It Takes Two

by Jenny Holiday

  But they were otherwise engaged, scraping across his scalp angrily, almost pulling his own hair. “God,” he bit out. “I’m an idiot. I knew this was a mistake.”

  “No,” she said, through tears she couldn’t get to stop. But at least they were silent tears; she wasn’t audibly sobbing anymore, just leaking from her eyeballs. She couldn’t blame him this time. “It’s not that. This was…” She trailed off, making a weak version of the Vanna White gesture that had accompanied her declarations earlier this evening. It was one thing to have the best sex of your life, quite another to say it out loud. She was glad her dress hadn’t come off, glad the rip he’d made in it hadn’t exposed her breasts. She smoothed the dress down. “This was good,” she finished softly, then bent over—ostensibly to put her tights back on but really so she’d have an excuse not to look at him.

  “What is it, then?” he asked quietly.

  She stayed bent over, even though she knew she couldn’t hide from him indefinitely. She needed a moment to…put on her armor.

  “Please, tell me what’s wrong.”

  I’m in love with you, that’s what’s wrong.

  She stood up, met his eyes, and opened her palm. “You got me a Pez.”

  He smiled uncertainly. “Which I would not have done if I’d known it was going to make you cry.”

  And you don’t love me back. I tried to harden myself against you all those years ago, but it’s all happening again.

  “It was more just…that you remembered.”

  “Did the Yankees one I mailed you make you cry, too?”

  He was teasing, so she tried to form her lips into a smile. “No.” But it had inspired her to make that fateful trip to New York—the real New York. The trip that had started all of this.

  I’m right back where I started.

  But again, it wasn’t his fault. “I’m just…a bit overwhelmed by the fact that you remembered something so insignificant as the fact that I used to collect Pez.” She was aware that this explanation had, again, fallen short. Women didn’t burst into post-sex sobbing because someone remembered something about their former hobbies.

  Normal women didn’t, anyway.

  “Of course I remembered.” He furrowed his brow. “I remember everything.”

  Her defenses were down because she’d slept with him. That goddamned Elvis Pez had unhinged her. Because the next thing that came out of her mouth was: “Do you remember standing me up at the prom?”

  * * *

  He did remember, that was the thing. Not in the sense that he stayed up nights thinking about it—but of course he remembered. He’d been strangely, sharply, surprisingly disappointed when he’d had to call the school that night to pass on a message that he wasn’t coming. And not just because he felt bad about leaving Wendy dateless, but because he’d wanted to go. Which, he’d told himself at the time, was ridiculous. It was a school dance. A bunch of streamers and balloons in the gym, a lot of bad music being spun by a subpar DJ, everyone sweating in ill-fitting formalwear.

  But he’d wanted to see what Wendy was wearing. Wanted to dance with her. He’d wondered if it would be as much fun as running with her.

  But, as he’d always done in those days, he’d set aside what he wanted in favor of what needed to be done.

  “They offered me a double shift at the store,” he said slowly, sending himself back to that evening. The plan had been that after his normal shift ended, he’d go meet Jane, Tim, and Wendy at the school. He had a rental tux stashed in his car and had been planning to ninja a corsage together from the store’s floral section. But then two of the night stockers had called in sick and the manager had offered him not only double but triple time to stay on for the overnight shift. He hadn’t even hesitated. It wasn’t like it was an actual date.

  “You said it was fine.” He hated the defensiveness that had crept into his tone. He’d called her to apologize the next day, and she’d brushed it off. Hell, she hadn’t even really wanted to go to the dance in the first place. He and Jane had had to talk her into it.

  “It was fine.” Wendy turned and looked at herself in the mirror. She paused for a moment, then started wiping away the mascara smears under her eyes.

