Practice Makes Perfect

by Sarah Title

“So?” Helen asked, knowing she was about to say something untrue. “It was late. Maybe he wanted to let loose.”

  Grace snorted. “You and I both know that Henry does not ‘let loose.’ C’mon, Helen. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” Helen lied. She begged her cheeks not to flush as she was reminded of just how well Henry “let loose.”

  Grace sat on the chair next to Helen’s desk. “A little while ago, Henry told me he thought you were acting weird. He wouldn’t let it go, even when I told him I didn’t think he was right. Lately, he’s stopped insisting on your weirdness. And now he’s acting weird, and now that I look at it, so are you. So you can tell me what’s going on or you can tell me to butt out, but please quit pretending it’s normal that Henry was walking your dogs half-naked.”

  “He wasn’t half-naked!”

  “No bow tie is half-naked for Henry. As you have pointed out to me in the past.”

  Helen sighed. Grace was right. The first time the three of them went running together, Helen half expected Henry to show up in a T-shirt and a bow tie. When he didn’t (just the T-shirt), she spent most of the run teasing him about finally getting a full view of his Adam’s apple.

  Her big mouth was getting in the way of this keeping-secrets business. Oh well. In for a penny and all that, she figured.

  “Henry’s helping me with a project,” Helen began as quickly as possible. She didn’t want to lose her nerve. She was being honest now. “See, I wrote this romance novel—”

  “What!”

  “Hold on, just let me finish. I wrote a romance novel and I found an editor who’s interested—”

  “What? Helen, that’s great—”

  “But she says my love scenes need work, so Henry volunteered to, uh, be my research assistant.”

  Grace shook her head as if she was trying to loosen up the part of her brain that was preventing her from understanding what Helen was talking about. “Let me see if I have this right: You’re sleeping with Henry?”

  Helen nodded.

  “For research,” Grace added.

  Technically, that was right. That was kind of the deal she and Henry had struck. It just sounded so bizarre when Grace said it. But it wasn’t bizarre. It was research.

  Toe-curling, mind-blowing research.

  “There are so many things I want to say to you right now, but I can’t figure out which one to start with.”

  Helen nodded.

  “It’s probably most polite for me to ask about your book. Which I am very curious about, don’t get me wrong, but the Henry . . .” Grace sighed. “So . . . tell me about the book.”

  Helen did, about the MMA fighter and the woman who opens up his hard shell to reveal a soft, gooey, sexy interior.

  “And it needs better love scenes, so you got a research partner. You couldn’t just, like, watch videos?”

  “I did. It’s not the same.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  They sat in silence for a minute, lost in thoughts about videos and their much preferable human counterparts.

  “Just promise me one thing,” Grace said, breaking the spell. “Right now it sounds like this is purely academic—”

  “Purely,” Helen lied.

  “Fine. But if, by some strange quirk of the universe, feelings start to happen, you’ll let me share in your happiness.”

  “OK.” That seemed a little too easy, Helen thought. She wasn’t having feelings—come on, this was Henry. Henry of the bow ties and the strong hands. And the wicked tongue. And the muscles . . . those weren’t feelings. It was just sex. Great, amazing, best-ever sex from the last person on earth she’d thought was capable of such a thing.

  But surprise and wonderment were not feelings.

  Not change-the-nature-of-the-relationship feelings, certainly.

  “And,” Grace continued, “promise me that you won’t put me in the middle of any bananas that happen if the feelings stop.”

  There would never be bananas, Helen thought. He’s just Henry.

  “Well, that’s really romantic of you,” Helen said.

  “I’m just saying. I’ve never really thought about you and Henry as a couple.”

  “Who said anything about a couple?” Not her. Definitely not her.

  “It could work, though. I mean, you’re kind of opposites. But, then, Jake and I are really different. And we totally work.”

  “Well, Henry and I aren’t working on anything but my book.”

