Chapter 17 #2
My fingers sweep over the spines of the books on a narrow shelf beside his ancient CRT TV.
To Kill a Mockingbird , 1984 , The Catcher in the Rye .
Probably his assigned reading for high school English.
I spot a few textbooks from college science gen eds, some of Shakespeare’s greatest hits, a worn copy of the New Testament.
It’s interesting seeing what was deemed unworthy of the thousand-mile journey to the bookshelves in his studio in Arlington.
“Stop caressing my books,” Hollis says. He has his arms folded over his chest, and with him naked and relaxed on the bed, he looks like he’s posing for a life drawing class.
“Jealous?” I ask, yawning halfway through the word. My suitcase is on the end of the bed, and I move toward it to search for my toiletries bag.
I find it but get distracted again before I make it to the bathroom. There’s just so much interesting stuff in this room. Little League trophy. Blue and orange CO 2 dragster. Picture of a teenaged Hollis in a baseball uniform (shaggy hair, grimacing, awkwardly cute).
“Really, dude?” I hold up a DVD of Showgirls I find beside the TV, sandwiched between Zoolander and Super Troopers .
“Big Kyle MacLachlan fan,” he says.
“Riiiight.”
I pick up a tiny, hand-painted wooden turtle bobblehead from his nightstand.
I attempt a reenactment of the “Bohemian Rhapsody” scene in Wayne’s World with it, but it slips out of my hand.
It winds up rolling under the bed, so I drop to the floor.
The oatmeal-colored Berber carpet is rough against my bare skin as I wiggle myself half under the metal frame and rescue the turtle.
“Hey, did you know you have a baseball bat under here?” I ask. “And a flashlight? At least I hope that’s a flashlight.”
“I’m not sure what else you think it could be,” Hollis says in a faux-innocent tone that makes it clear that he does indeed know what I’m talking about. “Now, as captivating as it is to watch you dig around under there with your bare ass in the air—”
“Hold on... what’s this?” I slide a slender, forest-green book out from under the bed and read the cover. “Walt Whitman. Did you know this was under there?”
“Wait,” Hollis says, almost falling off the bed as he reaches for the book. I dodge his hand and open to the title page. Someone inscribed this copy: To Hollis—I love your every multitude. Forever yours, Vanessa.
Hollis tears the book from my hands, his face drained of all color.
“So, Vanessa,” I say, trying to sound casual. “Who’s she?”
“No one worth discussing,” he says, and flings Walt Whitman into the empty trash can by the door.
“Wait a second. The other day, when I was joking about you not doing relationships anymore because someone broke your heart—Hollis, is that actually what happened?”
I’m about to laugh when he turns away from me, the muscles in his back hard and tense. Oh. This isn’t another remnant of his youth that stayed behind in this room when he moved on to adulthood. It’s something he still hauls around with him.
I wrap my arms around his waist and press myself against him. This is my chance to figure out if whatever turned him off love is something he’ll ever be willing to cast aside. “What went so wrong with Vanessa that you never want to try again?”
Hollis doesn’t respond.
“Will you tell me if I guess correctly?” I ask into his shoulder blade.
He lets out a humorless huff. “Pretty sure you won’t.”
“Did she cheat?” It’s too obvious, but I’d be remiss not to start there. I wait a beat but am met with silence. “Okay, so not that. Did she not actually love your every multitude and disapprove of your aspirations to become a writer?”
Nothing.
“Okay. So what then? She turned out to be a flat-Earther? Ate your goldfish in front of you? Tried to frame you for tax evasion? Don’t tell me all this ‘lasting love doesn’t exist’ nonsense is because you ultimately wanted different things.”
Hollis flashes one of his horrible, gritted-teeth fake smiles. “If by ‘wanted different things,’ you mean I wanted to marry her and she wanted revenge on my father, then yeah, I guess we wanted different things.”
“What.”
His shoulders sag as he exhales, like he can no longer hide the way this weighs on him.
“Can we at least have this conversation sitting down?” Hollis takes my hand and leads me to the bed.
He sits on the edge and pulls me onto his lap.
The skin-on-skin contact lasts about ten seconds before he says, “God, your ass bones are sharp,” and knocks me off.
I yelp as I fall backward onto the comforter.
Hollis sprawls beside me and drapes an arm over my hips, tugging me closer.
His eyes dart around as he observes my face.
My determination to get some clarification must be apparent, because he asks wearily, “Is there any way I get to go to sleep tonight without talking about this?”
“No. Because I don’t think I can sleep without talking about this. You can’t just say something like that and then not elaborate.”
“Fine,” he says. “Short version: I was a senior in college, I met a second-year lit PhD student at a lecture, I fell completely and stupidly in love with her way too fast, thought she felt the same way, took her home to meet my dad and sister. Turned out she was my dad’s ex and was only with me to get back at him for dumping her. ”
My eyes go wide and it takes me a while to remember to blink. “I have... so many questions. I mean, how did you not—”
I’m not sure if the frown on Hollis’s face is deeper than any other he’s ever given me, or if laying so close and side-by-side is somehow exaggerating the curve.
Still, I get the message: This is the sorest of subjects.
Figuring question time is limited, I readjust my strategy to make the most of it.
“So clearly things between you and her ended. What happened with you and your dad?”
“We had a huge fight. About how his selfishness had hurt so many people—which I still stand by, actually. I said some unnecessarily terrible things to him, though. Like how I’d always be disappointed to have a father who wasn’t a better man.”
I’m so tempted to try to dig deeper into what he means by his father’s “selfishness,” because the way he emphasizes the word reminds me of how adamantly he insists he’s ruled by nothing but his own selfish impulses.
