But at the moment, she didn’t care.
She was alive.
And she’d met her soul mate: Danny Parish.
“. . . he saved your life?” Nicola Kestle grabbed Holly’s care package from home—a cardboard box containing 3 Musketeers bars, a Marathon Bar, Ho Hos, Wacky Packages, gum, and a Teen Beat magazine. She put her hand over the top to block Holly’s view and get her attention. “Danny Parish saved your life?”
They were sitting on the top bunk, enjoying a few minutes as the only two in the cabin since everyone else had gone to the campfire sing after dinner. The only light came from a small battery-operated lantern hanging from the post of the bed, and it cast their shadows, large and dramatic, on the wall next to the open window.
Holly kept thinking it would be a cool painting, and she wished they’d let the campers work with oils in art instead of primary-color tempera paint. There was no way to capture the colors of the cabin at night with blue, green, red, orange, and purple tempera.
“Yes.” Holly nodded, proud. Her shadow echoed the motion big against the wall, like a shout. “So doesn’t that mean I, like, owe him my life?”
“Well”—Nicola frowned, and the light emphasized her nose, which she was very self-conscious of—“in some cultures. Though I have to say I’ve never really understood that. I mean, it could be a drag to save someone’s life and then have them hanging on you forever, offering to be your slave, getting in the way of everything all the time.”
The door opened and Lexi walked in, took one look at the two of them, and rolled her eyes. “What are you guys doing?”
“Just talking.” Nicola pushed her coppery hair back, the way she always did when she got self-conscious.
“About what?”
“None of your beeswax!” Holly snapped, sounding braver than she felt.
For a split second, Lexi looked shocked. Obviously she didn’t think Holly had it in her to confront the Great and Powerful Lexi Henderson.
Good. Maybe she’d think twice before tormenting Holly again.
“Just shut up and go back to pigging out,” Lexi said, going to her drawer and getting something that she put into her front pocket. “It’s what you’re best at.” She tossed her head—and her light golden hair bounced like she was on a shampoo commercial—then she flounced out the door, letting it bang behind her.
“Whatever.” Holly opened a Marathon Bar and wished it were frozen, so she could whack it against the wall and break it into a hundred pieces, as the packaging suggested. Instead it was just like a chewy 3 Musketeers. “So back to Danny—I wouldn’t mind following him around forever.”
Nicola snorted, and both she and her shadow threw up their hands. “Then you better get in line behind Emily Delaney.”
“Who?”
Nicola peeled the thin chocolate off her Ho Ho. “You know, the blond counselor who just came in a couple days ago? The one who wears really, really short shorts?”
“There’s no new counselor!”
“Uh-huh. She was at crafts today. She had the coolest shell necklace I’ve ever seen.” She popped the Ho Ho chocolate into her mouth.
Holly, on the other hand, was beginning to lose her appetite. “And she’s pretty?”
Nicola nodded and started to unroll her now-bare Ho Ho. “She looks exactly like Stacy on T.J. Hooker.”
Now Holly felt genuinely sick. “Heather Locklear?”
“Yup.”
Holly grabbed Nicola’s wrist, making her drop what was left of the Ho Ho. “Are you serious?” Her shadow looked fat and formless on the wall, a stark contrast to Nicola’s wiry, thin one.
“Hey!” Nicola objected. “Now you need to give me another one!”
“Fine. But does Emily really look like that? Is she really that pretty?”
“Yeah, why? I’d think you’d be glad someone has come along to rub Brittany’s stupid face in it.”
There was that.
The problem was that Holly felt exactly the way she hoped Brittany would feel: hideously ugly, incapable of ever being able to compare in any way to a girl who looked like Heather Locklear. Suddenly the romantic fantasies of Danny that had carried her along like a gentle wind all day felt like embarrassing words tattooed on her forehead.
Outside the open window, the crickets and frogs seemed to amplify their echoey songs.
