by Holley Trent
Jennifer and Tanya’s spouses averted their gazes and slumped in their seats. They just wanted to get out of the ordeal unscathed. Joey could hardly blame them.
The kids all stared wide-eyed back and forth between Lisa and their grandmother.
Finch looked confused.
Joey really couldn’t blame her for that.
Jennifer and Tanya were, like Joey, probably counting the seconds in their heads until one of the women cracked.
If they thought it’d be Lisa, they didn’t know her as well as they thought.
“Everyone’s so mean to me,” Ma muttered again, but she picked up her fork, pretending to be resigned just like she always did.
“Finally,” one of the men murmured at Joey’s left because that meant they could all pick up their fucking forks and eat something. No one ate until Bitty got her first bite.
“It’s all right,” Ma said through a mouth full of turkey.
“If it’s just all right, I’m taking that second bird down South with me and Joey tomorrow, then. You know, if it’s just all right.”
Ma made a dismissive hand wave in Lisa’s direction. “No one said all that. The bird stays here.”
“Uh-huh.”
Joey turned his head and tried not to laugh, because as funny as the situation was, the reaction would just get Ma all riled up and they’d never get to dessert.
He didn’t know if Finch could actually bake worth a shit, but that beautifully frosted layer cake looked appetizing, and he was going to need something sweet to get him through Ma’s inevitable post-dinner lecture. Last year’s sermon was about how none of them had dare put her in a nursing home and steal her house from under her because she was her own person and such.
Finch had a fork loaded with Lisa’s Southern-style macaroni and cheese poised in front of her mouth when Ma pointed a dinner role at her. “You. You’re extra. What is it you want?”
“Ma, cut that out,” Joey said over the chorus of groans from the other adults, save Lisa. “She’s a guest. Grandma Anna would be disappointed.”
Ma scoffed and bit the roll. “What do you know of my mother?”
“Only that she lived here until she died. I was seventeen. Contrary to what you might believe, I’m not so old that I can’t remember seventeen.”
“Everyone’s so mean to me.”
“I work with your son,” Finch said graciously. “At Athena. I suppose I looked undernourished and he took pity on me.”
“Scrawny.”
“Ma,” Joey warned because no one deserved that shit, not even people who thought he should gracefully accept defeat and hand his girlfriend over to them. He could appreciate that the lady had good taste.
It was kind of like being in a little club, actually, with just the two of them as members, because the admission requirements were so rigorous and exclusive that almost no one made it past the velvet rope.
Ma didn’t try that shit with Lisa because Lisa had put her in check in the first breath of their meeting. She’d never given him time to come to her defense.
It’d be easiest for him to throw Finch to the proverbial wolf and for her to decide that she didn’t want to get tangled up in anything that to do with him or Lisa after all. He wouldn’t have to worry that maybe Lisa liked her more and that she’d decide that Joey was too inconvenient after all.
But something about sitting at that table with his family and having Lisa’s hand protectively gripping his thigh pretty much nonstop scrambled his brain on the subject.
He didn’t feel any hostility about Finch sitting across from them at the table or her occasional enthralled looks at Lisa when Lisa wasn’t watching.
He tried to feel angry that there was some nascent thing budding between them that wasn’t platonic. He couldn’t. The only thing that had changed was that his and Lisa’s recent conflict had caused Finch to open the curtains and let the light shine in on certain struggles. She’d made herself important.
And more interestingly, she’d made Lisa care about her.
Who the fuck was he to demand that someone not care about anyone?
Under his mother’s scrutiny, Finch’s skin was flushing red from her neck up to her hairline. She looked like she wanted to bolt.
You run, and I will never let you forget it.
There was no way in hell she could shoehorn herself into Lisa’s life—and his by extension—if she couldn’t hang tough when the spotlight shone in her eyes.
Looking to the ceiling, he nudged her foot under the table.
Say something, woman. Fucking say something.
“Well. I…” She cleared her throat, shoved noodles into her mouth, and said, “I’ll…concede that I’m not voluptuous, but only means we may be able to share clothes. That’s a lovely...frock you’re wearing, Mrs. Novak. Is it from this decade?”
Ma looked down at her striped dress.
The spouses slumped lower in their seats.
The kids were thrumming with the sort of “oh shit” energy that hinted to a potential mass elopement.
With her shoulders shaking from unerupted laughter, Lisa pressed her lips together tight and squeezed Joey’s thigh tighter.
Well, well. Look who found her tongue.
Joey leaned back in his seat, folded his arms over his chest, and grinned. He was starting to like their little club more and more.
“Pass the gravy boat,” Ma said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Joey closed the front passenger door of his car behind Lisa and turned to Finch on the sidewalk.
She clutched her doggie bag of Novak Christmas cheer against her chest and blinked solemnly at him.
He would have been shocked if she had any brain cells left to rub together after all that household tumult. The kids had gotten into the eggnog, and somebody’s shit-for-brains husband hadn’t thought to inform the rest of them that he’d spiked it “medicinally.”
