Now Or Never by Stella Rhys

21

IAIN

The attemptat my usual this morning had failed.

Miserably.

I’d woken up at five, made my coffee and responded to pertinent emails, as was routine.

But all routine ended there.

Had it not, I’d have gone for my usual run along the Hudson, played a client’s podcast, and hit the High Line before running back to complete my five miles. I’d have gone straight home for a shower, gotten dressed then headed to the office.

That was what a regular morning would’ve looked like.

Of course, this wasn’t that.

I’d woken up a madman this morning, my muscles still buzzing like they had in Boston, and my blood still thrumming in my veins.

It was like whatever rush had started then had yet to die down. I was still reliving the way Holland had tormented and owned me for forty-eight hours. Still reliving how fucking good she felt last night.

Kissing me like a wild animal. Milking my cock and begging for my cum.

The night’s adrenaline was coursing through my veins by the time I woke up this morning, and I knew the usual run wasn’t going to do jack shit, which was why I was now here—panting and jabbing, my pulse beating in my ears till a confused voice pierced through my consciousness.

“Iain?”

Stopping the heavy bag with my gloved hands, I looked over to see Evie Maddox in an Empires championship T-shirt and sweats, holding Kai, who was wearing basically a matching outfit. Her eyebrows were arched as she poked her head into the boxing studio of the gym.

In our building.

Because I lived in the same damned building as Drew.

We shared the same real estate agent in our mutual friend, Lukas, and since the day Drew moved in, it’d managed to be more of a blessing than a curse—mostly because the neighbor situation was great for catching Drew during his wild years in his never-ending lies. Lies about coming home by a certain hour, and definitely not bringing back a pack of strange girls he met at the club so he could party with them for all to hear on his balcony till 6AM.

Thankfully, that wasn’t either of our realities anymore.

My need to keep tabs on Drew had ceased since I set up his fake relationship-turned-very real marriage to Evie. Thanks to her, in the past couple of years, the neighbor situation had finally struck a balance to become something peaceful. Pleasant, even.

Though this particular run-in wasn’t quite ideal.

Mostly because I wasn’t exactly myself at the moment, and one of the last two people I wanted witnessing that was Evie, since she and Drew had made the recent decision to become so very suspicious of my personal life.

“Look at you. Never knew you could get this fired up,” Evie remarked, eyebrows still arched, though it was less surprise now. More of a blatantly delighted, suspicion-tinged curiosity. “I feel like I never see you here either.”

I was still breathing hard, using the break to grab my water bottle and hydrate. “I usually run in the mornings,” I explained.

“Mm. Running didn’t cut it this morning?”

“Guess not,” I said, capping my bottle and setting it back down just as Kai started talking. Gibberish, as usual, but animated, as usual. I smirked. “You guys working out?”

“Oh,” Evie snorted, looking at Kai and crinkling her nose as he grabbed it. “Yeah, no, I’m not starting him on the lifting quite yet. Might wait till he turns three,” she joked, grinning as she removed his grip from her nose, making him break into his little baby laugh. “We just come here in the mornings because he likes to look at the pool.”

I nodded despite not quite getting it. “To just look at it?”

“Yeah.” She turned to me and snorted at the confusion on my face. “It’s a parent thing. You’ll get it when you have kids,” she said before catching herself. “I mean—if you have kids. Which you don’t have to. Obviously.”

I just nodded in the brief silence that followed, recognizing that Drew had clearly told Evie that I wasn’t interested in having a family with Keira.

The quiet went on for only a second longer before Evie nodded at the bag.

“Pretty good form there before. Used to box?” she asked.

“Not really,” I lied.

Adam had gotten me into it back in college. Basically on the very day we’d met thirteen years ago, when he was just some stranger who broke two noses on my behalf outside a shitty dive bar in San Leandro.

What the fight started over, I couldn’t say. Memories of that entire weekend were a blur, but if there was any one thing I couldn’t forget, it was the gleeful fucking grin on Adam’s face, and the genuinely joyful whoop he let out before jumping into a four-man brawl and sinking his fist into some roided-out asshole’s jaw, effectively neutralizing the mismatch I had on his group of drunk, piece of shit friends.