  It’s fine. Those had been her exact words, in fact, when they’d spoken on the phone about it. He had taken them at face value. Wendy had always been mature. And she was practically part of his family back then—one of the few outsiders who knew how tight things were. So when she’d said she understood that he had to take the extra shift, she’d understood. She’d waved away his apology and then…

  And then he had hardly seen her for seventeen years. He remembered thinking it was odd that she hadn’t come to the good-bye party Jane threw him a couple weeks after the dance. And then, when he came home to visit, she’d rarely been in town. The few times she had, they hadn’t gone on a single run. His interactions with her had been limited to dinners with Jane or church with her aunt Mary. In fact, he’d probably only seen her half a dozen times in the seventeen years since he graduated.

  Holy shit.

  Okay, he needed to be rational here. He was giving himself too much power in this story. If he went over every person he knew and tried to figure out which of them were likely to be carrying around a hidden seventeen-year-old wound, Wendy wouldn’t even make the top ten. Hell, the top hundred. Wendy was smart and efficient and self-aware. She didn’t do shit like that.

  But then why had she suddenly brought this up?

  “Did I…” Arg. He ran his hands through his hair, which wasn’t a habit he had generally, but he feared that before the night was over, he would manage to tear off his scalp. “Wendy, was me not showing up at that dance a bigger deal than I thought it was?”

  She shook her head, with her back still to him. She seemed to be done fixing her appearance, but she kept looking in the mirror. He tried to catch her eye, but her attention was fixated on herself. “You needed the extra shift. You did what you had to do. You didn’t need to worry about hurting some kid’s feelings.”

  She sounded like she was reciting lines from a play, and not very convincingly.

  “But I did, didn’t I?” All the evidence supported that conclusion. He wasn’t one for running from his mistakes. He couldn’t make it right retrospectively, but he could, at least, own his mistakes. “I did hurt you.”

  She didn’t deny it, which, for Wendy, his worthy adversary, the woman who always had a snappy defense, was saying volumes. God, what an idiot he’d been not to see it. He’d let himself stand up a shy wallflower of a girl for a couple hundred bucks? Yeah, things had been tight back then, but not taking that extra shift wasn’t going to put them out on the street. It hadn’t even been about the money, really. By that point, he’d basically been on autopilot. Work? Yes. That was just what he did back then. Work was the one variable he could control.

  “I was…” He searched for the words to explain. “Back then, I was consumed with not dropping the ball. I was single-minded about what I regarded as my responsibilities.”

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth he realized they were still true. That’s what Jane had been trying to get him to see this afternoon. You’re on autopilot just as much as I was, she’d said. Let up on the gas a little.

  “I know.” Wendy was still talking to herself in the mirror, but at least she’d stopped crying. “You protected Jane, and by extension, me, since I was always around.”

  “I tried to.” And he had. It had been the imperative burning in his chest, powering him through those impossible years.

  She finally met his gaze, allowing him to see her eyes, though only the reflection of them in the mirror. “It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate your protection. I did. And I do even more now, in retrospect.”

  “I sense a ‘but’ coming.”

  She turned around. Somehow, the sight of her real eyes, not merely the reflections of them, sliced through him like a sharp stick, clearing away decades of cobwebs that had prevented h
im from seeing the world clearly.

  “But protection wasn’t all I wanted from you.”

  Oh my God. He prided himself on having taken care of his sister and her friend, on being attuned to what was happening to the girls, to their unmet needs.

  Apparently he’d had huge fucking blinders on when it came to Wendy, though.

  He hardly dared to ask the next question, but it needed to be done. His throat was so dry, it came out barely audible. “What did you want?”

  “Besides not to be humiliated at the prom?” She didn’t say it in an accusing way. There was nothing in her tone but defeat. And, God, that wasn’t right. Not from his Wendy Lou Who. His mind conjured an image of her all dressed up, standing under the disco ball in the school gym…alone.

