Clairy didn’t want to tell her friend that it hadn’t been this dinner that had been on her mind when she’d dressed for tonight. She didn’t want to tell Marabeth that—like always lately—Quinn had been what she was thinking about.
Quinn, and the way Thursday night had ended. And all the things that ending had left unfinished. And that the only thing she’d been able to think about since then was whether or not she should let those things be finished...
“At least Quinn just wore jeans and a T-shirt,” Marabeth said, casting a glance across the room and out the patio door to where he and Marabeth’s fiancé were standing on the small cement slab that was the apartment’s patio, in front of the outdoor grill, beers in hand.
Marabeth was right—Quinn was dressed casually. But even so, the sight of him in jeans and a navy blue polo shirt still increased her already whetted appetite.
“Is this—tonight—okay?” Marabeth asked then, sounding tentative. “Having the two of you here together?”
The newly engaged couple had invited Clairy and Quinn to Marabeth’s apartment for dinner.
“We wanted to thank you for the party,” Marabeth went on, “and Brad wanted to have Quinn over before he leaves town again, so we thought if we could have you both at the same time...”
“It’s fine, no big deal,” Clairy answered her friend.
“How’s it going between the two of you?” Marabeth asked. “I never saw you together at the party, but I know he was still there when I left. And tonight he drove you?”
“Seemed silly to take two cars.”
“Because you’re on friendlier terms...?” Marabeth queried.
“We’ve been working together so much we’ve sort of had to be.”
There wasn’t much to that statement, and yet it seemed to be exactly what Marabeth wanted to hear. “I knew it!” she said victoriously. “I told Brad when we left your house Wednesday night and Quinn didn’t that something was going on!”
“Something has been going on—we’ve been working together. And Wednesday night Quinn stayed to help finish the cleanup and take out the party trash,” Clairy said.
But her friend wasn’t accepting that it was as low-key as Clairy was trying to make it sound. “And then?” Marabeth urged.
Clairy knew denial wasn’t going to fool her bloodhound best friend, so she gave up the ghost and just smiled.
“I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!” Marabeth’s exclamation was loud enough to stop the conversation outside and draw the men’s attention.
“Everything okay in there?” her fiancé asked.
“Just fine,” Marabeth called back, delight in her tone and in her face. Then to Clairy, she said quietly, “How friendly has it gotten?”
“Enough for me to learn that you might be right that he’s not the same as he was before—”
“Like Brad. I told you!” Marabeth interrupted her with more triumph.
“Plus, I’ve gotten to know Quinn a little better and learned a few things that explain some of what he did as a kid. And he’s bent over backward apologizing.”
“And now you like him!” Marabeth concluded, sounding like a teenager.
“Now I don’t think I hate him anymore.” That was all Clairy would concede.
Marabeth shook her head vigorously. “You dressed up for him tonight!” she accused. “Have you already slept with him? Did the two of you come here straight from bed? Did you get all dressed up so it didn’t look like that?”
“No!” Clairy scoffed before her friend could dig in any deeper.
“But you want to sleep with him!”
Clairy finally caved and confessed under her breath, “So bad,” giving up all pretenses and making her friend laugh.
“Then why haven’t you?”
“Come on, really? There are a million reasons.”
“But if you want to, that’s the only reason that counts.”
Clairy sighed, laughed and shook her head at that oversimplification.
“I’m serious,” Marabeth said. “Just do it for fun—after Jared and seven years of uninspired, scheduled sex that had to be over in time for the financial report? You’ve earned it!”
Clairy and Marabeth had shared every intimate detail of their lives since they were children, including that. And especially after Clairy complaining to Jared hadn’t accomplished anything, and she’d grown more and more disappointed and frustrated. Which had led to venting to her friend.
“Is that really me, though?” Clairy said. “I’m barely divorced. A week ago I still counted Quinn as my sworn enemy. Plus, there’s nowhere for anything between us to go, and knowing that, wouldn’t it end up seeming kind of shallow and maybe even...yucky? I mean—”
“I know. We’ve both always needed there to be a full-blown relationship, the potential for a future, love—or at least being on the verge of love...”
They really had been discussing this subject since puberty.
“So let’s look at it like that,” Marabeth suggested. “Maybe things between the two of you could go somewhere...”
Clairy shook her head again, a slow, definitively negative shake that allowed for no possibility.
Despite that, Marabeth went on. “What if the line between love and hate is thin and the two of you have crossed it? What if your dad’s death is destiny bringing you together? Think how great that would be! We could do this—” Marabeth glanced out the patio door again “—we could all live here in Merritt, two best friends married to two best friends. The four of us could have dinner every Friday night. We could raise kids together who could all end up best friends, too—or maybe they’d fall in love and get married to each other and make us all one big—”
“Oh, we’ve entered fantasyland!” Clairy said.
“Stranger things have happened.”
