I had promised her, I reminded myself.
“Okay,” I said, even though I didn’t really have a choice. “I’ll be back late, but I will be back.”
“We’ll be fine,” Casey said, but somehow I knew—down deep—that he’d only break her heart. My promise to Hollis was the only reason I left.
23
Hollis
“You know, you have to actually pretend to like me, right? I’m not asking you to be my Jack Dawson here. But maybe a little less hostility would be a good start.” It was a weak attempt at humor since he’d been in a mood upon arriving at the apartment, but he didn’t laugh.
“What hostility?”
“Well,” I began, sucking in a deep breath. “The moment you walked in through the front door, you’ve been kind of pissy. And now, you’re holding a butcher knife and looking at me like you’re wondering where my softest spots are for you to sink the knife into.”
“I don’t have to wonder about that.” He leveled me with his dark gaze, and my legs trembled. “I already know.”
I bit the side of my tongue to keep myself from saying anything to that. Why did him talking about stabbing me sound so sexy? It made no sense. “I-I thought you didn’t pay attention in science class,” I choked out.
Oh, there it was. The smallest crack in his armor. His lips lifted, betraying him, and he struggled to keep a smile from fully forming. “You got me there.” He looked me over. “Nice dress, by the way.”
I looked down at myself, as if I had forgotten what I had chosen for my parents’ house. It was more flirtatious than I usually went, but then again I didn’t usually bring a boyfriend around my parents. I had chosen the red, off the shoulder A-line thinking it was the perfect balance of sexy and classy. “Thank you,” I said.
“Hand me the brick of cheese would you?”
“Which one?” I asked, gazing at the line of white and yellow and orange cheeses on the counter.
“I don’t know. The one that looks like it belongs on this board. This is your deal, not mine.” Annoyance flitted through his voice and at my quick glance, he exhaled through his nose. Watching him trying to calm down was easily in my top five favorite Adam Oliver moments. It was like an orchestra, really. He braced his hands on the solid wood butcher block, the ropy muscles in his arms tensing and un-tensing. The rise and fall of his chest, like a drumbeat solo, sent my gaze further up, to his face, where I got to witness a quick hollowing out of his cheeks before he inhaled again and looked back at me. For just a moment, just the briefest of pauses, I saw something there in the dark, that made me think he didn’t hate me as much as he seemed to.
I calmed my own tone. For Christ sakes, we were about to come to blows over a charcuterie board. “Sorry.” The absence of “I’m” from that felt insincere so with a quick wince, I corrected myself. “I’m sorry. This board is a mix of cheeses, meats, nuts, jams. So, they’ll all go on it in some fashion.” I grabbed the wedge of gouda and brought it around the counter to him. “This is gouda.” I reached over him, brushing his skin just slightly and completely unintentionally, and sliced off a sliver of the cheese for him to try. “Here.”
He stared at me stonily, and I worried he thought I was mocking him.
“It’s good,” I insisted and tore off a piece. I held it up and worried for a second that he’d make me feed it to him. I very much wanted to keep my fingers attached just then. But he relented, taking the piece from my hand and setting it in his mouth. The entire time, his eyes were locked with mine. The room felt suddenly too small, with Adam here taking up so much space. And it wasn’t just because he was tall. It was his presence that filled the room, that made it more intense.
“Do you like it?” I asked when I couldn’t take the silence between us any longer.
“It’s fine.”
I deflated a bit. “Well, it’s really good on grilled cheese.”
He scoffed a little but took the wedge and sliced it identical to the slice I’d given him to try. “American cheese suits me fine.”
I knew what he thought of me, by making that comment. I had to take a different approach if I wanted to get him to talk to me. “Have you ever had goat cheese?” I asked, grabbing the log from beside the other cheeses. “I had the best goat cheese in Bolivia this summer.”
“Do I look like the kind of person who would know what goat cheese tastes like?”
I knew what he meant, but his attitude was grating. “I don’t know what someone who has had goat cheese is supposed to look like. It’s not like it’s stamped on your forehead, Oh, hey, I have tried goat cheese! So I have no way of knowing.”
“Well, no. I haven’t. I am not someone who eats fancy cheese.” He stepped away for a moment, returning with the cheddar cheese that he seemed much more comfortable using, completely bypassing the goat cheese in my hands. “Not all of us get the opportunity to go gallivanting off to another fucking continent on vacation and waste our days lounging on a beach.”
I squared my shoulders. “I didn’t go there for vacation. I paid a lot of money to go, sure, but I wasn’t exactly spending my days tanning on the beach or shopping or whatever else you assume I did.” I yanked the goat cheese out of the wrapper, aggressively rolled it in a cranberry and walnut mixture my mother had shown me how to do once, and slapped it on the board, hard enough to rattle many of the nuts off. Adam took a step back and looked at me. “I went there to help orphans with homework. To teach them that the world isn’t so cruel, especially for those who have only known cruelty.” Rage boiled beneath my skin and I could feel its heat climb to my face. “For someone who has such disdain for my privileged life, you sure deliver your insults with a lot of smugness. For your information, Bolivia is landlocked. There are no beaches, you jerk.” I thought of all the children I had worked with, and how grateful they would be just to be standing here, in an air-conditioned room discussing the trivialities of cheese, of all things. Shame colored my cheeks and I turned away so he wouldn’t see. Swiping my water bottle from the counter, I could hear him move behind me and I closed my eyes, taking the first swig and setting it down. “Look,” I began, “I get it. I know I’m privileged. More than the average person—forget a country full of orphans. The life I lead looks better than yours right now. But I am no more at fault for being born in a wealthy family than you are for being born into yours. I’m trying, okay? It may not be my best because yeah, sometimes I have to check myself, but I am trying to be a better human in all the ways that count to me.”
