Hers for the Weekend

“Well, in the town I’ll be visiting, the closest thing they have to a gym are the three machines in the high school weight room, only two of which ever work at the same time. And eating my mother’s cooking for the next few days, I’m sure to come back ten pounds heavier. I figured one last workout would be good for me.”

“You’re so disciplined.”

Piper raised her eyebrows. How was she any more disciplined than her friend, who attended the gym with the same regularity? “You’re here most mornings at six, too.”

“Yeah, but that’s because I want to look good so I can find Mr. Right.”

Piper just didn’t get it. Her cousins she could maybe understand, since they’d been raised in such an old-fashioned setting where their peers aspired to good marriages shortly after high school. Gina’s life was more contemporary than that. An attractive, self-reliant attorney, she nonetheless spent a lot of weekend nights with dates who didn’t deserve her, only to agonize the following week over why they hadn’t called and whether she would ever meet someone.

Piper knew that with her friend, it was more a case of wanting a relationship, not buying into the myth that women needed a man to take care of them. But honestly, why did Gina want something so much when it was usually a one-sided effort that left her grumbling about how there were no good men available?

Friends who’d known Piper post-Charlie had teased her, only half kiddingly, about her militant feminist streak. Maybe she was being too cynical, she thought as she pumped her arms in rhythm with her stride. After all, what was wrong with healthy equal partnerships?

Nothing, if they exist.

At first, Piper had thought that’s what she had with Charlie, until his little manipulations had added up to one big picture. Never complaining that she preferred jeans to a more traditional feminine look, but buying her skirts for her birthday; insisting that children could wait while she built her career, yet managing to make sure she was holding some cute baby at every possible opportunity, hinting that she’d make a wonderful mother.

Charlie was just one example, true, but she didn’t see a lot of counterexamples in the people around her. Gina’s attempts to find a fulfilling partnership had yet to yield any convincing successes, and Piper’s other closest friend, Josh, actively shunned emotional involvement.

Then there were Piper’s relatives, the people she’d grown up watching. One could argue that her mother was happily married, but how happy could a woman really be while doing her husband’s laundry and fixing his dinner and voting the way he voted? Personally, Piper would probably gnaw off her own arm to escape that kind of relationship. Her cousin Stella, divorced three times, obviously hadn’t found the magic formula for true happiness, either.

Even Daphne, who in the past had echoed Piper’s resolve not to end up like their mother, was now married and living in Rebecca, pregnant with twins. True, Daphne taught school instead of following their mom’s homemaker path, but what had happened to Daphne’s plans to travel and see the world? Her husband, Blaine, had apparently convinced her that staying in town so he could run his family’s ranch was more important.

Frustration fueled Piper’s gait, and neither she nor Gina spoke as they concentrated on their workout. It was only as they slowed to do one final cooldown lap that Piper caught her breath enough to relay the story of her mother’s phone call and the resulting situation.

“You can imagine how shocked I was when Josh volunteered to go with me,” she concluded.

Gina regarded her strangely. “Why is it shocking? You spend almost all your free time with the guy already. Is it even stretching the truth that much to hint you’re a couple?”

Piper stopped so suddenly she almost tripped over her own sneakers. “Of course it is! You know our relationship is nothing like that.”

Stepping off the track toward the free weights, Gina teased, “What I know is that you’re close to a gorgeous straight man who has steady employment, yet you refuse to set me up with him.”

Gina and Josh? They were all wrong for each other. They…they…actually, they were two attractive, intelligent people with a compatible sense of humor and similar career drives. Nonetheless, Piper had to restrain herself from snapping a warning that Josh was off-limits.

But she couldn’t resist a quick reminder. “I’ve told you, we promised not to date each other’s friends.”

“From the way you make him sound and from the glimpses I’ve caught of him, I might be willing to ditch you as a friend.” Gina grinned.

Piper halfheartedly returned the smile. Trying to atone for her inner snarkiness, she said, “It may not seem like it, but I’m doing you a favor not setting you up with him. Josh is a lot of fun, but he’s hell on female hearts. You know how many women I’ve seen him break up with?”

“Maybe because he hasn’t met the right one.”

“Won’t matter. Josh isn’t going to let himself find the right one.”

If the right woman dropped into his lap, he’d be too busy running the other way to notice. Not that Piper entirely blamed him for his behavior. With her close-knit—sometimes suffocatingly so—family, she didn’t pretend to understand what it must have been like to grow up being bounced between foster homes. People coming and going through Josh’s life as if it had some sort of invisible revolving door had probably become the norm for him. His dating habits now simply reflected the pattern.

