by Dee Lagasse
Bethany Callahan is instantly forgotten about when I see a voice memo from “Hurricane” pop up. Pressing play in the message, I hear, “Hey Mack Daddy. Ew. I know I text it all the time. But, um…Gross. Why did you ever call yourself that, you fucking dork? Also, I hope there were people around to hear that you used to call yourself that. For those of you in the back, Chase Merrimack used to refer to himself as The Mack Daddy.”
A girlish giggle comes from the phone for a good thirty seconds before she continues,
“ANYWAY. Um, fuck, what was I going to say? Oh! I’m driving right now so this is just easier. And I can’t come for cheeseburgers. I switched my shifts at Cap & Co., so I’m bartending tonight. But I mean, if you’d be down for midnight snacks, count me in.”
God, I’m so glad there isn’t anyone around me. One, because I’d never live down the Mack Daddy thing, and two, because everyone would see how this woman affects me. A simple one-minute voice memo and her little giggle has me grinning…and thinking of the best midnight snack for her to come home to.
Holding the gray microphone down next to the text area, I say, “One, that nickname was legit as fuck. And your brother is the one that started calling me it, actually. Two, so cheeseburgers are a no go, but I can make a stop at Kaighan’s Creamery for a pint of Cookie Monster ice cream?”
“So that’s why you won’t go out for drinks?” a disgusted, bitter tone comes from the doorway of my office. “You could have just told me you have a girlfriend.”
Standing there with her arms crossed, Bethany—the apparently batshit crazy English teacher that can’t take a hint—taps her heels on the concrete floor of my office demanding a response. If this was last year, I would have been all over it, all over her. She looks like Teacher Barbie come to life. Her platinum blonde hair falls right below her shoulders, styled every day.
Her perfect tan, her perfect make-up, her bright red, perfectly trimmed nails just seem fake. Even her bright yellow, preppy sweater vest, white collared shirt, and dark denim pants come off as calculated. Hollis’s freckled face, ripped jeans, messy buns, oversized black glasses, and band tees flash through my head as Bat Shit Crazy Barbie continues to tap her heels on the floor. Instead of denying the fact that Hollis is my girlfriend, which I probably should have, I look Bethany right in the eyes and shrug.
“I just didn’t want to go out for drinks with you, Bethany,” I say, trying to sound remorseful, but coming up a bit short. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to be a dick, because we work together, but really, I’m just all set.”
“You are such an asshole,” she glares before dramatically turning while shaking her head in disbelief, as if the thought of me turning her down was inconceivable.
Seriously?! What the fuck was that? I could understand if I gave her any indication I was interested, but I barely even looked at her when we were in the same room, never mind held a conversation about anything other than the weather, or when I repeatedly shot her down for drinks. And the guys wonder why I don’t go on multiple dates, never mind try to settle down.
As if on cue, my phone dings letting me know I have a voice memo. Hollis. A happy, relieved sigh leaves my body as I tap 0 9 1 5 in, unlocking my phone. Bethany who?
Over the last few weeks, Hollis has spent more nights in my guest room than in her own bed. We’re not dating. We’re not even sleeping together. In any manner. I sleep in my bed and the guest room has unofficially become Hollis’s room. Unless there’s a thunderstorm, like two nights ago, when she climbed into bed with me.
We never discussed her staying over, it just kind of happened. And I would be completely lying if I said I was bothered by it. We weren’t doing anything more than drinking coffee together in the morning and eating take-out and watching movies together at night. And laughing. A lot. God, she makes me laugh.
I’m going to miss waking up to her standing in my kitchen, in a pair of my old football sweats from college. The three pairs of pants that, up until recently, had been sitting at the very bottom of my last dresser drawer, had officially become her “sleepover sweats.”