From that fateful night, we bonded over our shared love for cars and all things speed. I’d introduced him to snowboarding. He’d introduced me to boxing.

“Okay, well. I’ll let you go do your thing,” Evie said as Kai started fussing. “We’re just going to do a little more strolling here till he gets bored.”

I nodded, though I didn’t resume my workout with Evie and Kai still walking around the gym. Just the sight of her briefly peering my way while on the phone was enough to give me images of Drew suddenly appearing down here with his shit-eating grin and questions about what had me so fired up. So I opted to head back up to my apartment.

Despite the fact that I’d wanted to let Holland sleep.

I rubbed the back of my neck, taking awhile to notice Evie and Kai waving goodbye to me as I headed out of the gym. I waved back just before I headed out the door, my mind already occupied by the fact that I was returning to a not-empty apartment.

And a not-empty bed.

Admittedly, I’d planned on never doing an overnight when this arrangement started, let alone one at my home. But little about the past forty-eight hours had gone according to plan.

I’d brought Holland back to my apartment last night after what was the hottest fuck of my life, and hours later, we proceeded to top that orgasm with Holland on my bed, begging for my cum on all fours.

We’d both passed out after that.

And it would be a lie to say I didn’t enjoy what I saw first thing this morning.

She had looked so peaceful when I woke up, her breathing soft and her petite body curled up tightly just a foot away from where I lay on my back. She took up barely any space on the bed, but what she lacked there she made up in being a hell of a blanket stealer. Over the course of the night, she’d somehow managed to collect the majority of my heavy down comforter, wrapping herself in it and disappearing inside like it was a cocoon, everything but her eyes and nose burrowed deep into the Swiss cotton.

She was so adorable it was hard to process that she was the same girl who had the power to drive me up a fucking wall. The same girl I couldn’t stop thinking about for long enough to complete a three-day business trip.

In just a few weeks, she’d turned me upside down. Obliterated the stability of my long-practiced routine. For so long, I’d been rigid about my habits, how I preferred to do things, just to ensure that I was in full control of every situation.

And now this.

Of all things, I shook my head, because of all things to send me into a tailspin, I didn’t expect it to be Holland Maxwell. But then again.

My jaw tensed as I rode the elevator up to my apartment.

I probably should’ve known.

* * *

My limbs were stilltight and restless, in need of calm as I rode the elevator up to my apartment.

But just as Holland was my problem, she was my solution, because the moment the elevator doors opened into my foyer, I heard the sound of music coming from the kitchen. Along with the light clattering of plates. Maybe pans.

An instinctive frown furrowed my brow as I headed for the kitchen, but once I got there, I found myself suppressing my grin.

Because standing in front of the sink was Holland, wearing her white T-shirt and the cotton boy shorts I hadn’t gotten a good look at till now since I kept ripping them off her ass yesterday. They were her favorite shade of blue—soft and pale, especially against the sun-kissed bronze of her tanned skin. Her hair was pulled into a high ponytail, and it bounced as she moved her head from side to side, singing along to poppy-sounding music I didn’t recognize in the least.

It was definitely a scene that I’d never witnessed before in my kitchen. One I would’ve never guessed that I’d welcome.

But like she tended to, Holland got away with it.

She was so distractingly cute that it took a second for me to process the groceries scattered all over the counter, and the fact that they looked entirely foreign to me. Eggs. Berries. A variety of different fruits. They certainly hadn’t been in my home last night, but with a quick scan around, I saw the paper grocery bags on the floor, my address printed on stickers slapped to the sides.

She’d had the groceries delivered to my house.

I raised my eyebrows, impressed as I took a seat at the island, my gaze following the dozen emptied orange halves on the counter next to a citrus juicer I’d never used before in my life.

Looking up again, I realized what Holland was doing at the sink: carefully straining the pulp out of her freshly squeezed juice. Suddenly, I remembered my many breakfasts at the Maxwell house in Jersey. The fact that Holland liked pulp in her OJ.

I, however, didn’t.

And I had a feeling that particular fun fact was on her mind right now.

Resting my elbows onto the counter, I stroked my fingers across the smile curving my lips, managing to keep my laughter suppressed till the moment Holland turned around.

