It Takes Two

by Jenny Holiday

  So much for the deluxe package.

  “You have somewhere more exciting to be?” Gia asked.

  Jane laughed. “I actually do. Cam is kicking his brother out of the room, and I’m going to stay there tonight.”

  Wendy couldn’t take it anymore. She was going to cry.

  So she made her way over to Gia and whispered in her ear. “I’ve got to go to the lobby for a bit to settle up our accounts with the company that’s providing the evening’s entertainment.”

  Gia nodded and didn’t notice when, instead of going out the main door, Wendy slipped through the adjoining door to the other room.

  Nobody noticed.

  Which, although that had been her aim, was pretty much par for the course.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Wendy sank into the bath in Gia and Elise’s room and let loose a big sigh. Yes, it was kind of weird that she was taking a bath shortly after midnight when there was a stripper—a stripper she had hired—doing his thing in the adjoining room. It was just that when she’d fled, a jumble of shitty emotions cresting in her chest, she’d been breathless, determined not to cry. She’d come into the bathroom in Gia and Elise’s empty room and suddenly, on top of the sadness and anger that had been warring in her chest, she was…ashamed. Ashamed for shit-talking Cameron. Ashamed of wishing Jane wasn’t getting married. Ashamed that she was jealous over it. Ashamed of the stupid, juvenile bet with Noah that had inspired her to bring the bachelorette party to Vegas in the first place.

  So, after staring at herself in the mirror in disgust for a few minutes, she’d impulsively decided to get in the bath. She wasn’t going to go back next door—her poor heart couldn’t take it. She wasn’t naive enough to think she could just wash off her shame, but, somehow, the idea of undressing, of immersing her body in water as hot as she could stand, had seemed like an oddly logical next move.

  The problem was the bath didn’t clear away the crud. It just reminded her why she wasn’t normally a bath person. All baths did was provide a comfy setting for brooding.

  She tried to resist, but she was already feeling so low. So vulnerable.

  So she just let her mind go there. She’d been so excited. So stupidly excited.

  New dress, new shoes, new haircut. New makeup, purchased not from the drugstore, but from the Clinique counter at the Bay. New underwear even, pretty underwear, including a lacy push-up bra, though she knew Noah would never see that part of her outfit. She’d spent six hundred bucks, all told, which she’d taken from her college fund without her mom’s knowledge.

  Wendy felt the stares of her classmates as she entered the made-over school with Jane and Tim. She steeled herself. It was inevitable, given that she was arriving alone.

  “My date is meeting me here later,” she whispered to Mr. Piper, the math teacher manning the registration desk. It wasn’t against the rules to go stag to the prom, but as a single underclassman, she needed to be with someone older.

  “Who’s your date, Wendy?” Mr. Piper asked. Luckily, he knew her from her advanced track math class.

  “Noah Denning.”

  She’d been trying to keep her voice low, but she must not have succeeded, because the female half of the couple in line behind them burst out laughing.

  Wendy’s face ignited. Tim started to say something, but Mr. Piper, who was looking down at a clipboard, said, “Yes. Okay, here you are,” and waved them in.

  The theme this year was Out of This World, and the main entryway had been totally transformed. It was hung with thousands of tiny lights, including some grouped into a Milky Way, and couples were being herded under a big arch made up of the planets of the solar system, in order to pose for photos.

  “Be in our picture,” Jane said as they approached the front of the line.

  “No, you go ahead!” There was no way Wendy was crashing Jane’s portrait. When Jane seemed like she was going to argue some more, Wendy turned an entreating look on Tim, who must have heard her silent plea, because he hustled Jane under the arch and made quick work of the photo, so Wendy only had to stand awkwardly on the sidelines waiting for a couple minutes.

  They felt like hours, though. She held her head high, aware of the stares of everyone in line behind Jane and Tim. “I’m waiting for my date,” she wanted to say, because it was true, but there was no need to be so loud about it. Her point would be made sweeter when Noah Denning arrived and took her arm. She hoped they could come back and get their picture taken when he did. This was a night she was going to want to remember.