It started with her birthday weekend and then turned into an almost every night thing when Davis and Kinley’s wedding needed to be planned in just shy of three weeks. Three fucking weeks. Now, I don’t know much about planning weddings. I’ve never been engaged, and the last time I was in a wedding party, I was seventeen, so I don’t even know what exactly goes into planning a wedding. What I do know is that people usually have a year, sometimes two, to plan this shit.
The day after their engagement announcement, Kinley came to Sunday dinner at Hollis’s grandparents’ completely frazzled, and Davis went right to the beer. Despite an original plan to keep the pregnancy quiet, Kinley started sobbing when Ellis offered to make her a martini. After a mug of tea and a whole slew of happy tears from Ellis, Elisabeth, Nonna, and Hollis’s aunts, Kinley spilled that she had wanted to wait until she was three months to tell everyone but the more she thought about it, the more she genuinely wanted to get married before she had the baby. But she also didn’t want to get married when she was the size of a blimp. (Her words, not mine!)
While everyone was gushing over the baby and trying to comfort Kinley, Nonna, like a 5-foot Italian ninja, snuck out of the room, and pulled Nonno away from the football game we were watching. Before anyone knew what was happening, Kinley’s parents and sister Cole were knocking on the front door.
After an hour and a half of being closed off in the formal dining room, it was decided there would be a small, intimate wedding at the Capparelli’s summer cabin in the White Mountains on the Saturday night of Columbus Day weekend. Later that same afternoon, Kinley asked Cole, Hollis, Ellis, and Elisabeth to be a part of her bridal party. Following suit, as expected, Davis asked Travis to be his best man and me, Kenny, and Tucker to be groomsmen.
When he pulled me aside and asked, Kinley watched like a hawk and winked pointing to Hollis mouthing, “bridesmaid.” The fact she still thought I had no idea she has been trying to push me and Hollis together for years is hilarious to me. I let her go along with it, because the thought of me and Hollis together wasn’t exactly upsetting anymore. Not that it ever was, but I found myself welcoming the idea more and more every day.
While the wedding is going to be small by typical wedding standards, there was still so much that needed to be done in such a short time. In the days that followed, I would come home from football practice at five and without fail, Hollis’s Jeep would already be parked in front of her brother’s house next door.
It was about seven o’clock the Thursday after wedding planning started when there was a knock on my front door. Not expecting anyone, I opened the door in just the plaid flannel pajama pants I was wearing. Much to my surprise, a very stressed-looking Hollis pitifully looked up to me and all but begged for “any kind of alcoholic beverage.” I poured her a glass of wine, we ordered pizza, and she fell asleep on my couch. When her brother knocked on my front door, looking for her around midnight, she was still sound asleep on my couch, the credits to Iron Man scrolling down the TV hanging on the wall. Davis moved her Jeep into my driveway and told me to leave a note for her saying she could skip their run in the morning before heading back next door to his place.
The next night, I knew she would be working the bar at Cap & Co., so for the first time in my life I went and sat at the bar, getting both dinner and drinks by myself. Which ended up being me spending most of the time internally talking shit to every guy that flirted with her or excessively tipped her. And when her shift was coming to an end, she made a comment about how she couldn’t wait to go home and drink some hot cocoa. Like an idiot I said, “You know, I have hot cocoa and mini marshmallows at my house.”
As soon as I said it, I had a new fear that she would laugh in my face and shut me down, like we weren’t best friends for half our lives, but a girl I was genuinely trying to take home. Instead of laughing, she put together a box full of pastries and cookies from the rest
aurant downstairs and told me that if I didn’t mind her using my shower, she was in. Then, wearing my old sweats she came with me to my mom’s for breakfast again, and I went with her to her Saturday night set.
From there we just fell into an unintentional routine. After she finished helping Kinley, she would drive her Jeep into my driveway, we’d figure out dinner, and then do it again the next day. Friday nights after games, I would head to Cap & Co., and there would be a Captain and Coke waiting for me before I even got to the bar. I was even making a point to get up a bit earlier than I needed to during the week, so I could see her before her morning run and when she left for work.
