by Ivy Jordan
“Oh, you’re stressed?”
“Yes.” Babs brought her head back up and scrutinized me. “You have to tell him. You can’t deal with Stacy on your own. If she showed up at your office, that’s basically a warning.”
“A warning for what?”
“I don’t know.” Babs shrugged. “But when has Stacy ever been nice to you?”
I frowned. Stacy hadn’t ever been particularly mean to me, either, to be fair. But I knew what Babs meant—Stacy wasn’t the sort to drop by and see how things were going out of the goodness of her heart. She always had an agenda, and I’d failed to gain intel to see what her agenda might be.
“I don’t want to tell Sawyer,” I said. “I don’t know, Babs, he’s dealing with a lot right now.”
“Exactly. Sawyer’s dealing with a lot right now. The last thing he needs is to run into Stacy by surprise, especially if Stacy’s clearly planning something stupid.”
I hadn’t considered that. “Shit. I should have warned him.”
“Uh, yeah. You still probably should. It’s not…” Babs frowned. “It’s not really my business to tell you what Sawyer and her got up to. So I won’t. But what I can tell you is that she did with him what she does with all of her boyfriends. She traps them and reels them in and fucking ruins their lives.”
I grimaced at the implication that Stacy had totally wrecked Sawyer’s life. The only ideas that I could gather were ones that were linked to the limited information I’d gotten from Babs before—that he did some of the drugs that Stacy did. That wasn’t what Babs meant, though, I was sure—at the same time, I didn’t ask for clarification.
“She has an effect on these people,” Babs warned. “It’s unreal. It’s like… bug pheromones, or something.”
“What?”
“Bugs release pheromones. You know ants and stuff?” Babs shook her head. “Never mind. It’s not important. I mean that she has an effect on them, and if he really is dealing with a lot like you say he is, you need to treat him a little less like a glass vase and a little more like a vulnerable person.”
She was right, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that. I did know, from observing from afar, the way she treated the people she dated. Based on that alone, I should have made the connection that Sawyer wasn’t up for communicating with her again.
“Oh, come on, don’t beat yourself up about it,” Babs said. “You’re trying your best.”
“Yeah, but it’s not going very well,” I said, offering a smile. “So what do I do? Tell Sawyer Stacy’s out and looking for him? Tell Sawyer everything? Demand answers?”
“A little bit of everything,” Babs said. “I think you should tell him about Stacy being out for sure. Let him know that she’s out and that she knows he’s home, so he can prepare himself for running into her. Or so you can help him prepare for it, whatever you’re doing with each other to help him emotionally.”
I wrinkled my nose at her phrasing, but she continued.
“And I guess if he wants to tell you about Stacy, he’ll tell you. If not, he won’t. You can ask if you want, but I don’t know if he’ll tell you anything he doesn’t want to.” Babs shrugged. “I’ve only seen the guy in group settings, and from what I’ve observed, he’s not exactly inclined to talk on his own.”
He certainly wasn’t. Sawyer had to be badgered for any little detail unless he was comfortable or in the mood for sharing. It was the reason why therapy would be such a good idea for him—therapists were trained to badger specifically, extracting the pieces that hurt the brain as a whole.
“Is… is totally gross of me to be kind of still his therapist while we’re seeing each other?” I asked, thinking out loud in part.
“Probably, but what the hell are you gonna do?” Babs offered. “Different shit works with different couples. If you’re happy, who cares if it’s what the textbooks say is healthy? Define your own happy medium.”
It was a profoundly hippy answer to give, to let people be people and screw the statistics. Usually, it would sit wrong with me. There were studies that showed what healthy relationships looked like, and there was serious science to back up different behaviors and their link to a relationship’s durability. But in every study, there was an outlier, and I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t want badly to be the outlier in this case.