  Grace held up her pinky finger. “Just in case,” she said.

  Helen completed the pinky swear.

  Not that she needed to. There would be no drama. This was, as Grace said, purely academic.

  Chapter 11

  Henry spotted Mary Beth right away, even though she was sitting at a table tucked away in the corner of the Daily Drip. She was hard to miss, what with her waving frantically at him. Her big, hulking police chief of a husband sitting at the table with her didn’t hurt, either.

  “Hey,” Henry said as he took the only unoccupied seat. He shoved his laptop bag under the table. After Mary Beth said whatever she had to say, he hoped to stick around and get some grading done, fueled by the smell of coffee.

  Because he knew he wouldn’t have time for grading tonight.

  Because he had a date with Helen.

  Not a date, he reminded himself. A research meeting.

  He was probably getting himself into trouble, feelings-wise. He’d spent a lot of time not thinking about Helen in a sexual way before. He knew she was beautiful—he wasn’t blind, just clueless. But they’d met in a professional setting, so he’d automatically put her in the colleague category. And then when they became friends, well, Helen dated a lot, so even if he’d wanted to think of her as more than that, it had never really seemed appropriate.

  Obviously, he was an idiot.

  The more he thought about it, the more wonderful Helen became, and the dumber he felt for not seeing it sooner. She was smart. They didn’t always agree, but she expressed her opinions with such boisterous good humor that he never felt annoyed. She was loud. Very loud for a librarian. But she helped him challenge stereotypes, and she made enough noise that he didn’t have to, not unless he wanted to. He could go on being his nerdy, introverted self. And her dogs loved him.

  So it was a good thing he hadn’t thought about it before. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was ruin their friendship. It was one of his favorite things about living in Willow Springs.

  That, and the dilapidated brothel that no one seemed to believe had actually been a brothel.

  A best friend and a brothel. What more could a guy ask for?

  “Thanks for meeting me,” Mary Beth said, passing a mug of something hot his way. “Two sugars, right?”

  “Thanks,” he said, adding two more sugars. Whatever Mary Beth wanted to talk about was probably pretty serious. One does not just get a guy coffee for a regular old meeting. “You sounded so mysterious on the phone. Do you expect violence or something?” he said, nodding toward Chief Brakefield.

  “I just had a minute, so I’m meeting my beautiful wife for coffee,” the chief said. “But if you do get violent . . .”

  Mary Beth rolled her eyes at her uber-alpha husband. “Don’t you have some patrolling to do?”

  Chief Brakefield stood up and kissed his wife. “No, baby, I’m the chief. I get to do the paperwork.”

  He nodded at Henry and left.

  Mary Beth watched him leave. Henry thought she might have forgotten that he was still there, and that she had something important to tell him. He cleared his throat.

  “Oh! Hi. Sorry. He’s, um, distracting.”

  “That seems to be going around,” Henry muttered, thinking about the four times he’d walked past the library today, even though it was clear across campus from where he needed to be. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  “How’s your drink?”

  Henry didn’t know Mary Beth very well, but he recognized a
stalling tactic. Had Helen said something to her? Had he imagined the wonderfulness of last night, and now Mary Beth was here to spill ice water on his sexual prowess?

  He obediently took a sip of his coffee and gave a thumbs-up. It was good. Too sweet, just the way he liked it. The impending sense of doom he felt did nothing to diminish that.

  “Good. The reason I wanted to talk to you . . .” She took a deep breath. Henry braced himself. “I’m not supposed to be talking to you about this, but we’re friends, right?”

  “Friends of friends,” Henry said, then winced. Even he knew that was not a very polite thing to say, although it was true.

  “Sure, friends of friends. But I respect you, Henry, and I know how strongly you feel about the Wood Street property.”

  Henry’s stomach dropped to the cold café floor, too-sweet coffee and all.

  “You know I helped broker that deal for Pembroke.”

  Henry nodded.

