by Reid, Penny
Steven, back to eating his sushi, shook his head. “Yes, as I told you before, the boss vets all new clients for the private accounts. He’ll fly over with us, God help us all.”
“Oh.” I thought about that for a moment. In preparation for the Vegas meeting, I’d been drafting proposals for the mysterious boss without comprehending that Quinn was the boss. In fact, I’d even told Quinn about one of my ideas when he interrupted my lunch at Smith’s last week. I felt like I was going to be sick. I croaked my next question. “We’re all taking the same flight?”
“We’re all taking the company plane.” Steven’s voice was so nonchalant he might have said, “Wednesday is the day I cut my toenails.”
I blurted out, “There is a company plane?”
“Yes.”
My heart rate increased at the thought of spending four hours in an enclosed space with Quinn. “And we’ll all fly together—with him?”
“Yes.”
I searched the table as though it might provide me with answers, and I tried to squelch the panic from my voice. “But what if I want to fly on a commercial flight?”
Steven raised a single eyebrow at me. “And why would you want to do that?”
I huffed, not wanting to tell the truth but recognizing the strangeness of my statement. I could only think of one excuse. “I have frequent flyer miles.”
Steven’s thin lips curved into a broad grin then he abruptly laughed so hard that tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. I could feel myself turning red then eggplant purple with embarrassment. His laughter was, however, contagious, and I managed a self-depreciating half-hearted chuckle.
“Oh, Janie, you are a peach.” I think he meant it as a compliment, but I only heard you are a fuzzy fruit. “You won’t mind forfeiting some frequent flyer miles, I promise. It’s a pretty stress-free way to travel. And we’ll be briefing the boss and talking over strategy en route, so there is actually a good work-related reason to travel together. He’s not so bad if you stick to business topics.”
I didn’t know how stress-free it would be; I already felt pretty stressed out just thinking about it. “Who else will be on the plane?”
Steven wiped at his tears of hilarity and gave me an open smile. “Well, you and me, Carlos, Olivia, and the boss—you know, Quinn Sullivan.”
I glared at Steven. “Thank you. I get it now.”
He gave me a sweet smile. “Just making sure.”
Suddenly, I had a headache.
* * *
That night, I cancelled my tutoring session on the South Side and I called Jon.
I didn’t call Jon last Sunday as I had promised I’d do. At first, it was an oversight, but after talking to Kat during our bathroom pow-wow on Tuesday, I’d been purposefully avoiding him. I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t certain he’d been the reason I’d lost my job, and I didn’t want it to be true.
However, for some reason, now I really wanted to see him. Elizabeth didn’t say anything about my abrupt decision, but she gave me plenty of disapproving stares before I left the apartment and, as I pulled on my boots, said, “Isn’t Quinn calling you tonight from New York?”
A sharp pang reverberated in my chest; her words had found an unintended target: I missed Quinn and I wanted to talk to him. I missed talking to him, seeing him, touching him. Despite my confusion after he left on Sunday, I’d been looking forward to his call all week. I swallowed the knot in my throat and set my jaw.
I currently had no plans to tell Elizabeth that Quinn was my boss’s boss. I needed to process it first, decide what it meant. Right now, in my current mindset, it meant that Quinn and I were already over.
In response to her passive-aggressive query, I shrugged my shoulders and stood to leave.
She lifted her chin toward my cell. “You’re not taking that?”
I shook my head. “Nope.” And I pulled on my coat.
She crossed her arms over her chest, her glare heavy on my retreating back. “Well, if he calls, I’ll just let him know you’re out with your friend.”
I paused at the door, took a deep breath, and called over my shoulder as I shut it behind me. “Don’t wait up.”
I thought I heard her growl as I walked down the hall, but I couldn’t be certain.
