Vacancy: A Love Story

by Tracy Ewens

  “Looked like you were on a roll there. Maybe I should bring the lunch to you. You could have a working lunch?”

  “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

  She laughed as he led her back out onto the patio before disappearing, soon reappearing with cold salads, bread, and drinks.

  “How’s Matt?” he asked, sitting next to her on the couch.

  “He’s Matt.”

  “Evasive, interesting.”

  “I’m not being evasive. I’m providing factual information in response to your question.”

  “Ah, okay. I can play. So, have you and Matt hooked up again?”

  Hollis laughed and ate her salad. Mitch was waiting for a “factual response.” She should have known better; her uncle was a slippery one.

  “Hooked up? I’m not sure what you kids call hooking up these days, but no. We have talked a few times, cleared the air if you will, and now things are… well, he’s Matt.”

  He made the sound of a buzzer. “I’m sorry, but we are going to call bullshit on that response.”

  “What do you want me to say? I’m not kissing and telling. How’s that?”

  “So you have kissed him.”

  “Dear God. Yes! He kissed me and I kissed him back. It’s a… curiosity thing.”

  “Huh, you know I’m curious about a lot of things, antique stringed instruments at the moment, but I rarely have sex with them.”

  “Can we be done now?”

  “Okay, no denial on the sex reference either. Wow, things are progressing along splendidly. Quick story.” He held up his hand as if that would keep her in her place.

  Uncle Mitch had a habit of telling stories, some of them entertaining—complete with voice impersonations—but most of them with a hidden message. When she and her sisters were younger, they would scatter at the phrase “a quick story,” but as they grew older it was a respect thing. Resisting was futile and hard to do without hurting his feelings. Mitch was the single nicest person she knew. No way she was going to hurt him, so she sat.

  “When you were… I guess around eleven because Meg was going to start first grade the year after that summer. Maybe you were twelve?”

  Hollis gave him a look she hoped asked, “does it really matter?” It must have worked, because he moved on.

  “Anyway, you girls used to play business, which was typical for the Jeffries overachievers.” He laughed. “Sage wanted to own a garage so she could be a mechanic or a baker. Interesting combination, but then again, so is Sage.”

  They both laughed.

  “Annabelle was always a—”

  “Bookstore,” they said together as Hollis joined in on the memory.

  “Meg wanted to be a pilot or run a safari.”

  “God, remember the safari hat she used to wear?”

  Her uncle nodded. “That thing saw plenty of adventure. I wonder if she still has it.”

  Hollis laughed. “I doubt it. Unless she can fit it in her pack. She’s probably upgraded to something more… functional.”

  “Do you remember what business you used to play?”

  Hollis shook her head then said, “Banker or lawyer, maybe? Huh, it’s weird I don't remember.”

  “It’s not all that weird. When you were little, it was ‘richest woman in the world.’”

  “That’s right.” She laughed.

  “Until you were about twelve. That year you said you ‘ran a partnership.’”

  “I did not. That’s not even a business.”

  “That’s what you used to say. ‘My partner and I have big desks and they face each other. And we have paintings.’ That’s what you’d say.”

  Hollis tried to remember being so silly and wondered why her sisters had not laughed at their big sister’s vague business plan. “Did we do anything?”

  “That was my favorite part. ‘We help people during the day and at night we sit on the pier and talk,’ you said.”

  “No fu-nking way!”

  Her uncle nodded. “That one year, that is exactly what you said because I remember thinking despite all the pressures your parents put on you that you would be perfectly fine.”

  “That year? What business did I run the other years?”

  “Oh, you went back to richest woman in the world the following year, but for that one summer, you had such potential.” He smiled.

  Hollis searched her memory and vaguely remembered the desk. She had pictures of that perfect desk in her mind and her partner sitting across from her. So weird. Where had that piece of dreaming gone? Hollis stood to leave.

  “I need to get the towels from the dryer before your guests check in at four.”