“I’m glad,” Holly said weakly, then looked at the Marathon Bar in her hand.
It wasn’t helping anything. It, along with the Ho Hos and the Juicy Fruit gum and every other favorite thing her mom had packed for her were all serving to keep her from the one thing she really wanted: Danny Parish.
“You know,” she said as casually as she could, “I don’t think I want this after all.” She dropped the chocolate over the side of the bed into the wide tin bucket they used as a trash can.
“Are you crazy?” Nicola looked over the side, clutching the bed rail with both hands like she might jump for it. “I would have taken it. It’s better than corned beef, which you totally know they’re going to serve again tomorrow night.”
“Then I won’t eat anything,” Holly resolved right then and there. People always told her she had “such a pretty face,” sometimes even adding, “if you could only drop a few pounds.”
She hated the part of herself that kept on eating anyway. She hated how she felt when people looked at her with pity and scorn, and she hated, even more, how she felt when she ate a Twinkie or something after that. It was stupid of her, and she knew it. She had to change.
Now she would. She was determined.
She’d drop a few pounds, even if it killed her, and see if maybe—just maybe—she could be pretty enough to win over a guy like Danny Parish.
2
The Present
“No wine for me, please,” Holly Kazanov said, handing her menu to the waitress. “Seltzer with lemon or lime would be fine.”
Randy Peterson, her boyfriend of four months, nodded approvingly, ordered his steak with mushroom sauce, Cakebread cabernet sauvignon, and handed his menu over. He watched the waitress—a slender redhead dressed in the usual tuxedo getup that made girls with her shape look like boys—walk away before he turned back to Holly and said, “That was a good choice.”
Holly glanced after the waitress. “What was a good choice?” The pants? Holly didn’t think so. They were too tight, making her proportions seem even bigger, like a woman in a Fernando Botero painting.
Holly was feeling like a big, fat Botero subject herself at the moment.
“Your diet. I didn’t want to say anything myself, of course, but I’m glad you’ve made the healthy choice.”
She looked sharply at him. “I’m sorry?”
He frowned, his sandy eyebrows changing his expression from pleasure to concern. “You ordered the chicken and skipped the wine. I assumed that meant you were dieting. Doesn’t it?”
“Should it?” Suddenly it felt like her gut expanded by six inches. The Lycra in the waistband of her pants seized and pulled inward. She’d been feeling okay about herself just minutes earlier, but this was all it took to rock that confidence.
Had he been noticing—observing—everything she ate?
“Sweetheart.” He reached his hand out and put it on top of hers. His fingers were long and tapered, as opposed to the overstuffed sausages that extended from her hands. “I only care about what’s best for you.”
“So you think I’m fat.” Were her rings actually getting tighter?
“No, no, you’re . . . What’s the word? For that painter who did portraits of chubby women?”
Holly felt ill. “Rubenesque?”
He snapped and pointed a finger gun at her. “That’s it! You know your art.”
She should. She was a co-owner of the Macomb Gallery on Macomb Street in Northwest D.C. It was the only thing that appealed to her after getting her masters in art history.
As it turned out, all that experience had narrowed itself, in this conversation, to the in
formation that Randy thought she was, at best, “chubby.” People meant a lot of things when they said Rubenesque, and if they knew anything about Peter Paul Rubens’s art, they didn’t necessarily mean big fat whale, but Randy had said right up front what he meant.
That painter who did portraits of chubby women meant “like you—you’re chubby.”
It didn’t exactly indicate that he viewed her as sexy.
“I’m not sure that’s all that flattering,” she said with a short humorless laugh. She didn’t want to snap at him. She just wanted him not to call her fat.
“I want you to be healthy.” He gave her hand a squeeze. “I want you to be with me for a long, long time.”
Time froze.
Was he talking engagement?
Marriage?
If so, how could he even find a ring to fit her ridiculous fingers?
She’d thought several times over the past four months that maybe this relationship had what it took to go all the way. She’d hoped Randy felt the same way, but she hadn’t brought it up.