“I guess,” I said. “I’ll do my best. If he spooks…”
“He’s not a deer,” Babs said with a laugh. “He’s not gonna spook. Jesus. This guy was in the armed forces for six years, and you think he’s gonna spook at the mention of his ex-girlfriend?”
“He spooked the other day,” I pointed out. “He had some kind of nightmare and basically ran out the door. I think he was embarrassed for me to see him like that.”
“That’s not the same,” Babs insisted. “That’s just being annoyingly masculine.”
I liked how masculine Sawyer tended to be, the tough-guy attitude that he wore on his sleeve, but I knew Babs was right. It wasn’t so much him getting frightened as him not wanting to deal with the implications of having nightmares with me at that moment.
“I have to go get some stuff set up for our date tomorrow,” I said, standing up.
“It’s tomorrow. How do you do all this planning?” Babs asked incredulously. She, of course, being the girl who had barely even remembered to purchase a prom dress, whereas I had bought mine the winter before and continuously wore it to make sure it still fit.
I went home and went through my wardrobe, trying to keep my mind off the conversation I’d had with Babs. I knew what my game plan looked like: tell Sawyer about what went on with Stacy and leave him to decide whether he was going to divulge information. Any further fretting on my part was counterproductive at best.
As I leafed through my clothes, I thought back to the first time we’d slept together. Did it count as sleeping together if all we’d done was fuck a little crudely in my office? There had been a sort of animalistic lust, then, both of us coming a little unhinged. I’d never done anything like that before, and I got the feeling that he hadn’t, either. We’d simply lost control of our inhibitions.
I set aside a dress I liked and a pair of shoes that matched. For now, at least, it seemed that between Sawyer and I, things were fine. Despite my own issues, we were fine, and that was all that mattered for now.
Chapter Twenty-Three
SAWYER
After Quinn went home, I took the time to call the owners of the house I’d visited to discuss their rates. For a few hours I spoke to their realtor, tried to get all of the information squared away, and when it came up that I was a veteran towards the end of the conversation, everything got much easier. A married couple was selling the house, and the woman, Grace, had been a veteran too. We talked briefly about out time overseas, though nothing terribly in-depth, and eventually, we settled on a very reasonable rate.
I knew that generally there were house tours and things like that before just deciding to move in somewhere, but I couldn’t bring myself to go to that much trouble. If there was something wrong with the house, I would fix it, plain and simple.
The next day, the only thing I was concerned about was my date with Quinn. I worked with Pete a little in the morning, though not much, and then came back home to take a shower and go through the clothes I had. I was running out of decent shirts—few of the ones I’d owned before the military still fit me after the muscle I’d gained, and I’d already worn most of the ones that did fit me around her. Would she notice?
I had one button-down left that she hadn’t seen me in, so I wore that, sleeves rolled to my elbows. I pulled on my shoes and ran a brush through my hair out of sheer habit. I didn’t have nearly enough hair to brush. It was beginning to grow, ever-so-slightly, but it was certainly still close-cropped.
On my way out the door, I caught Dad standing in the kitchen with his hand on the coffee maker. When I started past, he didn’t dart off as he usually did, but instead squared to face me.
/> I stopped, not wanting to do what he did and flee when he saw me.
“Kim said you were looking for a house,” he said.
So he and Mom did talk about me. Sometimes I wondered. “Yeah, I did,” I said. “I found one out off thirty-five.” I didn’t know why I gave him any level of detail when all I wanted to do was leave. I was far from being late to pick Quinn up, but I didn’t want to talk to him.
Or did I? After all, I did get angry when he walked away from me.
“That’s good,” Dad said. “It’ll be good to see you out.”
I stared blankly at him, unsure whether he could have possibly meant for that to be so offensive. “Sorry, I’ll ask for eight years next time,” I said and turned on my heel.
“Sawyer, that’s not what I meant—”
I was already gone, doing my best not to slam the door behind me in my wake. I didn’t want to disturb Mom, after all, if she was still home. I could fight with Dad all I wanted, but I didn’t want her to worry. I got in the car, turned the key in the ignition, and started trying to calm myself down.
