Sleeping with Her Enemy

by Jenny Holiday

By the time Danny rang the doorbell just before noon, bearing lunch, everything was ready to go and the place was sparkling.

  The group gathered on the floor of the dining room as Danny unloaded sandwiches and deli salads. “Who wants a mimosa?” Leave it to Danny to bring champagne and fresh-squeezed orange juice. Amy raised her hand. The better to numb the pain.

  Everyone munched their sandwiches while Danny passed out paper cups. Dax was the only one who demurred. “I’m going to hit the road soon with your stuff for my storage locker, so I shouldn’t.”

  She didn’t know whether to thank him for helping—or to berate him for helping when she’d specifically told him she didn’t need him. She understood that he regarded what had happened between them as a meaningless fling. It had been a meaningless fling. But even so, how could he just be here acting like everything was normal—like they hadn’t been wrapped around each other less than a month ago?

  Then Michael’s phone rang, and she was so jumpy already that she about hit the ceiling as she let loose a little shriek. Her brother eyed the caller ID. Oh, crap. She could tell just by looking at his face.

  “It’s Mom,” he said, confirming her fears.

  “You listen to me.” Her finger had come out, seemingly of its own volition, so she just went with it and poked him in the chest. “Just because we’re moving a day earlier than planned does not mean we need to go to their party.”

  Michael looked uncertain. He had always been such a good boy. He had trouble lying to their parents. She understood. Until recently, she had been a good girl.

  “What party?” Danny asked. She ignored him.

  “We have an excuse!” She poked harder. “The excuse has already been relayed.” Staring at her brother, she tried to bore some sense into him with her eyeballs. She could not add her mother to the shitstorm of emotion that this weekend was turning out to be.

  “I’ll go. You don’t have to. I’ll tell them you’ll be busy unpacking. Knowing one of us will be there will get her off our case about it, anyway.” He pressed a button on his phone.

  “No!” She buried her head in her hands even as he stood up and started walking. She could hear him say, “Hi, Mom,” as he disappeared into the now-empty kitchen, could feel him capitulating. She knew she probably looked like she was being melodramatic for effect, but real tears were starting to prickle in her eyes. It was all just too much. She needed a pair of ruby slippers to click so she could magically be done with this all and transport herself home.

  Except she didn’t know where—or what—home was.

  “What was that?” Cassie asked gently.

  She swallowed the lump in her throat and lifted her head to face her friends. “That was my mother. My parents have this big stupid party every year at the end of the summer. It’s generally nonnegotiable, but I told them we weren’t coming this year because Michael was helping me move. My mother has been on a warpath ever since.”

  “Wow, she really wants you there,” said Danny, who, of course, knew nothing about the woman who had given birth to her.

  “No.” Mortified, Amy felt a tear start to break free. She swallowed, hard. “She wants accessories. Perfect, successful children to show off to her friends.” She swiped angrily at the tear. “They’re not even her friends. It’s like they’re her…competitors.”

  “Don’t go.” All eyes swung to Dax. He’d spoken quietly, but with such force that Amy was startled. She imagined everyone else was, too, given the way the directive brought a hush to the group. He looked at her as if they were the only two people in the room. “You don’t owe her anything. Just don’t go.”

  She wanted to say that he didn’t have the right to an opinion on the situation. But everyone else was watching, waiting for her to answer. “I wouldn’t. But Michael is going to cave—I can tell. And I can’t send him into the shark tank alone.” She waved her arms around the room, filled with neatly stacked boxes. “Especially not after he just stayed up all night helping me do this.” She could feel herself hardening, her jaw locking. Good. Steely resolve was better than weepy uncertainty. She could do this. Move. Sleep. Get up and go to the goddamned white party. By Sunday night, it would all be over, and she would have fully launched herself into the next chapter of her life—Amy Morrison, Single City Girl.