  “Look at you being all hospitable. I might have to keep you.”

  She laughed. “Not going to happen, and you are in the home stretch with all those tiny pieces of paper. Back to it.”

  “Eh, come to think of it, maybe I don’t want you. No, I do. Even though you’ve killed most of the perfectly innocent dust in my office, I like having you here, Tiny Tots.”

  Hollis smiled and turned to leave.

  “Hey, before you go. What summer did you meet Matt?”

  She didn’t bother turning around. There was the lesson in the story, delivered with a punch. “You already know.”

  “I do. Might want to remind yourself is all.”

  She shook her head, not wanting to give anything away. Walking back to her cabin, Hollis found herself with that nagging need again, this time, though, without all the talking.

  The air smelled of lilac and Matt could hear the buzz of distant bees as the moisture from his beer bottle dripped around his fingers. He loved summer. Loved it even more now that she was around. The stupid grin on his face would not go away. He knew there were still hurdles to get over, that he wasn’t guaranteed anything more than a summer, but sipping his beer, Matt didn’t care. He let the warm day take him back to another all-important summer.

  Hollis had made sure to point out every bad tack and rigging mistake he’d made that first week of Junior Sailing as if they were training for Olympic trials instead of floating around on dinghies with a ragged sail that had seen far too many summers.

  She liked to hit his shoulder and he liked to tease her. She would pop up at the general store or on the beach. They were friends, and then they turned thirteen. That summer, her hair was long and mermaid wavy, at least that was how his newly minted teenage mind saw it. She’d starting wearing cutoff shorts he knew had not been worn during other summers and gauzy tank tops the colors of Starburst candy. She worked at the sandwich shop and used to jump off the pier with her friends until they collapsed on towels and giggled their way to the ice cream parlor. Her friends were attractive, now that he thought about it, most girls were pretty as soon as Matt turned thirteen, but Hollis was beautiful and fierce. That was the summer he held her hand for the first time while he walked her back to Bunny Blue after she got off work. Hollis’s parents had money, but she worked. She relied on no one, even back then.

  There were nights on the pier when they would stay up until four in the morning. He told her his parents fought about not being able to have another baby and she told him her parents had lost a baby in between Annabelle and Meg, but nothing like his brother’s death. She teared up when he told her about John and she was the first person he could remember ever saying to him, “That must have been hard on you.”

  The summer they turned thirteen was the “Summer of Knowledge,” as Matt liked to call it. They’d messed with each other up until then, teased, but that summer things were different. He knew even back then that Hollis was special and a guy met one, maybe two, girls like her in a lifetime. When she’d kissed him for the first time that summer, he would have traded his entire comic book collection to be around her forever.

  Matt fell softly from his memory and back into watering his parents’ rosebushes. He must have missed the knock at the door over the rush of the hose because the side gate opened and Hollis walked through wearing nothing b
ut bathing suit bottoms and a white tank top. Her feet were bare and her hair was pulled off her face. She had more freckles on her face than she did when she’d first arrived back at the cove.

  “Hey.” Matt turned off the hose.

  She walked straight toward him, took the beer from his hand, and set it on the small patio table his parents had bought at a garage sale when they first moved into their bungalow at the cove. Each time Matt looked at the table, his mind confirmed that was the garage sale table. Weird the way the mind worked, he thought, right before his completely shut down because Hollis lifted the hem of his T-shirt, pulled it over his head, and threw it on the garage sale table.

  “I folded the towels,” she said, running her hand along his shoulder and kissing her way along his back until she was standing behind him. “And my uncle is almost done with the receipts.”

  At least that’s what Matt thought she said when her arms snaked under his and moved along his chest, her body pressed against his back. She smelled like coconuts and fabric softener and he tried to find his words, but her lips were on him again. The sun was warm. Matt closed his eyes.

  “The kitchen ran out of butter. Can you believe that?”

  He groaned, not at the question but at the way his body danced when she went up on her toes and took his earlobe between her teeth.