As I left the building and walked toward the el platform, I was acutely aware of the two guards behind me. I wondered if they were in frequent communication with Quinn. I wondered whether they would tell him what I was up to and who I was meeting. The thought made my stomach turn a little sour. I didn’t like the sensation of being leashed. The cell phone felt like an albatross around my neck, and I’d only had it a week. The guards also were starting to grate on my nerves.
With a literal shrug of my shoulders, I tried to shrug off the mounting irritation and redoubled my efforts to focus on the task in front of me. I walked faster.
Jon and I met at one of our previously regular haunts. It was an Italian restaurant on the North Side with tall burgundy leather booths, dim lighting, and really good fried cheese. I didn’t return his embrace when I entered, but rather, my arms hung limp at my sides, and I felt no nostalgia when the heady tomato, wine, and sausage aroma wafted over me. But I did allow him to lead me to our usual table. We placed our drink orders. I wanted only water, but Jon ordered a bottle of expensive Sangiovese and two glasses.
No sooner had our waiter left when I asked, “Why did you cheat on me?”
It wasn’t the question I meant to ask. In fact, I didn’t really care about the answer. I was just stalling before confronting him with Kat’s evidence about his father’s role in my job loss. Also, for some reason, I was craving drama. I wanted to yell at someone.
“Janie…” Jon sighed, his head dropped, his shoulders slumped. “It was a mistake. It was the biggest mistake of my life.”
“Jon, I’d like to know.”
“This is going to sound crazy. You have to…” he reached out like he was going to grab my hands but then seemed to think better of it. “I’ll tell you, but you have to promise me that you’ll stay—you’ll stay and talk to me after. Don’t get up and walk out.”
“I asked, didn’t I? I want to know; I want to talk about it.” I winced at my own lie. I really just wanted to yell at him for being a liar and a manipulator.
“But you might not stay after I tell you why I did what I did. You just have to promise me you’re not going to shut me out after. I don’t think I could live with that.”
I pursed my lips and scowled. “Fine, I promise. I promise I will continue to talk to you after you tell me. Would you feel better if I attached a timeframe to the promise? Ok, I promise I’ll stay and speak to you for no less than one hour after you tell me.”
“Honestly, yes; it would make me feel better.” He looked relieved and a little desperate.
I blinked at him, incredulous, but I promised anyway. “Ok, I promise to stay and talk to you for the period of one hour after you tell me.”
He sighed again, nodding, and looked like he was going to be sick. He swallowed. He affixed his gaze to a spot on the table and began. His voice was so quiet that I had to lean forward to hear him. “You have to understand,” he said. “I’ve loved you from the very first moment I saw you. I just knew you were the one for me. Do you remember?” He smiled sadly, still looking at the table. “You were arguing with our professor on the first day about using linear equations as an approximation of non-linear equations. You were so angry.”
“I wasn’t angry.”
He glanced at me, his green eyes, still somewhat sad, glittering with amusement. “Not every equation is solvable. If we didn’t use linear equations as estimates, we would be left with chaos.”
I smiled in return and shook my head. “Nah. We’re not talking about this now. Besides, I don’t get angry. I was annoyed.”
The shadow of amusement faded from his expression. “But, it’s relevant. What you just said, you just said that you don’t get angry. This is true, you don’t
. All these years we’ve been together, I’ve never seen you more than one standard deviation from baseline. You’re never excited. I’ve never even seen you embarrassed. Even when you drank too much that one time when we were in the Hamptons, you were so calm. If you hadn’t thrown up, I wouldn’t have been able to tell whether you were drunk.”
“I still don’t see the relevance.”
He cleared his throat and stared at the table again. “I did it to be closer to you.”
I waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, I leaned farther forward and folded my hands on the table, prompting him. “What? What do you mean you did it to be closer to me?”
