Page 4 of Hers for the Weekend

Oof. A gut punch.

“Yay?” Holly managed with the air left in her lungs.

“She looked so great. She’s finally letting her hair go back to its natural blond. You know, I always thought you two were meant to be, and you’d get back together once you got a little older.”

It was, no question, absolutely wonderful that her Irish Midwest mom was so very supportive of her lesbian daughter, and always had been. Unfortunately, that meant Holly wasn’t exempt from her mom’s extreme matchmaking.

“Ivy’s with someone else, Mom,” she pointed out patiently. “Remember Wren?”

She did not say, “Remember how things ended with Ivy? Remember how I was so mean to her, and she blocked my calls, and I spent years avoiding getting involved with anyone else because I didn’t want to treat them the way I treated her?” Her mom wasn’t great at hearing things she didn’t want to.

“Oh, sure, but how serious can they be?” Her mom brushed this off. “They’ve been together for years, and they’re still not married?”

The stress headache was unavoidable at this point. “Maybe Ivy doesn’t want to jump into marriage.” The “again” was silent, but they both heard it loud and clear. “People don’t get back together after almost a decade, Mom. You’ve been reading too many romance novels.”

There was a hmmm noise that Holly knew well. It meant her mom was ignoring her. “Well, all I know is, she said she’d love to stop in for coffee for the holidays, and if you happened to be there…”

“Ope! I hear Matt calling from the front. He needs me to take a table!” Holly said. She should have just hung up, but if she hung up on her mother, she would still be hearing about it in the afterlife.

“You haven’t been home for Christmas in five years, Holly Siobhan.” Ah, the guilt trip was right on time.

Holly needed a distraction. “Is Dustin bringing a girlfriend to Christmas? I thought he told me he was seeing someone. You should ask him.”

This lure proved too much for her mother to ignore, and Holly finally got off the phone.

Christ on a cracker. What was her mom thinking? Trying to get her and Ivy back together? She was going to need a good excuse for not going home, immediately. “Matt, if my mom calls the cafe phone, I’m swamped with tables, okay?”

“She must have riled you up.” The manager gave a half-smile. “You sound like you just got off the bus from Fargo all of a sudden.”

This earned the middle finger it deserved. As if Iowa and North Dakota accents sounded anything alike.

“If you feel compelled to actually do some work,” Matt said, chuckling, “Tara’s out there.”

“For what it’s worth, I was working. I was saving your ass by getting all the baking done. I’m not even supposed to be here today,” Holly grumbled. “You could, I don’t know, make me a full-time baker, and then you wouldn’t have to call me in on my day off when your baker no call no shows again.”

Matt laughed at her, which was what he always did when they had this conversation. It was unbelievably frustrating. “You’re too good a waitress, Holly. No matter how delicious your coconut cake is.”

That was always the answer. “Can’t pay you to do what you love, Holly. You’re too skilled at something else that happens to pay less—oh, but we can still have you do the thing you love, at your lower salary, once in a while.”

She liked this place, but not enough to stay if she was going to be taken advantage of. Charleston was hot, and sticky, and full of rich assholes, and maybe it was about time she moved on. The only thing keeping her from picking up her last check and using it to fill up the tank in her held-together-with-zip-ties 1979 Subaru Brat was the beautiful woman currently in the dining area, waiting for a cup of coffee.

Tara was her favorite (and hottest) customer, a perfect blond Southern ice queen. When they’d first met, Tara had been engaged. Holly liked Tara’s ex, Miriam, a great deal, and missed her now that she’d left to go live out a Hallmark movie plot. Since Tara wasn’t engaged anymore, Holly had been flirting hard. She hadn’t had any luck so far, but hope sprang eternal. And every time she thought about leaving Charleston without tasting those lips, something stopped her.

She peeked out the round port window in the swinging kitchen door, to where Tara was sitting in her normal spot. Somehow, her perfectly flat-ironed hair looked droopy, her shoulders hunched up several degrees past power pose. Most worryingly, she seemed to be in her house clothes with no eyeliner on, which meant she’d gone out in public without her full armor. It appeared they were both having difficult days.

Holly didn’t know how she would thaw Tara’s ice long enough to get her in bed, when no amount of flirting had worked, but as for how to fix a Southern girl’s terrible day?

She had that covered.

Chapter 3

Tara

Oh, Lord,” Holly said, setting down a carafe of coffee. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. I’m bringing cake.”

Tara was, temporarily, distracted from her panic about the whole “I made up a girlfriend” thing by how hot Holly looked in ripped up jeans and a skeleton tank, her long red hair in a messy bun, a green shamrock bandanna tied at the top in a bow like an emo Rosie the Riveter. When she was working, Holly dressed in fit-and-flare dresses and rockabilly hair, but Tara had noticed that on her days off, she was more punk than pinup.

“That obvious, huh?” It shouldn’t matter that Holly was seeing her at full freak-out. Holly had seen her at her worst. Holly was one of the only people on earth Tara didn’t need to act for, and all of the rest of them were currently up in the Adirondacks in a godforsaken moldy hotel in the middle of the woods. And while she might be Tara’s favorite waitress and secret crush, she might be tall and willowy with waves of red hair and green eyes and legs for days, she was not for Tara.

---