It Takes Two

by Jenny Holiday

  “A librarian?” Noah looked equal parts amused and confused.

  “Yeah. You know, that’s the kind of guy I always imagined Jane would end up with. Someone bookish.”

  “We’ve been over this.” His voice took on a menacing tone.

  “Yeah, yeah. I know.” She did. She needed to stop beating this dead horse.

  Noah’s gaze returned to his sister, and at that same moment Jane looked up. What would it be like to have a sibling you were so connected to? What would it be like to have anyone you were so connected to?

  Upon recognizing her brother, Jane smiled and waved. Then she grabbed the librarian’s arm and started towing him toward the bar. A second guy, who’d been standing nearby on the dance floor, followed them. Although the librarian was nothing to sneeze at, Guy #2 was Fine-with-a-capital-F. He was so gorgeous, in fact, that Wendy would even say nice things about his novel-in-progress if it meant she could get in his pants. Maybe she’d finally found her prince for a night.

  More important, maybe she could hit on him in full view of Noah. She whistled a little, just loud enough for Noah to notice. When he raised his eyebrows questioningly at her, she said, “I would listen to that guy talk about craft beer and community gardens all night long.”

  His retort was cut off by Jane’s arrival. She stepped right into his arms for a hug. “Hello, brother-mine! Have you come to collect me because I missed curfew?”

  Noah rolled his eyes, but he didn’t deny it.

  Jane turned to her man-posse. “This is my brother, Noah. Noah, this is Jake. He’s a librarian, and we’ve been having quite the chat about young-adult literature.”

  Jake stuck out his hand. “I’m a big fan of your sister’s books.”

  Wendy entertained a momentary fantasy where Jane was still single and the two of them could pick these guys up. Jane could go home with Jake, and Wendy could go home with Jake’s hot friend. But of course Jane would probably ruin things by falling in love with Jake and expecting Wendy to do the same with Jake’s friend. She would want them to get married and buy adjoining houses or something.

  “This,” said Jane, gesturing to Wendy’s fantasy man, “is Jake’s husband, Julio.”

  Right. Of course.

  Wendy could feel Noah smirking as he greeted the men.

  Jane put an arm around Wendy and squeezed. “Jake, you met Wendy earlier. Julio, this is my best friend Wendy I was telling you about. She’s the maid of honor in my wedding.”

  “Oh, she could totally pull off tartan,” Julio said, not acknowledging Wendy other than to let his eyes scan her up and down like she was a horse at auction.

  “Julio is a costume designer for Broadway shows,” Jane said excitedly. “We were talking about the wedding—he had the idea that we could incorporate Cameron’s heritage by having the bridesmaids wear tartan dresses.”

  “Cameron’s from Thunder Bay,” Wendy said, because it was all she could think to say, given that she was still reeling from the fact that her fantasy one-night stand not only wasn’t straight, he was, apparently, redesigning her bridesmaid dress.

  “It’s a great idea.” Jane pulled away from Wendy and made a dismissive gesture in Julio’s direction. “But the wedding is going to be really low-key. The girls already have their dresses. I’m totally not one of those high-maintenance brides.”

  “Honey, you can be as high-maintenance as you like,” Julio said. “It’s your wedding.”

  Jane got a moony look on her face, and Wendy got a sick feeling in her stomach.

  Noah looked at his watch. “Well, shall we, ladies?”

  “We shall.” Jane let loose a big yawn, and Wendy gave up. There was no point in sticking around. Sometimes the only thing you could do was lose your case and move on to the next one. Time to go home—like, all the way home to Toronto. Just one more day to get through, and tomorrow she and Jane were slated for Jane’s dress appointment, so she wouldn’t have to deal with Noah, who was planning to go into the office even though it was Sunday. She could do this.

  Wendy could feel Noah watching her while Jane said good-bye to her new friends and procured their address so she could invite them to her low-key wedding. Because low-key weddings always involve guests you met once in a bar in another city.