“I knew Bolivia was land-locked,” he said and I nearly choked on the next swig of water. He made no mention of anything else I said? Really? I turned around and was greeted with a hand held up, palm out. “And you’re right,” he said, and again, that annoyance burned. “I shouldn’t have assumed.”
I took another swig of water. “It’s so hard for you to say I’m right about anything, isn’t it?”
“Is that what you’re after?”
I set the bottle on the counter and turned to him. “No. I just want to explain myself. You’re going to my parents’ house, you’re going to see their expensive things. I’m their daughter, but,” I waved a hand over myself, “I didn’t ask for this. And because of that, I do try to use what’s available to me to do good. You wouldn’t know because you haven’t seen.”
“You don’t post any of that on Instagram, so how would I have known?”
So he was still looking at my social media? I digested that carefully before answering. “Yes, because that kind of cheapens it, doesn’t it? I didn’t go to Bolivia for likes or hearts. I went there because it’s what I’m passionate about and posting it for some kind of limp validation from people who don’t get what it felt like to be there would cheapen it.” I shrugged and grabbed another wedge of cheese, needing to do something with my hands. “Besides, it’s not like you post about your family on your Instagram.”
“You’ve been stalking me?”
A smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. �
�You’ve been stalking me, since you admitted to it first.”
“Yeah, well.” He shrugged and took the cheese from my hands. “I had to make sure you hadn’t gone off a deep end.”
“I’m not entirely sure I haven’t.” A headache beat at my temples and I ached for some caffeine. I packed one can into my purse, knowing if I brought more than that, my mom would drain them in the sink. “I just don’t think I can stand you thinking so little of me.”
He was quiet for a long moment as he attempted to spiral slices of prosciutto and layer them in the gaps on the board. “I sometimes feel like you’ve got the upper hand on me. You’re developing a relationship with my sister, and I guess I hadn’t expected that when I agreed to this.”
“I like your sister,” I said. “If you’re worried I’m going to hurt her, I won’t.”
He looked directly into my eyes. “I am worried about that. She’s been abandoned too much in her life.”
And so have you, I thought, understanding him more. “I won’t.”
“You can’t make that promise. When this thing between us is over, you’ll have no obligation to her.”
Oof. I wanted to press a hand to my chest, where his words punctured the deepest. When this was over. I mean, that part was inevitable, right? Soon, this would just be a blip in both of our individual memories. We’d probably never speak again.
Why was I mourning a loss that hadn’t happened yet?
“Okay,” I conceded. “You’re right, I can’t make that promise. But I see in your sister what I saw in myself at her age. My middle sister and I are the same age apart as Casey and me.” I grabbed the nuts that had spilled on the counter. “I would’ve given my left arm for my sisters to pay attention to me.” I took in a breath and grabbed the brie. “I won’t abandon her.”
He stared at me for a long while. “Okay.” But he didn’t fully believe me, I could see it. “You understand that it’s a little hard for me to get why all this effort is necessary, right? The fake relationship, the fact that you haven’t dated for years and have held up this lie that whole time?”
“The short answer is that I haven’t had time to date.” Or the interest, I added to myself. I showed him how to slice the brie. “As far as the trust fund, I’m not exactly dying to stay under their thumbs the rest of my life.” I adjusted a few slices of the cheeses and then added little spoonfuls of jam in little white pots, strategically around the board. “I want to do more with their money than go to law school and pursue the career my dad wants for me.”
“So you’re lying to them to get access to that money?”
“I know it isn’t honorable. I have to make my peace with that.” I shrugged, as if it didn’t bother me as deeply as it did.
“Do you even like your parents?” He turned away from the board to allow me to continue with my little piles of nuts.
“I love them, of course. But there’s a reason my sisters went MIA after they graduated. And since my parents changed the stipulations of my trust, I don’t have a ton of options here, even when I do graduate. Not if I want to make the impact I want to.”
“So money is your barrier from causing change?”
“When you say it like that, it makes it sound so sleazy. So cheap.” I stepped back and regarded the board carefully. I wanted this board to be perfect, so that not even a tiny bit of my confidence wavered when we walked into their house. “But money is really only a stepping stone for me. If I get to do what I want to do, I won’t be able to get very far on the salary.”
“You mentioned once that your degree was in cultural anthropology?”
