Page 77 of Hers for the Weekend

Holly

When she left (okay, was kicked out of) Carrigan’s, Holly had no spare clothes or car keys or toothbrush. She didn’t even have her phone.

The front lawn was deserted, with everyone inside for the wedding. It felt eerie, snow blanketing the still-blinking reindeer noses and sliding off the tall pointy hats of statuary of Santa’s elves. The trees were dark sentinels, whispering in the wind about what an asshole she was.

She shivered against the cold and wished that, if she was going to storm out, she’d thought to do so with a coat. She felt very much like Edmund Pevensie, out in an unknown wilderness and likely to sell out her loved ones for a little Turkish Delight.

As a kid, she’d always assumed that if she ever got sucked into a portal universe, she would be the hero. Lucy or Peter, hopefully, because Susan got shafted. Here she was, though, the villain of the story.

How was she going to get out of here? She didn’t exactly know how to hot-wire a car. Not that she would steal a car from these people. Maybe Cole, he could afford it. Possibly this wasn’t the time to be considering a career of Robin Hooding.

It was a moot point, anyway, because her misspent youth had been spent in the library, not learning how to steal cars, even from millionaires. She definitely couldn’t walk into Advent. It would be a hike in daylight, in summer, in good boots. She was in heels, in winter, in the dark.

She couldn’t call an Uber, because she didn’t have her phone and there weren’t any up here. She was weighing the benefits of trying to sneak back into the house to sleep in the library for the night, when Gavi Rosenstein stepped up beside her.

“I heard you fucked up big,” Gavi said.

Holly nodded decisively. “Oh boy.”

“Catch.” Gavi tossed her a set of keys. “Take my Outback. It should make it down the road safely. Ernie’s should be open with a skeleton staff, for people who don’t have anywhere to go on Christmas Eve. I’ll let her know what’s going on, and she’ll let you stay for a while.”

“Are you sure?” Holly asked. If she were Ernie, she’d probably kick herself out.

Gavi smiled, as if they could hear Holly’s thoughts. “If Ernie kicked out everyone who made terrible life choices, she’d have a hell of a time running a dive bar. Anyway, I have to get back inside, but I’ll make sure your stuff goes with Ernie.”

Wow, they were a master at predicting guest needs, even if Holly was no longer a guest.

“Go back inside before you miss the reception,” Holly said, suddenly tearing up. Now that her anger had frozen in the snow, she wished she were inside eating her own cake. She’d been excited about it.

Instead, Holly inched the SUV down the hill from the farm into town, hunched over the steering wheel, her nose nearly touching the windshield. She was used to driving in snow, in Iowa, but snowy mountains were a different creature entirely.

They felt like that, a creature, alive and breathing around her. She was grateful that it took all her effort to drive without crashing, so she couldn’t replay the fight with Tara in her head.

She pulled up in front of Ernie’s bar, shaking, and pried her fingers from the steering wheel. She sat back against the driver’s seat and closed her eyes. Get out of the car, Siobhan. Go into the bar. Get a drink. Get warm.

All of her internal monologue was directed toward Siobhan, but no one in her life ever called her that. That was probably something she should unpack at some point. That for the past several years, no one in her life called her by her real name, just by a part she’d been playing. That the only person in her life she’d stopped acting for, in almost a decade, was never going to talk to her again.

Tonight, however, she wasn’t going to unpack anything.

Everyone she knew was at the wedding, so she was able to slink into Ernie’s and get a table against the wall without anyone greeting her. The last thing she wanted to do right now was be in a crowd of people. What she really wanted was a room she could lock herself in, so she could—what? Freak out? Scream? Cry? How did a person exist in their skin after they fucked up as badly as she just had?

For the second time in an hour, she realized that the one person whose advice she needed was Tara. That thought, the feeling of desperately wanting only Tara, in front of her, immediately, and knowing she couldn’t have that, probably ever again, because of her own actions, was almost too much to breathe through.

When the waitress came to ask if she needed anything, she ordered a Fried Everything platter, because getting plastered seemed irresponsible but she sure as hell needed something to dull her feelings. As she dipped fried pickles in ranch dressing and ate them, mechanically, one by one, tears streaming down her face and onto the mozzarella sticks, the last week flashed in front of her.

Tara’s absolute inability to say no to her family or to listen to music made by straight people unless it was nineties country by women. Her deep-seated belief, trained into her by her family, that none of her friends loved her or wanted her around. The way she funded Miriam’s art career, and forgave her for the breakup, and saved her wedding, in a desperate attempt to make herself indispensable to people who already thought she was indispensable for no reason but that she was herself.

Herself, the woman who sang like she’d been trained in a choir, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of lesbian history, who used to steal cars and set fires but now got her Draper James tailored into pencil skirts. The woman who put on bedazzled pink cowboy hats in truck stops and looked like a babe in them.

Holly had never met anyone as contradictory or as fascinating as Tara, anyone as committed down to their bones to making amends for a mistake.

When the shit hit the fan and Holly felt cornered, she got mean. She lashed out like a snake and bit whoever had the poor fortune to be walking by. Ivy’s nickname for her had been Cobra. When Tara’s shit hit the fan, her first impulse—her absolute in her bones gut reaction—was kindness. Sure, she could be a little petty, or cold, but when it came down to the wire, she instinctively gave people the benefit of the doubt, and she never walked away from things because they were hard.

Since her divorce, Holly had assumed that she would never want to get involved with someone for life, because she couldn’t imagine another person she’d ever want to fall in love with. She’d never even been close, since Ivy. And then, out of nowhere, the last person she’d ever expected had blown into her life like a storm off the coast.

“Are you Holly?” the waitress asked. When she nodded, the woman told her, “Ernie texted to say you’d be in and that your meal was on the house? She says you’ll be sleeping in the apartment above the bar for a while? It used to be Sawyer’s place but I guess he rented something bigger to fit all of Cole’s clothes?”

Her name tag said Kinzi, and she looked like she couldn’t possibly be old enough to be serving alcohol legally. Holly blinked at her, trying to figure out when she’d gotten old enough to think the serving staff all looked like babies.

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