caught, and Holly almost got lost in a very dirty fantasy. How were they going to keep it up for several more days? It had only been a couple of hours, and Holly already felt like she was going to combust.

If this fake dating thing was going to work, they were going to need to actually sleep together. It was the only way Holly would get through this weekend without tearing off her skin from lust.

Back in their room, Holly had a plan, and that plan was to look so hot coming out of the bathroom that Tara threw her on the bed and took full advantage of her. The problem with this plan was that she had not accounted for Tara’s skincare regimen.

Holly said, “I’ll just wait for you to be done before I use the bathroom.”

Tara said, “Oh, it will take me absolutely hours before I’m done. I insist that you go first.”

As a result, Holly was relying on plan B, which involved lying seductively across the bed. It wasn’t as satisfying as plan A, or as subtle. A person could, theoretically, happen to come out in sexy pajamas and saunter toward the bed. It was difficult to nonchalantly lounge in a seductive manner.

Still, she had tiny shorts and willpower, which had to get her somewhere.

The longer she sat propped up on the pillows, her legs extended over the covers, getting colder and colder, the more she suspected that Tara was staying in the bathroom until she thought Holly was asleep. Even with a fire burning, the room was too chilly for her to stay as she was.

It was time to resort to plan C.

She braided her hair, because having to untangle it tomorrow morning was not worth the potential sexy factor tonight, crawled under the blankets, and pretended to be asleep. She heard the door to the bathroom creak open, and then open all the way. Light footsteps crept to the bed, and then Holly felt Tara’s weight sink down. On top of the blankets.

Well, if she could stand the cold, Holly guessed Tara had won this round.

This was what she thought, until she woke up in the middle of the night with Tara’s silky legs tangled with hers, Tara’s sleek head tucked up under her chin. She could smell Tara’s breath, feel her heartbeat, and she tried to focus on her own breathing but she couldn’t go back to sleep. She lay there, getting intimately acquainted with Tara’s skin as Tara, in her sleep, turned into a very handsy octopus.

When one of Tara’s hands closed over her breast, she couldn’t stop herself from squeaking as her nipple immediately became so hard it was painful.

She heard Tara’s breathing change, and then the hand was gone. “Oh my God, Holly, I’m so sorry!” Tara jumped up, taking the top blanket with her in her rush to get out of the bed.

“Please come back to bed,” Holly said, rubbing her eyes. She was nearly vibrating with sexual frustration. She’d planned to be cool, to act unaffected and hard to get to pique Tara’s interest. Instead, she whined like a needy puppy. “Tara,” she begged, “please. If you don’t let me fuck you, I’ll die.”

Tara laughed, which was perhaps not the response one hoped to get from this kind of declaration.

“I’m not sure what concerns me more,” Tara said, wrapping the blanket around herself, but not coming back to bed. “That you think you can die of sexual frustration, or that you think you would be fucking me.”

“Explain to me why we’re not having sex right now,” Holly pleaded. “Like, this exact moment.”

“Well, at this exact moment, we’re not having sex because I haven’t brushed my teeth, but in the larger scope of things, we’re not having sex because we can’t date.”

Holly nodded thoughtfully, fully awake now and ready to argue her case. “And we can’t date because we can’t get married, right?”

---