“So this string of broken hearts, is that the reason you’ve never gone for him yourself?” Gina asked, surprisingly stubborn this morning. Normally all it took was one of Piper’s we’re-just-friends pronouncements to change the subject.

“I don’t need a reason not to go for him. I’m not looking for romance, remember?”

Gina sighed. “And yet you’re the one going away for the weekend with the sexy guy.”

Yeah. Piper would love to laugh off her friend’s comment—except the fact that she was going away for the weekend with a sexy guy was what had kept her awake all last night. How far would she and Josh need to go to convince others they were a couple? The man stiffened whenever she casually hugged him, and lately, she was no better. Yesterday, her entire body had tensed whenever he got close to her. So what would happen if he actually had to, say, kiss her?

And why didn’t she believe her own self-assurances that she wasn’t secretly dying to find out?

4

JOSH FOUND PIPER in the parking garage. She was loading the trunk of her car and glanced up with a smile when he called out a hello.

“Hi.” She took his duffel from him, then unlocked the back door of the car to hang up his garment bag. Shutting the car door, she turned expectantly toward him. “Didn’t you bring anything else?”

“Nope. I have everything I need.”

“In a garment bag and one small duffel?”

Nodding, he peered through the car window at Piper’s luggage. It appeared she’d packed the entire contents of her apartment. Maybe to avoid being robbed while she was out of town.

“I noticed the car was sagging,” he kidded her, “but I thought we just needed to fill up the tires before we hit the freeway.”

“I have presents to take home for the kids in the family, plus a gift for my sister, who’s pregnant, another for my cousin who got engaged, one—”

His laugh cut her off. “It’s your car. Bring as much as you want.”

She slid in the driver’s side and reached across to unlock his door.

Soon they were zooming down the road and Josh was clenching his fists in his lap. Usually, whenever he and Piper went somewhere, he drove or he took his car and met her there. Or he walked, or did whatever else was necessary to avoid riding with her when she was behind the wheel.

It wasn’t just her tendency to drive at warp speed that bothered him; he detested being in situations where someone else was in control. He was a lousy passenger and he knew it. People disliked “backseat drivers,” especially stubborn, independent people like Piper who hated to be told what to do.

I am going to keep my mouth shut, he told himself. As far as he knew, Piper had never had a single accident. She didn’t need him to tell her how to drive.

His well-intended resolution lasted for about five minutes. Piper’s head was nodding in time to the fast-paced song on the radio, her braid bobbing against the collar of her pale yellow shirt, and with each chorus, the car accelerated a little more.

“So,” he blurted, “what’s the speed limit on this road, anyway? We shot past the sign so fast I couldn’t tell.”

She glanced at the speedometer and immediately slowed the vehicle down.

He couldn’t repress a sigh of relief. It was irrational to get nervous when he was in someone else’s car, but for the first eighteen years of his life, he’d had no control whatsoever. He hated not being in charge of a situation. Usually, he managed to project an easygoing image, but his heart pounded every time he had to fly on a plane or ride with another driver.

For a while, his irrational feelings had even affected his job history, driving him to quit voluntarily before something beyond his power might force him to go. A few months ago, he’d started freelancing his services and it had started to pick up. He was regularly approached with jobs that were big enough to keep him busy, but too small for firms like C, K and M to expend energy on. Lately, he’d had to turn down as many assignments as he accepted, but he never backed too far away from his freelancing—and not because he needed the money. Life had taught him that little was permanent. Not jobs, not families, not lovers. Why get attached to people? Why give someone else the opportunity to leave him? He’d lost enough already.

First his parents, although he’d been so young that he remembered them mostly as faces in the photographs he owned. There’d been a string of foster families he’d stayed with only long enough to start caring before being yanked away and sent elsewhere. Living with the Wakefields had been the last time he’d really dared to hope for a family. After they’d moved, he’d decided becoming close to people was just an invitation to get hurt. He’d once dated a woman, Dana, who had tempted him to try to let someone in. He’d wanted to, he really had, but he’d never been able to adjust to the level of intimacy she’d needed. So she’d become just one more person to walk out of his life without looking back.

Piper zoomed beyond Houston’s city limits, and for a moment he silently applauded her speed. Too bad he couldn’t outrun the bitterness of his past with the same ease.

Maybe conversation would help alleviate his tension. “Is there anything in particular I should know about you?”