Sleeping with Her Enemy

by Jenny Holiday

  “Where’s Amy?” Jack appeared at his elbow, Cassie on his arm, both of them holding drinks that appeared to have little pine trees or some shit sticking out of them. “I’ve seen her brother, but not her.”

  “There she is!” Cassie started to wave but then dropped her hand. “Oh.”

  He followed her gaze to the staircase. There, indeed, was Amy. His breath caught for a moment. Wearing a calf-length, sleeveless ivory dress, she looked more like a bride than she had on her wedding day. She scanned the room as she slowly descended the stairs, her face closed down, unreadable.

  Then she saw him. And as at the karaoke bar, her face lit up. He smiled back and winked, hoping that this time, it would stay lit up.

  It didn’t.

  She pulled her arm away from the person who’d been escorting her down the stairs.

  And that person was Mason.

  He tried to tell himself that her proximity to Mason didn’t mean anything. Their families were no doubt close. And there was such a thing as a civilized breakup. Just because he wanted to grab one of the ceramic serving trays being used to circulate appetizers and smash it over the prick’s head didn’t mean Amy had to want to.

  But if she thought he was going to be nice to the guy, she was mistaken.

  “You guys all look great,” she said, flashing a not-genuine smile at Jack and Cassie. It disappeared entirely when her eyes swept over him, stopping at his shirt.

  “Yeah, I bought these pants, and I was going to put on a white shirt I already have, but in the end, I just couldn’t do it.” He hadn’t been able to resist the sartorial fuck-off to Amy’s parents.

  “So you went with bright orange.” She fingered the cuff of his shirt, and he wanted to grab her hand and press it against his bare skin.

  Something was off. “Are you okay?” he said, searching her face.

  She pulled away from him like he’d burned her. “I’m fine.”

  You’re mine, is what you are.

  He had to shove that caveman thought aside for later, though. Mason was closing in. They had met at the odd office function over the years. Mason always called him Dan and wanted to talk about video games. Dax had been trying to be mature. To keep his tray-smashing fantasies securely lodged in the land of make-believe. But suddenly, the thought of this entitled man-child with his hands all over Amy… Thinking he was worthy of her. And then having the gall to cast her off?

  Change of plan.

  He grabbed Amy’s hand. “I need to talk to you.” She opened her mouth in surprise. “Now,” he said, lacing his fingers through hers, doing a 180, and pulling her in the opposite direction from Mason. She emitted a little squeak of surprise but followed him through the crowd, murmuring “excuse us” and “so sorry,” as he roughly parted the sea of white-garbed assholes in their way. The right thing to do was to wait for this stupid party to be over, but he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.

  “Amy?” came a voice. An older, feminine voice he assumed belonged to her mother, given that he followed the sound of it to a chic fiftyish woman with a severe blond bob and the same lanky build as Amy.

  “Amy’s busy right now,” he barked, enjoying the woman’s shocked response. Hell, she was lucky he didn’t stop in his tracks and proposition her daughter in front of the whole goddamned party.

  Heading the opposite way from the main stairwell took them into the kitchen, which was populated with a small army of people preparing food and stacking used dishes. He kept going, ignoring their stares, until he found a door. He yanked it open. A pantry. Fine.

  He pulled her in behind him, slammed the door shut, and kissed her.

  “We can’t keep doing this,” she murmured. But she kissed him back, twining her arms around his neck.

  “Yes, we can,” he growled. “We’re both adults. We’re both in the same headspace right now. So why the fuck can’t we?” He wanted to say more, to say that he had made a mistake by calling off their last trip to the “movies.” But to do that, he had to stop kissing her, and she was moaning now, soft and low, just for him.

  But then, suddenly, just as he was about to deepen the kiss, she pulled away. “I can’t do this.” She waved her hands around in the space between them. “This isn’t enough. I wanted it to be, but it wasn’t.”

