It Takes Two

by Jenny Holiday

  “That doesn’t give you the right to just—”

  The door opened.

  The door opened.

  Of course it did. This wasn’t her room, after all. Why shouldn’t its occupants return at will?

  “Wendy! Are you in here?” called Gia. “The adjoining door is locked! Gunnar’s getting ready for his finale. He wants to talk to you about the weird-ass literary deluxe package you booked and—”

  There was nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide. Barely time for Noah to whip the covers up and over both of them before Gia’s jaw hit the floor.

  “Oh my God!”

  At least it wasn’t Jane. “Gia, if you can just—”

  “Oh my God!” Gia was blinking extremely rapidly.

  “Gia, this isn’t—”

  “I’m going to go back over there.” Gia was still opening and closing her eyes rapidly, as if enough blinks would cleanse her eyeballs of the horror she’d just witnessed. After a few seconds of that, she turned her attention to Wendy and contemplated her in silence for a few heartbeats before saying, “I suggest you get dressed and come over and try to act normal so Jane doesn’t find out you slept with her brother.” She paused and let her gaze roam over them for a few moments. “Unless this is a…real thing. Something you’re prepared to come out about.”

  “No,” Wendy said quickly, even as some small part of her brain posed the question: Why can’t it be a real thing?

  She quashed that part of her brain. The most important thing was that she’d answered Gia’s question before Noah could.

  Because she had to be the one who set the parameters this time. Yes, they’d just slept together, but that’s all it had been.

  She wasn’t getting abandoned again, left standing under the lights alone.

  Chapter Fourteen

  If Wendy and Noah are getting it on, you know what that means, Gia. You need to hook up with Hector.”

  Elise dropped her one-sentence bomb over breakfast the next day, and it was hard to say who objected more, Wendy or Gia.

  “I am not ‘getting it on’ with Noah!” Wendy said at the same time that Gia made a loud, vague noise of protest. They were sitting on stools at the counter in an old-school diner, and both women swiveled to face Elise, who was seated between them.

  Wendy still couldn’t believe Gia had told Elise, though if she had wanted what had happened with Noah to be a secret, she shouldn’t have banged him in her friends’ room. They had, by some miracle, agreed that no one should tell Jane, so Wendy supposed it wasn’t the end of the world.

  Well, it wasn’t the end of the world that Elise knew that she’d slept with Noah.

  The actual sleeping with Noah part?

  The jury was still out.

  Though she supposed she hadn’t slept with him, technically. In an old-school penis-in-vagina sort of way.

  Oh, who was she kidding? It had been the best sex of her life.

  She’d had the best sex of her life with her best friend’s brother, the boy who’d hurt her so badly. The first and last man to break her heart.

  And she wanted to do it again.

  Okay, yeah, jury deliberations complete: it was the end of the fucking world.

  Last night, Wendy had managed to get her shit together sufficiently and quickly enough to attend the end of the Gunnar Show. And it turned out the money she’d spent on the deluxe package had been a total waste because Jane had, as planned, hightailed it downstairs to meet Cameron as soon as Gunnar had completed his final gyration. Gunnar had offered to “talk about books” with Wendy—and he’d winked exaggeratedly as he did so—but she’d declined.

  “You’re not getting it on with Noah?” Gia sipped her coffee placidly. “Hmm. So I guess the reason I caught you guys naked in my bed was because you weren’t getting it on.”

  “Okay, yes.” As much as Wendy wanted to, she could not deny reality. “But not get it on. Got it on. Singular past tense.”

  “So everyone got it on last night except you,” Elise said to Gia as she attacked her omelet. “That’s an unusual twist.”

  In last night’s evolving game of musical beds, Cam’s brother, Jay, once he was booted out of Cam’s room because Jane was there, decided to get his own room rather than bunk in with Noah and Hector. Which meant Elise had followed in Jane’s footsteps and decamped to her husband’s room at the Paris hotel. So much for competing bachelor and bachelorette parties. These parties were totally, irredeemably commingled.