  And not only because she had a date.

  Because it was Noah.

  Because maybe, if she was very brave—or very lucky, she couldn’t decide which—whatever had almost happened between them last month on that run would happen again.

  Maybe more than that would happen.

  The stares became more overt once they made their way into the gym, where the dance itself was being held. Her reward—and her classmates’ comeuppance—was coming, though, so she could hold out.

  Which she kept telling herself as she shooed Jane and Tim out onto the dance floor. They’d been insisting on staying with her, but that only made it worse. She didn’t need a babysitter.

  Then the whispers started. Well, they weren’t really whispers in the sense that most of them were designed for her to hear, snarky comments about the girl who’d come to the dance alone.

  But she could stand the discomfort, because he was coming. So she stood there, sweating but holding it together as the gossip grew louder and more vicious.

  Until a teacher came over and found Jane to pass along a message from Noah that he wasn’t coming.

  “What?” She wasn’t sure why she was asking that. Jane had whispered the news, but Wendy had heard her just fine.

  “Apparently he’s staying on for the overnight shift at the store.” Jane placed her hand over her heart. “I’m so sorry, Wendy.”

  “He probably didn’t feel like he could turn it down,” Tim said. “If you do back-to-back shifts, you get double-time for the second one.”

  “Oh my God.” Jane rolled her eyes. “I know he works so hard for a reason, but honestly. If there was ever a shift to turn down, this was it.”

  All Wendy could do was blink—which hurt because her eyeballs were dry. Everything was dry: her throat, her mouth. Her heart, which felt like scorched desert earth, run though with a network of cracks. It felt like the cracks kept continuing, radiating out through her body and into the gym itself, splitting open the floor so she was marooned on an island, hot and thirsty and alone.

  She thought, suddenly, about that dumb Princess Jasmine Pez dispenser her dad had given her the day before he died. The situation was different, but the feeling was the same. Of being blindsided. Deliriously happy and then…alone.

  She shook her head. She was being ridiculous. It wasn’t the same thing. Her dad had died. He hadn’t left her on purpose.

  Unlike Noah, who had.

  Self-delusion was not Wendy’s thing. If there was any dignity to be salvaged in this situation, it was in the knowledge that she wasn’t lying to herself. The truth was that although Noah probably cared about her in his way, it was because she was Jane’s best friend. Because she was around. They went running because she was there, always there, in his house, the girl in need of a surrogate family. He came to the occasional softball game because he felt guilty that she was always the only kid on the team with no one in the audience. But she wasn’t important enough for him to turn down a shift at the store.

  So he’d put his hand on her cheek. Big freaking deal. She’d been deluded if she’d been reading something into that. The truth was Noah didn’t see her as a romantic interest, and he never would.

  Facing the truth was hard, but it gave you a way forward. A way to start mending your heart. She took a deep breath and tried to imagine water raining down on all those cracks in her heart. Filling them in, or at least disguising them enough that the terrain could be travers
ed.

  “Let’s just go home.” Jane looked at Tim and hitched her head toward the coat check.

  “No.” Wendy spoke sharply enough that it stopped Tim in his tracks. “Why would I want to go home?”

  She could hear the mania in her tone, but it was better than not saying anything, than cowering silently and being led out of the dance like a silly child who had been stupid enough to get her hopes up. She did want to go home. She wanted to wash the paint off her face, curl up in her bed, and cry. But she had to stay, at least long enough to show all these bastards that she didn’t care about being abandoned by Noah Denning. To show that she was in on the joke. Wendy Liu thought Noah Denning would go to the prom with her? Ha, ha, ha, hilarious!

  She didn’t know if she was allowed to stay here without a senior date, but she sure as hell was going to try.