  “Well, I think we should come with you.” When everyone looked at Danny, he shrugged and added a defensive, “What? If she can’t get out of the party, I think we should all go with her. We’ll be her bodyguards. Or backup dancers. Or whatever.”

  “Yes,” Dax said, still looking at her with a bizarre intensity that bordered on anger.

  “Great idea,” Jack said.

  “What do we need to know?” Cassie asked. “Time? Address?”

  “Dress code?” Danny added.

  Amy opened her mouth to demure, to insist that they had done enough already. But then she closed it. Looking around at the little circle, she was suffused with a sense of gratitude. This is what friends did for one another. There was also the part where it would be hilarious to show up with four guests whose pedigrees hadn’t been personally vetted by her mother. So why not let them? She thought for a moment about whether there was a way to finagle it so Danny and Jack and Cassie came, but not Dax. But that hadn’t really worked when she’d told him to stay away today, had it? She could endure one more day of Dax if she had to. She sighed. “Well, here’s the thing. It’s a white party.”

  “Well, I guess that counts me out, then,” Dax said. The grin he flashed was in such marked contrast to his previous intensity that it unsettled her a bit.

  “Not white people—though there will be that, in spades. White clothes.”

  “Like the gays!” Danny said. “The Miami white parties are legendary.”

  “I wish. Not like the gays—then we might actually have fun. Like the Hamptons. Apparently there’s some big party in the Hamptons every year where all the rich people get together and wear white.” It sounded so stupid and affected when she explained it. “My parents are nothing if not social climbers. So they started this thing when we were kids. It’s always the last Sunday morning before the Labor Day long weekend—they couldn’t do it Labor Day weekend, of course, because their actual rich friends were always away at their cottages. The idea is this party your last chance to wear white for the year.”

  “Huh?” Danny said.

  “You know how you’re not supposed to wear white after Labor Day?”

  “No, I do not know. Who the hell came up with that? And if that’s a rule, how do you explain the phrase ‘winter white’?”

  Amy shrugged. “Anyway, if you want to come, you have to wear white.” A rogue image popped into her mind of her friends crashing the party en masse in a rainbow of obnoxious colors. “Or don’t! I’m just so thankful that you’d do this for me. I’ll text everyone the address.”

  “I’m not doing this for you,” Danny said, refilling her Dixie cup with champagne and not even bothering to add any juice. “I’ve never been to a social-climbing, Hamptons-wannabe, straight-people white party. A person doesn’t turn down an invitation like that.”

  Dax stood. “Well, I’d better go home and start pressing my suit.”

  “You don’t have to come.”

  He didn’t answer, just said, as if she hadn’t spoken, “You’ll want the driveway free for when the truck gets here, so I should get the car loaded and take off.”

  She hadn’t gotten up, so he looked down at her as he spoke. Dax was always so all-consuming. When he was around, it was hard to pay attention to anyone else. But as she sat on the floor and looked up at him, he literally filled her field of vision with his commanding dark persona. She felt his presence deeply.

  She also felt the impending loss of him leaving. It took the form of a little finger of panic working its way around her throat. She’d told him not to come today. Now she didn’t want him to leave. And that was dangerous—and fruitless.

  So she just got up, walked him to th
e door, and said, “Thanks for all your help today.”

  Then she watched him drive away into the bright afternoon with her stuff in the back of his car.

  Why did it feel like he’d driven away with her heart, too?

  Chapter Seventeen

  Going home wasn’t as bad as she’d built it up to be in her head. Neither, surprisingly, was her mother. In the two months since the wedding, she’d accumulated a bit of a phobia about seeing everyone again. But in one sense, the white party was the perfect venue for reentry. Her mother was too busy running around yelling at the hired catering staff to pay much attention to her children beyond giving them a cursory kiss and ordering them to stay out of the way in the den upstairs. To Amy’s amazement, not a word was uttered about the wedding.

  Despite her objections, Michael had insisted they come early. Once he’d decided to capitulate, he’d done it utterly, it seemed.