  When she was done, Noah gestured for Jane to precede him, but he didn’t take his eyes off Wendy. Once Jane had started cutting a path through the crowded bar, he repeated the gesture. Wendy, as much as she wished she could flee to the airport and get on a plane home right now, stepped ahead of him.

  As she did so, he leaned down and whispered in her ear. “See. You knew you were going to end up coming home with me tonight.”

  She didn’t bother responding, merely kept following Jane through the crowd as if she hadn’t heard him. As if her whole body hadn’t ignited at his words.

  She felt oddly like they had faced off in court and he’d won the day. She hated that feeling. But Wendy was fair. She was clear-eyed. There was nothing she could do, at least for now, but concede.

  Point to Noah Denning.

  Chapter Nine

  Noah did not go into the office on Sunday.

  When Wendy emerged from her bedroom, aka the Christmas tree–scented torture chamber, it was after nine, so she assumed he’d be long gone—which was why she came out wearing only a T-shirt and underwear.

  “Well, now I get to see the bottom half.”

  She screamed.

  He was sitting in the living room commenting wryly from over the top of a newspaper. She’d walked right past him on her way to the kitchen.

  “Ack!” Jane hustled over to Wendy and performed the same ineffectual airplane-arms shielding thing she’d done when Noah walked in on Wendy changing her shirt at the photo session in the spring. “I’m sorry! I should have warned you he was here!”

  Wendy, tugging the hem of her T-shirt down to cover her butt, composed herself and made the same reply she had back then. “No worries. It’s only Noah.”

  It was a lie then, and it was a lie now.

  “I talked him into coming to the bridal salon with us,” Jane said.

  “What happened to your workaholic ways?” Wendy called over her shoulder as she headed back to the bedroom.

  “I rethought my priorities. How often do you get to go wedding dress shopping with your little sister?” Noah said as Wendy reemerged from the bedroom fully dressed.

  “Well, you never know,” Jane joked. “This Cameron thing might just be a phase.”

  Noah’s gaze whipped to Wendy’s, and her face heated. He didn’t say anything, though, and she appreciated the hell out of that.

  “Nah,” Wendy said, talking to Jane but looking at Noah. “I’m pretty sure Cameron’s the real deal.”

  Noah smiled at her. It was sort of like the smiles he used to give her after her softball games—a proud parental smile. Which, as embarrassing as it was, made sense. He knew what it had cost for her to say that.

  But there was also something else in that smile, something she couldn’t quite identify. Something that made her uncomfortable. It was almost like he could see inside her.

  But that was impossible.

  Right?

  * * *

  Maybe this hadn’t been a good idea. Maybe the correct number of times a man should accompany his little sister wedding dress shopping was actually zero. Because as far as Noah could tell, he was adding no value to this excursion. He was just sitting on a big poufy pink chair in a room that he could only describe as an antechamber while Jane tried on approximately one million wedding dresses.

  And, ignorant as he was about such matters, he’d had no idea how long it took to put one of those things on—or how many helpers it required. Each new dress required a small army of overly Botoxed women in Chanel suits to carry it into the fitting room, and, from the sound of things, to hoist it onto Jane.

  And worse, all the dresses kind of looked the same to him. They looked good, to be fair, but he wasn’t seeing as much
difference between them as Jane seemed to.

  The only thing that was saving him from going out of his skull with boredom was Words With Friends.

  Words With Friends with Wendy, to be precise.

  H-E-L-P she spelled from inside the dressing room. She was in there with Jane and the Chanel army, so she wasn’t taking a turn very often, but he was staring at his phone like he was waiting for the secrets of the universe to be revealed.

  Then came a message from the app’s chat feature.

  That was actually a message from beyond the grave. I have been smothered by tulle.

  He didn’t know what tulle was, but he cracked up anyway.

  But it was also, you will have noticed, a triple letter score for the L.

  He wouldn’t have thought Wendy was an emoji sort of person, but that last message was followed by a face with its tongue sticking out.