I caught a nanosecond of her happy, relaxed smile before she spotted me and jumped.

“Oh!”

She gasped and yelped at the same time, sloshing fresh juice onto her shirt and pausing in shock for exactly two seconds before closing her eyes, inhaling through her nose then breathing out with laughter.

“Dammit. That was like… a whole orange’s worth,” she groaned while looking down her wet front. “I don’t even want to admit how long it took my weak arms to squeeze out the amount of juice that I’m currently wearing.”

I smirked. “Let’s not waste it then.”

Her head tilted as she looked up at me and cocked an eyebrow. But with a glint of mischief on her eyes, she read the look on my face, and without missing a beat, she rounded the counter to me, grinning as she let me pull her in by the waist and press a kiss to her lips, my tongue sweeping in full strokes against hers before I dropped my mouth to her breasts.

Hugging her arms gently around my head, she tipped her own back, breathing the sweetest little sounds as I ran my tongue over her juice-soaked cotton and sucked her nipple over her shirt. I could feel the heat of her pussy as she climbed into my lap, allowing me to lick up the swell of her breast before pulling my lips to hers and kissing me so sweetly but so deeply that I felt like I’d been fucking drugged.

I was at the height of my high when a timer went off, prompting Holland to gasp with excitement, and forcing me to feel an actual physical pain as she popped up to get off me.

I dragged my palm down my face, spinning around in my seat and willing my dick down as I watched her rush excitedly to the oven, bending over to carefully pull out a white casserole dish that I only vaguely remembered owning.

My eyebrows furrowed but went right up when she finally turned around to show me what was inside.

Baked French toast with blueberries.

What they cooked every June at the Maxwell house for birthday breakfasts.

Holland stared bright-eyed at my reaction for a second before she burst out laughing. “Okay, so I figured in case you were a stubborn jerk who insisted on working through your birthday next week, I’d at least make you celebrate today with this breakfast,” she explained as she set the dish onto the counter. “But judging from the look on your face, I just triggered the PTSD you have for my house.”

I laughed. “Memories,” I corrected, leaning forward on the counter. “I wouldn’t classify it as PTSD. I actually enjoyed staying at your house.”

She narrowed her eyes at me while taking off her oven mitts. “Shut up. Really?”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t have kept coming back if I didn’t genuinely like it there.”

“Huh.” Her eyebrows went up and stayed there as she blinked to process this information. “Adam always made it seem like it was such a pain for you guys to come.”

I smirked. “Well, your brother’s instinct is to be an asshole.”

“True. So it wasn’t torture after all?”

“No. Your mom wasn’t the most welcoming, obviously, but your dad more than made up for that,” I said, remembering how good Holland’s father had been to me, and admittedly how much that had meant to me for awhile. “Plus, your house always felt like a hotel compared to ours.”

“What? How?” Holland laughed.

My brow furrowed as I thought back for a second. “Well, you guys always had better food in your kitchen. Plus you had the pool. And that couch,” I said, my heart actually aching at the memory of the massive, ridiculously comfortable leather section in the Maxwell living room that used to prompt the most spontaneous of sleep attacks. I had never been a great sleeper, but that couch had been a game-changer.

No movie went finished if you watched it on that couch. That was a fact.

“Yeah, but you guys had a nice house back at Stanford too,” Holland pointed out, referring to the three-bedroom I’d rented near campus during law school. “I remember from FaceTiming Adam. You had a pool. And a pool table. And couches, too, obviously.”

“Yeah, but…” I pulled my shirt up to wipe the sweat from my brow as my mind drifted back to that house. They were always trashed from the parties, I thought before saying, “They weren’t kept up quite as well.”

Holland was in the middle of grabbing forks from the drawer when she peered up and hit me with a knowing look.

“Mm. Right,” she smirked. Because she knew.

I knew she knew.

It was no secret to anyone that her brother and I had been party animals.

Worse than Drew Maddox during his very worst phase.

So there was no doubt in my mind that her parents had bemoaned Adam’s ways in front of her on more than a few occasions. And beyond that, she’d caught us stumbling home before. Out of respect for her dad, Adam and I had always agreed not to go out and get hammered when we were staying over. But that didn’t actually stop us from going out once everyone was asleep. Getting hammered like we said we wouldn’t. Getting into fights at bars and rolling home bloody, bruised and laughing our asses off.