  “I took the truck and bought butter and then I thought I’d come get you for paddleboarding.” Her hands moved down his stomach to the waistband of his board shorts.

  Matt’s brain tuned back in for a minute long enough to yell, “Hell, yes!” then went fuzzy again.

  Hollis pulled the Velcro at his waist and moved back around to face him. Her eyes bluer than silver, at that moment they almost matched the sky.

  “Then I had a stupid conference call”—she kissed his chest and Matt felt his shorts drop around his ankles—“I had lunch with Mitch and he told me a story, of course. When I was walking back to my cabin, I started thinking about you… inside me, our bodies warm and pressed together.” Her voice was barely above a whisper and thick with a need Matt knew all too well. “I thought it was a memory, maybe something from the past I was revisiting, but then I realized: it wasn’t.” Hollis slid her fingers into the sides of her bathing suit and Matt thought he might stop breathing right there. Was it the butter or the conference call that got her like this? Whatever it was, he could get used to this.

  “I was remembering the other night”—she slid the suit off her legs and kicked it aside—“and for the first time in so long, my present was better than my past.”

  Finally able to use his hands, Matt pulled the tank top over her head. The minute he lifted her onto the garage sale table and sent the beer bottle flying to his parents’ grass, he knew exactly what she was talking about. They’d moved beyond their past. It was still a familiar friend, the glue that connected them after all of these years, but the present, even with all the mess, was where they wanted to be. Hollis arched her back and Matt ran the palm of his hand through the center of her most perfect breasts, right down to her stomach. When they slid from her afternoon fantasy into making another memory, he was suddenly grateful for every minute he’d been without her if all of that brought them here.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Matt woke to Hollis wide-awake on the living room floor of his parents’ bungalow. She was gloriously naked and under the same blanket he’d grabbed off the couch when he realized they weren’t going to make it to the bedroom. The sun had set and while she looked thoroughly loved tucked in next to him, she was staring up at the ceiling. Something was wrong and he didn’t know how much longer he could wait, so he tested the waters.

  “Why was your conference call bad?” Matt asked, sitting up and clicking on the light next to them. Her legs were outside the covers, and he noticed she had no toenail polish on. In all the time he’d known Hollis, save maybe when they were younger than thirteen, he had never seen her toes unpainted. Something about the bareness of it, the vacancy in her stare, told him she didn’t need an interrogation, so he changed direction.

  “I need to find a new dentist.”

  Hollis looked up at him.

  “I mean, I’ve had the same one for a few years now, but the last time I went in, his assistant said they were not using happy gas anymore for cleanings.”

  Her face softened as she raised her eyebrow. He kept talking.

  “As you know, I’m scared of the dentist, even the cleaning, so that is not going to work for me. Have you ever had happy gas? I don’t think we’ve ever talked about this. Are you scared of the dentist?”

  “No.”

  “To both?”

  Hollis nodded, and Matt thought he could see the slightest upturn of a smile. He kept going.

  “I hate to do it because they’re so close to my house and the office too for that matter, but I need the happy gas. I searched Google and checked to see if I could bring my own—yeah, that’s a narcotic.” He laughed. “Then I tried to turn on the charm with the assistant. I used the eyes and asked if she could make an exception.”

  Hollis sat up.

  Matt shook his head. “It didn’t work. She was immune to the baby blues. So I’m not sure what I should do. This guy at work says he tried acupuncture to get over his fear of the dentist. Have you ever tried acupuncture?”

  “No.” She was definitely smiling now.

  Matt was glad because he wasn’t sure what was left to say about his dentist. Being the talker was hard, but then Hollis leaned over, kissed him, and climbed into his lap. He thanked his dentist and her bare toenails for letting him help. Scooting over until his back was resting on the back of the couch, he turned on the television.

  “Have you seen the The Karate Kid?” she asked, turning so she was now facing the television and between his legs. He was going to need to put some clothes on soon or he wasn’t going to be able to think, but he didn’t want to move.