  “You don’t know that I didn’t get lucky last night.” Gia pushed the pieces of a waffle she’d cut but not eaten around her plate.

  “Are you kidding me? You would have told me by now. You would have texted me after the fact,” Elise said with obvious affection in her voice. “Or maybe even during the fact.”

  Wendy was glad to hear that marriage hadn’t made Elise off-limits for late night post-hookup texts from her best friend. She had assumed that once one half of a friendship was married, that dynamic would change.

  Gia made a noncommittal noise and shuffled her food around her plate some more, but the grin she was trying to suppress said that Elise was correct.

  “Well, tonight you need to pick up Hector,” Elise said. “It completes the set. You can’t argue with fate.”

  “Completes the set?” Gia echoed. “I have no idea what that means.”

  “You know. Then everyone in the wedding party is hooking up with someone else in the wedding party.”

  “I am not hooking up with Noah,” said Wendy at the same time that Gia said, “I am not hooking up with Hector.”

  Elise ignored Wendy. “Oh, come on,” she said to Gia. “You’re not that picky.”

  Whoa. Gia shot Elise a withering look. Elise almost certainly hadn’t meant anything by the remark, but, damn, it had come out pretty slut-shamey.

  “What’s wrong with Hector? For a night, I mean?” Elise went on, oblivious to her friend’s irritation. “You have that ‘one and done’ rule anyway. It’s not like you have to date him.”

  “There are two things wrong with Hector.”

  Elise looked startled, either at the odd specificity of Gia’s answer or at the sharp tone in which it was delivered.

  “One: he knows who I am.”

  “You’re a model,” Elise said.

  “Yeah, but I’m not a supermodel. I’m not a model-slash-actress. I’m not in Taylor Swift’s squad. I’m not trying to move into lifestyle—you will never see me goop-ing.”

  Gia was always making those distinctions. She actively avoided the spotlight.

  “I’m not on social media,” she went on. “I can walk down the street and not be recognized.”

  “Right,” Elise said. “I know all that. But I don’t see what that has to do with Hector.”

  “Hector knows me. He mentioned he’d seen me in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue a couple years ago.”

  “So? The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is a huge deal.”

  “Yes, but I wasn’t one of the headliners. They always have a few big-name, legitimately famous people, and then the rest of us are just sitting there getting sand in our butt cracks. A guy who has gone to the trouble of finding out my name…” She trailed off and curled her lip in disgust.

  “Okaaay.” Elise looked unconvinced.

  On the surface, Wendy could see how people might have trouble understanding Gia’s logic—she was a model who didn’t want people to see her modeling? But Wendy got it. She didn’t want a man who wanted her because she was a model. “You said two problems with Hector,” Wendy prompted, hoping to ease the tension-filled exchange. “What’s the second one?”

  “I’m not going to complete your ‘set,’ Elise,” Gia said. “Hector could have the brain of Bill Gates and the body of Chris Hemsworth, and I wouldn’t go near him on principle.” Then she shot Wendy a look. “Someone has to be the last woman standing.”

  Wendy felt it like a knife to her gut.

  “Hey, girls!” Jane appeared behind
their stools, looking impossibly bright-eyed after a night of drinking, strippers, and who-knew-what with Cameron. She smiled at them all, but when her gaze landed on Wendy, she blew her a kiss, the same greeting the two of them had shared for more than twenty years.

  Wendy lifted her palm to pantomime plucking the kiss out of the air, and, traitor that she was, pressed the palm to her heart. She’d never slept with a guy and not told Jane. That knife that Gia’s comment had stuck into her gut slid in deeper…

  “My brother is going to come shopping with us, okay? He’ll be here in a sec.”

  …and twisted.

  * * *

  Sunday morning the guys slept in, but Noah hauled himself out of bed for a day of shopping and sightseeing with the women. He wasn’t really sure why. He could try to rationalize it as being about his “who can throw the best party” thing with Wendy—like trailing along after them would somehow mess up their fun.