“I don’t think they have,” Clairy said. “Even if Quinn might have changed, he hasn’t changed that much. He’s still my father’s marine mirror image—a dyed-in-the-wool forever marine—”
“And exactly the kind of person you swore you would never get involved with when you grew up,” Marabeth said, repeating what Clairy had told her numerous times.
“The kind of person I pretty much already married, which means I had to learn all over again that it’s what I don’t want, because if that fantasy of yours played out with Quinn, I’d either be on a military base somewhere hoping it might give me ten more minutes with him, or here alone—raising kids alone—and not even getting that ten minutes. No, thanks.”
Marabeth deflated. “I know you’re right.” It took only a moment, though, before she brightened again. “But then I’m back to saying just have some fun now, while he is around.”
Brad poked his head in the open patio door. “Platter—we’re getting close,” he announced.
Marabeth took a serving dish over to him and kissed him, then returned to the kitchen cubicle and Clairy.
Only when she was sure her fiancé was fully outside and talking to Quinn did she go on. “If you were ever going to have a one-night stand, this is the perfect setup, isn’t it?” Marabeth said in a confidential tone. “The guy is sizzling hot with a body that doesn’t end. You want to. You already know there’s no future in anything with him, so you don’t have any illusions about anything coming of it. He’ll disappear any day and you may never see him again—or at least probably won’t see him again for years—so you don’t have to worry about being embarrassed or awkward or anything, if or when you meet up again. And it’s a great way to put Jared behind you, take that first step at moving on.”
“Postdivorce phase one,” Clairy said with a laugh, explaining that she’d already considered most of what Marabeth was saying.
“So you’re gonna do it,” Marabeth said optimistically.
“I’m not sure. And I don’t think he is, either.”
“So seduce him,” Marabeth whispered.
Clairy laughed once more, but she didn’t commit to anything.
As tempting as it was to consider that one-night stand with Quinn, she still wasn’t sure she should.
Or could.
Because what if she did take that leap and didn’t come away from it as unaffected and detached as her friend thought she would?
* * *
“Am I missing something?” Quinn said on the way back to Clairy’s house when Friday evening with their friends had ended. “How come Marabeth wouldn’t let you not take that bottle of wine and kept telling you to go home and open it tonight?”
Quick lie, quick lie, come up with a quick lie, Clairy...
“She thought you and I should celebrate burying the hatchet to work together on the memorial and finishing the project.”
“Ah...” he said, seeming to accept that. “So you told her you’d buried the hatchet?” he asked, sounding very interested to hear that.
“I told her that she might be right, that you—and maybe Brad, too—aren’t still the creep you used to be.”
Quinn laughed. “Faint praise but I’ll take it and be grateful.”
There was a moment’s lull that Clairy hoped put to rest his curiosity about the wine Marabeth had really given her to encourage having some fun tonight.
Then he said, “If you think we might not still be creeps, does that mean you’re feeling better about Brad?”
“I’m hoping for the best,” Clairy allowed. “Marabeth is going to marry him no matter what I think, and I don’t want to see any marriage fail.”
“There’s always that risk, though. Relationships are tough.”
“Spoken from experience?” she asked.
“To be honest, relationships have been really easy for me—even the two that went on for a while. Until the end of them, anyway. But, apparently, they have been tougher than I ever realized for whoever I’ve been involved with.”
“Let me guess—they’re easy for you because you enjoy the fruits of the relationships, then go on about your business. You get deployed or leave for trainings or missions or whatever. But the women you’ve been involved with are left behind, left hanging, waiting, worrying, and as alone as if they weren’t involved with anyone at all.”
“Well, yeah. But that’s all a given, being involved with anyone in the military,” Quinn said. “My two bad breakups put a whole lot more blame on me than on the military, and after this last deal with Mac, it got me to thinking—”
“Were they women marines that my father tried to push out?”
“No, both the women were civilians. Rachel was a legal secretary and Laine was a paramedic. Neither of them ever even met Mac. But after having my eyes opened to the way Mac saw women—and looking at the complaints against me through that lens—I decided that maybe I’d better figure out if being involved with me has had its own special downside.”
Was that why he was taking a hiatus before he screwed up another relationship, what he’d said last night?
But Merritt was a small town and it had only been a short drive from Marabeth’s apartment, so he’d piqued Clairy’s curiosity again just as he pulled his truck up to the curb in front of her house. And there was no way Clairy could just end the evening and leave it at that.
She held up the bottle her friend had forced on her as they’d left and said, “So, wine...” as an invitation to come inside and tell her more.
Quinn’s only answer was a smile before he opened his door and got out.
Clairy got out, too, and met him to walk up to the house.
She’d meant to turn on the air-conditioning before leaving tonight, and remembered only after unlocking the front door, when they went into the heat and stuffiness of her house.