It was silent for a bit as I watched Holland plate the toast with a faint smirk on her lips.

“We don’t have to act like I don’t know, Iain,” she finally said.

“Know what?”

She hit me with a look. “How bad you and Adam were?”

I laughed at the phrasing. “And how bad were we exactly?”

She snorted. “You know the answer to that, Iain, but if you’re asking exactly what I knew, I can say that I’ve heard everything from you guys sneaking back in after a crazy night out to you fucking girls from the bar in my parents’ pool house.”

My stomach dropped. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

I stared. “When did that happen?”

Holland looked up for a second, giggling at my reaction before continuing with her plating. “You thought I had left the house with my mom, but we came back because I forgot my library card. And that’s when I heard it. From my room. But it’s not like it traumatized me. I was fifteen. It was the most titillating thing to happen to me that year.”

I couldn’t help being fucking horrified. “That doesn’t make it better, Holland.”

“Okay, well how about this—I also hung out with you once in the kitchen at like, 3AM when you were fresh from a bar and still blackout drunk.”

“Why would that make me feel better?” I asked, so openly perplexed that Holland cracked up at whatever look I had on my face.

“Because,” she giggled, making me think that was the full answer for two seconds. “Because even when you were totally shitfaced—like, eyes-barely-open shitfaced—you made me a grilled cheese the way I liked it. With pepper jack instead of Swiss or cheddar. I only told you once but you remembered. And then you asked me how my Coco Chanel presentation went at school,” she said, wearing a little smile of content as she focused on her plating, in particular fanning out the strawberry slices at the edges. “No one else asked me about that. Not Mom. Or Dad. Or Adam. Which means even when you were completely hammered you were nicer to me than they were.”

She was laughing, carefree as she said this, and I couldn’t stop staring in disbelief—all while quietly feeling a twisting in my chest because I was suddenly remembering Holland when she was younger.

Really remembering.

I’d been avoiding this kind of reminiscing since the night I saw her again, entirely because I preferred not to mix memories of her teen self with the intense fucking attraction I felt for her. But now that I was allowing myself to remember young Holland, I remembered just how much I’d felt for her back then.

How even my cold dead heart had ached for her, because she was such a sweet but obviously lonely kid.

All because of her wildly possessive mother.

Jeannie.

She was a normally sullen woman who avoided eye contact with Adam or me unless we dared to speak to Holland in her presence. In that event, she’d hawk us, watching us unblinkingly, waiting to hiss like a feral cat the second she heard either of us utter something she didn’t want her daughter to know about—even if it was just an invitation to a movie or a game.

She was like that with about everyone, and as a result, Holland’s dad left her upbringing entirely to his wife—just the way she preferred. Besides, he had “his” kid in Adam, who’d also given up on bonding with Holland long before I ever met him. Because she was her mother’s. Anything regarding Holland was brought to her mom first. That was always understood.

At least in the sense that it was a rule that was followed.

In terms of actual understanding and relating, I’d never gotten it. Nor did I get how Holland had survived that woman without getting completely fucked up in the head. Jeannie had clearly done a number on Adam. The anger that lived in him was undoubtedly to do with her, but he’d at least had his close relationship with his father.

Holland, however, didn’t.

Her mother had made sure she was her daughter’s “only lifeline,” as Adam would say, and now that I thought about it, I realized how the soft spot had started. Holland had been stuck being raised by the cruelest fucking psychopath she knew.

And I could relate well to that feeling.

“What are you thinking about right now?”

Her voice was soft but her question pulled me right out of my thoughts. I blinked, studying her face for a moment before replying honestly.

“You.”

“Huh.” Her eyebrows quirked up and I could see her trying not to smile as wide as she was. “And what about me?”

I held my gaze on her for a little longer.

“You turned out pretty damned good,” I said.

She laughed before feigning a thoughtful frown. “Yeah. All things considered, right?” she said as she ran a box of raspberries under the sink. “God, you have no idea how glad I am that you know about my mom. I spent a whole drunken night explaining her to Mia during one of our first girls’ nights in, and she gets it, but she doesn’t… really get it, you know? She didn’t see firsthand just how crazy my mom was. All. The frickin’. Time.”