When Joey and Lisa stepped outside with Finch, about half the kids were doing a mock MMA match in the living room, the others were at the piano banging out a remixed Kidz Bop version of “Truth Hurts,” Tanya had gone outside to smoke, Ma was in the street yelling at the Nebraskans across the way—“My family came here after the war before there was even good plumbing in your house. Go back to your cornfields!”, and the spouses had mysteriously vanished.
“Um. Thank you for the invitation, I think,” Finch said. “I’m not sure who should be thanking whom, actually.”
“Yeah, that confusion is normal when you have dealings with my family. It’ll pass in time.”
Lisa motored down her window and leaned onto the sill. “Is he being mean?”
Finch cracked the barest of grins. “No. Just explaining the family dynamics a bit. I think I sorted out most of them on my own.”
Ma made the sign of the cross at the Nebraskans. That was probably the Polish, Roman Catholic version of “Bless your hearts.”
“You kind of have to either get used to it or resign yourself to it,” Joey said, gritting his teeth.
“I see.”
Lisa raised her brows and let them fall.
Then she looked to Joey.
There was expectation in that intelligent brown gaze, and like so many times in recent weeks, he didn’t know, precisely, what gift he was supposed to be presenting to her.
He could just be honest about that.
“Tell me what you want, and I’ll give it to you.”
She arched a brow in a query, but he didn’t have anything else to say.
He’d been clear.
“Well, then. Let’s go. We have to get packed if we want to set out early. We’re gonna hit turnpike traffic if we leave after sunrise.”
The words were simple enough, and direct, but that wasn’t entirely what she meant to say. He knew.
God, just tell me what you want.
Just say it, Lis.
She rolled her eyes, thumped her palms against the outside of the car door, and sighed in Finch’s direct
ion. “If you’d like to come watch us squabble over how many pairs of boxer briefs a man needs for a three-day trip, you’re welcome to tag along.”
And there we go.
He’d expected it.
She should have known he’d just expect it, but apparently, Finch made things questionable for her. She needed to understand that it didn’t have to be that way.
Joey pulled the back door open and headed around the front to the driver’s side without waiting to see what Finch would do.
He’d already braced himself for what might happen after dinner.
Lisa wasn’t the kind of woman who would start things and leave them dangling. And she’d escalated something with Finch in that basement when she’d pulled her onto her lap and let Finch kiss her like she’d stop breathing if she didn’t.
The back door slammed shut a second after Joey shut his door.
He caught a glimpse of Finch fiddling with her seatbelt strap as he eased out of the parallel parking space and into the flow of traffic.
Lisa had a hand on his thigh like she always did when he drove.
He didn’t talk. Neither did she.
Finch stared out her window.
And that was fine.
Maybe they needed that sterile environment to decompress, kind of like pilots did in the cockpit of planes. They were controlling delicate machinery and take-off and landing were always the most dangerous parts.
Apparently, what they were doing, in their own clumsy way, was taking off.
Maybe soon, they could stop holding their breaths.
Joey parked the car in the underground garage beneath his building.
Lisa got out before he could get around to her side.
Finch struggled with her seatbelt.
“It catches,” Joey said through the partially opened door. “One of my nephews spilled something all over the seat last year. Here.”
She held her leftovers out at arm’s length as he reached around her.
She wasn’t scrawny like his mother had asserted. Waifish, maybe. Finch’s build seemed slighter because of her choice of aggressively modest clothing. For as long as he’d known her, that had already been her aesthetic. Pale colors. Yards upon yards of fabric. It was a don’t look at me sort of style. He couldn’t guess if that was intentional, but it’d certainly worked on him up until that point.
One could be pretty without being attractive, and that was Finch—pretty, but no one would know unless they saw through what wasn’t there.
His arm brushed a breast and he pulled back immediately, putting his hands up like a mugger had just pressed a knife’s tip against his back.
“What did you do, Joey?” Lisa asked. “Did you pinch her?”
“No!”
“It’s fine,” Finch wearily. “I get groped way more on the train. I can’t open this. My fingers aren’t strong enough. You’re going to have to do it.”
Taking a deep breath, he reached in once more and managed to depress the release without flattening a breast in the process.
She grabbed her purse and her food and shimmied out the tiny gap between cars. Parking was tight in New York.
“I don’t miss this at all,” Lisa said as though she were living in his brain.
He slung the strap of her heavy purse over his shoulder and wrestled the building key fob out of his back pocket. “It misses you.”
“It does or you do?”
“I’m not gonna answer that.”
He swiped them into the building and held the door open for them both. Finch’s skirt twined around his leg as she passed—too much static in the fabric making it cling.
Lisa added Finch’s purse to Joey’s haul.
It was even heavier than Lisa’s.
“People are gonna think I’m a pirate,” he muttered as they climbed the ramp to the elevator. “Carrying around a bunch of designer purses.”
“Better a pirate than a player,” Lisa said.
He scoffed and bumped the elevator call button with his elbow.
