Best Practice

by Carsen Taite

  She put her key in the lock of Campbell’s house, but it swung open before she could turn the knob. Campbell stood on the other side and she didn’t look happy.

  “Where have you been?”

  And just like that, the glow she’d been feeling after her night with Grace faded. Perry pushed past Campbell to walk into the house, her guard up at the edge in Campbell’s voice. “Nice to see you too, sis.”

  “Sorry, but I have a right to be concerned. You’ve been MIA almost twenty-four hours.”

  “So, you’ve mentioned. Twice. In case you forgot, I am an adult. Besides, I texted you to say I wasn’t going to be home. I’m sorry I missed today, but since you’d planned all that stuff to make me feel better, I thought you’d be relieved to know I found my own way out of my funk.”

  “You chose to spend the day with some girl you met at the bar instead of your own sister who hasn’t gotten to spend one-on-one time with you in years, and that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  Perry studied Campbell’s face. She’d grown used to Campbell playing parent, but this was something else. Campbell felt genuinely dissed. “Hey, I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t think you really wanted to do all that stuff. That you were just doing it for me, and since I was…you know, I figured I was letting you off the hook.”

  “I’ve barely seen you. Maybe next time choose me instead of a stranger.” Campbell waved toward the kitchen. “Come on, dinner’s almost ready.”

  Campbell hadn’t raised her voice, but her even keel didn’t hide the fact she was annoyed, and now Perry was annoyed too at Campbell’s implication she’d put a stranger before her own family. Sure, she hadn’t been around much, but she still loved Campbell and Justin as much as she’d loved their parents. And that was the problem. Would Campbell ever stop trying to be Mom, so they could be sisters instead? Sisters who shared important things without fear of judgment. For years, she’d chafed at Campbell’s attempts to micromanage her life, and her annoyance bubbled to the surface. “I wasn’t with a stranger.”

  Campbell stopped and turned around. “What?”

  “I wasn’t with a stranger. I was with Grace.” Perry stared at her, daring her to speak, but Campbell stood in place, silent except for the glower emanating from her eyes. Perry decided to go all in. “That’s right, Grace. Your best friend, the managing partner of your law firm. An amazing woman by anyone’s standards. You want to tell me again how I don’t make responsible choices?”

  Campbell walked toward her, and Perry resisted backing away at her ominous approach. “You’re telling me that you spent the last twenty-four hours with Grace? At her house?”

  “Yes. And we weren’t playing Scrabble, if that’s your next question.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Call her and ask.” Perry prayed she wouldn’t. She’d known, on some level, Campbell would be upset that she’d slept with Grace, but she hadn’t expected nuclear level anger. “Why are you mad?”

  Campbell shook her head. “Mad? You think I’m mad? Grace is my best friend. You had a weekend of fun, got what you wanted, and as soon as your passport comes in, you’re going to leave, right?”

  Perry averted her eyes, unable to stand Campbell’s steely gaze. “That’s the plan.”

  “And where does that leave Grace?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about my best friend, who apparently blew off a chance to date a woman her own age with a great job for a fling. Does she know it was a fling? Does she understand you’re out of here as soon as you get the chance?”

  “She’s not a child, Campbell. You can treat me like a kid all you want, but Grace is a grown woman who can make her own decisions. She was as into it as I was.”

  Campbell put her hands over her ears. “Stop. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have brought it up.” She took her tone down a notch, hoping to diffuse the situation. “We’re consenting adults. Grace knows I’m not staying in Austin. We had fun and that’s all it was.” As she spoke the words, a nagging voice within called them into question, but she batted it away, forging ahead. “Once I’m gone, she can resume whatever with that leggy blonde. It’s all good.”

  She watched Campbell for some sign she was getting through, but Campbell’s frown appeared to be permanent. There was no pleasing her, no matter what she did or didn’t do. The realization fueled her anger. “And by the way, if you wanted me to stand up for you at your wedding, you could’ve asked.” Campbell looked shocked at the remark, but Perry attributed it to the abrupt change in subject.