  But now, as she sank back against the overstuffed sofa in the den—the only room in the house her mother actually permitted anyone to live in—she was glad for the time to soak up a little calm before the storm.

  “The move went well,” Michael said.

  She nodded her agreement because of course he had no idea that she’d spent the whole night sobbing. She’d intended for them both to go to a hotel, assuming that the unpacking wouldn’t be advanced enough that they’d be able to stay in the new apartment. But with Cassie and Jack’s help—the pair of them just would not quit—they’d made a ton of progress. Exhausted by putting on a brave face for everyone, she’d sent her brother to the Sheraton alone and crashed on her mattress on the floor, kept awake by the traffic noises from the busy street below, and, of course, by her own tears.

  She assumed that once she unpacked and got used to the new space, everything would normalize. It had to. Because this shaky, vulnerable feeling was the worst. This was not who she wanted to be. What had happened to the defiant girl who pitched her cell phone into Lake Ontario?

  As she looked around the small, comfy room—this really had always been her favorite room growing up—a part of her missed her old life. Not Mason, exactly, and certainly not her parents. But the idea of the life she’d been going to have. Of knowing where you were, knowing where you were going, and traveling the path to get there.

  What if she hadn’t sold her house? What if she hadn’t assigned the house all that huge symbolic meaning? She could be there right now, having a cup of tea in her backyard, blissfully alone. And if someday, she met someone she wanted to share the house—and the life—with, well, what was wrong with that?

  And if that someone was nice, considerate, and successful? Seriously, what was wrong with that? Because if she had to choose between nice, considerate, and successful or…she struggled to put words to the image in her head she’d conjured to stand in for the opposite concept.

  The image of Dax.

  “Don’t give it another thought! I’m sure she’ll be delighted to see you.” Amy shook her head at the sound of her mother’s voice, just outside the door, rousing herself from her thoughts.

  “And so it begins,” Michael murmured.

  Indeed. She wondered whom her mother was bringing to foist upon her. Possibly Carolyn, their cleaning lady, who was usually engaged to help at parties. She couldn’t imagine her mother letting anyone else see the den.

  Except maybe Mason.

  “Michael, can you help me with the flowers downstairs?”

  Her sweet big brother had jumped to his feet at the sight of Mason, as if to physically protect her. Now both men stood staring at her, uncertainty on their faces.

  “It’s okay,” she said to Michael. And it was. She had known she would have to face Mason at some point, so why not now? Why not make this craptastic weekend just a little bit more so? She smiled at her brother. “Go ahead.” When he didn’t move, she had to make a shooing motion. “Mason and I are overdue for a chat anyway.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, gathering strength. When she opened them, Michael and her mother were gone, and Mason was staring at her, looking as bereft as if someone had just set fire to his record collection.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  She shrugged. “It was for the best.”

  “That’s the thing.” He folded and unfolded his hands a few times, which is what he did when he was nervous. “I’m not sure it was.”

  “Excuse me?” He might as well have slapped her across the face.

  He grabbed her hands. “I made a horrible mistake. I was scared. All the wedding stuff freaked me out. I lost sight of the fact that after the wedding, nothing was going to change. That we’d still be us.”

  Amy blinked rapidly, trying to adjust to the impossible words that were coming out of his mouth. She could not disagree: if they had married, after the wedding, everything would still be the same as it always had between them. The clincher was that the same was no longer acceptable.

  “I lost sight of the most important thing,” he went on, “which is that I still love you.”

  She thought about how Mason had broken her heart by breaking her vision of the future. But also about how she’d moved on. She understood now that she was better off without Mason, just as Dax had always said.

  Too bad she couldn’t quite convince herself that she was better off without Dax, too.

  “I’ve sold the house,” she said.

  His smiled. “It doesn’t matter. The house isn’t important.”