“It’s miserable in here,” she complained as she turned on the air now. “Mim and Harry brought her old patio glider over this morning—they didn’t like the look of it with Harry’s outdoor furniture. It’s in the backyard again and I left the lights from the party up, so why don’t we take the wine out there?”
“Good idea.”
Clairy gave Quinn the job of uncorking the bottle as she kicked off her sandals and got two glasses. Once he’d poured the wine, she led the way out the rear door.
She’d used string lights with small white round globes to add to the festivity of the party, and they still made a nice canopy over the yard.
The cushioned, love-seat-sized glider that was against the house was comfortable, if not contemporary. The unoiled metal base squeaked when they both sat down, and the seat unavoidably moved backward until they were settled, facing each other.
“Okay, explain how what you found out about my father triggered something about your private life,” she prompted.
“It goes without saying that Mac was the biggest influence on me—from the time I was a little kid. When I found out what he was doing to women marines, it kind of opened a curtain on what he thought of the opposite sex in general.” Quinn tried his wine, seemingly buying himself a moment.
Similar to when he’d told her about her father’s misdeeds Thursday night, Clairy could see again that it was difficult for him to speak ill of her father, that it was a struggle he waged with himself.
Then he said, “You came to mind, and for the first time, I actually thought about the way he’d always treated you. I don’t know why—knowing Mim, knowing how he was raised, it shouldn’t have been true of him—but Mac deeply believed that there was something that made men better, more important, more valuable all the way around, than any woman.”
Clairy breathed a wry sigh at that. “I had that same thought last night when you told me what he’d been doing. It kind of helped me to think that it wasn’t only me... I’ve always thought it was...”
“It definitely wasn’t only you. But the thing is, it got me to thinking about the way I’d treated you when we were kids and about the way I might have followed Mac’s lead—”
“It seemed okay to you to be a jerk to me, to shove me aside to get to my father, because I was just a girl and not as good as you,” Clairy surmised.
Quinn flinched. “It was never a conscious thought. It’s never been a conscious thought about any woman. But your dad was—”
“Your idol, your role model, everything you wanted to be, and if that was how he saw women, maybe it rubbed off on you.”
“That’s what I wondered about. Beginning with you and the way I treated you when we were kids.”
“It was what my father modeled for you from the day you showed up at our door,” Clairy confirmed, looking at the situation like that herself now. “I actually remember that morning like it was yesterday. He was reading his newspaper, ignoring me. But when you got there and said you wanted to be a marine just like him, he folded it and put it down, and suddenly he was interested in what you had to say.”
“Again, Clairy, I’m sorry,” Quinn said contritely. “But, yeah, Mac did act like you were just...a pet or a piece of furniture—something we didn’t need to take into consideration even when you were trying to get in on his training me, or when you wanted to watch his war movies with us...”
Clairy nodded, but this time instead of getting into that part of this, she was more interested in how this had translated into Quinn’s view and treatment of the women in his life.
He seemed to sense that and went on. “Even though I never consciously thought I was better than or more important than any woman, I can see where Mac’s influence may have colored the way I’ve always gone about things with women—”
“With very little regard for them?” Another guess.
“Possibly. I know personal relationships have never had priority with me—”
“Long-or short-term ones?”
“Any of them,” he admitted somewhat under his breath
. “Short-term were just numbers I called or texted when I felt like it. If there was no answer, I called or texted the next number on the list—”
“Oh, nice!” she chided.
“They were doing the same thing with me,” he claimed.
“And the long-terms?”
“I guess I didn’t recognize that things were much different with those,” he acknowledged, sobering as if thinking back on the more serious relationships really was giving him pause now.
“With Rachel,” he said, “it lasted about a year, and I thought we were doing okay—I was stationed in Georgia then. After dating steadily for two months, I needed to leave on assignment for a few weeks. She invited me to stay at her place when I got back, to stay with her every time I was going to be back rather than staying on base. I thought she was being...you know, practical. I’d made it clear that I’d be in and out. She seemed to accept that, and she said she wanted to keep things going even under those circumstances, to be together whenever I was in town. I figured she just figured that it was nicer to have her place to come back to than the base, that it was for convenience.”
“But she saw it differently—as the two of you living together,” Clairy suggested.
“She didn’t say that outright in the invitation, but she did when things blew up—she said me moving in took the relationship to another level. But I hadn’t seen that...” He shook his head as if he still didn’t completely see it. “I guess she expected me to propose or something... Hell, I don’t know exactly. I just know I thought we were on the same page, and I didn’t think it was headed anywhere close to marriage. But when things exploded, she said she’d given me hints and signs and signals, that she’d said things that—if I’d given her even a second thought—I would have caught.”
His sigh sounded frustrated. “The bottom line was that she wanted more, and she’d believed when I moved in that she had the right to expect it... But I was...oblivious. And it all came to a head when I found her in bed with some other guy—”
The Major Gets it Right Page 16