  “I wanted to surprise you. With the tux. Stella came to the office, right?”

  Perry knew this was the point in the argument where she was supposed to say thank you and tell Campbell she was sorry for bristling under her control, but now that her happy afterglow had been extinguished, she wasn’t in the mood to make nice. “Yes. Did you bother telling your best friend you plan to have me be the maid of honor or whatever?”

  “Yes, Grace knows I planned to ask you. Does she know you might not even show up?”

  “Grace knows me better than you do.”

  “Has she seen this side of you yet? The one that runs away at the first sign of an emotional connection to anything?”

  That’s it. She was done. She’d promised, over and over, that she’d be there for the wedding, but apparently Campbell didn’t believe her, and it was about to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Campbell wasn’t going to be satisfied with anything she said or did. At least not until she quit her job with Lawyers for Change and moved back to Austin. Well, if Campbell wanted her to make a move, she was ready. “Tell Wynne I’m sorry I couldn’t make it for dinner.”

  “What? Where are you going?”

  “Upstairs to get my stuff. I’m going to stay at Justin’s for a while.” She started up the stairs.

  “Perry, don’t go. We can work this out.”

  “Maybe, but not right now. I need some space.”

  Campbell stared at her for a moment, and when she spoke her voice was even, but Perry could hear the frustration beneath her words. “Fine, but I think you better not come back to the office for now.”

  Perry instantly thought of a dozen responses. No big deal that she was effectively being fired from a job Campbell had made up to keep her from doing what she really loved. What did Campbell think she was accomplishing by this move? If she and Grace wanted to date each other, barring her from the office wasn’t going to stop that.

  She rolled that last thought around in her head for a moment. She wasn’t dating Grace. Nope. She’d just told Campbell what she had with Grace was casual, but now she wasn’t certain that was true. Was it a matter of wanting something she was told she couldn’t have or were the feelings she’d had when she and Grace made love for real?

  She couldn’t think about this now. She needed to spend some time alone and clear her head. “Fine.” It wasn’t fine.

  Thirty minutes later, she was in the back seat of Flint’s car, grateful he’d still been in the neighborhood and grateful his constant stream of chatter managed to drown out the barrage of thoughts about Grace and Campbell and the future. The thoughts, she could handle, but the feelings that came with them made her want to run fast and far away.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Grace sensed something was wrong the minute she walked into the office on Monday morning. Graham, who usually greeted her with an overly formal prediction of the state of the world, abruptly ended the call he was on and simply said, “Conference room. Campbell and Abby are waiting.”

  “I didn’t see a meeting on my calendar,” she said, hoping he could give her a heads-up as to what was going on. “New client?”

  Graham hunched his shoulders. “I am merely the messenger.”

  She stared at him for a moment, and although she was certain he knew more, he didn’t cave under her gaze. “Tell them I’ll be there in a minute.”

  She s
topped in her office and unpacked her bag, setting her laptop on the center of her desk. The laptop she’d insisted she had to have at home with her this weekend had been barely used. After Perry had left Saturday night, she’d been too consumed with after sex haze to manage to do any work, and yesterday had been more of the same. Several times, she’d pulled out her phone, planning to text Perry and invite her back over. If she wasn’t going to get any work done, she may as well play, but she stopped short almost every time. She didn’t like to ask questions when she wasn’t sure of the answers, and no matter how intimate their time together had been, they hadn’t touched on the topic of what would happen next beyond a simple “see you later.”

  Finally, right before she went to bed last night, she’d texted a simple Had a great time with you yesterday and set her phone down, vowing not to stalk her message app for a response. An hour later, her phone buzzed on the nightstand and she scooped it up, quickly scrolling to find two simple words. Me too.

  That was it. No, let’s do it again. It was the best night of my life. Being with you makes me want to reconsider leaving town. Had she really expected more?