  “And I’ve been involved in the plans the college and the town are making for it.”

  Henry nodded. He was turning into a bobblehead.

  “It’s all part of the downtown revitalization project, which I am fully in support of. I grew up in this town, and I love it. And it seemed like Pembroke’s purchasing the Wood Street house would solve two problems: deal with a public eyesore, and increase the cooperation between the college and the town.”

  “Seemed like?” Henry asked. His voice hadn’t squeaked, had it? That was surely just in his head.

  “That was the goal. That still is the goal. And the committee really loved your presentation and vision for restoring the house. And you know I support any house restoration project.”

  “Sure.” Henry knew that Mary Beth’s brother, Jake, made his living pulling old houses out of their dilapidated graves. It was one of the only things Henry liked about Jake. Everything else about him was just overwhelming masculinity and simmering resentment. But old houses; that, they bonded over.

  “Well, it seems the committee has gone with a different plan.”

  “Different how?” Henry asked, though he was pretty sure he knew.

  “They want to tear it down.”

  Once, when Henry was a kid, his grandparents took the whole extended family to a resort on a tropical island. It was Henry’s first plane ride, and his first time seeing the ocean. He remembered being surprised at how loud it was. Then, later, in a gift shop, his grandfather had put a giant conch shell up to his ear, and Henry couldn’t believe that he was hearing the ocean inside what was really just a big pink bone. It scared him, hearing the ocean inside his head like that, and he couldn’t hear anything else, as if he were being swallowed by the ocean right there inside the gift shop.

  That was exactly how he felt now.

  He saw Mary Beth’s lips continue to move, and he vaguely heard things like “archive” and “spirit of the architecture” and “cost-effective.” But he didn’t hear anything properly after “tear it down.”

  Then the ocean turned into a boiling pit of rage, and his whole body felt fever-hot. How could they do that? How could they just tear down a house that meant so much to the town? And to him, yes, but there were so many stories that house had to tell. The college wanted to tear it down before he even had a chance to discover them?

  He barely registered Mary Beth patting his hand, then leaving. He might have said good-bye, or he might have just continued to stare blankly at the pastry case behind her. The only thing he knew was that he had worked his butt off to save the brothel, and he had failed.

  And that his coffee had gone cold.

  Chapter 12

  Henry was coming over again tonight, and Helen was nervous. There were so many levels to her nervousness that she couldn’t even focus on one, to try to breathe through it. It was Grace’s fault. Helen wouldn’t be thinking about feelings if Grace hadn’t brought them up earlier today. But there they were, tiny little seeds of feelings spreading on the soil of her overactive imagination. Were they real feelings or just sex-feelings? And if they were real feelings, were they mutual? And if they were mutual, was it worth risking their friendship to see if they went anywhere? And if they were just sex-feelings, would continuing to have sex turn them into something more? Should she put a stop to this, if it was causing so much confusion? Even if it was improving her writing about sixteen hundred thousand percent? Just today she’d written two thousand words. She hardly ever wrote two thousand words on a workday, and she’d been doing it for the past few days. And they were good words, not just filling up an empty page with “insert sex scene here” notes to herself.

  She should probably wait on the feelings conversation. Once she was done writing, they would be done researching, and then she could see what was left after some time apart. Or at least some time clothed. Which would be a shame, given how much she liked looking at Henry unclothed . . .

  No, she should keep her feelings to herself, at least for now.

  And she also had to keep her conversation with Lou to herself, under pain of death, according to Lou. They were getting a new archive, Lou assured her. The woman was positively bubbling over with glee, which at first Helen thought was a heart attack. No, not a heart attack. A new building. It would be off campus, and they’d have to share it with the Willow Springs Historical Society, who did not have the same professional standards she did, but Lou had been assured that she would be the lead on the project and she felt confident she could whip those armchair archivists into shape.

  That’s great, Helen had told her. Also, what are you talking about?