  She moved to brush past him, and he moved to let her—what choice did he have? But they both moved the same direction, which in the small, enclosed space, caused a minor collision.

  A pit opened in his stomach. He reared back. “What the hell is that?”

  “What?” Her eyes widened.

  He sniffed the air to make sure his nose hadn’t been deceiving him. “You’re wearing different perfume.” Some kind of perfumey perfume that didn’t seem like her at all.

  Her hands flew to her neck. “Oh, yeah.” Her eyes darted around.

  With a sickening thud in his gut, he understood why he suddenly wasn’t enough for her. “Why were you with Mason just now?”

  “Mason gave me this perfume.”

  He raised his eyebrows, trying to ignore the anger coursing through him. “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  “He wants to get back together,” she whispered, so low he could barely hear her.

  Yes. He’d known that was coming the second he smelled that bullshit perfume. Still, to hear it from her lips was a punch to the gut. “And you told him no.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  He couldn’t catch his breath. Rivulets of sweat were running down his back in the suddenly stifling pantry.

  “What the hell do you care, anyway?”

  It was a fair question. What was the matter with him? He had no jurisdiction over her—wouldn’t have even if she had agreed to his “hey, let’s start sleeping together again” plan.

  When she finally spoke, her voice was low. “This had to stop, Dax. I finally understand. It’s been a hard lesson, but I get it now.”

  “Get what?” What was she talking about?

  “That a person can’t have it all.” She smiled, a little sadly. “I thought I could have everything. But I see now that I can’t.”

  “Define ‘everything,’” he shot back. He wanted her to say it, to admit that she was going to pick white parties in Forest Hill with Mason.

  She wasn’t going to pick him.

  Then, inexplicably, he thought of his father saying, “It’s better with her around.”

  He was drowning. He couldn’t think with that bullshit perfume filling his head. So he walked out through the still-buzzing kitchen, back into the throng of white, and out the front door. He wasn’t going to stop until he got to the island.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The feeling of drowning persisted until Dax was on the lake. The irony wasn’t lost on him that it was only once he was on the ferry, surrounded by water, his ears filled with lapping waves and screeching seagulls, that he could breathe again without feeling like an elephant had taken up residence on his chest.

  The last time he’d felt like this was years ago, when he’d canoed out onto this very lake and let a radical idea, one that had been buried deep in his mind, swirl up through his consciousness: starting Cherry Beach Software Solutions. Back then, it was as if his body had forced a reckoning that day—seeking out the lake it knew would give him the space to breathe. To think. As he’d bobbed in the canoe that day, stewing about his miserable professional circumstances, he had realized he was at a proverbial T in the road. He could be a cubicle jockey, a cog in the Microsoft machine, for the rest of his life, or he could fucking man up and do something else.

  It’s better with her around.

  He couldn’t get his father’s voice out of his head

  When Dax thought about love, which wasn’t often, he always assumed it was an anachronism. Something his parents had, but not something that had survived into the modern world. Even if it was worth the risk—which it wasn’t, Allison had taught him—who had time for that stuff anymore? Everything moved too fast. There was
too much irony buzzing around for modern, urban people like him to look up from their atomized, work-fueled existences, and find love.

  Love was his father making his mother beef stroganoff every Sunday for forty years, even though he hated it.

  People didn’t do that anymore.

  Or so he’d thought as he’d hightailed it down to the ferry docks after having fled the party like he was Cinderella.

  Except…

  Once he could breathe again, and as the ferry had built up a head of steam, he started to imagine life without Amy. Not just life without sleeping with Amy, but actual Life Without Amy.

  It’s better with her around.

  He’d thrown back his head then, and he had actually laughed at the blue sky above. Dax liked to flatter himself that he was an intelligent guy. But Jesus Christ, it had taken him long enough to get his head out of his ass. To realize that Amy wasn’t Allison.