“Yeah,” I muttered, suddenly hit with a montage of all the times I’d heard Jeannie Maxwell yelling in her bedroom at her husband and sometimes Holland. “The hell happened to her, really?”

The question had blurted out before I could think twice about it, but it didn’t seem to faze Holland in the least. She didn’t even look up as she sprinkled berries onto the plates.

“Well. You know the story they tell.”

“‘Adam was a bad kid,’” I repeated, having heard the line several times from both Adam and his dad to explain Jeannie’s ways.

Judging from the wry smirk on Holland’s lips, she found it just as absurd and confounding as I had.

“Yep. Five words to sum up why I had to sacrifice all sense of normalcy as a kid,” she snorted, briefly disappearing behind the counter as she bent over to grab something out of one of the paper grocery bags. “And… all of my friends by junior year of high school,” she grunted distractedly before coming up with an enormous jug of maple syrup in her hand.

She was explaining now about why she had to buy that size. Something about it being the only thing available, but I wasn’t quite processing, because my mind had yet to move on from the topic she had just been talking about.

That whole thing that had happened to her in high school.

Having stayed so often at her house, I’d picked up on a lot about Holland over the years. Her family dynamics. Her day-to-day life. All her little personality quirks and habits, both good and bad. I had most of Holland Maxwell’s puzzle pieces.

But this had always been one of the ones I’d been missing.

Something happened to her during her junior year. I knew that. I knew that things got tough at school, because her dad asked Adam to come home to visit more often. To call here and there. He said vaguely that there was trouble with friends. But Adam never asked what exactly happened, and I’d never thought it was my business to bring it up if he didn’t. Beyond everything else going on in my own life, I was in my last year of law school, and I’d told myself it was better off if I didn’t know or get invested.

The advice probably still held true today. The wise thing to do right now would be to refrain from feeding my curiosity.

But I couldn’t be bothered with that this morning.

“Can I ask what happened your junior year?” The question left my lips before I could stop it, making Holland’s eyes go so wide with surprise that I followed up with, “You don’t have to answer if you’re not comfortable.”

“No, it’s… okay,” she replied genuinely, though she was still staring somewhat stunned at me. “I’m not… not comfortable. It’s just Adam never even asked. So I guess I’m surprised you want to know.”

I was too.

I’d gone a long time being content with the picture I had of Holland Maxwell. It was by no means complete, but it was clear enough, so I never wondered at length about the missing puzzle pieces. They had never really bothered me. Until now.

“Okay, so I will happily go into that mess,” she started humorously before leaning across the counter to place my elaborately plated French toast in front of me. “But you have to take a bite of this first, because it’s still warm and it’s really good and it’s technically your birthday gift from me.”

I smiled at the look on her face—confidence mixed with excitement as she watched me take a bite.

And pause immediately, because holy shit.

I looked up at her so fast she snorted, biting her grin back as I kept my eyes on her through my second bite, trying to figure out what was so good about what I was tasting. “You changed something,” I finally said.

“Mm-hm. Still exactly the same and yet completely different, right?”

“Exactly. What did you add?”

“It’s a secret,” she grinned. “And by that I mean the answer is right in front of you. You just have to look.”

I narrowed my eyes, squinting at her then my plate. But when I looked back at her, she laughed.

“It’s okay, don’t hurt yourself,” she said, reveling in the dry look I shot her as she folded her arms and leaned against the counter. “Anyway. Getting into the story of junior year…” she started, sounding much brighter than I would have expected given the topic. “As you may know, my mom was a bit of a smotherer.”

“In an understatement.”

“Mm-hm. I definitely spent a lot of my teenaged years begging her for chances to do the same things my friends and classmates were doing. Like going to movies without parental supervision. Halloween parties. Dances. She said no to all of it, obviously, and by the end of sophomore year, I had my best friend Kelsey and her mom helping me beg my mom to let me do something special, because everyone in town knew how tight a leash she kept me on,” she said, reminding me of something Adam had once told me—that their neighbors used to call her Rapunzel for how seldom Jeannie let her out of the house.

