Chapter 17
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The thing that wakes me is the lack of noise. No humming engine, no whooshing of passing cars. No radio on or road-trip playlist picking out banger after banger. There’s only Hollis’s breathing in the driver’s seat.
“What’s going on?” I ask, my words stretching along with my body.
He pulls the key from the ignition and clutches it in his palm. “We’re stopping for the night.”
“What? No. Hollis, we can’t—”
Hollis takes my hands in his. At first I think it’s sweet until I realize it’s just to keep me from continuing to flail around in panic.
He ensures I’m looking him straight in the eyes before he speaks.
“Listen, Millicent. We have a while to go still before we reach Key West. If we keep driving tonight, we’re going to arrive at four something in the morning.
But if we stop here, we can get some sleep, do a load of laundry, and still leave early enough to be at the nursing facility soon after visiting hours start. ”
My brain flitters awake enough to notice that we’re parked in a residential driveway in front of a white stucco ranch with a Spanish-style clay roof that’s flat except for a steep diagonal over the two-car garage. “Where are we?”
“Boca Raton. Come on.” Hollis gets out of the car before I have the opportunity to request he be more specific. He grabs our bags from the trunk and heads to the wooden double doors, my legs too stiff from several hours of upright sleep to follow with any haste.
“Wait,” I say, these events proceeding too quickly for me in my still-drowsy state.
Hollis fiddles with an outdoor thermometer mounted near the door. It pops open to reveal a key.
“Are we breaking and entering?” I whisper.
“Just entering. No breaking required,” he says, gesturing to the way the key turns into the lock and the door cracks open.
I cross the threshold into a large room with a tiled floor.
When Hollis flips on the overhead light, I can see that we’ve entered a living room decorated in beige and chocolate brown with pops of butterscotch yellow.
We slip off our shoes before going any farther, and the cool tile feels nice against the bare soles of my feet. “Is this an Airbnb?” I ask.
“No, it’s my dad’s house,” he says, setting our bags on the floor.
“He isn’t here?”
“He’s at a conference in Paris.”
“And he doesn’t mind us staying overnight?”
Hollis shakes his head. “Nah. I texted him when we stopped for gas to see if we could crash if needed. He said we should make ourselves at home.”
I walk over to a built-in bookcase and run my fingers over the leather-bound tomes lining the shelves. The gilt letters on their spines appear to be Cyrillic. “Is this Russian?”
“Yeah. My dad specializes in Russian lit. He’s one of the foremost Dostoyevsky experts in the United States.”
“Bet he loved Josh’s book then.”
“Huh?”
“Josh’s book. It’s supposed to be some sort of modern take on Notes from Underground .”
“Oh. Is that what he was going for? I thought it was just a lot of navel-gazing through the perspective of a horny, depressed accountant.”
A laugh originates deep inside my stomach, weaves over and under my ribs, and barges out of my mouth.
Hollis looks perturbed by the sound I’m making; it must seem to him like an absolutely bonkers amount of laughter in response to what he’s said. “What?”
How many times did Josh claim I just didn’t understand his work?
But Hollis can see through his bullshit, which means I’m not alone.
That’s what I like best about Hollis: He makes me feel like there’s nothing wrong with me.
For all his fussing about my perhaps worryingly high tolerance for risk, he makes me feel like I can trust myself.
And maybe I didn’t realize it until he made me start again, but that’s something I haven’t been doing nearly as often in the last few months.
“That made me very happy is all,” I say. My grin is beginning to hurt my cheeks, but it refuses to fade. Something deep inside me feels like it’s glowing, and this goofy smile seems to be the only way to safely let out some of the light and heat before I burst.
Hollis stares at me like a cat sizing up a mouse. He stalks over and wraps his arms around me from behind. He’s never touched me like this. Then again, he’s only been doing it at all for a couple days, so there still must be countless ways he hasn’t touched me.
The intimacy between us is dialed way up again, not only physical but something else I can’t name as well, and that glow inside me is growing with the encouragement of his warmth—both literal and metaphorical.
Then it fizzles out as I remember that we’re just friends.
Friends who have had sex and may continue to.
But still just friends and nothing more.
Like is not love. I can’t let myself forget that.
My eyes search for something in the room to comment on, to break the silence and get my feelings back on track.