He took a deep breath then met my gaze; his olive green eyes were ripe with sadness and regret, and a touch of accusation. “I did it to be closer to you. Sometimes you are so…” His hand on the table balled into a fist. “You are so distant, almost apathetic about me, about us. It’s like you don’t care whether or not I’m there. Do you know how that makes me feel? I love you so much. I burn for you. I ache for you.” He reached across the table and gripped my hand; the force of the action startled me. “I just want you to feel something for me—just one-tenth of what I feel. I can’t stop thinking about you, and damn it, Janie…”
For the first time in maybe ever, Jon made my heart beat faster. His voice was filled with such raw emotion I imagined I could almost reach out and touch his words. At one point in my life, I was convinced this was the person I was going to marry, and with whom I would have a dog, a house, and two babies. I thought he was consistent, safe, and reliable.
Now, suddenly, I was faced with passion.
There were, for lack of a better word, stirrings; something akin to when my leg falls asleep. The stirrings weren’t pleasant or unpleasant. They just were. But I had to ignore them; I needed to sort through and comprehend the explanation for the cheating and the employment sabotage before I could focus on defining the depth of feeling which may or may not exist.
“I don’t understand, Jon. How could you cheating on me possibly bring us closer together?”
His grip on my hand increased, and he clenched his jaw. He released a slow breath that whistled between his teeth before he confessed. “I slept with Jem.”
My jaw dropped, my lashes fluttered. I assumed I misheard him. My voice was a whisper. “What did you just say?”
I watched him swallow; his eyes seared me; his expression was plain agony. “I slept with Jem. I slept with your sister.”
The beating of my heart reached a crescendo between my ears. “That doesn’t make any sense. Jem isn’t…Jem lives in…” I sighed. Jon’s mouth moved but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I thought I heard my name. I searched the table as though it held answers, and I said again, “This doesn’t make sense.”
His hand tugged on mine and roused me out of my indefinable state; he was mid-sentence when my mind engaged. “She called me and said she was in town. She said she wanted to surprise you, so I met her.” His words were an avalanche, increasing in pace, the next more urgent than the last. “I hadn’t seen her since she visited us that one time in college, and when I saw her, I couldn’t believe it; she looked just like you. I mean, just like you. She is taller than she was before; she’s your height, and her hair and her eyes are even the same color as yours. I thought it was you at first, from far away, but when I got closer, I saw the differences. Her voice doesn’t sound anything like yours. She’s not anything like you. I know that now, but then…but then she was so interested in me, and she seemed so like you but yet so different—animated, uninhibited—and I thought…I thought…”
We stared at each other for a long time, my mind playing catch-up with his words. He said she looked like me, but then he only mentioned her hair and the color of her eyes. It didn’t make any sense. Jem and I had always looked more alike than June and I did, but Jem had always done everything in her power to change that. She cut her hair short, dyed it purple, or bleached it. She wore contacts to change the color of her eyes. She had nose piercings and lip piercings and other piercings. It was true that the last time I had seen her was going on six years ago when she’d been seventeen and I’d been nineteen. I looked basically the same.
The rest of his words fell over me: She’s not anything like me; instead, she’s interesting and animated—she’s uninhibited. When I thought of Jem, I never thought of her as being interested in anyone other than as a means to an end, and she was never animated. If possible, she was even more withdrawn than I was; I always thought of her as coldly focused. However, she certainly was uninhibited.
I sighed again. My forehead fell into my free hand. Jon took it as a sign to continue, and I closed my eyes when he spoke.
“I drank too much, but that’s not an excuse. I was drawn to her. She reminded me so much of you, but it was different because…” He let out an unsteady breath. “I just wanted you. But you never seemed to want me like I wanted you; you were always so detached. She acted like she wanted me, and I liked that.” He swallowed the last word.
I lifted my head and watched him. He looked truly undone. I cleared my throat and drew his attention to me. “Jon, why didn’t you ever say something about this when we were together? I never knew. You never told me there was anything wrong. You never said anything about me being distant.”