  This was why she’d been so angry at him. The wedding had forced her to spend time with him in a way she hadn’t since they were kids. And she was still mad. The flashes of anger he’d seen from her, the ones that had seemed out of proportion, uniquely targeted at him—they all made sense now.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Neither of them acknowledged it. They remained where they were, Wendy having recovered her composure, her face completely blank. He, on the other hand, was not composed. Far from it. His chest hurt, and he feared his spine might actually buckle under the weight of the epic error he’d made so many years ago.

  The knock became a pounding. “Wendy!”

  That broke their stalemate, because they both knew that voice.

  “Wendy, open up! I can’t find my key! It’s an emergency.”

  Noah could tell from his sister’s tone that it wasn’t a wedding-related emergency, but a real one.

  Fuck. Instinctively, he started toward the door, but he stopped himself. He was not supposed to be here.

  And if he was going to be in his sister’s best friend’s hotel room at one in the morning, he was not supposed to be naked.

  Wendy jolted into action, calling, “Hang on a sec! Be right there!” Then she whirled, grabbed his hand, pulled him to standing, and whispered, “I hate to turn this into a bad Hollywood rom-com, but you are going to have to hide in the shower.”

  “But—” His sister was in trouble. She needed help. He couldn’t hide in the shower.

  “Listen to me, Noah,” she hissed. “You can eavesdrop from in there. Whatever it is, I will take care of it. If you’re needed, I’ll figure out a way to get rid of her, and then you can find her and do your goddamned white knight thing.”

  He hesitated.

  Then she said, “Please. Please don’t do this to me.”

  And there it was again, that vulnerability he thought he’d caught a glimpse of when he’d first walked into the room and seen her looking out the window. There she was, the girl inside, the girl who didn’t want to be humiliated by him. Correction: the girl inside who didn’t want to be humiliated by him again.

  So he hid in the bathroom. Left the door open a crack and actually got into the shower and closed the curtain like he was in some kind of stupid romantic comedy. Except he was pretty sure that when the heroes in romantic comedies hid naked in the bathroom, they didn’t feel like they had been run over by a truck.

  His clothes sailed in through the crack in the door. He’d forgotten them, but Wendy must have gathered them.

  He heard the sound of her unlocking the door, which was saying something because the blood in his head was like a raging river.

  “Wendy!” His sister was breathless, her voice high. She took a deep breath, audible even to him in the next room. Then, her name again, but this time he had to strain to hear it. The second “Wendy” was said with a hitch in Jane’s voice that almost made him bust out of the bathroom, but he forced himself to be still.

  “It’s your aunt. She’s been in a car accident.”

  There was a kind of indeterminate shuffling sound, then a thud he hoped to God wasn’t Wendy falling. He waited for her to say something—anything. To make any sound at all. But there was only more from his sister. “Someone from the church called me. They’ve been trying to reach you, but apparently your phone is off?”

  Then it came: the wail. Wendy making a sound of utter defeat.

  He’d been imagining something horrible having happened to his sister. But this. This was just as bad.

  He grabbed his pants and started jamming his legs into them. He had to get out there, damn the consequences.

  * * *

  Wendy had experience being blindsided. No matter how prepared you were for a trial, it sometimes happened. A surprise witness, a bombshell piece of evidence your client didn’t tell you about.

  But that was different. This wasn’t her job. This was her aunt. The last family member she had.

  She pushed off the wall she’d crashed back against and grabbed Jane’s arm. “What did they say? Where is she?”

  “She’s at Sunnybrook Hospital.” Jane’s voice was heavy. “They’re trying to get her stable enough to do surgery. They don’t know much more, other than she got hit by a car while she was crossing Warden Avenue.”

  “Who is they?” Wendy asked.

  “I spoke to someone named Leticia who works in the church office. Your aunt had a program from a church service in her pocket, so the cops contacted the church. Leticia said when they couldn’t reach you, they tracked down one of the partners at your firm, who told them you were here for my bachelorette weekend. He called your assistant, who gave them my number.”