  She had, and she could kick herself for doing so. Perry had been clear about her intentions from the beginning. Her stay in Austin was temporary, and she wouldn’t even be here had Grace not convinced her to return. When it came to the attraction between them, Perry had never mentioned anything more than wanting to live in the moment. Grace replayed their exchange for the hundredth time since Perry’s text: What about after? I don’t know, but we’ll figure it out together. Well, where was the together part?

  She shook her head. Enough. Enough dwelling on whether she’d made a huge mistake. Enough wondering why something that felt so good could leave her feeling positively wrecked. She had to get her act together because Campbell and Abby were waiting and she knew in her gut something serious was going on, and they were probably looking to her, as the managing partner, to offer a solution. She stood up straight, assumed her ready for trial face, and strode to the conference room.

  The first thing she noticed when she entered the room was that there were no donuts, signaling the level of serious was several notches higher than she’d thought. “Sorry, I’m late, but I didn’t get a message about a meeting this morning.” She slid into her seat at the head of the table. “What’s up?”

  Neither Campbell nor Abby responded, and Abby seemed to be trying to find a particular spot on the wall to focus her attention. “Does someone want to tell me what’s going on? Did we lose a big client?” Her gut clenched as she wondered if Hadley had contacted one of them to complain about last week’s meeting. “Was it Hadley?”

  Campbell looked at her with a puzzled expression. “What are you talking about?”

  Okay, it wasn’t Hadley. Could it be Leaderboard? “Did Brax fire us?”

  Abby chose that moment to stop looking at the wall. Her head shake was subtle, but not so much with the way she cut her eyes toward Campbell in an over-exaggerated telegraph. Grace wasn’t sure how to interpret the maneuver, but she didn’t have time to be relieved they hadn’t lost their most lucrative client before Campbell spoke.

  “Perry quit.”

  Grace absorbed the stinging blow and struggled to keep her voice calm. “When?”

  “Saturday night when she came home after spending the night with you.”

  Boom. Grace returned Campbell’s glare. She got that Campbell was mad. She’d expected that, but the fact she’d been stewing about it since Saturday without reaching out to her? That wasn’t how their friendship worked. They fought, sure, by hashing out their disagreements, not by keeping secrets and letting them fester. “You’re saying she walked into your house and quit this job. Just like that.”

  “Oh, no. There was more, but I’m pretty sure you know the rest.”

  Grace didn’t bother trying to hide her own anger in response. “All I know is that Perry was in a good mood when she left my house and she didn’t say anything about quitting.”

  Abby stood and made a time-out motion. “Let’s start over before this gets out of hand. Okay?”

  Grace stared at Campbell before nodding her assent. She didn’t want to fight with her, and she’d anticipated there would be fallout from sleeping with Perry, but she wasn’t prepared to concede she’d done anything wrong. She and Perry were both adults. If they wanted to sleep together, that was their choice and it shouldn’t matter who either one of them were related to. But it did, and behind Campbell’s anger she could see hurt, and it pained her to know she’d caused it.

  “All right,” Abby said. “Campbell, did Perry really quit?”

  Campbell sighed. “Not exactly. I may have told her not to come back to the office. It’s possible she thinks she was fired.”

  “What did you do that for?” Grace asked, not bothering to temper her voice.

  Abby waved a finger at her. “Hang on. I promise I’ll get to you. Campbell, what did you do that for?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. She’d come home from spending the weekend with Grace.”

  “One night,” Grace interjected.

  “Whatever. We had words, she packed her stuff and said she was going to Justin’s, and I reacted. It’s possible I overreacted. I don’t know. Obviously, something’s been going on between them for a while. I sensed it, but clearly they were keeping it a secret.”

  Abby held up a hand. “Hang on. When it comes to keeping relationships secret, I don’t think either one of us has room to talk. You were sleeping with Wynne when she was competing for our business, and Roxanne and I kept seeing each other even though she was trying to put Barclay’s out of business.”

  “Exactly,” Grace said. “And come on, Campbell, you fired your sister for sleeping with your best friend. What’s that about?” She paused and a nagging feeling crept in. “Do you think I’m not good enough for your sister?”

