Alec looked away this time. “My dad used to spend a lot of time at the office. He wasn’t always as…present as he is now. I don’t know that I’d do any better.”
Suddenly Lilly hated the turn of this conversation. How had it come to this? Imagining Alec procreating with some woman to produce a nursery full of little Thatchers put her in a sour mood.
“You know, Audra and Jacob were talking about having children right away,” she said, her bad temper evident in her voice. “He agreed with her they should start trying during the honeymoon. But that didn’t turn out to be, did it?”
It felt good, in a weird way, to poke at the wound of the wedding-that-wasn’t. To remind them both they were here together in this moment because a romance had gone awry.
Alec made a noise suspiciously like a snort. “And her walls rise up again,” he murmured.
If her throat hadn’t tightened right then to the size of a straw, she might have ground out some home truths to explain her bone-deep instinct for self-preservation. My mother abandoned me to people who never loved me. A man has never taken my side in anything. Every day I look in the mirror and I look at my best friend and I see object lessons in all the reasons not to get into a relationship and surely not to dream of a husband or something as impossible for Lilly Durand as family heaven.
Chapter 5
The next day, Audra wandered from her bedroom mid-afternoon. Lilly took a quick inventory, and stifled a sigh when she noted the wedding dress still covered her friend’s upper body. She wore it with jeans and she’d hacked at it again with something sharp. Now it met the waistband of her pants but the inches of fabric she’d removed looked to have been tied around her pale blonde hair like a headband.
Not for the first time, Lilly worried her friend had not introduced said hair to shampoo since their arrival at the Heartbreak Hotel.
And she was also starting to doubt the purported powers of the place because Audra didn’t seem to be any more lively than when they’d arrived. Lily had grave doubts that would change anytime soon.
She hopped up to grab a cold bottle of water from the mini-fridge and delivered it to the other woman. “Hey,” she said, handing it over. “Long time no see. You okay?”
“I’ve been reviewing important moments in my life,” Audra said.
“Um…oh?”
“Did you know I passed on having sex with the lead singer of Arrow our senior year?”
Lilly felt her eyes bug out. “What? How?”
“As chair of the Student Activities committee, I had a backstage pass and a responsibility to liaise.”
Liaise. Only Audra would use that word. “Why’d you never tell me? He was hot. Like hawt hot,” Lilly said, using their college-era lingo to describe the member of a popular rock band. “And why didn’t you take the opportunity?”
“Because I thought for sure I’d come out of the experience with an STD or at least a hickey.”
“But it would have been a Dash Hickok hickey,” Lilly said, ignoring the prospect of disease. “You could have had him autograph it!”
“I also had on boring cotton underwear, and worse, I wore my panties that said ‘Friday’ across the butt and the concert was on Saturday night. It was a simple mix-up on my part, but he might have thought I didn’t daily change my undies.” Audra shuddered. “What could be more humiliating?”
Lilly neglected to mention being left at the altar. “Well, you could have taken your panties off before he had a chance to see them,” she pointed out, thinking of Dash Hickock’s signature scruff on his chiseled jaw and the tattoos crawling all over his lean body. Yeah. Hawt.
Audra stared. “That never occurred to me. I, um, usually let the guy take charge of the disrobing.”
Lilly didn’t laugh at her friend. If she could cast her mind that far back—ages and ages ago—she’d have to admit she’d never been particularly assertive when it came to intimacy either.
“Anyway,” the other woman continued. “It seemed pointless to have sex with someone I never intended to see again.”
“Didn’t the band play for two nights?”
Audra gave her a look. “You get what I mean.”
“I do, but—”
“Then there was the time I refused the camel ride on that family trip to Morocco,” she said. “It was a two-day expedition and it included an overnight at an oasis.”
“I remember that. Your cousin warned you against it—she said you’d be in pain during the journey and a long time afterward, right where no woman wants to hurt.”
Audra nodded.
Lilly couldn’t figure out where the other woman was going with these reminiscences. “So now you regret missing out?”
Her friend shook her head. “Oh, no, not at all.”
Confused, Lilly perched on the arm of the sofa and narrowed her gaze. “Okay. You’re not sorry for the hookup you didn’t have with a famous rocker. You’re not sorry you didn’t snatch the opportunity of a lifetime and get your tender parts bruised by a humped dromedary.”
“Yes,” Audra said, rolling the plastic water bottle between her palms so that it crackled. “Isn’t that sad?”
Lilly rubbed her forehead. It wasn’t sad, right? Because Audra hadn’t done things she didn’t want to do.
“Don’t you get it?” her friend demanded. “It’s pitiful. I have no regrets! I always followed the rules, I always chose the sensible path. There’s not the memory of one hickey that I wish I could forget.”
“What you regret,” Lilly said slowly, thinking she might be getting it now, “is that you have no regrets.”
“Exactly,” Audra said, then strolled back to her room and