The only thing I could think to do was focus on this date with Quinn. I knew I had a lot of things to make up to her—or, rather, one thing to make up to her. Even after we’d spent time together looking at that house, I wasn’t sure that I’d appropriately apologized for everything. I needed to make things right, however I was supposed to do that.
When I pulled up to her house to pick her up, she stepped out before I had the chance to get out of my car. Her dress shimmered slightly in the light of the evening, and I caught the urge to touch the hair that was tucked carefully in a few pins above her ear. I opened the door for her, and we made our way to dinner.
There was light conversation in the car, mostly just her checking up on the house from the day before. I had the feeling that there was something that she wanted to tell me, just as much as there were things that were on my own mind. It wasn’t until we got to the restaurant and got seated that things began to come up.
“You seem like something’s bothering you,” Quinn said.
I frowned and resisted the urge to groan. I didn’t want this to turn into some sort of therapy session. But then, most conversations between couples were like therapy sessions anyway. Quinn and I had already sort of talked about this; she wanted to help me, and I aimed to return the question in due time.
“Just more stuff with my dad,” I said.
“Oh? Did you talk to him?” Quinn stirred her drink, and I watched the sugar swirl, refusing to dissolve in the iced tea.
“Sort of. He talked to me.” I shook my head. “He asked me if I’d found a house, and I told him I had, and he told me he was glad I’d be leaving soon.”
“That’s rude.” Quinn raised an eyebrow. “Especially considering…”
“I just got back, yeah,” I agreed. “I turned and left, and he said something about not meaning it. I guess he must have said something wrong, but honestly, how many other meanings could that have?”
Quinn twisted her mouth over to one side and then shrugged. “I can’t think of many,” she admitted. “Unless he’s happy that you’re moving on and getting on with your life.”
“Maybe, but that’s not what he said,” I reminded her. “In any case, it just really rubbed me the wrong way.”
“I’d imagine so,” Quinn said. She furrowed her brow and took a sip of her tea. “You know, there’s a lot of animosity between the two of you. I keep thinking maybe you wrecked his car when you were a teenager or something, but there’s way too much… Hate’s strong, but there’s way too much anger for something that small.”
“I wish I’d just crashed his car,” I said. Cars could be taken to the shop. I could have worked over a summer to pay damages on a car. A busted car didn’t cause long-lasting ramifications on the family name and force a man into social hiding for shame of what his son had done.
Quinn looked across the table at me, and she didn’t ask anything. I couldn’t understand how she remained so kind to me. If I were her, it would be difficult not to be pushy with asking for information.
“I had a problem with some stuff,” I said. That was extremely nonspecific. “I, um… before I was in the military, I was dating Stacy Black, your, uh, cousin.”
Quinn nodded—with a nod that ready, I wondered how much she already knew. If she knew about Stacy, there was no telling.
“She was really into the party scene. Or, something like it. She did a lot of drugs, and at first, it really freaked me out. I grew up in a conservative household and everything. But she wanted me to be a part of her world, and one thing just sort of led to another.” I frowned. “I was just bored, I guess. That’s how a lot of us from these small towns end up, we get bored, and we try drugs because we have time to kill. I never cared about school or anything else. I didn’t have any reason not to, and Stacy was so unbelievably cool to me.”
Quinn stayed quiet, but she didn’t draw back. She was listening.
“I thought I’d just smoke pot, and then I thought I’d try crack one time, to make her happy. And then I thought I’d try it one more time, because she wanted me to. But it stopped being because she wanted me to. She stopped being a part of that equation.” My frown deepened, and I spoke more quietly, not exactly wanting to be overheard in this place. “I was doing it because I wanted to. And as you can imagine, things started to spiral pretty quickly from there.”