I find a framed photo sitting on one of the shelves in front of me.
It’s of a middle-aged man and a young woman.
The man is definitely Hollis’s father; they look almost identical except for his father’s hair being a handsome salt-and-pepper instead of dark chocolate, and his eyes are both identical in color—the blue-gray of Hollis’s right one.
“Who’s this?” I ask, pointing to the frame. “Your dad and your sister?”
“No, that’s Fiancée Number Four. Madison, I think her name is.”
“Oh. She’s... um... young.”
“Twenty-three.” In this position, Hollis’s breath tickles my earlobe as he talks. “My father ages, but his girlfriends never seem to.”
“Oh. Well. She looks... nice.”
“She probably is. I haven’t met this one yet. Dad didn’t start seeing her until after I was here for Christmas, and then he proposed a few weeks ago.”
I turn my head to try to meet Hollis’s eyes, but instead wind up almost headbutting him. “They got engaged after dating less than five months?”
“It was a record for Dad. Three months from first date to proposal is his usual modus operandi. Guess he’s getting more circumspect in his old age.
” There’s a twinge of bitterness in Hollis’s sarcasm that I’m tempted to press him on, but I don’t get a chance before he says, “Come on, let’s get a load of laundry started so we can go to bed. ”
He slides his hand to my lower back and guides me down a hallway.
We stop at a door that looks like it’ll open to a linen closet but actually holds a stacked washer and dryer.
Hollis fishes my bag of dirty clothes from my suitcase and empties it into the machine, then adds his own collection from his duffel.
“Strip,” he orders.
The idea of getting completely naked in the hallway of a stranger’s house makes me pause for a moment.
What if Hollis’s dad isn’t in Paris, France, but in like, Paris, Mississippi, and he decides to come home early?
But once Hollis is standing in front of me with nothing on except his glasses and watch, it feels almost more uncomfortable not to undress.
Walking in on your son and his friend naked might be awkward, but finding him naked and the friend still fully clothed probably raises more questions.
“I need help with my dress,” I say.
He pulls the zipper down, his breath warm against my neck but his mouth never touching the skin there.
I recall earlier in the morning when he trailed kisses over my shoulders and ran his hands over my body as the dress slipped to the floor, and I’m slightly disappointed he’s not initiating a repeat performance.
Then again, two orgasms in the last twenty-four hours is already an extremely admirable quantity.
Should I be worried that Hollis somehow makes me go with such speed from shy about undressing in his dad’s house to wanting him to take me on the floor?
The dress turns out to be dry-clean-only (no wonder Connie didn’t mind getting rid of it), so I shove it into my suitcase while my bra and dogs-with-sunglasses underwear get thrown into the washer. Hollis adds some detergent and presses the button to start the cycle.
“Onward and upward,” he says, guiding me down the hall, his hand returning to the small of my now-naked back.
His touch makes my spine feel like undercooked spaghetti.
At the end of the hallway, we climb a small staircase, which leads to a bedroom.
By the angle of the ceiling, I can tell we’re over the garage.
“This was my bedroom over summers and holidays,” Hollis says. “And during college, whenever my roommate’s long-distance girlfriend came to visit. She snored like a freaking buzz saw.”
The room is clean despite its disuse; the bed is made, the dust is minimal, and there aren’t any funky smells. But otherwise it’s a time capsule. A museum diorama with an interpretive sign reading: Male Teenager’s Room, mid-aughts.
“This is a nice space. I’m surprised your dad didn’t turn it into a guest suite or a library or something by now. It looks like he hasn’t touched a thing in here.” I shuffle through a stack of video game cases. “Oh shit, you have a PS2? I’m super good at Guitar Hero.”
“I would absolutely obliterate you,” he says. It’s not a very menacing threat since he sounds like he might fall asleep at any second.
My attention jumps to a framed high school diploma. “?‘This certifies that Frederick Hollis Hollenbeck has completed’— Wait. Frederick ?”
“Yep. Named after my father.”
“You’re a junior?”
He throws himself onto the full-sized bed in the corner. “No. We have different middle names.”
“You’re telling me this whole time I could’ve been calling you Freddie? Or Fred? Oooh. That’s even better.”
“I am very much not telling you that.”