  He calmly played L-I-N-K-E-D with the same L, racking up a nice chunk of points. A message came immediately in.

  Oh, bite me.

  He grinned. He had to talk himself out of sending her a big smiley face back.

  There really was nothing as fun as sparring with Wendy.

  For Wendy and him, sparring was routine. It was their normal. It had been ever since they were kids.

  He was beginning to think that where they had gone wrong the other day—even though it had felt so very right at the time—was that they’d stepped out of that routine. They’d been bickering—par for the course for them—when he’d thought she was expressing disapproval over Jane and Cameron’s relationship. But then, in a whiplash-inducing shift, she’d told him a pretty big truth about herself, and his instinctive response had been to comfort her. Which was fine—he didn’t regret that. But then of course there had been that searing kiss, which he most certainly did regret.

  Maybe regretted.

  Well, regretted its aftermath anyway.

  And then, last night, he’d gone even further off the rails by swooping into that bar and cock-blocking her. Which, in the bright light of day, he had to admit was none of his business. That had been way out of character for him. He wasn’t a caveman—usually.

  So if he was feeling unsettled about that kiss and its consequences—and happy and calm arguing with her via Words With Friends—surely that signaled a way forward: more sparring. Yes. The way to survive the wedding-enforced proximity in their future was to get things back to normal. Find something to argue—superficially—about. Double down on “normal.”

  Buoyed, he tuned into the discussion under way in the dressing room. They were talking about something called mermaid dresses.

  “Just try it!” Wendy ordered over Jane’s insistence that she absolutely, positively didn’t want a “mermaid dress.”

  Several minutes of rustling followed. Then, Jane: “Ohhhh.”

  “Told you.”

  They were coming out, so he set down his phone.

  “What do you think?” Jane asked as she emerged.

  His eyes slid over her without really taking her in and settled on Wendy, who was gazing at Jane and wearing a satisfied look. Clearly, Wendy approved of the dress. He had a momentary thought of disagreeing just to be contrary—in the name of his larger cause of finding something to argue about so as to get things back to normal. But he probably shouldn’t do that over something as important as his sister’s wedding dress. So he turned his attention back to Jane, who was being helped onto a little platform across from a three-way mirror.

  “Wow.” She looked great. Even he could see that this dress worked better than the previous ones had, though he couldn’t articulate why. “I think that’s the one.”

  “It really does show off your hourglass figure, dear,” said one of the Chanel ladies.

  He got up and went over to Jane. “Let me buy it for you.”

  “Let me buy it for you,” Wendy said, and Noah almost cracked up. His assessment was spot on: arguing was their normal. And he hadn’t even been trying there.

  “Huh?” Jane turned a confused look on both of them. “Neither of you is buying my wedding dress. Honestly, you two are so weird. Haven’t you ever watched Say Yes to the Dress? This is the part where you’re supposed to be getting all emotional over me having found the perfect dress.”

  She was kidding—he thought.

  “Sorry,” Wendy said. “You know I’m not really a crier. I just want you to have the best wedding ever.”

  “I want you to have the best wedding ever,” Noah countered. It was true. He wasn’t even saying that as a counterpoint to Wendy—or at least that wasn’t the only reason he was saying it. He wasn’t the type to get choked up over dresses, but he wanted her to be happy—happy and safe. It was all he’d ever wanted. And the way he often defaulted to showing that was with cash.

  “Well, I appreciate that, but I’m buying my own wedding dress!” Jane put her hands on her hips and looked down at him from her platform like a mother scolding a kid. “Why don’t you channel your enthusiasm into something more useful?”

  “Like what?” he asked.

  “Well, if you really want to help, brother dearest,” she said, “you could get involved with planning Cameron’s bachelor party. Jay, God bless him, is a little…”

  “Uninspired?” Wendy supplied.

  Jay was Cameron’s brother, and as such, Jane’s future brother-in-law. Noah didn’t know him that well, but he could see why Wendy would say that. Jay was a great guy, but he didn’t make a big impression. He was an accountant. He seemed very straitlaced.

