Parallel

by O'Roark, Elizabeth

Wrong choice of words, Jeff. Resentment, held back for so long, floods me. “It’s funny, then, how your logic always leads to me giving things up,” I snap. “Do you realize I’d be done with grad school by now if you hadn’t convinced me to wait? But you did. And then you convinced me we should buy a place, just before you quit your job. Yes, I can see how it’s plenty logical for you—you get to flit from one job to the next, knowing I’ll pick up the slack, but how was any of that logical for me?”

  He stares at me for a long moment, shaking his head like he can’t believe what he’s hearing. “My God, Quinn. Have you felt like this all along? I thought you agreed. I thought you wanted the house.”

  “I didn’t not want it,” I admit. “I just didn’t know that it was going to mean giving up everything I wanted more.”

  “You should have told me,” he says. His shoulders are rounded. Every last bit of confidence he’s regained these past few months seems stripped away from him. “I had no idea.”

  My inclination is to take it back, to apologize, but I don’t. “And I had no idea you thought me going back to Georgetown was a sign that my brain was malfunctioning. You might have said that in private instead of announcing it to my doctors first.”

  He’s silent, and then he leans over and pulls me in for a hug. As much as I want to resist, I don’t. “I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is choked. “I want to be what you need, but this whole situation brings out the worst in me. Everything’s changing, and I hate it. I don’t know what’s going on with us, but I feel like I can’t do anything right with you now.”

  I let my head drop to his shoulder. This situation has gone too far and it’s entirely my fault. I’ve been pushing him aside ever since that first day at the inn, before I even knew Nick existed. I’ve been telling myself I was protecting him, but when Nick spent the night in my hospital room, when he went with me to meet Grosbaum, when we wound up staying together in Baltimore…I didn’t keep those things to myself because of Jeff’s tender feelings. I did it because I knew they shouldn’t have happened. Each step has been slightly less justifiable than the one before it.

  I swallow, forcing myself to make a suggestion I probably should have made long before. “Should we call off the wedding?”

  His head jerks back. “Call it off? Why?”

  I was hoping it would be obvious to him. “Because we aren’t getting along. I mean, are you even sure you still want to get married?”

  “Of course I do! What kind of question is that?”

  His astonishment leaves me flustered. Surely the thought has occurred to him at least once? “It’s just…I’m just being realistic.” I press my lips together, staring out at the dense summer foliage just beyond the parking garage. These are the last few days of July, and I don’t even know if I’ll have another one. “We don’t want the same kind of life. You want to move home and live on a farm, which is my idea of hell. I’m keeping you from all the things you want in the world, aside from me, and the truth is that neither of us knows how long I’m even going to be around.”

  His eyes well. “But you’re the part that matters, Quinn. You. Not living back home. Not the farm. Okay? So, we are still getting married. If you want to cancel the big wedding, we’ll do that. People will get it, under the circumstances. I’ll talk to the church down the street and see if they can open something up next weekend.”

  I freeze. The dread I’ve been feeling—about the future, about staying with Jeff—it sinks into my very bones at his words. “Next weekend?” I repeat, my voice too breathy. “I don’t know if we can pull it together that fast.”

  “Just family and close friends,” he says. “You’ve already got the dress. Instead of a reception, maybe we just go to dinner somewhere.”

  An anchor sinks deep in my stomach. I made a commitment—to Jeff, to my father—and it’s not as if Nick’s an option anyway. I look at the tears in Jeff’s eyes and my shoulders sag. I’m not sure a year or two of independence would be worth the number of people I’d have to hurt to gain it.

  * * *

  That night, I try to persuade Jeff to leave town as planned for his bachelor/camping weekend, but he insists on staying. “I’ll leave in the morning instead,” he says. “Let’s just have a nice night in. It’s been too long.”

