Page 63 of Hers for the Weekend

She called the judge before Cole could find her and stop her.

Like clockwork, he arrived as soon as she hung up, looming in the doorway. He was probably trying to lean insouciantly, she assumed because he was jealous that Levi looked so cool when he did it, but he was taller than the old Victorian doorway, so he was more lurking than anything.

“Why are you staring at me like you’re worried I’m going to spontaneously combust?” she asked. “You’re freaking me out.”

He closed the door behind him but didn’t move fully into the room, just leaned back against the door. His face, normally alight with mischief, was still and drawn, and he kept pushing his hair off his forehead. It was a nervous gesture of Levi’s that Cole must have picked up while here, because she’d never seen him do it before. Of course, he was so rarely nervous.

It was strange to see him with new mannerisms, but she guessed the longer they were physically apart, the more she wouldn’t know his every move. She wondered, when that happened, if any connection would still exist between them, or if they would become people whose parents were friends. Could whatever invisible string held them to each other hold up when it wasn’t reinforced by habit and proximity?

“Fraser, get in here,” she said. “Say whatever it is you’re standing there trying to force yourself to say.”

He walked toward her, his long legs covering the small library in a couple of steps. Folding himself in half, he sat down on the floor in front of the window seat, hugging his knees.

“I need to ask you something,” he said, and his ocean-blue eyes were the gray of an incoming storm.

She motioned for him to continue. “Ask away.”

“You’re going to get mad at me.”

Oh, Cole. “I think you’ll live.”

“I need you to do me a favor, and you’re not going to like it, but I know you won’t do it for yourself so I’m asking you to do it because I need you to.”

She put down her phone, moved her iPad off her lap, and really looked at him. Now she was getting nervous. Maybe she didn’t want to hear whatever this was.

“Spit it out, baby doll.”

“I need you to start taking care of yourself.” He had stopped pulling at his hair and was sitting with his hands on his knees, the most still she’d ever seen him. “You’re burning yourself out as fast as you can, trying to martyr yourself to prove you deserve the oxygen you take up. And I get it. Your fucking parents, they made you think you needed to earn every breath. But I can’t let you burn up. Not again.”

Tara knew what he wasn’t saying.

While she had been at boarding school, she’d picked up some poor habits from some of the other girls. It had been a shitty time, she’d felt like she was careening out of control, and a lot of things had seemed like a good idea, from vodka to diet pills to shady hookups. But that had been during the dark time. Cole had shown up and pulled her out of that, but it wasn’t fair of him to equate that time and this. That had been a conflagration. This was… a controlled burn.

“I’m more healthy, emotionally and physically, than at least eighty percent of our social circle,” she protested.

Cole guffawed. “Tara Sloane, that’s the worst rationale I’ve ever heard. Bailey Ellis has been on a juice and cocaine cleanse for the past five years. Rachelle Parkins thinks Gwyneth Paltrow is an actual prophet, and I think she’s in a candle cult. And that’s not getting into anyone’s relationship with gin.”

“Ugh.” Tara crossed her arms like a toddler. “I’m fine.”

Why did they have to talk about this? She thought they’d silently agreed that they were going to pretend nothing had ever happened and go about their lives pushing it under the rug with everything else from their past they never talked about. It was a big rug, there was room for a whole lot of mess.

“Fine like you’re taking vitamins and sleeping? Or fine like you only ended up in the hospital from dehydration and exhaustion once this year?” he clarified. He still had her pinned with his stare.

Please. She’d never ended up in the hospital. She was very good at walking the line of burning the candle at both ends without self-destructing.

She picked at her sweater. “It’s not that bad. Honestly. I work too much, but it’s only for now. I just made partner.”

“And then what? The goalposts move, and it’s until you become a judge? Or state senator?”

This conversation fucking sucked. “Why are you asking this?”

“I don’t know, Tar,” he said sarcastically, throwing up his hands, “the last time you had a terrible year and we didn’t see each other for a while, I had to show up and drag some dude out of your bed. A DUDE!”

He had done that. She didn’t know why. She could still hear him as he dropped her back off at school, with a final warning that if she didn’t get her shit together, he would move in and sleep on the floor, no matter what her roommate thought (or the administration at her all-girls college).

She did have her shit together, mostly. No one made partner without losing some sleep or destroying their stomach lining with caffeine. She wasn’t out of control, because Cole had asked her not to be, and sometimes in this life, when we didn’t want to do it for ourselves, we held on for other people. He’d saved her life, not just that semester of college but the night of the fire.

When she had been transfixed by the flames, then racing toward the building and trying to run in to make sure no one was there, he’d pulled her away, sheltering her body with his when the windows started exploding. He had scars on his back from where he’d been hit with burning glass, and every time she saw him in a swimsuit, she wanted to trace them with her fingers, as if she could magically erase them by will alone.

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