Like maybe Hollis has convinced himself that his father’s choices are a symptom of something genetic, something inescapable that’s also embedded in his own DNA. But all I manage to say is, “Ouch.”
“I was only twenty-one,” he explains. “Young. Impetuous. I did know on some level that I couldn’t blame him for what Vanessa did, and I actually agreed with his reasons for breaking up with her once he explained.
For all his flaws, my father’s always been weirdly ethical in his philandering—that was the first and last time he dated a student in his own department.
But I was so angry and heartbroken. And my mother had just died.
I needed to be mad at someone. Blame someone.
He understood, I think. Understands. But it definitely made our already somewhat-strained relationship a lot worse for a while. ”
“Considering we are currently staying in his house, does that mean it’s better now?”
“We’re back on speaking terms, at least. Mostly thanks to my sister. She insisted we patch things up before her wedding. So for the last couple of years, I’ve been coming here for Christmas and whenever else she and Jan decide to visit. And it’s... it’s all right.”
Josh’s text to Hollis flashes in my mind. You should know she’s only using you to get back at me. Must’ve heard that’s all you’re good for. “That bastard,” I say.
“Pardon?”
“Josh. He knows about this, about what happened with Vanessa, doesn’t he? That’s why he said what he said in that text. About me using you. To dredge up all those bad memories.”
“Yeah. When we were doing memoir stuff in one of our classes, I wrote a bit about it.” He brushes my hair from my face, still careful to avoid the bruise from the deer. “I’m sorry I let his stupid texts get to me, by the way. You’re nothing like her. You’re pretty much the anti-Vanessa, actually.”
“And I swear I’ve never even met your dad.”
Hollis playfully pushes my shoulder until I’m on my back. “Not funny,” he says from his sudden new position on top of me. But there’s a slight lift to the corner of his mouth.
“I’m sorry she hurt you,” I say, removing his glasses and placing them on the nightstand. He has that one lusty eye, one annoyed eye thing going on again. But they shift as my words sink in. Now there’s vulnerability and some sort of warmth that I haven’t seen there before.
“I’m sorry she did too.”
It’s such an odd and unexpected response that I grab hold of it before it can zoom past unexamined.
“Why are you sorry?” When he doesn’t immediately respond I nudge him with my elbow. “If you need to apologize for anything, it’s your terrible taste in movies as a kid.” His eyes follow mine as they drift over to a poster for the 2004 version of Catwoman .
“You found my DVD of Showgirls and yet you think half-naked Halle Berry was in my room because I was a fan of the movie? You of all people should know how gross teenage boys are about beautiful celebrity women.”
“Ew,” I say.
“Yeah, well, if it’s any consolation at all, I would rather die than walk up to Halle Berry at an airport and reveal that I used to jack it to her on the daily.”
“Chivalry isn’t dead after all,” I say.
Hollis kisses me with a suspicious intensity. He’s trying to distract me. But it’s not going to work. At least not for more than like... a few minutes.
“Why are you sorry she hurt you?” I repeat, turning my head to dodge the next kiss when my need for his words finally overrides my need for his mouth.
I know we’re already at like a thousand intimacies.
I know this was more than Hollis ever meant to share with me.
But I’m greedy for whatever is past this.
I’m finding that I’m becoming greedy for everything when it comes to him.
Hollis pauses for a moment, letting out a slow sigh.
“Because,” he whispers against my skin as his fingers comb deeper into my hair, “if I still believed in happily ever afters, I think I would’ve begrudgingly enjoyed having one with you.”
Hollis stares down at me. If he’s waiting for a verbal response, we’re going to be here a very long time.
I cannot form a coherent thought, much less put one into words.
Hollis’s declaration is like an eraser scrubbing frantically at a chalkboard, except the chalkboard is my brain and it’s now pretty much blank except for some dust to remind me there was once something there.
I take his face in my hands and pull his mouth back to mine.
It’s the coward’s way out, I know. But my affection for Hollis is growing so rapidly that I can hardly keep up with it (much less outrun it).
And I don’t know how to put that into words without it also sounding like a lament that he can’t offer me anything beyond what we’re doing right now.
I’m surprised and also somehow not surprised to realize that I am disappointed.
Him acknowledging that we might have had a future under different circumstances seems to have pried open the little hope-filled treasure chest that I’ve kept buried deep inside my heart lately, then plundered its contents in one fell swoop.
Kissing the pirate feels easier than confronting him over the theft.
Our nakedness hastens things along, and soon Hollis moves down my body and rests his head on one of my breasts while he cups the other.
His thumb brushes over my nipple, back and forth, back and forth.
I close my eyes to savor the way the sensation pulls at some intricate knot low in my stomach, threatening to unravel it.
My fingers thread into Hollis’s hair, and he lets out a barely audible moan as I mimic his rhythm over his scalp.
Soon his movements slow. The initial frustration I feel as his hand comes to a rest is eclipsed by the expectation that he is going to switch sides, or maybe use his tongue.
Except he doesn’t. Because he’s fallen asleep.
“Hey,” I say, nudging his shoulder. “Wake up.”
“Sorry,” he mumbles. “I was just... taking a short break.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure you were.”
“Where was I?” He plants a kiss on my breastbone, then gives a yawn so big that I can see the dangly thing in the back of his throat.
I slept something like five hours in the car, but Hollis has been up since early this morning. And last night wasn’t exactly restful. “Bedtime,” I decide, rolling out from under him.
“But, Mill, I want you—”
“I’m going to be incredibly offended if you fall asleep inside of me, and there’s a not-insignificant chance of that happening if we keep going. Sleep, Hollis.”
As he drowsily navigates to the pillow, he mumbles a reminder about the laundry and something about how he’s cursed to never make it past second base in this room. He’s out before I can even ask him for the Wi-Fi password.