  It’s probably what we need. A night where we’re enjoying something together instead of a night where I’m thinking about all the things he’s not. I could have watched Inception with him last night. There’s this ugly assumption inside me that Jeff can’t quite fill Nick’s shoes in any given situation, but I’m not even giving him the chance to try.

  “South Park?” he asks after dinner, turning on the TV.

  “Let’s watch Inception,” I tell him, ignoring the strain on his face when I say it. Just because he prefers to watch comedies doesn’t mean he’s incapable of feeling something as deeply as Nick does.

  It starts. I’m every bit as riveted as I was the last time, perhaps even more since I know just how badly it’s all going to go. Jeff doesn’t look particularly intrigued, but he’s not complaining either. Give it a chance, Quinn. Give him a chance.

  At the forty-minute mark, he sighs and hits pause. “I’m sorry, hon,” he says. “This movie doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. You keep watching. I’m going to bed.”

  I want to argue. For some reason it seems like my entire future, the fate of our relationship, rests on just getting him to the end of the movie. And that’s insane. He doesn’t have to like what I like. I don’t like to watch football and that’s not a dealbreaker for him.

  But as soon as he’s gone the next day, I do what I absolutely should not. I pick up the phone and call Nick.

  31

  NICK

  Ever since Quinn left my office yesterday, I’ve been hunting for a solution that doesn’t exist. There’s a very good reason doctors can’t date their patients, especially in a situation like ours. It’s possible we could tell the right lies and hide it enough to get away with it, but that still wouldn’t make it ethical.

  Yet the minute I get her call, I know I’d be willing to do it anyway.

  She insists on driving herself. We arrange to meet at a market near the lake, since my parents’ place is off a series of unmarked roads.

  “And pack the red bikini,” I add, only half-joking.

  “Nick,” she says softly. “I’m still engaged. This is just one last effort to figure things out.”

  But whether she’s admitting it or not, it’s also one last chance for her to figure out she would rather be with me.

  * * *

  The air is warm and moist, the buzz of insects rising toward the clouds. I stand for a moment outside the car just before I leave to meet Quinn, feeling something that’s been absent so long I’d forgotten there was a time when I expected it—hope.

  All I should want from today is that Quinn remembers enough that we solve this, or remembers enough of who she was that she decides to end it with Jeff. The hope I feel is a warning sign, a reminder that my desire to get her away from Jeff is not wholly altruistic. There are things I want from today for myself as well as for her, whether I’m supposed to have them or not.

  She arrives at the market not long after I do. I watch her climb out of an old Jetta, wearing a gauzy sleeveless dress with a slit up the side. I’m trying hard to pretend I don’t see a flash of tan thigh as she walks toward me. Today is about convincing her to give this a shot, convincing her that she has no reason to fear me. Thoughts about those thighs straddling me in a hotel bed a few nights ago will have to wait.

  “There’s a deli here,” I say, pulling the door handle. “I thought we could grab some lunch and eat it out on the dock.”

  She walks in ahead of me and makes it five feet before she comes to a sudden stop, pressing her fingers to her temples.

  My hands are on her arms in an instant. “Are you okay?”

  She nods, slumping against the glass door of a drink refrigerator. “I’ve been here before,
” she whispers. “With you. We were buying food for the weekend, because the grocery store wasn’t done yet.”

  There’s a chill up my spine. “Yeah,” I say casually, pretending it’s not completely bizarre she knows this. “The grocery store opened just before I got out of college.”

  She looks off into the distance, like she’s watching our past on a movie screen only she can see. “We bought a bunch of food here, enough to last the weekend, but we ended up coming back…” She trails off, looking so embarrassed I have to ask.

  “What?”

  She shakes her head and turns toward the deli. “Nothing. So, what’s good?”

  “That’s not fair,” I tell her, gently cupping her elbow to turn her back toward me. “You can’t keep starting a memory and not finishing it.”

  The color rises in her face. “We ran out of condoms,” she whispers, not meeting my eye. “So you came here for more. Twice. The cashier gave you a hard time about it.”