  They were going to demolish that old house downtown, Lou told her, and they’d build the archive up from scratch. A real archive, built to be an archive. Not some ancient administrative building that had been shoddily converted from a library into a glorified broom closet full of old stuff. She’d be able to catalog everything, restore everything, preserve everything. And it would all be in one place, and she would be in charge of the whole collection.

  All they had to do was tear down Henry’s dream.

  How could Helen keep that to herself? She’d promised Henry she wouldn’t keep any secrets from him, and now here she was, keeping a secret that she knew would destroy him. He’d put so much of himself into proving that the Wood Street house was really Madame Renee’s infamous brothel, and now he wouldn’t get the chance to find the answer either way. Because the house would be gone.

  There would be a plaque, Lou assured her. But not a plaque that acknowledged what the house really had been, because there was no proof. Just a plaque that said how old the house was, and how it was now an important piece of the partnership between Pembroke College and the town of Willow Springs.

  Rah rah rah.

  She’d promised Lou that she wouldn’t tell anyone. And she’d promised Henry that she wouldn’t keep any more secrets.

  So this was what that space between the rock and the hard place felt like.

  “I don’t like it,” she told Tammy, who huffed at her in response. “Great. My emotional crises don’t even warrant a real bark from you.” George howled from the front room. The front door opened. Henry was here.

  Helen put on her happy face as she followed Tammy to the door.

  Henry did not look happy. His eyes looked drawn and dark, as if he hadn’t slept well last night. Which, maybe he hadn’t? Helen had slept like the dead, or at least the really, really sated. She hadn’t noticed Henry not zonking out the same way she had.

  As she moved closer, she realized that “tired” wasn’t the right word for how he looked. He looked troubled. Her panicked head went to last night again. Had she done something wrong? Had she pushed the boundaries of their friendship? Yes, of course she had, but had she done it in a way he had changed his mind about?

  Whatever was troubling Henry, though, seemed not to be Helen-related, because as soon as she was close enough, he pulled her into a tight hug, stuffing his face into her neck and inhaling so deeply she thought he would ta
ke her pulse with him.

  “Hey,” she said, pulling back far enough to get a look at his face but not so far that he had to let go of her. They felt good, those arms of his. “What’s wrong?”

  He shook his head.

  “Don’t tell me nothing,” she said. “No secrets, remember?”

  “No, it’s just—” He sighed and she braced herself for the blow of really bad news. “Can we do this later?” He pulled her closer, and she let him.

  “Can we just get this sex stuff out of the way?” she teased.

  It was the wrong thing to say. Henry looked like she had slapped him.

  “Is that what you—”

  She cut him off with a kiss. “It was a joke.” She leaned back into his mouth. “A terrible joke.”

  “OK,” he said, and he pulled her even closer, so close her feet left the ground. Then he walked her back to the bedroom and shut the door and Helen thought for sure her word count would at least double tomorrow.

  Chapter 13

  Helen was definitely sleeping.

  He knew this because he had asked her. She had said yes and swatted him away. Then she snuggled in close to him and put her arms around him and now she was snoring. Just a little, but it was definitely the deep breathing of the soundly asleep.

  He brushed her hair back off her face. She was flushed again, and her lips were swollen again, and she looked peaceful and sated. He felt sated. They were definitely both sated. That was some next-level closeness they’d achieved, and at the same time.

  That’s what it was. Not just research. Not just sex. They had been intimate last night in a way that none of their other practice sessions had been. He’d come here after work, not just because they had a date. He’d come here because he needed her.

  He always needed Helen, and he always came to her when things were rough. When he was facing a professional crisis, when he’d had a bad date—Helen was the one he turned to. And she turned to him. But last night was different. Yesterday afternoon he’d had the rug pulled out from underneath him. The brothel was going to be destroyed and all of his work destroyed with it. The only thing he was sure of was Helen, and that he needed to see her, and that she would make it better.