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Chapter One
Holly – Present Day
“Listen, Holly, just one date. It doesn’t even have to be a real date; you could just go grab coffee one afternoon or something. It would do you some good to put yourself out there again, you’re not getting any younger.” I rolled my eyes so hard they nearly fell out of my head as I leaned back in my office chair. I held my cell phone between my shoulder and ear, balancing it as I continued to make adjustments to the digital mock-up of the layout I was working on for my latest project. I guess I could put her on speaker phone but considering as I’m currently debating on whether or not I’m going to hang up on her, it may be a waste of my time anyway.
“Well, that was a bitch thing to say, you sound like mom. I just turned thirty last year. I’m not ancient, Tilly. And I definitely don’t want to be set up with one of Kris’s golfing buddies, no offense.” Tilly is short for Mistletoe. Yepp, our mother has a thing for Christmas. Tilly is my oldest sister and is thirty-seven, happily married to her high school sweetheart with three kids. She wears an apron to cook dinner every night, and probably only has sex in the missionary position – if you get my drift.
I have another sister, Noel, she’s thirty-four and writes sexy romance novels for a living, or you know, porn with a storyline as our mother likes to refer to it. She has an affinity for tattoos and is kind of the black sheep of the family – I think Tilly has given up on trying to tame her, and our mother definitely isn’t sharing her work with her friends down at the Country Club.
“Holly, language. I’ve got you on speaker and the baby is nursing. All I’m saying is that your fertility clock is ticking down by the minute. Not to mention, Chet was an asshole. I can assure you, there are other men out there. Men that don’t shave their arms. That was weird, Holly.”
I snorted through my nose at the reminder that Chet shaved his arms regularly because he swore that it highlighted the definition in his muscles. Gag me. Show me a woman that likes day old prickly man arms. Exactly.
“I am fully aware that there are other men on planet Earth besides Chet, Tilly. Also, can I just point out that my foul mouth isn’t going to spoil the mind of your infant while she sucks on your boob. She’s not even listening to me, she’s too busy getting milk drunk on your tits. Remind me again, how are we related?” I teased.
My sisters and I have an interesting relationship, the age gap between us is rather large and throw in the fact that our personalities are all so vastly different, sometimes it makes it hard for us to relate to each other.
For a while there, after Chet somehow swindled me into a borderline abusive relationship, I didn’t see them or talk to them. I was segregated from my entire support system, and if it weren’t for my group of girlfriends, I don’t think I would have been able to pull myself out...without having to bury a body. Not gonna lie, there were a couple of times I considered sneaking some arsenic in Chet’s morning protein shake. Sue me.
“Jesus, I ask myself that question every day. Have you talked to Noel lately?” Oh boy, have I talked to Noel lately. I talked to her last week. She was shacked up with an Italian guy somewhere in Europe. Apparently, he doesn’t speak English, and she doesn’t speak Italian, but there is one language they both speak and well, let’s just say that’s not something I’m prepared to share with Tilly tonight.
“Yeah, did you read her new release? It’s still hanging on tight to the number one spot in Kindle Unlimited for the erotica genre. That scene with the guy and the other guy and the girl. Holy hell.” My sister is a lot of things, but damn that woman can write some steamy sex.
“Shhhhhh….yes. Yes, I read it. Don’t talk so loud, Kris is in the office with the door open.”
“Tilly, it’s a book, woman. It wouldn’t kill Kris to take a few pointers, I’m sure. I mean, not that his swimmers aren’t obviously working fine. I’m just saying. Live it up a little, take a walk on the wild side. When was the last time you did it in the middle of the week? When, Tilly?” I gave up trying to work, having too much fun playing with my sister. I know her face must be beet red right this minute.
“Now who’s being a b-word? Talk to me when milk leaks from your boobs if your husband so much as looks at them the wrong way, and you have a three-year-old that screams and beats on the bedroom door the second they sense the lock is turned. The very second. Bunch of cock blockers. Oh my gosh. I can’t believe I just said that. You and Noel both are bad influences. This is why Cousin Margaret is the godmother of my children.” Blah, Blah, Blah…Cousin Margaret, she may as well go ahead and send her kids off to boarding school instead.