  It’s a gut punch, but the good kind. The idea of running through multiple boxes of condoms with Quinn…Jesus. I want to pin her against the refrigerator case and make what happened in Baltimore look like child’s play.

  Pull it together, Nick. I clear my throat. “I could buy some now, only in the interest of a by-the-book investigation?”

  She laughs, as if I was entirely joking. I definitely was not.

  * * *

  My parents’ white, two-story colonial sits at the end of a long gravel road that is dappled with sunlight beneath a canopy of trees. By mutual agreement she rode with me instead of following behind. It still doesn’t seem possible that the sight of the house itself is causing her seizures, but a few weeks ago I didn’t think time travel was possible either. As the house comes into view, I find her hand in mine. I’m not even sure which of us is responsible.

  “Still okay?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she breathes. “I’ve been here too. Your and Ryan’s room was up there.” I stiffen as she points to the room I once shared with my twin.

  “That’s probably the first time anyone’s spoken his name here in a decade,” I tell her. “My mom—I guess we all try to protect her.”

  Her face falls. She couldn’t look guiltier if she tried. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Seriously.” I open her door and get another flash of her legs as she climbs out of the Jeep. It’s probably for the best that she refused to bring the bikini. I’m having enough trouble as it is.

  We walk into the house and I watch her face, hoping, praying, for a reaction. Some memory that will provide an answer we need.

  Her mouth curves downward. “It’s just like walking into the home of your favorite childhood friend as an adult. Familiar, but meaningless. Why the hell did I ever think seeing it might heal a brain tumor? I was expecting miracles.”

  I return and find my hands wrapping around her arms, forcing her to meet my eye. “Who says it would have to be a miracle?” I ask. “We can’t explain anything that’s happening. But there was a time when people couldn’t explain the change in seasons, or sunlight, or gravity. It doesn’t mean there wasn’t an explanation. It just meant it hadn’t been discovered. Why should this be any different?”

  She looks away, pressing her lips together. “But the tumor—you don’t actually believe we can stop it.”

  I tip her chin up, feeling a little desperate. She can’t start losing hope now. I need her to keep fighting until we find a solution. “Do I think it’s unlikely this can fix the tumor? Yeah. But your tumor is also unlike anything I’ve ever seen. And how could I say it was impossible anyway? Every day, you and I are witnessing the impossible. We’re having the same dreams, for God’s sake. You know things you couldn’t possibly know, and from the moment I met you, it felt like you were…”

  “It felt like I was what?”

  “Mine,” I reply.

  The awkwardness of that word washes over us both. I’ve never called anyone mine in my life, and she is with someone else. But I also know what I said was right. She is meant to be mine, and somehow today I need to convince her of that.

  * * *

  She sits on the dock and keeps me company while I prepare to pull the jet ski out of the water. I throw my shirt in the grass and I’m just about to pull the trailer up the hill when I glance up and catch it—Quinn’s eyes on me, cheeks flushed, her full lips slightly ajar. I’ve never seen a female watch me with such blatant, unconscious lust. Probably the way I’m looking at her every time we’re together. God, what I wouldn’t give to act on it.

  I catch her eye. “Remembering our honeymoon?”

  “Our honeymoon was in December,” she says primly. “No one was wearing a bathing suit.”

  I grin. “If it was a good honeymoon, I imagine we were wearing a lot less.”

  “Yeah,” she breathes, her lids fluttering closed for a second. She’s fucking remembering it, right here in front of me. Today is going to be a test of my self-restraint, as it is, without having to watch Quinn when she’s thinking about sex.

  “Jesus, don’t do that,” I plead, giving the waistband of my shorts a quick, desperate tug.

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Don’t say yeah like that, as if you’re remembering it all while you sit there.”

  Her cheeks turn pink. “Sorry,” she begins. “I wasn’t remembering our honeymoon, I promise.”