  Wendy laughed. “Yeah. He’s probably going to repeat his own boring bachelor party.” She turned to Noah. “They hung out all night in the same pub he always goes to. There was nothing special about it.” She smirked at Jane. “Except I guess of course that you and Cameron got it on for the first time that night.”

  “Hey.” Noah covered his ears. “I don’t need to hear that.”

  “Yes,” Jane said. “Cameron probably doesn’t even care, but I kind of do. I want him to have a big, fun party. It’s not going to come from Jay. And his other groomsman besides you and Jay is this guy Hector he knows from the army. Hector is…how do I say this? Hector is not the most thoughtful guy in the world.”

  “I got you.” He had this. “One spectacular bachelor party coming up.”

  “You want Cameron to have a big, fun party, but what about yours?” Wendy asked. “The girls and I have been taking you at your word when you said you wanted a low-key wedding.” She glanced at the dress. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but that is not a low-key dress. You gotta tell us if you want us to kick it into high gear for the bachelorette.”

  Jane made a sheepish face. “I kind of want you to kick it into high gear for the bachelorette.”

  And…there it was. The perfect battleground being handed to him on a platter—the way to undo all the weirdness of this weekend with Wendy. He wanted to laugh in triumph. Instead, he took a step forward, puffed up his chest, and said, “Hey, Wendy, I bet I can throw Cameron a better party than you can throw Jane.”

  “Oh, really? You? Mr. Serious?” Wendy smirked.

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’re not exactly the cut-loose sort.”

  He took a step forward and folded his arms across his chest. “I am, too.”

  She stepped forward, too, and arranged her arms in a mirror-image gesture. “All right, Noah Denning. You’re on. Prepare for defeat. And if you’re so confident, why don’t you put your money where your mouth is?”

  “Here we go,” Jane muttered.

  “With pleasure. What do you have in mind?”

  “Guys,” Jane said. “I know enough to know that I probably can’t stop you from making this stupid bet, but you are not allowed to bet big piles of money on it.”

  Wendy ignored her. “What I have in mind isn’t financial.” She grinned and let her gaze rake him up and down, sizing him up. “Loser goes to Josh Groban.”

  “Ha!” Noah let loose a b
ark of laughter. That was a great stake.

  “For life,” Wendy added ominously.

  Well, shit. Things were getting serious. But he was in. He was so in. He stuck out his hand. “You got yourself a deal.”

  Chapter Ten

  TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE WEDDING

  Wendy was stuck in one of Toronto’s famous traffic jams. She was supposed to be at the airport picking up Gia, who was arriving a couple days in advance of the bachelorette party.

  Her phone buzzed. She shouldn’t have picked it up, but she was at a dead stop. It was Noah.

  How’s the party planning going?

  They’d been texting a bit since they’d made their bet in New York. Doing a bit of trash talking.

  I rented out a branch of the freaking Toronto Public Library.

  She’d like to see him top that. She picked up the phone again and attached a couple of pictures to her next text.

  The invitations were on vintage library cards. The cocktail stirrers are topped with little tiny books.

  And the waiters are nerdy, bookish hunks.

  She didn’t have a photo to go with that last text, but she would take one at the event and make sure he saw it. Ha!

  Ooh. A book theme. You really know how to throw a party, Wendy. Maybe I should just give up now. NOT.

  Oh shut up. What are YOU doing?

  Like I am going to tell you?

  Hey! I told you mine.

  We never said any of this had to be public.

  Well, if our plans aren’t public, how do we judge who wins? How can we decide which is the best party if you won’t tell me about yours?

  There. She’d like to see him argue with that logic.

  You may have a point.

  HA. SO THERE.

  I suggest we let the wedding party vote. Photograph your party, and I’ll do the same. When we’re all together for the wedding, we’ll share the photos and each of us can describe our party and try to convince the group to vote for us.