“And thank God for that really, Til. I love your little devils, but if something were to happen to you or Kris, heaven forbid, I just don’t think I could do it. I’m not cut out for the parenting thing. And Noel, we won’t even go there.” I hate to even admit this out loud, for fear that my ovaries may actually shrivel up and fall out of my vagina – you know on the off chance I change my mind one day, but I’ve never wanted children. Never even had the slightest inkling that I would one day want to suck snot from a baby’s nose with my bare mouth. Yes, it’s a thing, I watched my sister do it. I prefer to spend my time with my one true love, design; specifically historical properties. Give me a building that has some history behind it - walls that have seen centuries pass - over dirty diapers any day of the week.
“We won’t even go there. Right. Anyway, if you change your mind about the coffee thing, text me. I’m telling you, Kris has some really good-looking friends, and successful – they all have jobs, and none of them live with their parents. Well except the one, but I wasn’t even going to suggest him. You don’t need to stay holed up in your office for the rest of your life, Holly. Because I know that’s where you are right now. I can smell you through the phone, smells like caffeine and a graveyard of ink pens.” She’s not wrong.
I looked around my desk at the scattered black ink pens, half of which I’ve discarded because they no longer roll as smoothly as the new pens do. At some point they start to skip, and if one of my pens even think about skipping, they are trashed. I only buy one specific brand and it has to be the black.
Technology has its place, and I don’t know how I would do my job without it, but when I’m truly designing – when I’m feeling the stories of the people that have walked the halls of the worn and haggard architecture before me – I will always go back to my ink.
“Give the babies my love, Til. And tell Kris I said hello, and might I suggest that sex on Tuesdays is fun too.”
“Night, Holly.” I could physically feel her tired through the phone as I hit end on one of the longest phone calls I’ve had with my oldest sister in over a year. Having three children all under the age of five is killing her. Not that she wasn’t a total bore before, but now she’s extra vanilla.
???
My parents are the upper crust of the upper class, old money, handed down generation after generation. I’m not even entirely sure what my father does for a living. Investing? Trading stocks? Real Estate? I really can’t be sure, but the money – there was always plenty of it, and my mother made sure everyone knew too. Her career consists of hosting dinner parties and social gatherings, thus her love for all things Christmas. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, darlings. I can hear her now, as she spends enough money to fund a third-word orphanage on a nine-foot-tall Christmas tree for the entrance in the grand hall.
We were raised to be debutantes, even had a coming out ball on our consecutive sixteenth birthdays. In case you were wondering, that’s kind of like an auction for your fancy virginity. My mother put us in etiquette classes from the time we could walk, and we spent our summers swimming in the pool at the Country Club while my mother sipped cocktails and gossiped with her fake friends and my father played golf with his associates – or fucked one of my mother’s friends in the locker room.
Not that she cared, she fucked the pool boy every Thursday at precisely three o’clock in the pool house. That’s when I was supposed to be practicing my piano, but what my mother didn’t realize was I could see the entrance to the pool house from the windows in the conservatory. Ms. Sicily, my piano instructor, bless her two-hundred-year-old soul, was totally oblivious to the scandalous activity I was privy to every week.
Tilly, being the first-born, was a people pleaser. She followed the rules, dated within the pre-approved circle and married for money – er, love – when she turned twenty-six. She had to wait for Kristopher to finish his doctoral program, of course. Kris is a good guy, but the man’s a podiatrist. He couldn’t go to medical school for something cool like cutting people open. No, he looks at crusty old toes for a living.
Anyway, I’m sure my mother thought she was golden, raising Tilly to perfection. Until Noel came along and dropped a stick of dynamite in her evening bourbon.
Noel was hell on wheels straight out of the gate. Her favorite pastime was sneaking her boyfriends into our three-story home in the coveted cul de sac of our gated community – don’t even ask me how they scaled the fortress we lived behind, because those boys weren’t from our side of the gates, that’s for sure. And then the time she forged my dad’s name on the form for her first tattoo – at sixteen and we won’t even talk about the time her phone synched up to the Bluetooth in my mother’s luxury SUV and began playing hardcore porn through the speakers on our way to ballet class. I was ten.
By the time I came along, well, they were just glad I preferred drawing over writing. I kept my nose stuck in history books and stayed quiet. Noel was so busy being a distraction that it was easy for me to slip by under the radar.
That was fine by me, because I didn’t care for their high-class society. The gossip and the fake smiles. Maybe that’s why I fit in so well with my girlfriends now. They are crass and loud, but they’re real. And sure, maybe I’m the odd man out now and they push me to date just like Tilly. But their men, the men they lean towards…well, maybe I wouldn’t mind getting trapped into having a cup of coffee with one of them. Or trapped under them, I never said I was an angel.