Christ. I shook my head with fresh disbelief of her mother as Holland went on.

“So, since our family had been close to the Shaffers for like, ten years, and Mom actually liked Kelsey’s mom, we finally wore her down, and she agreed to do a mother daughter cruise with them to the Bahamas. And me, Kelsey, and Kelsey’s mom were so excited for months, but then the time came for the trip and Mom came down with some stomach bug, so she said we couldn’t go. But Dad had already paid for it so he convinced her it’d be fine. That Kelsey’s mom was just as strict. That she’d take good care of me.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Somehow I doubt that Kelsey’s mom was just as strict.”

“Oh, Kelsey’s mom wasn’t strict at all,” Holland snorted. “She just used to pretend she agreed with all my mom’s ranting and raving, because that was the easy thing to do. But really, she was like everyone else in town. Thought my mom was over-the-top. Bit of a nut. She raised Kelsey with tons of freedom, so when we got on the cruise, she let us room alone and she didn’t check on us after bedtime, so of course, Kelsey decided to go out one night and meet the other young kids on the ship that we’d seen around…” Holland trailed off, cringing at herself for a second as she used her fork to cut a piece of her toast. “And I was super nervous, but I just felt like this was my one and only chance to be like every other girl my age. So basically, despite my very high discomfort levels, I followed whatever Kelsey did that night. When Kelsey flirted with a boy, I flirted with his friend. When Kelsey went to make out with the boy, I went to make out with mine. But once we were alone, it just… escalated. Fast. To a point where I couldn’t just go along with it anymore…”

She trailed off again, suddenly looking down at my chest and my arms, alerting me to the fact that my every muscle had gone rigid.

“You look like you’re going to punch a wall,” she frowned.

“I’m not. What did he do?” I asked.

“It’s not what you think,” she assured me. “He… put his fingers inside me. I yelled for him to stop, Kelsey came running, and then it was over,” she said hastily. But then she tilted her head with a bit of a wry look. “Well. I guess that was actually just the beginning.”

“Your mom found out,” I presumed.

She winced and nodded. “I was so off when I got home. And I was a terrible liar, so she knew something happened. And she went looking for my diary while I was in the shower.”

Of course she did. “I take it she went a little crazy?” I guessed as Holland popped a blueberry in her mouth.

She shook her head, taking her time to chew and swallow before she answered. “Fucking nuclear.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well.” Holland straightened up and took a deep breath, as if this part of the story took a little more out of her. “She started by telling everyone she could about what happened. Like it wouldn’t humiliate me. She was ‘warning them,’ she said. She even went to the school about it. Wanted them to know ‘what kind of person’ Kelsey’s mom was, since she was involved with all the school events and volunteering. She sent emails. Literally sent emails detailing what happened to me on my summer vacation. To all the parents she knew,” she said, looking up at my reaction, which I assumed was the facial equivalent of Jesus fuck because she nodded as if to say yeah. “She wanted everyone to see Kelsey’s mom as a criminal. She did everything short of going door to door with flyers about how terrible the Shaffers were. Throwing around words like ‘child abuse.’ She picked me up from school one day and screamed at Kelsey in front of all our friends.”

With the last sentence, she took a pause, the memory clearly potent enough to give her a thorough shudder. But when the moment passed, she took a deep breath and went on.

“Kelsey stopped talking to me, obviously. Her mom too. Everyone treated me like a pariah. Parents, teachers, neighbors. People would literally only talk to me if they had to, for as many words as they needed to. They didn’t want to risk saying the wrong thing to me and having to deal with my mom. Kind of like Dad and Adam on a daily basis,” Holland snorted, making me frown despite the fact that she seemed genuinely entertained by the connection she made just now. “Anyway, Mom doubled down on her protectiveness after that, and I went the rest of high school without any friends,” she finished with a bitter laugh—or what I assumed was a bitter laugh, though it didn’t sound as bitter as I’d expect. Taking a bite of her toast, Holland looked at me as she chewed, waiting till she swallowed before asking, “What?”

Stunned, I blinked, needing a second to gather my thoughts and figure out which of my many reactions I wanted to express first.