How could she? She still couldn’t believe her luck, that a good-looking guy like Randy was interested in her. It would be pushing her luck to hope for more.
Yet she couldn’t help it.
“Wow,” she breathed, both excited and humiliated. It was a strange combination of feelings. She wanted to fall into his arms and run away all at the same time.
Running would be a very poor choice, though. Particularly in light of this conversation, he did not need to watch her chugging away, breathless and wheezy.
“Do you”—he looked into her eyes and gave her hand a squeeze—“feel the same way?”
“Yes. Absolutely. I could definitely—” Whoa! She was overstating her case. “I’d like to see where things go.”
He gave a half smile. The laugh lines around his left eye deepened, reminding her of George Clooney. “Is that all? Do you just want to wait and see? Or do you want to make it happen?”
“I want to make it happen!” God, she sounded like a game show contestant. I want to go for it, Pat Sajak! Big money! Big money!
But Randy looked at her as if she were his dream woman. “I think you’re on the right path. Ah.” He leaned back as the waitress brought their food. “Perfect timing.”
The waitress set his Cholesterol Special in front of him, and the grilled chicken that had inadvertently put Holly on the road to marriage in front of her.
What if she’d ordered the steak? Or the pasta? What if she’d ordered the pasta and asked for extra cheese, as she usually did? Or salad, with extra blue cheese on the side? What if she’d made just one slightly different move that had said to Randy that she didn’t care enough about her health and living a long life by his side?
Would this conversation even have come up?
Had fate just been testing her?
If so . . . had she passed? She had, right?
She ate only half the chicken breast and avoided the rice altogether. Randy didn’t say anything, but a couple of times she caught him looking at her with what looked like pride.
She was doing this for him, and he appreciated it. That was so refreshing!
In fact, for the rest of the meal, the more he glanced at her, the smaller her bites got. It was the most satisfying meal she could ever remember having.
“You have got me so hot.” Randy took off his shirt, did a quick fold, and set it on the cedar chest at the end of his bed. “You have no idea. . . .” He ran his hands along Holly’s shoulders and down her back, expertly snapping her bra open.
Holly flushed with pride and warmed with passion. “I’m not even doing anything yet.”
“You don’t have to. It’s just you. And this whole night.” He sucked in his breath as he unzipped his pants.
Holly sort of thought she should be doing that, but the last time she had, the zipper got caught on his underwear and, long story short, the mood died.
“You’re just amazing,” he finished.
“So are you.” She moved in and kissed him.
He responded hungrily, pressing his hands on her shoulders and kissing her deeply before pulling back just long enough to take his pants off and drape them over the wooden valet next to the bed.
Holly pulled off her cotton dress and let it drop in a pile at her feet.
He glanced at it, then at her, and kissed her again, guiding her onto the bed. He paused for only a moment to turn off the lights, then gave her his full attention.
It was the most exciting sex they’d ever had.
Afterwards, while he was in the bathroom, she lay in bed trying to figure out exactly what was going on tonight.
She wanted to call someone. She wanted to call her friend Kim or, no, she wanted to call Nicola. Nicola had been living in L.A. for years now; she’d grown very wise in the ways of men and relationships and everything. Nicola was a huge success, so she would undoubtedly know what to make of this almost ordinary day in suburbia.
Holly glanced at the clock. It was nine fifteen. Randy had been in the bathroom for about three minutes so far. Usually he took about six. But she couldn’t be sure. Hell, she didn’t even know what he was doing in there, but whatever it was, he jumped up and did it every single time after they had sex.
Sometimes he took longer, but once in a while he came out sooner. She didn’t want to be on the phone if tonight was one of those quicker nights, so she just lay back on the pillows and looked at the changing shadows on the ceiling, wondering where the night would lead from here.
“Sorry,” he said, coming out of the bathroom wrapped in a bathrobe. “Just needed to clean up.”