The thought of starting my day with Hollis Capparelli had made it surprisingly easy to abandon the warm covers I always had to drag myself out of every morning. Before, I would stroll down the stairs with just enough time to spare to go through a drive-through and get a cup of scalding, burnt coffee. It had been too easy getting used to walking into my kitchen to see her pouring a cup and getting the same begrudged, evil eye I got every morning when she handed over that first cup to me.
Which is why now, I wait. I could go to bed. I could leave the door unlocked, text Hollis and tell her I’ll see her in the morning. But, the truth was, I wanted to see her, to make sure she made it okay. It’s crazy how easily you can become used to someone’s presence and how empty a house, a person, can feel when that presence is gone—even if just for twenty-four hours, like Hollis had been.
She had to pick up her dress from the seamstress yesterday and wanted to go home to pack and practice the song Davis and Kinley asked her to play for their first dance, so she’d spent the night at home. Her home, not mine. And I’d slept like shit. The house felt empty without her in it.
So I had tried to make dinner plans with her, in the hopes of getting her back here. And though dinner wasn’t possible, as soon as she said that she would come over after her shift, my whole day got better. Pulling a carton of cookie dough ice cream from the freezer, I grab a spoon and just dig into the pint. In the late hour of the night, the silence of the empty house is deafening. Which is weird for me, the confirmed bachelor who up until recently, relished in the thought of having his own space. It wasn’t until Hollis started spending more time here did I realize just how empty this big house feels when she’s not here.
“You better have another spoon for me.”
And just like that, everything feels right in the world again.
Chapter Fourteen
Hollis
There is no feeling better than the sense of being home. As my feet hit the dirt below me, with Chase by side, that sense completely washes over me. Ahead of us is the summer cabin that has been in my family for as long as I can remember.
This is my safe place, my refuge when the world becomes too crazy and I need clarity. I’ve been all over the United States, to Italy, and England…and there is nowhere on this earth I love more than the Capparelli Cabin.
Over bowls of ice cream last night, Chase had suggested we head up early today just to make sure no last minute decorating was needed or cleaning needed to be done. Knowing that my grandmother hired a cleaner and the only decorations were the flowers and the arch my dad built, I still agreed. Not because I wanted to clean or decorate, but because selfishly, I wanted to come back to my favorite corner of the world before all the craziness of wedding weekend happened.
Not that the last few weeks hadn’t been complete craziness. If I wasn’t working, I was either with Kinley helping her with something wedding related or with Chase decompressing from helping Kinley with wedding related things. Three weeks. That’s how long they had in between Kinley’s kitchen meltdown about being a fat bride and when the crews would come to winterize the cabin. And, Kinley was determined to make it happen.
My brother and my cousin Travis had to pull some serious strings to both be off this weekend, so most of the planning ended up falling on Kinley, which trickled down to Cole and me. So many little details needed to be figured out. Like dresses, the fellas’ tuxes, food, an officiant, flowers, music…now I know why people take years to plan this shit. It wasn’t even my wedding and I was ready for it to all be over, just so we could have some form of normalcy again.
Though I don’t know what normalcy would mean for me and Chase. At this point, we were spending so much time together, it feels weird when we aren’t. It has gotten to the point that my dad asked what was going on with us and if I was moving in with him. Weirdly enough, something that was never asked the entire two years I was with Noah. Pushing it off under the guise that it was just easier being right next door to Kinley when she needed me, I assured him after the wedding, I would be back home, bothering him all the time.
With Monday quickly approaching, I needed to deal with, and find answers for, the looming questions I had. It made no sense to stress over going back to my basement apartment at my dad’s. I had a place to go. Chase’s house wasn’t mine. And it’s not like there is anything between us that would keep me at his house more permanently. He was just being a good friend, giving me a place to crash right next door to where I needed to be most of the time that also happened to be closer to my work.