  She wanted to interrupt to tell him that yes, the house was important. She had been trying to make it not important. But it was. It really, really was. It was a great big symbol, and even though leaving it had been the right thing to do, it had been gutting. But it was gone now, just like their relationship. But he wasn’t done talking. “We can get another house. A better one. I’ll be done with my residency in December, and I have an offer at a small OB practice at Spadina and Saint Clair.”

  “Forest Hill Village,” she said. He’d be doctoring the rich mommies-to-be right in the neighborhood.

  “Yes! Look, I know it was a huge sacrifice for you, all these years, while I was in school. I want it to be your turn. Let me take care of you for a while.”

  She had no idea what he was talking about. Was he suggesting she quit her job? Or just pledging to be the attentive partner she had always hoped he’d turn into?

  He dropped her hands—she’d forgotten he was holding them—and took a step back. “But I’ve said too much. I’m overwhelming you.”

  That much she could agree with, so she smiled weakly. She should open her mouth and send him away, but she was exhausted, and it was so much easier to just let things happen.

  “All I’m asking is for you to think about it.” He dug in his pocket. “I got you a little gift.”

  “Perfume?” she said, focusing on the small box he held out to her. She turned it over to read the label. “Chanel Number Five?”

  “Yes! It’s a classic, I’m told.”

  That was true, she supposed.

  He took it from her and opened the box. Freeing the bottle, he held it out to her. When she didn’t move to take it, he prompted. “Will you wear some? Just try it.”

  She wasn’t wearing any perfume at the moment. She hadn’t been able to find her toiletry bag in the chaos of the move, so she’d picked up a few drugstore essentials so as not to look like a hobo at her mother’s party, but she hadn’t purchased any scent.

  She felt like a robot, letting him take her wrist and spritz some perfume onto it, Reflexively, she pressed the wrist against her throat to distribute the scent, just like she always did with her usual perfume. What had just happened? Did he think this meant she was considering getting back together with him? Or was it just perfume?

  Mason shot her a huge smile. “Let’s go downstairs. The guests were starting to arrive when I got here, so I imagine things are in full swing now.”

  Yes. Her friends had probably arrived. Dax had probably arrived. To her embarrassmen
t, a tear slipped from the corner of her eye.

  “Hey, now. Don’t cry. You’ll ruin your makeup. We don’t need everyone gossiping about us any more than they already are, do we?”

  “I suppose not,” she said, letting him take her hand and lead her out of the den. “Mason,” she began as they started down the stairs, “I don’t want you to think…” God, this was hard.

  “Excuse me?”

  She took a deep, fortifying breath.

  And then panicked.

  Because she smelled like her mother.

  …

  Where the hell was Amy?

  Dax had been walking around wearing a ridiculous pair of white pants that made him look like an old man from Boca Raton, and for what? Maybe she’d already bolted. He hoped she’d already bolted. When Cassie had texted him that Amy and her brother were going to get to the party early, he’d made sure he showed up at the stroke of ten. Danny had been exactly right, even if his terminology had been overly colorful. Right now, Amy needed backup dancers. Reinforcements.

  And he and his lily-white pants were leading the goddamned cavalry.

  With any luck, by this evening, his lily-white pants would be on the floor next to a bed with her in it.

  He wasn’t sure what was going on with her. Moving was stressful, but he didn’t think moving was solely responsible for how out of sorts she’d been yesterday. He’d watched her like a hawk, and she’d seemed like a bundle of raw nerves, perpetually on the verge of tears.

  And that wasn’t going to fly with him. He needed the old Amy back, pronto. He was pretty sure she was in there somewhere.

  So now it was his job to clear the way for her. Get all the shit out of her path. Yesterday, that had meant disassembling her furniture and moving her stuff to his storage locker. Today, that apparently meant being the rear guard—or the front guard or whatever guard was required—at this ridiculous society party.

  They just had to get through this weekend. Because once her head was clear, they were going to have so much goddamned fun, they were going to blow the roof off his house. Or her rental. Or wherever. They were going to blow all the roofs off. He grinned just thinking about it.