  Jane looked unconvinced. The DJ cued up some horrid Coldplay ballad. “Tim,” Wendy said. “Dance with me?”

  “You bet.”

  Normally, she would ask Jane if she minded lending out her date, but she needed to move, so she grabbed his arm and towed him toward the center of the floor, where they could get lost in the crowd.

  “I’m sorry, Wendy.”

  She shrugged as he pulled her into a loose embrace. “No big deal.”

  “Noah works so much, I’m not actually sure how that place is going to survive without him next month.”

  “Next month?” It was late May. She would have assumed Noah would work as much as possible over the summer.

  “Yeah, he’s leaving for New York the day after graduation.”

  “He is?”

  “He got some work-study job or something. Had the option to start early. It pays more than the store.”

  “But…” I thought we were going running this summer.

  But why would she think that? Hadn’t she just forced herself to face the truth? If Noah wasn’t going to turn down a shift to come to the freaking prom with her, he certainly wasn’t going to turn down a job because he’d promised to go running with her.

  She took another deep breath and kept concentrating on the mental image of water rushing into the chasms in her heart. Icy-cold water that was, paradoxically, healing.

  And she decided something right then and there: she was done putting herself in situations where people could hurt her. Leave her.

  She was never going to let anyone do this to her again.

  “Anyway,” Tim went on as he looked around at the other couples, “I’m sure he didn’t realize how awkward his bailing was going to make things for you. Jesus Christ, is this a public school or a cult?” Wendy shaped her mouth into the smile that was required. “Next time I see him, I’m going to murder him on your behalf.”

  She looked at the dots of lights swirling around the floor, then up at their source, the disco ball. It was silver, like her dress. All jagged edges and impervious surfaces. That was a better pattern than the network of cracks she’d been imagining. She imagined herself made of mirrors, hard and shiny and impermeable.

  Because from now on, that’s what she was.

  “Eh.” She let a shoulder rise and fall. “Don’t waste your energy. It’s only Noah.”

  She said it like she meant it.

  Wendy jumped when a noise reached through her consciousness—and across seventeen years—and yanked her back to the present. She cocked her ear, but she heard nothing. She must have imagined it. Which was fine. She’d take any excuse, even nonexistent noises, to get her out of her head.

  She was disgusted with herself. The prom had been almost twenty years ago. It was not worth this much mental energy. See? This was why baths sucked.

  Honestly. If someone else had been telling the story, she’d have been tempted to say, big deal. You got your heart broken. You were humiliated. It happens all the time. Welcome to the human race.

  But it wasn’t just humiliation that had made the experience so formative, she could see as she looked back from her grown-up vantage point. It was the sense that she’d failed herself. That she’d been so utterly taken in by all the trappings of the prom. That she’d compromised her pride. That she’d allowed herself to get her hopes up. The pain of that night wasn’t even really about Noah—it was about her and what she was made of.

  Noah Denning hadn’t broken her heart.

  She had let her heart be broken.

  But at least that had been the last time. She hadn’t put herself in that position again, not even when Noah called her the next day and apologized. She’d brushed that off as her pride demanded, and it hadn’t even been that hard. Because she’d transformed herself under the disco ball, into something strong and unbreakable.

  * * *

  Noah watched Wendy leave. She said something to Gia and then slipped next door without anyone else noticing.

  Except him. He noticed.

  The logical thing for him to do now was to follow his sister’s orders and leave. He had won this evening’s battle—or at least the first part of it. He had successfully crashed the party, which everyone seemed to think had been his sole aim. He still needed to stick around to make sure no “deluxe packages” were consumed, but he could just as easily do that by lurking outside to make sure Gunnar left when the dancing was over. He wasn’t in a homophobic panic over the idea of watching another guy get naked, but he also didn’t need to see his sister get a lap dance—he totally took Jane’s point there. He would let the women have their fun.