  “I have. Have you seen the second one? I think there’s a third one too.”

  She looked over her shoulder at him. “Really?”

  Matt did eventually get up and put some sweats on while they made popcorn. They watched The Karate Kid, Part II and The Karate Kid, Part III, agreed they should have stopped at two, and when she fell asleep in his arms, he carried her to bed and held her until the sun peeked through the blinds in the morning.

  Hollis did most of the talking, the work when they were younger. She was the effort and Matt was the ease. She planned and he helped her calm down. Most relationships were that way, one person more something than the other, but tonight the roles were reversed and Matt found that babbling whatever was on his mind helped settle the thing that was making her so crazy. In the years since they’d last seen each other, he’d learned some things too.

  Hollis woke up the following morning to coffee, a still-warm sticky bun, and a note that simply said, “Gone to find a new dentist.” She laughed and sat up in bed. Taking the lid off the coffee, she thanked the gods and sipped herself awake. It was Thursday. Hollis loved Thursdays. It was well into the week, but there was still enough time to get things done before people started winding down for the weekend. When she used to work sixteen-hour days, Thursday was the sweet spot. She pushed her hair off her face and took such a large bite of the sticky bun that she had to scramble from bed for a napkin because she couldn’t reach all of the stick on her mouth with her tongue. Crawling back into bed, she leaned back on the pillows and thought about Matt talking her down last night. He knew what she needed still, and for some reason, she let him help. Hollis had never climbed into anyone’s lap other than her uncle’s, and that was a long time ago. She was learning to let someone help and finding it was all right for Matt to see her knocked off her self-imposed pedestal.

  Right as she finished her coffee, her phone vibrated. It was seven in the morning, and Reese was already calling her. God, she hoped it was good news, that her long-held appreciation of Thursday would remain intact after she hung up.
r />   “I should have known you weren’t playing around,” his game show host voice said before she even greeted him.

  “What is it, Reese?”

  “Matthew Locke. I knew I recognized him. I thought you hated tech. You said after the Fat Pigs thing, and I quote, ‘I’m going back where I belong.’ Guess you changed your mind.”

  “Still waiting for you to make sense.” Getting the feeling Reese was simply calling because he liked to hear himself speak, Hollis put the last of the sticky bun in her mouth.

  “The guy you were playing sandbox with. Come on, don’t play coy, Jeffries. What are you two working on?”

  Hollis swallowed and felt that rush she rarely experienced anymore of not being in the loop. She could count on one hand how many times she had any kind of a loop issue. She checked and double-checked to make sure she was never caught with her big-girl pants down. She wasn’t sure what Reese was talking about or how he knew Matt, but she wasn’t going to tell Reese that. “Fake it till you make it,” her first boss at Dairy Queen had said. Turned out that was awful advice because there was a right way and wrong way to make a Blizzard. However, in this case, it was perfect advice.

  “I… I’m gonna need to call you back.” She hung up to Reese scrambling like a rat for more information.

  Hollis pulled out her laptop and googled Matthew Locke. Coffee, some half marathon, a puff piece on a new The Bean location, hardly WikiLeaks. Maybe Reese was mistaken. Yeah, that never happened. She searched Matt Locke, Matthew E. Locke, Matthew Everly Locke. Nothing, nothing, and nothing. Damn it!

  Hollis tapped the end of her pencil on her laptop as her corporate-killer instinct roared to life. Challenge, she loved a hunt. The idea hit her, and she smiled and called Reese back.

  “Hey, can you do me a favor?”

  “Do I get half the bonus?”

  “Can you spell Matthew’s company? I keep entering it wrong.”

  “He’s with you, can’t you—”

  “Reese, please don’t give me sh— a hard time on this. He’s meeting with two strategists right now and I’m not going to interrupt him to ask him how to spell his company. Cooperate, or I’ll tell Megan, your tight-ass boss, that you screwed her mother.”