So that’s what it was. Holly gave a laugh. “Just couldn’t wait to get me off you, huh?”
He took off the robe, hung it on his bedpost, and got back under the sheets with her. But he was wearing his briefs now, and she felt overdressed. “Cleanliness is next to godliness, isn’t that how the saying goes?” He kissed the tip of her nose.
“That’s how it goes.” She wasn’t sure she wanted God as part of a threesome, but she was even less sure of how to say that without sounding like a humorless heathen.
“One of the things I love about you is how understanding you are.” He drew her closer.
One of the things he loved about her? They’d never exchanged I love yous before, and in all the tense excitement of the night, somehow she’d forgotten that little detail.
Now that he’d said it—well, sort of said it—she felt a little more confidence in pursuing clarification.
Holly lay in the crook of his arm, trailing her fingers across his smooth bare chest and trying to screw up the courage to be up front. “So when you said you wanted me to be with you for a long time . . .” It was the perfect time to look meaningfully into his eyes, but she couldn’t. What if he shot her down? She didn’t need him having a close-up of her burning humiliation. “Just how long were you thinking?” There. That was good. Not too needy. Kind of flirty. Definitely open to interpretation.
He took her hand in his. “Look at me.”
She did.
He smiled that smile she loved. The brown of his eyes seemed to darken to liquid ink. “Are you asking me if I could marry you?”
She gave a small gasp. Yes, she probably had been asking that, in a way. But it wasn’t like she was going to ask it flat out like that.
And now that he’d asked her if that’s what she was asking . . . would her answer constitute a proposal?
At the end of the night, would the story be that she’d proposed to him?
She swallowed. That was not the way she wanted this to go. “Well . . . I think I’m just wondering what you have in mind.” She shrugged, which was awkward, given her position. “I hadn’t really taken it much further than that.”
“Hmmm.” He looked at the ceiling, clicking his tongue against his teeth thoughtfully before asking her, “Do you think you could marry me?”
Her breath caught in her chest. So much so, that for a momen
t she felt panicked. Was this a proposal? It didn’t feel exactly like one, but then again, no one had ever proposed to her before. How would she know what it felt like?
Maybe it had been a proposal all along and she kept throwing a wrench in the works.
“I don’t know.” Better to play it coy, she decided. “You’d have to ask.”
“What if I am?”
“Are you?”
He rolled over onto his side and she slid onto the mattress, facing him. “How about this: we call this a pre-engagement.”
“A pre-engagement.” Somehow this wasn’t adding up to the magical moment she’d always imagined. “What does that mean?”
He touched her cheek. “Contingent upon you getting healthy.”
She drew back. “I am healthy. Jeez, Randy, you’re making it sound like I have to give up my cigarette and meth habits.”
“Sugar can be just as addictive.”
“I don’t eat that much sugar!”
“Shhh.” He shook his head gently. Like he was patiently dealing with an idiot child. “You said it yourself tonight, you are on a diet, and making healthier choices so you can stick around for the long haul.” He reached down and caressed her left ring finger with his thumb and index finger.
“Y-yes.” She had somehow ended up saying that, hadn’t she?
“So I want your long haul to be with me. And I want to help you get there.”
“So what are you saying?” she asked. “Exactly?” There had been enough nebulous intimation tonight.
“You lose some weight.” He frowned and poked out his lower lip for a second. “Say—I don’t know—thirty pounds?”
“Thirty?” She was only five-four. If she lost thirty pounds, she’d look like a child! “Is that how fat you think I am?”
There was a moment’s hesitation—or at least she thought there was—before he said, “Okay, let’s say twenty. When you lose twenty pounds, we will get engaged. Officially.”
“I—” She what? This was both thrilling and horrifying. It was a night for contrasts. She didn’t want her first engagement to be tainted by body-image issues, but then again . . . Wait, why was she thinking first engagement at all?
Thin, Rich, Pretty Page 2