“That’s… fucking rough, Holland,” I finally said, feeling like I’d had the wind knocked out of me, because I was still reeling myself from the levels of sheer self-absorbed insanity that Jeannie Maxwell could apparently reach. I’d spent years witnessing her selfish narcissism, but this had to be the worst case of her treating her daughter like a prop rather than an actual human being.

Rubbing my jaw, I tugged on my lower lip, letting the profanity for Jeannie pass before I spoke again.

“Your mother’s a piece of work,” I finally said, making Holland snort like she knew I had more colorful words in mind. “And I don’t know if I’m more confused or impressed that you can laugh as you tell this story.”

She cracked a smile. “Yeah, well. It was miserable and it was my life for so long that I didn’t think it would ever end, but it did. It’s over now. And I’m just thankful for that,” she said earnestly. “Obviously, I wish I could know everything that happened in my family before I was born. What exactly Adam did to drive my mom this level of crazy. But in twenty-two years, no one’s given me anything close to the full story and I’ve learned that if you can’t get closure from others, you just have to find it within yourself. Some way, somehow.”

My eyebrows lifted at her maturity, and I was quiet for a moment as I felt an array of ways. Proud. Perplexed. I admired Holland’s strength and her sheer force of will. Though admittedly, I didn’t understand it.

Probably because I’d foregone the idea of getting closure in my own life a long time ago. It was something I knew I’d live forever without. But I wasn’t quite as at peace with it like she was.

“You’re looking at me like I’m crazy,” Holland finally said, making me laugh.

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” I said honestly. “I’m just… amazed that you don’t hold resentment for her.”

“Oh, I do. But I don’t carry it with me on a day-to-day basis anymore. It’s just constant pain that way, and the fact of the matter is that you can’t control what other people do. You can only control how you react, and I don’t want to spend any more time reacting with hurt and anger, and feeling like this is unfair and I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t. But I don’t deserve to keep torturing myself either. To keep waiting for answers. I’m never gonna get them, and if there’s any lesson I’ve learned it’s that life is really precious,” she said with a passion so contagious I could feel it in my bones, despite the fact that at my core, I disagreed with her. “I only get one, and I just want to live it every day to the fullest. You know?”

She said that to me a lot. You know? And I never knew. But this time, thanks to the little sparkle in her eyes and that perfect little grin on her lips, I wished I did.

She laughed as I looked at her.

“Yeah… you think I’m crazy,” she nodded.

“Only a little,” I lied for the fun of it.

“Well, If you keep looking at me like that, you can think I’m crazy all you want,” she smirked, her eyes still glimmering as our gazes stayed locked for a few moments of peace that I ruined with a question I didn’t even realize was brewing in my head.

“How did you get there?”

“Where?”

I stared, taking a moment to figure out what the hell I was even talking about. “The place where you weren’t angry anymore,” I finally said.

She smiled as if to say gotcha. “Me time,” she answered, and so smugly I had to laugh. “I mean it. My ritual. My things. Making a habit of it. I know I sound like an informercial, but it works,” she said. “I mean, yes, it’s definitely hard to get to this place, but you owe it to yourself. Just so you can have a fighting chance at being happy. You know?”

I nodded, once again struck by those two words.

They were seemingly innocent, but the way she said them this time made me feel like she was talking to me. About me.

And suddenly, I considered that she had pieces to my puzzle too. That she’d overheard things growing up. Knew more about me than I ever would’ve thought. And considering how vigilantly I guarded my past from almost everyone I knew, I should’ve been displeased. Unhappy about this.

But I wasn’t feeling any of the things I was supposed to feel today.

Including a need to go to work. To do the things I normally did on Sundays.

I hadn’t necessarily known I’d be taking the entire weekend after flying back from Boston yesterday morning, but as Holland and I cleaned up the kitchen after breakfast—as she whipped off her juice-soaked T-shirt and forced me to watch her rinse dishes in just her panties—I decided to say fuck it and let myself keep enjoying the day. I took work calls when they came, but I found myself unable to give quite as many fucks as usual, and I knew why that was.

Because slowly but surely, Holland Maxwell was unraveling me.

And the only thing more concerning than that was the fact that I was powerless to stop it.