  “What? That doesn’t even make sense. She’s the one I fired, not you.”

  “Well, you can’t fire me because I’m your law partner.”

  “I thought you’d be grateful she’s not here at the office.”

  Grace looked at Abby. “Are you hearing this nonsense?”

  Campbell raised her hands in surrender. “Okay, I told her not to come back to the office because I was mad at her. She’d packed her things and was leaving the house, running away like she always does whenever there are important things to discuss or whenever she’s faced with feeling anything. I said it to get a reaction. I half expected her to show up anyway out of pure stubbornness, but Justin said she was still in bed when he left for work this morning. Frankly, Grace, I did think you’d be relieved not to have to deal with the awkwardness.”

  Grace stood and started pacing in an attempt to digest Campbell’s words without blowing up at her. When she replayed the part about awkwardness, she couldn’t keep silent. “You thought I’d be relieved? Do you think I’m incapable of dealing with a little awkwardness with another woman? Especially a woman who makes me feel alive, who makes me laugh? A woman who gave me the best night of my life? It wasn’t your decision to make. Whatever there is between me and Perry, it’s for us to decide, and when it comes to what happens in this office, we all get an equal say.”

  She stopped pacing and slumped back in her chair. Abby reached out and clasped her arm in a show of solidarity. The three of them had achieved a wonderful balance over the years, each playing to their strengths in both business and friendship. Sure, they’d had minor disagreements in the time they’d been friends, but this? This was a bigger mess than any they’d faced before. She’d known better than to let anything develop between her and Perry, no matter how strong the attraction. She’d disrupted the balance, and for what? Perry wasn’t even around, so she’d sacrificed her friendship for nothing.

  “The best night of your life?”

  Grace looked up and met Campbell’s eyes. They were questioning, but kind and concerned,
like she really wanted to know the truth. “Yes. I’ve never felt this way before. And…” she stopped, uncertain about how much was appropriate to say. “This is hard. I don’t know if I’m talking to my friend Campbell or Perry’s sister.”

  Campbell smiled. “I’m not sure how we separate the two, but try friend first.”

  Grace took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. She stared at her hands as she spoke. “I’ve never felt like this before. I’ve spent my life being the responsible one, the one who put work before pleasure because that’s how you stay safe and sane, but when I’m with Perry, she brings out a side of me I didn’t even know existed. I want to have fun and be adventurous. I want to explore markets, and ride bikes through traffic, and dance until the bar shuts down, and I want to do those things with her.” She looked up, catching Abby’s understanding smile before turning to face Campbell.

  “You’ve fallen in love with her.”

  “Love? No.” Grace glanced back at Abby. “Come on, help me out here.”

  “Sounds like love to me,” Abby said, exchanging a knowing look with Campbell.

  “You two don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Actually,” Abby said, “We kind of do.” She pointed at Campbell. “This one’s getting married shortly, and…and I’m head over heels for Roxanne.”

  Grace play punched Abby in the arm, happy to have found a way to deflect the attention from her predicament. “You’re not going to keep it a secret forever, you may as well go ahead and tell her.”

  “Tell me what?” Campbell asked.

  “Do it or I will,” Grace said.

  “Fine,” Abby said. “I didn’t want to detract from your big day, but I bought a ring.”

  “OMG, let me see it,” Campbell said.

  Abby pulled the picture up on her phone, and Campbell oohed and aahed, while Grace watched. She’d always known she wanted what they had—someone she could share her life with, who she loved and who loved her back in equal measure. She’d planned her life carefully to prepare for finding that person, starting with establishing her career, achieving financial independence, and owning a home where she could raise a family, but in the process of checking all the boxes, she’d missed the one thing her friends hadn’t—the passion part. The I don’t care if it’s practical, the way you make me feel and the need to be with you is so strong, nothing else matters. Suddenly, she wanted the attention back on her because she needed her friends right now. She cleared her throat, exaggerating the sound. Abby put her phone facedown on the table, and she and Campbell made a show of sitting at attention.