I didn’t tell her the worst of it. I didn’t tell her about the time I stole my mother’s watch to pay for crack, or about the times I came home to my parents completely drunk off my ass and engaged in shouting matches in the front lawn with my father. I didn’t tell her about the fights with Stacy, either, about how we’d gone at each other and I’d stayed with her because if she left, I wouldn’t have cocaine anymore, and that was all I cared about.
“And then I got arrested,” I said. “I was out with some friends and we weren’t high, but we had it on us, and that was enough to put us in jail.” I still remembered how that felt, how I’d thrown up out of sheer fear. “My dad came and paid my bail. We didn’t speak to each other the whole way home.”
“It made the local news, and that was… that was pretty much that. You wouldn’t think it would do much, but it just about ruined the family name. Dad was embarrassed to show his face in some places.”
We hadn’t moved, though. We almost had, but we hadn’t. “In the aftermath of it, there was just me and Stacy. Mom wanted to keep me home and send me to rehab, and Dad wanted to kick me out, let me fend for myself. And he had a point. I was a grown-ass adult, twenty-two; it wasn’t like I was a teenager. They came to some sort of compromise. If I wouldn’t get my shit together somehow by the end of that month, I was out of there.”
“So I left.” I looked up, realizing now that I’d gone on a rant, and hadn’t meant to. “I went and joined the SEALs. I figured it was better than sitting around Austin waiting for something to happen. Sorry, though, I didn’t mean to go on like that.” Something about Quinn made it so that I felt disarmed around her without feeling vulnerable, and that lent itself to rambling and going on about things long since over.
Quinn’s facial expression had shifted over the course of me talking. She’d started out knowing, almost expectant, and now her eyes were a bit wider. Shock cast doubt into those blue orbs, and she had an iron-tight bite on her lower lip that wasn’t so much sexy as it was disconcerting. Like she wanted to say something but didn’t want to say it out loud.
“I didn’t know that,” she said, and I could tell that I’d surprised her with at least a part of my story. “It definitely explains the animosity between you and your dad.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I guess it does.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “Jesus, Quinn, you’re not my therapist. I can’t keep doing this.”
Quinn cocked an eyebrow and rested her chin on her hand. “Pay for dinner, and we can call it even.”
I couldn’t help but smile at the insinua
tion that even if we hadn’t ever seen one another in a patient-doctor sort of way, I would owe her for the miniature lecture. Maybe all of these relationships ended up being symbiotic, and there was little sense in trying to defend ours from being the least bit co-dependent.
“I think you’ve done the right thing overall,” Quinn said on our way out of the restaurant. I opened the car door for her and hopped in the driver’s seat.
“How so?” I asked.
“You did what you needed to do to be independent,” Quinn said. “Anyone can go to rehab and pretend to care about their recovery long enough to get out without too many questions. A ton of my patients are like that, burning hours and money away just so their parents or whoever get off their back. But you actually did something that would be transformative. Treated the disease instead of the symptoms.”
“Maybe.” The analogy made sense, anyway. “It wouldn’t have been right to put my parents out of that money, anyway. Not when it was my fault.” Maybe to an extent, it had been Stacy’s, but I was an adult. I was capable of making my own decisions.
When we reached her house, I let her out and walked her to her door. It had been such a long night, such heavy conversation, and a part of me wanted to do everything in my power to clear both our minds completely and entirely, regardless of whether that was ‘appropriate’ or whether we ought to talk about it more.
Still, it felt wrong to make a move on her after such a heavy conversation. I smiled at her, and before she walked in, she paused.
“Do you want to stay?” she asked.
I raised my eyebrow. What was I, a stray dog? “What do you mean?”
“Tonight, I mean.” She walked back towards me and set a hand on my face, leaning up to kiss me.
I kissed her back, and nearly forgot the question.
“If you’re sure,” I said, not wanting to neglect the emotional weight surrounding us.
Quinn nodded, and then she leaned up and kissed me again.
Chapter Twenty-Four