  By the time the boat docked, he knew a bunch of things with certainty. He knew that he would make Amy Morrison beef stroganoff every single goddamned day for the rest of her life if she wanted him to. He would eat peanut butter cups at the movies. He would trade in the millionaire-mobile and fold himself into her stupid little toy car every time he needed to go somewhere. He would memorize the stats of every single one of the Jays’ pitchers.

  He’d spent the past fifteen years thinking he wasn’t looking for a relationship?

  Fuck that.

  The idea was as radical as the one he’d had years ago—more so, even. The stakes were higher. That had been his job. This? This was his life.

  He picked up his phone.

  Gary had better be home.

  …

  Amy juggled her popcorn bucket as she waited impatiently in line to board the ferry. She hoped she wasn’t too late.

  Too late for what? It wasn’t like he was going to marry someone else this afternoon.

  It was more that she had to do this before she lost her nerve. Being New, Fearless Amy was hard. She was fairly certain she was going to get her declaration thrown back in her face and her heart shredded.

  But she had to try. She had to be honest. She had to go after what she wanted.

  Because that’s what she was about now.

  She just needed this goddamned ferry to move.

  It felt like she’d come flying after him, but of course that wasn’t strictly true. Admittedly, she had stood in that pantry for a good five minutes, freaking out among the dry goods. And then, of course, it had taken her another twenty to extricate herself from her mother. There was also the detour to the movie theater for popcorn.

  And, okay, there were twenty more in the middle there where she’d had to find Mason and tell him definitively what she should have told him earlier that morning. She hadn’t wanted to waste the time, but it seemed important that he know that they were, to in keeping with the Taylor theme, never ever ever getting back together.

  She wanted to fully close the book on her old life. Say good-bye to the old house, the old love.

  Because a totally clear head was necessary for the Hail Mary pass she was about to let loose. She was calling it Operation: Maybe You Can Have Everything.

  Clutching her bucket of popcorn and shuffling along as the crowd moved like snails up the gangplank, she tried to figure out why she had been so frightened all this time to lay things on the line with Dax. The obvious answer was that she’d already had a declaration of love thrown back in her face once that summer. But that was only part of the truth. The rest of it was that even though she had been trying to remake her life, she’d fallen right back into the same old patterns, projecting everything into some vision of the future she’d arbitrarily fixated on. This one had been Amy Morrison, Fun Single Girl. She hadn’t stopped once to think that maybe, in her overcorrection, she was doing exactly the same thing she always did—programming her feelings instead of feeling them.

  And what did it matter if Dax wasn’t the relationship type? What was the worst that could happen? She told him how she really felt, he rejected her, and they went back to being office enemies? It couldn’t be any worse that the last month without him had been.

  She had missed him. God, how she’d missed him. She hadn’t even realized how much until all of a sudden he started appearing—at karaoke, at her house on moving day, at the white party.

  The idea that he’d thought she was going back to Mason was impossible to bear.

  She’d been trying to tell him she couldn’t make out with him in the pantry. Couldn’t be his casual fling. Because nothing about them was casual. She wanted all of him. Admitting that to herself was hard, because it meant that she would have to settle. Because she knew with certainty that no other man was ever going to measure up to Dax Harris.

  Still, he deserved to know the truth.

  Even more than that, she deserved to speak the truth.

  The ping of an incoming text startled her—all this ruthless honesty was making her jumpy.

  Come to the island.

  A surge of adrenaline coursed through her.

  Another text arrived.

  Please.

  It took her a long time to force her clumsy, shaking fingers to transmit her reply.

  I’m on my way.

  Amy saw Dax without him seeing her. Of course, he would have thought she’d been replying to his text from her parents’ house instead of from the boat and would not be expecting her this soon. As she drew near, he was just disappearing into Gary’s backyard. She stood for a moment, letting the cool wind blow against her overheated cheeks, and stared at his little house while she gathered her courage.

  She knew then that this was why she was having so much trouble with moving, with the concept of home.