  But that was bullshit. The truth was he’d heard his sister and her friends talking about it yesterday, and this morning he’d “happened” to wander over to Cam’s room just as Jane was leaving to meet her friends. After looking at him funny, his sister had asked if he wanted to come, and he’d jumped at the chance like a puppy being taken on an unexpected walk by a beloved master.

  And that master wasn’t Jane.

  As evidenced by the fact that he couldn’t stop watching Wendy.

  Watching Wendy drink coffee. Watching Wendy buy fancy lotion. Watching Wendy and the girls laugh at inside jokes. Watching Wendy take in the fountains at the Bellagio.

  Watching Wendy act completely fucking normal. Like last night had been no big deal. Like he hadn’t had his face between her legs eight hours ago.

  But this was fine. He could deal with Wendy’s indifference. Wendy’s indifference was good. It wasn’t like they were ever going to become a couple.

  He just…wouldn’t have minded a sign that last night had affected her, even a little. That she was struggling with the embers of the inferno that had so recently engulfed them. Because he sure as hell was.

  But apparently it had been a case of slam, bam, thank you, sir. But what had he expected? She’d outright told him, that night at the bar in New York, that she wasn’t looking for a relationship.

  So he stomped on those embers. Poured water over them until they were merely a steaming pile of ash. Melodramatic, but, shit, he needed to be ruthless. Like Wendy was.

  The problem was he couldn’t seem to find his footing. Couldn’t get back to normal with her. He’d had plenty of opportunities to argue with her or to pay for things—to get things back to their version of normal, in other words—but he couldn’t summon the necessary fight. He just drifted around…watching her.

  This was why he avoided casual sex. It so often came with all these confusing emotions. You didn’t know where you stood. You had no control over how things were going to go.

  After shopping, he was taking a much-needed pre-dinner breather when Jane came by his room. Hector was out, so she flopped on Noah’s bed and proceeded to carry on a conversation while he shaved in the bathroom.

  “You know, you don’t have to follow me around all the time,” she said.

  “You’re the one in my room.”

  “You know what I mean. You invaded the party last night, and today, you crashed our shopping.”

  “You invited me along!”

  “Yeah, because you were already right there.”

  “Eh, the guys were planning to be at the tables all day. Not really my scene.” That much was true. A man didn’t grow up so close to the edge of financial ruin only to throw away his money gambling. Of course, he couldn’t tell her that the real reason he’d been stuck to her so intensely since they got to town wasn’t actually her.

  “Anyway, I’m not talking about today. Or not only today. I’m thirty-two years old, Noah. You don’t have to take care of me anymore.”

  He wanted to feign confusion, but once again, he knew what she meant. Finished with the shave, he rinsed his face and stared at himself in the mirror. His sister was a capable adult. He knew that, with his mind, anyway. He headed out of the bathroom. “I just…” What? He had no idea what he wanted to say. Everything was all muddled in his mind.

  “You can’t let go of the idea that you have to take care of Mom and me,” she said.

  He couldn’t deny it. It maybe didn’t explain his particular brand of intensity today, but it was true in a general sense.

  She scooted over to one side of the bed and patted the other. He went reluctantly, feeling like he was walking a plank to his death rather than sinking into a fluffy, feathery bed. He braced himself against the headboard for the lecture he was due.

  “Do you know that I always felt like Dad’s death was my fault?”

  What? That was not what he had expected.

  “That’s ridiculous.” He was speaking too sharply. He gentled his voice. “He drove drunk. He wrapped his car around a tree.”

  “I know.” Her eyes filled with tears. But then she proceeded to spin a shocking tale, telling him about how she always looked after their dad, cleaning up when he was sick, talking him out of driving.

  About how she had secretly started reading books for kids whose parents were alcoholics.

  About how, after learning from one of them that it wasn’t her job to parent her parent, she got angry.

