“I’m not brave. I’m just tired of pretending I don’t want him.”
Days later, Holly sat at her kitchen table with her crutches casually leaning next to her and a lukewarm mug of tea that was definitely not doing its job. Her suitcase lay on her bed in the other room, half-zipped, like a dirty little secret.Destiny calling from another time zone,buzzing hard like a notification you’re hesitant to open because you’re low-key scared of the answer.
Her nervous system had been in airplane mode for three days and was somehow still receiving turbulence alerts.
Her mom stood at the sink rinsing a bowl, ignoring her daughter’s holy shit today is the day where she might actually go to Denmark with a man who is definitely too good for me but also inexplicably mine spiral. Holly could hear her own thoughts rising in her head, tumbling over each other. Fighting for attention, as though she didn’t already know she was completely and utterly fucked.
You’re not avoiding your problems.You’re not.You’re just… cross-continental adulting with someone who may or may not be your soulmate.
“I think I’m in love with him,” Holly blurted, eyes wide and heart hammering in her chest as if saying it out loud had somehow broadcast it to the entire universe. Her gaze landed on her mother, who still had her back to her, silently pleading for some form of ancient wisdom passed down from Abuela or Santa Maria. Hell, she’d take something from fucking Dr. Phil right now if it’d stop her from feeling like she was about to have a stroke before the age of thirty.
Her mom eventually turned, drying her hands, unfazed like this was just another Tuesday. “The hockey brute?” she asked with zero judgment and maximum accuracy.
Way to sum up my entire emotional arc. Years of personal growth reduced to ‘hockey brute’ like a Netflix genre tag.
Holly groaned, laying her head on the table to hide her face. Not because she was ashamed of Nate. In fact, her feelings had morphed into quite the opposite, but the matter-of-fact way her mom said it made it sound like it wasn’t a surprise. It reminded Holly that it wouldn’t be because the whole of America thought they’d been dating for weeks.
“Yes,” she sighed, her cheek smushed against the table. “Nate.”
Ever since she’d been a kid, her mom had this way of seeing right through her. She’d fix Holly with this unreadable look that should have made the whole of Las Vegas happy that Marisol Martinez never became a gambling woman. She turned that blank stare on Holly now, pausing as if awaiting another panicked confession. “And?”
“And.”Holly exhaled through her nose because this next part was scarier than landing a jive with a busted ankle. “He asked me to go to Denmark with him. Just for a bit. To… heal. Away from the cameras, and everything else.” She curled a hand around her mug, but it didn’t help dispel any of the chaos perched on the tip of her tongue. “And I saidyes,and now I’m trying not to dissolve into a puddle of¡ay, cabrón! these are realemotions.”
Her mom didn’t laugh. She simply flicked the dish towel over her shoulder in a move that was so intrinsically mama-coded and sat next to Holly. She wore that calm-but-sharp look that saidI’ve been through hospitals and heartbreaks, I can handle this.
“You’re scared,” she told her daughter.
Holly pressed her lips together as she exhaled, hard. Because she knew. Her mom knew it. Nate knew it, too. So why did she have tosay it out loud?She looked at her mother, brows pulled helplessly as the lead balloon in her belly sank even lower.
“What if I get there and he regrets it? Oreven worse, what if we have this amazing time and I let myself really love him, and then the show ends and he just… goes?”
Marisol folded her hands, leaning in with the weird, grave encouragement that only someone who’d lived a full life could muster.
“Then it was a beautiful season, mija,” she said without fanfare. “Nothing more, but nothing less either.”
The gravity of those words hit Holly in a place that felt like it was constantly bruised these days. She felt a familiar but horrifying sting behind her eyes, and just watched her stupidly wisemama. Like traffic had just stopped in front of her, and she knew her brakes’d never stop her in time. All she could do was brace for the impact and just hope for the fucking best.
For a girl like her, who’d spent her entire adult life building herself a cage forged from control? That was devastating.
“Mija,” her mother soothed, reaching up to brush baby curls away from her temples. “You’re scared because it’sreal,mi amor.”
Holly blinked. That line didnotcome with a trigger warning, but it hit the only part of her that still believed love was a transaction and not a galaxy-wide shove into the unknown.
“Do you think he’s good for me?” she asked, voice just hovering on the edge of breaking. Like she was pitching an existential question to Siri and hoping for a less dramatic answer than her mom reaching into her soul with a Latin death stare.
“I thinkyouthink he is,” her mother replied, still stroking her hair in the way she used to when Holly had been young. “And that’s good enough for me,mi vida.”
That should have been a Hallmark special right there, but Holly’s brain immediately filed the moment undertear-jerking, dangerously hopeful, do not play before bed.
Fantastic. Now her subconscious hadnewmaterial for its 3am anxiety theater.
She finished packing her bag after dinner with an exacting precision that made her ankle ache. She moved quietly andcarefully, preparing for both heartbreak and sanctuary but not knowing what the dress code was for either. Toiletries, shoes, and clothes that didn't wrinkle because she was trying very hard to at leastlooklike she had her shit together. She zipped and unzipped the suitcase like it was a Fitbit she was trying to hit herdaily delulustep goals on.
Her mom stood guard in the doorway, arms crossed, as though she knew her baby girl’d never get through this without parental supervision. “You sure you want to go?” her mom asked at last, after watching Holly put her scarf into her carry-on and take it out again for the fourth time. But Holly knew the question for what it was.
The most subtle ass-kicking in the world.
She exhaled, trying to let go of the bitter tension clogging up her brain cells. “No,” she admitted with a breathy, self-aware laugh.