The thought hadn’t crossed his mind before that.
He hadn’t thought about what their little menagerie might look like with that framing. If he looked like a dog chasing the scents of two women, he didn’t want to know.
Surprisingly, he didn’t feel like a dog. It might have been that he wasn’t self-aware enough to even know if he were one, but the situation felt surprisingly normal for him.
Maybe it was that resignation he’d welcomed earlier. There was peace, sometimes, in not forcing things to be any different than they needed to be.
He managed to get them into his apartment without dropping anything.
Carefully, he set the purses on the coffee table and headed straight to the kitchen.
He’d give Lisa a minute with Finch.
He didn’t need to stand there watching them get the awkward explain-y bits out of the way.
After all, he’d spent six hours at his mother’s house without a drop of fortification. He’d been thinking about vodka all afternoon.
___
“I don’t know what this is,” Lisa said as she hung their coats. “But I suppose we can feel our way through it and see what happens. I never imagined I’d find myself in this situation.”
“This situation, meaning?”
Lisa laughed and rubbed the sides of her jaws. She always seemed to clench more when things are up in the air, and that was the entire past week in a nutshell: terrifyingly uncertain. “Not the whole gonna-fuck-a-lady part. That’s half my brand right there. The ‘I’m going to marry that guy, but hey, you can come, too’ part.”
“It is strange, I suppose.”
“It seemed less strange when my best friend did it. From my outsider’s perspective, the math was extremely facile. One and one and one are three, and in that particular situation, two wasn’t enough. Some people need more people.”
Finch fidgeted with a pearl button on her cuff. “And you?” She canted her head toward the kitchen Joey had disappeared into. “And him?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t seem like the same kind of math. Maybe in this case, the grouping of the numbers is different, and the functions aren’t the same, but the total ends up being identical.”
Lisa grabbed the wrist Finch was struggling with and undid the button.
Finch’s effort had driven Lisa to annoyance.
Finch trying to be all fastened up seemed pointless when all those buttons were going to become undone, anyway.
Lisa undid the button on the other wrist, too, and turned Finch around to reach the buttons down her back. “How did you even get this thing on?”
“Well, the dress is a little baggy, so I can turn it backward to button it and then tug the front around to where it belongs.”
“You know, false buttons would give you the same look and less frustration.” After freeing the long queue of buttons down Finch’s spine, Lisa parted the fabric slowly.
Sometimes, the unwrapping was the best part.
She liked seeing all the layers beneath.
Pale pink lace bra. A smattering of freckles across the shoulders.
Finch shivered as Lisa worked a fingertip between one drooping bra strap.
“I take it that it’s okay if I touch you?” Lisa whispered.
“Y-yes, of course. And I can touch you?”
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”
“I would have trimmed my nails if I’d known.”
“That is the gayest thing I’ve heard in weeks, and that’s really saying something.”
Joey strode over then, gaze noticeably averted, carrying a couple of shot glasses. He handed one to Finch, gave one to Lisa, and then retreated to the kitchen. “Na zdrowie.”
Shrugging, Lisa downed the vodka and shuddered as the heat made its way down her throat.
Finch gave hers a tentative sip, made a face, but then competently gulped the rest in a single swallow. “Ugh.”
“Can’t fault him for his taste,�
�� Lisa said, laughing. “At his age, he’s set in his ways.”
“I heard that,” Joey called out.
“If you’re going to eavesdrop, bring me another one.”
He brought out the bottle and splashed a bit into both glasses. He seemed to think on it a bit, and then poured a bit more into Lisa’s.
“What about me?” Finch asked.
“You look like you can’t hold your liquor,” Joey said.
“I hold my liquor just fine, and not just because my family is Irish.” She sniffed and thrust the glass toward him. “Given how large our community is, we go to a lot of wakes. Whiskey is the Alice beverage of mourning.”
Joey gave her a side-eyed look like he wasn’t entirely certain he bought that, but he filled her glass up anyway and then left.
She drank that one faster and then pushed the glass away. “Ugh, the taste in my mouth.”
“If you start swaying, I’m tucking you into bed with a bottle of aspirin and a trash can to puke into.”
“I’m not going to sway. I…might say some stupid things as soon as the alcohol hits my brain, but my booze balance is impeccable.” Finch tugged at Lisa’s blouse and freed it from beneath the waistband. “It isn’t fair that he gets to see you naked all the time.”
“Well, the payoff is that I get to see him naked, too. I think that’s why I can indulge his mother, honestly.”
“And what will I have to indulge for the honor of seeing you naked?”
“Don’t bite off more than you can chew, sweetheart. I can be very creative.”
“I wish you would be. I like creative.”
Clothes shimmied to the floor article by article. They stood in bras and panties, staring, touching, grabbing hold of each other.
Lisa’s bra straps were down her arms, and Finch’s mouth was on one of her breasts before Lisa remembered that Joey habitually kept his living room blinds open. The buildings across the street had an unobstructed view.
“Come on. I don’t want to give the whole neighborhood free entertainment.”