He’s had plenty of opportunities to make a move, and he hasn’t. Any silly hope I had imagined was just that, false hope. Once this weekend was over, we would go back to being the people that saw each other occasionally within our circle of friends and on Sundays at my grandparents for dinner. I needed to accept that.
“So, wanna be roommates tomorrow and, maybeeeee, Sunday?”
Unlocking the front door, I push it open, allowing Chase to walk past me, his arms full of the bags of groceries for dinner tonight. Since tomorrow was going to be crazy, tonight was going to be low-key, at least for the girls. Kinley, Davis, and the crew would all come up tonight after they all got out of work. After dinner, Davis, Chase, and the rest of the guys would leave and head into town to spend the night at a hotel.
She was giving up a lot having a smaller wedding, but the two things Kinley wasn’t willing to compromise on was that Davis didn’t get to see her before the wedding and that her dad walk her down the aisle.
Tomorrow after the “I Dos” and mini-reception, we planned on having one last official goodbye to summer weekend with everyone. There was no school on Monday because of Columbus Day, so I knew that Chase was in no rush to go home, but we hadn’t talked about staying up here past Sunday.
“Sunday?” I ask, following him to the kitchen and immediately begin taking the food out of the bags. “And you sure you want to crash together? I called dibs on the yellow room, and that just has one bed.”
“Yeah, I was thinking we could crash up here an extra night after everyone leaves,” he starts, quickly adding, “if you want. I know how much you love it up here. And I figured you’d be in the yellow room.”
When my grandparents decorated the cabin years ago, they had color coded each of the four bedrooms of the cabin. While the blankets and décor have changed throughout the years, the themes have remained the same. The blue room is the master bedroom. It goes without saying that Kinley and Davis get that all weekend. The yellow bedroom, which is my favorite, looks over the backyard. Like the master bedroom, it has a fire place, its own private bathroom, and it’s also the only other room in the house that has a bed bigger than a single.
The pink room, where Ellis and Cole would more than likely end up, housed two full-size beds covered in baby pink comforters. And then there’s the green room, the room my cousins and I spent most of our time in growing up. Two sets of wooden bunkbeds, handmade by my father sit on each side of the walls of the room—just enough beds for Travis, Tucker, Kenny, and Chase…which, I assumed would be what happened.
“You don’t want to crash in the green room with the guys?” I ask while pulling up the music app on my phone. Putting on my cooking playlist, I decide to focus on the prep for the chicken tacos I’m making for dinner tonight. Not wanting to seem too eager about the th
ought of sharing not just a room, but a bed with Chase for two nights, I pretend to be distracted by Frank Sinatra and the need to find a crock-pot.
“Stop,” Chase says, grabbing my hand as I reach for the cabinet in front of me. “Just for a minute.”
“Fly Me To The Moon” shuffles into “Sway” by Dean Martin as he guides me back and places his other hand on my hip.
“Dance with me.”
It’s not a question, or a request. The stubborn side of me wants to tell him that he doesn’t get to tell me what to do, but the words “you’re not the boss of me” never leave my lips. Wrapping my fingers in his, I’m like putty in his hands as I let him lead me around the kitchen. My hips move to the music as if they’ve been hypnotized.
His silky basketball shorts and my thin yoga pants are a dangerous combination. With every spin we make, I become more aware of the very little fabric separating us.
Alabama. Alaska. Arizona. Arkansas. California. Colorado. Connecticut. Delaware...Fuck, even the Sunshine State can’t distract me from the closeness we share right now. Holy shit. Who knew Dean Martin could be so damn sexy?
As the song comes to an end, Chase lifts the arm of the hand holding mine, twirling me like a princess. With a little too much gusto, he pulls me back to him. Slamming into his chest instantly sends me into a fit of giggles.
“What’s so funny, Hurricane?” he asks. The playful tone of his voice doesn’t match the intensity of his stare though.
False hope, Hollis. Don’t allow yourself to go there. Once this weekend is over, you’re back home. Chase will never be anything more than your best friend.