  But…what if Wendy went back through the adjoining door and then, after the show, stayed there with Gunnar? If Jane was going to stay with Cameron, that meant Wendy had her own room.

  Shit.

  Why had she left, anyway? Didn’t she want to see the show?

  A possible answer to that question exploded in his consciousness like a bomb. Had she gone next door to get ready to sleep with Gunnar?

  Jesus fucking Christ.

  “Noah!” his sister called. He was sitting on the bed closest to the bathroom, manically jiggling his legs as he imagined Wendy putting on makeup next door. Or, God help him, getting condoms or something. “Why are you still here? I mean, I love you, but…leave!”

  “I’m going!”

  He got up, but instead of leaving, he made his way over to the adjoining door. It was unlocked from this side. What were the chances she had left it unlocked on hers? Very slowly, so as not to attract attention from either side, he tried the handle. Nope. Locked.

  He should take that as a sign. If he stood right outside and listened through the door, he’d be able to hear when the show was over and…what the post-show plans were. He didn’t need to bust in on Wendy to find out what she was up to.

  But…fuck it. He was going to do it anyway.

  He picked up a purse he recognized as Elise’s, rummaged through it, emerged triumphant with a key card, called, “Bye!” to the party, and hightailed it out of the room.

  He paused outside her door, half afraid of what he might find. Arguably, it was better not to know, but he was beyond that. Some unfamiliar, primal part of him had to know what she was doing.

  His hands were shaking so badly, the first attempt at unlocking her door didn’t work. He paused for a moment after the red light blinked at him, waiting for it to reset. Waiting for his heart, which was thumping wildly for some unknown reason, to reset.

  This was what he’d felt like that night at the bar in New York. Like Wendy was about to sleep with some random guy and it was going to kill him.

  And what was the saying? Over my dead body.

  It was possible that it was actually going to happen. Because if Wendy thought she was going to sleep with Gunnar tonight, she was going to have to get through him first.

  * * *

  Wendy hit the drain with her toe when she heard the door click open. So maybe she hadn’t been hearing things a bit ago—that was definitely the sound of someone entering with a key card. “Is that you, Gia?” she called. “I’m in the bath.”

 
; She was met with silence.

  “Gia? Elise? I’m sorry I bailed. I’m borrowing your room. I just…needed a moment.”

  A moment in the bath. Because I love baths so much.

  More silence.

  Maybe Gia or Elise had popped in to get something and had already gone? Or—shit—maybe someone had called hotel security on them. Maybe the girls had been making too much noise, and the party had been shut down. That wouldn’t be good for her chances with the bet. Although maybe there was a way she could spin it: our party was so fabulous that it got busted.

  Only one way to find out. She was past done with this stupid bath anyway. She pushed up out of the water and felt her way to the towel rack. She’d forgotten to turn on the fan, and the bathroom was all steamed up.

  Wrapping the towel around her, she pushed open the door, her skin pebbling at the blast of cold air in the room in contrast to the overheated bathroom and her eyes blinking to adjust from darkness to light. “Gia? Is that you? I know it’s weird that I’m—”

  Noah. Noah was there—right there, two feet away from her. And he was pissed.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he growled.

  “The better question is what are you doing? I’m taking a bath! You can’t just barge in here!” She started to brush past him, but then realized that since she wasn’t in her room, she had nowhere to go. There was no refuge, except maybe back in the bathroom where her clothes were, but to return to her steamy cocoon seemed like it would signal a retreat. She didn’t know what was happening here, but she knew instinctively that “retreat” was not the message she wanted to send.

  So she stopped just outside the bathroom door, unsure of what to do but unwilling to show it. She tried to summon some anger to match his. He couldn’t just let himself into the room like this. It was an arrogant, entitled thing to do. But her brain didn’t seem to be cooperating. It was drinking in the sight of him, his sleeves rolled up over his lean forearms. Thinking about those forearms under her ass as he held her up that night on the High Line, held her up so she could wrap her legs around him.