  “So one day, I stopped. I decided I was done taking care of him, done trying to hide the worst of it from Mom.” She swallowed. “The day he died, I knew he was drunk. He was going out to buy more beer. I usually talked him out of doing that by pretending I needed help with my homework, or, if that didn’t work and he was bound and determined, I called him a cab. That day, I just didn’t call one. I yelled at him. I told him he was an embarrassment and he should just go to bed. Then I went to my room and put on headphones.” Her voice broke. “I saw how bad he was, and I turned away.”

  He had seen none of this. None. The revelation felt so dramatic, she might as well have punched him. His heart broke at the thought of his sister, so young—she’d been eleven when their dad died—taking such a burden onto her small shoulders.

  His response to his dad’s alcoholism had been to be out of the house as much as possible, to load his schedule with after-school and evening activities. Which of course had only made things worse for Jane, he saw now. He’d left his little sister to deal with the day-to-day fallout of their father’s addiction.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he croaked, willing her watery eyes not to overflow, because then he’d lose it, too. “He was never going to stop. He was going to kill himself one way or another. It was just a question of when and how. You can’t think it’s your fault.”

  “I don’t, anymore.” She smiled like she was remembering something nice. “Though that’s been a more recent revelation.”

  The look on her face made him ask, “And does this revelation have anything to do with Cameron?”

  “Let’s just say he’s made me see a lot of things differently.” Her smile grew. “Anyway, my point is not to trot out this whole ‘poor Jane’ sob story. The point is what happened after Dad died.”

  “What happened after Dad died?” he echoed, feeling stupid asking the question, because he’d been there. But obviously, he hadn’t really been there, not in any way that mattered.

  “I became the model kid. You became the parent—you had to grow up way too soon—and to compensate, I became the model kid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why do you think I never gave you or Mom any trouble? Like, not even once?”

  His mind skittered over the past. Jane had never dated. Never got mixed up in drinking or drugs. Got good grades. Didn’t go to parties. Her social life had consisted mainly of sleepovers with Wendy.

  “Because you were a good kid?” She had been. It had been in her nature…he’d thought.

  “Yeah, I was. Because I was terrified to be anything else.”
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  “Oh my God.” Having it all laid out like this, he realized how weird it was for someone to go through their entire youth without a single rebellion. “I didn’t see…”

  Yeah, there was a hell of a lot he hadn’t seen, wasn’t there?

  “I know,” she said. “Because that’s how I wanted it. I didn’t want to make your life any harder than it had to be.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice finally cracking, unable to withstand the onslaught.

  She scooted closer to him and wrapped her arms around him. “There’s nothing to be sorry for. You didn’t do anything wrong. You did everything right. You took care of us. Do you know how grateful I am to you for that? We survived because of you. I mean, Mom was lost those first few years. God, Noah, if it hadn’t been for you, I don’t know what would have happened. They may have taken us away from her, I suppose.”

  He nodded against her head and hugged her tighter. That had always been his worst fear, the family being separated.

  She pulled away and looked him directly in the eye. “My point is that I was trying not to rock the boat, but somewhere along the way, I became the person I was pretending to be. I actually became this cautious, risk-averse, guarded person. Like, for real.”

  He blinked rapidly. Her eyes, the same brownish-green as his, did the same thing.

  She sniffed and smiled. “But I figured out that I don’t have to be that person anymore. The threat I was reacting to is long past. The threat we were reacting to is long past.”

  Her use of the word we wasn’t lost on him. She wasn’t just talking about herself here.

  “I will always love you, Noah,” she went on, “and I’ll always want you in my life. You’re my brother.” The way she said brother imbued the word with all the meaning he felt, too—she was his sister, but because of what they’d been through together, she also felt like his fellow soldier. “But you don’t have to worry about me anymore. I promise, if I need help with something, I’ll tell you.”

  “I’m not sure I can just turn it off—worrying about you,” he admitted. It was like his early years had hardwired his brain. “But I’ll stop sending you money,” he said, trying to leaven the situation with a little humor.