“I tried. Really, I tried. When we were first together, I just thought you would come around. I mean, I was your first boyfriend; I was your first…but then I thought that maybe you just weren’t that interested in the physical stuff. I thought I was ok with that. I thought I could handle it if it meant being with you.” He had to take another breath, and when he next spoke, he sounded choked. “But now, I can’t stop thinking about you. When I said I ache for you, I meant it. Every day it’s like I’m counting the minutes until I see you, and I think maybe today. Maybe today she’ll change her mind and forgive me.” His eyes were watery and red-rimmed. “Janie, can’t we try again? Can you forgive me?”
A sudden thought occurred to me. “Is this what made you leave that night when I introduced you to Quinn? Does he know about this?”
Jon silently considered me before responding. “Are you dating him?”
I thought about his question and answered honestly. “No.”
His eyes bored into mine. “Did you call it off or did he?”
I huffed impatiently. “Does he know? Does Quinn know about you and Jem?”
Jon shook his head slowly. “No, not that I know of anyway.”
“Then why did you leave that night at dinner? What did he say to you?”
If possible, Jon looked even more uncomfortable. “I can’t talk about it yet. I just told you…” He pulled his hand through his hair. “Can’t we get through this one thing? You haven’t answered me yet; can you forgive me?”
I pressed my lips together in a firm line before asking him again. “What did you and Quinn discuss last Saturday? Why did you leave?”
Jon shook his head, seemingly unwilling to meet my gaze.
But I knew. I was suddenly certain.
“It was about my job, wasn’t it? The one you had your dad fire me from.”
Jon closed his eyes and leaned back in the booth. His head hit the back of the leather cushion. I thought I heard an expletive whisper from his mouth. He looked wretched.
I tried to swallow, but confusion layered with viscous emotion made my throat feel thick. “How…” My throat worked to swallow, and then I started again. “How did he know? How did Quinn know that your dad had me fired?”
Jon shook his head, his eyes still closed, and his voice was very soft when he said, “I don’t know. He just knew.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Quinn recruited you, didn’t he?”
I blinked at Olivia a few times. I was confused by her abrupt question, but then I recovered quickly. “Yeah, you could say that.”
It was Friday afternoon, the Friday before the big business trip to Las Vegas—the big business trip t
o Las Vegas that I was now dreading—the Friday of what was turning out to be the strangest week ever, and I was trying to function on two hours of restless sleep.
I wasn’t tired when I arrived back to the apartment earlier that morning even though it was past 2:00 a.m. Elizabeth was asleep; I could hear her soft snoring, so I stealthily removed my boots and closed her door so as not to disturb her slumber or incur additional wrath.
My mind was active; I felt unsettled but strangely numb. I checked my email, suddenly curious about Jem. I wanted to see if she’d replied to the message I sent last Saturday. Had she been in town this whole time? Why did she sleep with Jon?
I navigated to Gmail; there were no new messages.
I thought about emailing her again, but everything I wanted to ask, despite my mostly ambivalence toward Jon and the end of our relationship, would likely come across as crazy, jealous ex-girlfriend. My life was coming dangerously close to resembling a Jerry Springer episode; all that was missing was a question of someone’s paternity.
I started typing: Hi Jem, I was just emailing to ask you if you are in town. Jon mentioned something about seeing you a few weeks back. In your last email, you said you wanted to see me. Do you still want to meet up? Janie
I hit send then stared unseeingly at the screen until it blurred.
Jon was right about so many things. I avoided emotional intimacy. I hated relying on others. I wasn’t good at it, and I turtled any time I encountered a difficulty. Because of this, I bent on things that mattered to me or, using Jon as a case study, I abruptly broke off relationships. I also entered our relationship with extremely low expectations, and as long as I kept my expectations at a minimum, I was able to justify my somewhat marginal personal investment in him. It hadn’t been fair to Jon.
Regardless, he cheated on me with my sister, and when I broke up with him, he asked his father to pull some strings so that I would be fired. Neither his motivation nor his desperation justified his actions. I could not and would not forgive Jon.