  My teeth grind. I haven’t gotten laid in weeks and the only girl I actually want has her dress hiked around her thighs and is swinging her bare legs a couple feet from my face. “Well, you were sure as shit remembering something. It was written all over your face.”

  “I had this dream about you,” she begins. “We were in high school, right after homecoming, and we were in the back seat of your car. In the parking lot. And—”

  Her voice has gone low and breathy again, full of longing. She’s been with her idiot boyfriend for so long, she’s forgotten what a turn-on she is, even when she’s not talking. Add in that rasp to her voice while she describes a memory of something that was clearly sexual—with me, no less—and I’m a goner. She may not know she’s doing it, but my dick certainly does.

  “Don’t do that either,” I tell her, and I turn away, pulling the trailer up the hill. I feel like an asshole almost immediately, but I just don’t know how to do this—how to balance being what she needs and restraining what I want all at the same time. I get the jet ski into the shed and return.

  She watches me, her face solemn. “What did I do wrong?” she asks.

  I push my hair off my forehead, racking my brain for any excuse I can make, before I give up entirely. “Nothing. But you were describing the two of us, together, in the throatiest, sexiest voice imaginable. Let’s just say I walked away for a reason.”

  “Oh.” Then her eyes widen. “Ohhhhh.”

  There’s something so innocent about her at times. I love that innocence and want to preserve it, but at the same time, I want to destroy it into a million pieces. The jury’s still out on which way I’ll go.

  32

  QUINN

  Nick goes to the house and returns with our sandwiches and drinks in his hands. He hasn’t bothered to put his shirt back on, though I wish he would. I find my eyes going south far too often, resting on that trail of light brown hair below his belly button, imagining where it might lead if I flicked the button of his shorts to follow it.

  I don’t want to be having these thoughts about him, thoughts I’ve never in my life had for anyone else. But how do you make yourself stop thinking the wrong thing, and wanting it? He swings the bag down behind us, sitting too close. The distance he might sit if I were his and he were mine.

  I think of the way he said that word earlier—mine—and how it sent a visceral thrill through my chest. The way something inside me—that hard seed that began to flower the moment I met him—took another leap, came into full bloom.

  While he pulls food from the bag, I look over at the paddleboards on the beach, the Sunf
ish bobbing nearby. “Is this what we’d have done if we came here in high school?” I ask.

  He gives me a sheepish grin, handing me my sandwich on a paper plate. “Well, I’m guessing, based on your memory of condom purchases, it’s not all we’d have done.”

  I feel myself blushing as I remember that moment of intense déjà vu at the deli. It was our first time together. Something we’d waited years for. Different than London, where we must barely have waited, given how fast we got married. I don’t know how many lives I’ve lived with him, but it feels a little unfair that I can’t live this one with him too.

  He’s watching my face in a way I can’t pretend is just friendly. “I like having you here,” he says.

  I twist my ring, letting my feet swing over the dock, inches from the water. “It’s been the best Saturday I’ve had in a long time.” A disloyal thing to say, but not as disloyal as what I’m actually thinking, which is that it’s been the best Saturday I ever remember.

  I catch a flash of his dimple. “Even if it’s no Paris.”

  “You say that as if I routinely go to Paris. I’ve never even been out of the country.”

  “Why not?” he asks.

  I smile. “Spoken like a kid who grew up with everything. I was dirt poor in a town so small you’d miss it if you blinked.”

  He leans back a little, a casual gesture, but there’s nothing relaxed about the way he’s watching me now. “I guess that’s how you wound up with Jeff.”

  I bristle at his phrasing. He makes it sound like I’m saddled with Jeff, as if I chose him by default. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re just…ill-suited. He doesn’t seem like someone you’d have chosen unless you were someplace where there weren’t a lot of options.”

  He hasn’t seen the best side of Jeff since this thing started, but it’s not like I chose him out of desperation. I had plenty of options back home. “Going through a tragedy with someone shows you pieces of them you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. And when my father died, I realized what a good person Jeff was.”