“Yes. It’s the study of human societies, their histories and cultures. Eventually, I want to travel to more remote areas of the world, to obtain hands-on education. And then I want to work for a nonprofit that helps empower indigenous people and preserve their culture. It’s such a rare thing these days, for these cultures to exist as they did thousands of years ago. Diversity is beautiful, but for those people who wish to keep their customs, to live far from our modern world, I think we need to do what we can to protect them and their ways of life.” I shrugged. “I don’t know anything about my familial history. I don’t know when my family came over from Europe, I don’t know their stories and it bothers me greatly not to know where I came from or the things my ancestors did. When I met people in Bolivia, I heard their stories. They knew what their grandmother’s grandmother had done for work for their village. History is passed down through those kinds of stories.”
He was quiet for a long moment, regarding me carefully. “You make me wish I talked to my gram more, about our own stories.”
“It’s not too late,” I said. “Now, are you going to tell me why you stormed in here like you wanted to murder something?”
There was a tick in his jaw. “My dad showed up at the house,” he said after a while. “Surprise. He had a handful of sad, not-birthday balloons and insisted on keeping Casey instead of me bringing her to Keane’s mom’s house.” He took the plastic wrap I handed him and pulled off a length of it. “I don’t like that he’s at Gram’s, alone with her. But she’s not a baby, and she’s not my baby at that.”
“Your dad is still her legal guardian?”
“Yes. So no matter what I want, it doesn’t fucking matter.” He blew out a breath and braced his hands on the island as he looked at me. “Sorry I was a dick.”
He was actually apologizing to me. “Don’t be sorry. If you want, we can swing by your place after we leave my parents’. It’s closer, and I know it’ll give you peace of mind.”
He regarded me for a long moment. “Yeah. I’d like that.”
24
Adam
Hollis pulled up in front of her parents’ house. I looked up at the mansion before us and wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into. Hollis turned to me, worry straining her face, in the crease of her brows. “Are you sure you're ready for this?” she asked. “Because if not, we don't have to do this. We can leave. We can go back to my apartment and we can pretend that this night never happened. I can let you out of our deal. I'm not worried about it. The last thing I want is for you to feel uncomfortable.”
I placed a hand on her knee, calming her. “It’s okay. It’ll be fine.” But the truth was, I did feel uncomfortable after the showdown with my dad and what ensued. It was like there was this itch, to crawl out of my own skin, to be someone else, to not be the son of the man that was known famously for drunk driving around town, the man that was fired by my fake girlfriend's dad back in high school.
But I had promised Hollis, which meant I had to see this through because I would not be like my dad.
I just had to keep my eyes off of Hollis’s legs, which were on full display in the red, off the shoulder dress she wore. It exposed vast expanses of skin, most of her legs and her shoulders, and it was all I could do not to stare in a way that might incite a father to violence.
Hollis unlocked the front door, letting us both into the house. She called for her mom and dad, poking her head into a wide room off the side of the entryway. As I looked around, what struck me the most was how much space there was. Light wood floors as far as you could see, sunshine pouring in from directly across the front door, from windows that took up floor to ceiling real estate. The white walls looked completely free of smudges or fingerprints, as if they were freshly painted. Hollis set the charcuterie board on the front entry table, drawing my attention to the flowers arranged in the vase there. They were so well put together that I wouldn’t have been shocked if they’d grown from the ground exactly like that, as if Mother Nature herself had always intended for them to belong in an arrangement.
Everything about this house screamed—in a soft, careful voice—perfect. Clean. Like if I just touched the walls with the briefest of fingertip grazes, I would impart stains.
I looked down at my clothes, seeing little bits of lint on my black shirt and the little bits of scuff at the hem of my jeans. My clothes screamed imperfec
tion.
Hollis once told me that she'd had a crush on me in high school, which I now found unbelievable. She stood, her hands clasped gently in front of her, her rich brown hair pulled back into a taut ponytail. Not a hair was out of place. Not a wrinkle or lint or imperfection in her clothing. We were complete opposites. Did she enjoy slumming it with me? Is that why she’d harbored some kind of weird crush?
Hollis led me into a living room where I sat down on a very plush light gray leather couch. I didn't even know leather came in this color. I pressed my hands on the cushions feeling its bounce. You couldn't feel any springs. This wasn't at all a place I would be comfortable relaxing in, but I supposed I wasn’t there for relaxation, was I? I was there to perform. Perfection would not be natural for me, but I’d try, for Hollis. She gave me a smile that bordered on concerned and I knew that concern was for me. “I’m going to go see where they’re hiding,” she said, casually, but I knew by the little wave she gave me that she was not comfortable.
I didn't want to sit on the couch by myself anymore, so I stood and walked across the room, which felt like a football field in length, to a white marble mantle. Atop that mantle were photos of Hollis and her sisters, each photo displaying their achievements. I found it so interesting that each photo was posed carefully, revealing that each photo was specifically taken—for a purpose, not candidly. There was one of Hollis in her cap and gown, holding a diploma in her hands, but the smile on her face didn't quite reach her eyes. The photo beside it I assumed was that her sister, same pose, same smile. The last photo again I assumed was her older sister, based on the date of the diploma, and she too wore the same smile. If it wasn't for their slightly varying shades of hair color, one would think they were cloned.
One Little Lie: a hate to love rom-com Page 21
