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“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.