  The amount of detective work required. The number of people who had to be woken in the middle of the night. All because she was off indulging herself. Suddenly, she understood how Noah felt, like escaping one’s responsibilities was simply too big a risk.

  Still, Wendy was accustomed to being blindsided. Even if this particular blow was bigger, sharper, deeper than any she’d encountered before, she knew what to do. Keep her mind calm and agile. Quickly consider her options. Ruthlessly throw away anything that wasn’t going to help her in this moment. Make a decision.

  “I need to get to the airport,” she said, shaking her head against the hug Jane was trying to inflict on her. If Jane touched her, Wendy would succumb to the terror that was lapping at the edge of her consciousness. She needed to keep that terror away. “I didn’t answer my phone because I can’t find it anywhere. Can you go see if I left it at the restaurant?”

  A noise came from the bathroom. Damn Noah. What was he doing in there? She shuffled a few steps back toward the bathroom door, as if her presence would provide any kind of meaningful barrier between the siblings.

  “Are you sure? I can call Elise or Gia and send them for the phone.”

  The door handle was turning. Shit.

  Wendy shook her head as she reached for the door handle from her side, though she knew that if he wanted to come out, she wasn’t capable of stopping him. “I have all kinds of sensitive work stuff on that phone, and I trust you more than anyone.” She didn’t even have time to feel bad about how ruthlessly she was manipulating Jane. She wanted to fall into her best friend’s arms; instead, she had to send her away by lying.

  So she could murder her brother.

  Jane nodded. “I’ll call the room with news one way or the other.” Then she blew Wendy a kiss.

  Wendy pantomimed catching it and pressing it to her chest, but only because it was the quickest way to get rid of her friend. Really, though, there was no point in pressing the kiss to her chest, because there wasn’t a heart inside there to receive it, at least not one that was in working order.

  The door hadn’t even fully shut behind Jane when Noah emerged from the bathroom. He’d put his pants on but was still shirtless, and he had a determined look in his eye. He was going to try to comfort her, or worse, do that and try to address what had been unspooling between them before Jane had arrived. God, she’d basically admitted her teenage crush on him. Why? Why would she do that? It had absolutely no bearing on their grown-up selves, on their contemporary lives.

&nb
sp; He wrapped his arms around her and just said her name. “Wendy.”

  No. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t get close enough to him to let him hurt her again. So, summoning her last bit of strength, she pushed on his chest. Hard.

  He let go of her, but he tried to grab one of her hands.

  She was surprised to find she was still gripping the Elvis Pez dispenser with all her might. It was inside plastic-and-cardboard packaging, and she’d been holding on to it so tightly, the edge of the cardboard had cut into her palm, leaving a deep groove. Her hand hurt like hell, actually, but she’d only just realized it.

  She opened her palm fully, letting Elvis fall to the ground, and held both hands out to Noah like stop signs. “Don’t.”

  “Wendy, I’m not—”

  “Don’t,” she said again, louder, making a jerky motion with her hands, which were still raised. Whatever it was, she couldn’t hear it. “Just go.”

  He tried to reach for her again, damn him, and she twisted out of the way of his incoming arms. He made a frustrated noise. “I can’t just leave you when—”

  “Stop!” She actually yelled this time. It worked; he stopped. “If you care about me at all, you will leave now and forget”—she gestured vaguely behind her—“this. What happens in fake New York stays in fake New York, remember?”

  He took a step back. Good. She’d beaten him back.

  “Can I at least take you to the airport?”

  “No. Your sister can take me to the airport. But in order for that to happen, you have to leave so I can call her and tell her I found my phone under the bed.” God, she sounded like a cold-hearted bitch.

  She shook her head. It didn’t matter how she sounded. Nothing mattered except getting back to Toronto.

  “Please, Noah.” Normally she would hate for him to see her weak, but she tried to infuse her voice with all the desperation she felt. “If you care about me at all, please leave.”