  She loved her new condo, and she couldn’t wait for the construction to be over so she could take ownership. It was time to stand on her own two feet. But this place had felt like home from the first moment she saw it. It had been balm for her shredded soul that first night. She wanted to belong here, in this little blue cottage of Dax’s.

  Well, this was never going to get any easier. So she took a deep breath and marched to the gate on the side of Gary’s house. “Dax?” she called, a little mortified at how lame and uncertain her voice sounded.

  Cue the onset of urgent masculine whispering and unidentifiable banging. She couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. “I’m coming in!” she yelled.

  “Amy! Amy, hi!” Gary appeared from around the house wearing a game-show-host smile.

  “Where’s Dax?”

  “He’s not here at the moment.”

  “But I just saw him.”

  “Come on around. I’ll show you the latest with the machine while we wait for him.”

  She bit her tongue to keep from saying something mean and let herself be led into the yard. What could she do, short of starting to holler Dax’s name?

  “I finally figured out what the machine was meant to do,” Gary said.

  The setup was shaped differently than last time. There was a huge base obscured by a tarp, and the machine itself extended out over the oblong base.

  Gary wrung his hands. “You ready?”

  “Hit me.”

  He led her to a lawn chair adjacent to one side of the shrouded base. When she tried to move the chair so she could get a better view of the whole thing, his hand shot out. “You have to sit exactly here.”

  “Okaaay.” She leaned over to set the popcorn on the ground. “Any idea when Dax is coming back? Or where he went?”

  Gary hadn’t heard her. He’d moved to the other side of the machine, and with a muttered, “Here goes nothing,” pulled a lever.

  The beginning of the reaction was similar to what she’d seen last time. A ball ran down a seesaw and tripped a series of gears. The last gear caused a mallet to drop and hit a bell. She laughed at that, in spite of herself. The thing really was a hoot if you were in the right mood. Then a section of drops and pulleys resulted in the tarp coveri
ng the base being partially pulled back by a couple of mechanical arms. Just as she was about to turn her attention to trying to figure out what had been uncovered, a bunch of ball bearings were set loose along a sloped piece of wood. They gathered in one corner and then fell into a cup. Their combined weight tipped it. She laughed again in delight and appreciation. The cup had been connected to a golf club tied to a counterweight, and the club thwacked a ball that was larger than a normal golf ball.

  “Hold out your hand!” Gary shouted. “Catch it!”

  “Ack!” The ball was indeed coming right at her, careering down a metal chute. Instinctively, she cupped her hands, and the ball landed right in her lap, in time with whoops of delight from Gary.

  “That was amazing!” It truly had been. She looked around to find Gary, but he was gone. She was alone in the yard.

  “Gary?” As she stood, she noticed that the ball she was holding, which was a little round Nerf ball of some sort, had writing on it. “Amy,” was lettered on the side in big black block letters. Amazed, she turned it around. “Open me,” the other side said. There was a seam around the equator of the ball. It was covered with tape, as if someone had split the ball in half and then put it back together.

  When another look around the yard confirmed she was alone, she shrugged and started peeling back the tape. With a little effort, the two halves of the ball separated. It had been hollowed out, and inside was a small plastic Tupperware container. She popped open the lid to find…

  “A strawberry?” It was a perfect specimen of its type, red and ripe with an emerald green stem. There was also a tiny note tucked inside the box.

  Part two is in the boat.

  Part two is in the boat? Was she meant to walk back to the ferry dock? Because there was no boat in sight. Bewildered, she spun slowly in a circle.

  Her gaze caught on the base of the machine, the big thing that had been covered but partially revealed by the reaction. She grabbed hold of the tarp and pulled it the rest of the way off to reveal a kayak.

  It was a two-seater. Tears gathered in her eyes as understanding dawned slowly. She was starting to see that this had all been for her, as impossible as it seemed. With shaking hands, she reached into the front seat and retrieved a small box perched there.