SEAL’s Fake Marriage

by Ivy Jordan

  “Why would she want to stop by your office?” Sawyer frowned. “Doesn’t make sense.”

  “I know. But I didn’t want to tell you because I was worried it would freak you out, but it’s been pointed out to me that running into her unprepared would be worse. I don’t know. I just wanted to tell you.”

  Sawyer pulled me closer to him and kissed the top of my head. “I’m glad you did,” he said. “But I don’t need to worry about it. I don’t. She’s bad for me. The mistakes I made were my fault, and I own up to that, but she’s bad for me and I know that. I’m not interested in hearing anything she has to say. I have everything I need.”

  I smiled and a blush rose to my cheeks. It was what I’d wanted to hear, despite what I’d told myself about telling him for his own benefit alone. “I’m glad.”

  “Things are looking up,” he reminded me. “I don’t want to sabotage it.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I’m going to buy that house,” he mentioned. My eyes were beginning to droop in my tiredness, and he yawned behind me. “I forgot to tell you, I’m signing the paperwork soon and the house is going to be mine.”

  I smiled lazily. “That’s good, Sawyer,” I said. It seemed like despite everything, the mess with his father and the mess with Stacy and all the demons of the past that threatened to snatch him back to where he’d come from, things were looking up for him. I rested my head on his chest and let myself drift off to sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  SAWYER

  “You had a whole week to sit on your ass, now help me move this box!” Pete hollered across the house from the front door.

  I jogged from the back porch to help him with the box. Since the home came pre-furnished, there wasn’t a lot of work to do moving in, but I did need a little help getting my boxes of garbage into the house and unloading them. Pete didn’t know much about interior decorating, but Quinn was coming over later, and she could help make sure the place didn’t look too much like a barracks of some sort.

  We pulled the box into the living room and set it down on the floor. It held some of my service memorabilia, which I didn’t have enough of to really constitute more than a half of one box, and some of the things I’d taken from home. I brought a few pictures with my family, for example, and a few class pictures from my graduating class. I didn’t feel attached to it, but it seemed like the sort of thing I was supposed to have a picture of in my home.

  “I hope you’re not expectin’ me to help you set up and make everything pretty,” Pete huffed. He sat back on the couch and pushed his cap down onto his head.

  “Nope.”

  “Is Quinn coming by later?”

  “Yeah.” Actually, she would be by sooner than later. “She’ll help with all the decorating and stuff. She’s good with that.” From what little I’d seen of the inside of her house—I didn’t spent a lot of time pensively observing the decorations when I was over there—she was good at that sort of thing.

  “You two getting along well?” Pete took his cap off and set it aside. His hair had a comical dent where his hat had been, but I knew he was just trying to cool off a little.

  “Yeah, it’s been great.” I sat down on top of the box we’d brought in. “She’s really positive. We haven’t seen much of each other this past week since she’s been busy with work and I’ve been packing, but we’ve been in touch.”

  “You’re not having any trouble without a therapist?” Pete asked. “I don’t want you to go to some pill-pusher in the city.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not having trouble. When I have an issue, I tend to talk to Quinn about it more often than not. If I end up needing therapy, we’ll talk about it. But things have been really great lately. I don’t want to throw a wrench in it by seeing another therapist.”

  “What, would that be cheating? Are y’all in a relationship technically?” Pete asked.

  I wasn’t sure about that. “Seeing a therapist wouldn’t be cheating, no.” As to his other question… “I don’t know if we’re in a relationship. It’s complicated, I guess. We see a lot of each other, and I think we’re exclusive, but I don’t think she’s calling me her boyfriend. Seems kind of childish, if that makes sense.”

  “Yeah,” Pete agreed. “I mean, to each their own. But I always think of high-schoolers when I think of boyfriends and girlfriends. I think adults have boyfriends and girlfriends too, though. And it might do you well to clarify that little label with her.”

  “In time.” I looked out the window and squinted into the sunset. “I’m not really in a hurry to do much of anything now.”

  A knock at the door made Pete shift over in his chair.

  “Speak of the devil,” he said.

  “Not the devil!” I protested, walking to the door.

  He rolled his eyes. “Figure of speech,” he defended.

  I made a face at him and opened the door. Quinn stood in the doorway, wearing jeans and a t-shirt and her hair pulled back in a bun. She had a box in her hand and a smile on her face, and I leaned down to kiss her in lieu of a greeting.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  “Should I go?” Pete asked.

  Quinn laughed and walked in. “No, you’re fine. I’m just here to, you know.” She adjusted a pot that sat on the mantle by the fireplace. “Do that.”

  “What’s in the box?” Pete asked.

  Quinn set the box on the table and withdrew a few baking ingredients and other groceries. “Some essentials. I was pretty sure you had plans to go out, but I wanted to break in the kitchen a little bit.”

  “I could use a home-cooked meal,” Pete said.

  I shot him a glare. I knew he was teasing me by pretending he couldn’t take the hint that Quinn and I wanted time alone, but that didn’t make it less irritating to me.

  “But unfortunately,” he said, standing, “I’m on my way out. I got a hot date with some tax returns tonight.”

  “Tax returns? You run a farm,” I said.

  “You want me gone or not?” Pete argued, grinning.

  “We don’t want you gone,” Quinn chided. “Do we, Sawyer?”

  I offered a comical shrug, and Quinn swatted me with a dishrag. Pete went out the front door, and I walked into the kitchen to see where I might be helpful to Quinn if she planned on making dinner.

  “I would have gone out and bought groceries,” I said.

  “You most certainly would not have,” she pointed out. “Pass me the salt shaker.”

  I obeyed. “Thank you for coming by. I’ve missed you lately.” Something about her was familiar. We’d only been with one another for a few weeks, maybe a little over a month at most, but it felt familiar to sit here with her. I didn’t know that I wanted her to leave.

  “I’ve missed you too, lately,” Quinn returned. She fired up the stovetop and hummed to herself while she set out some meat, tortillas, bell peppers, and onions. “I’m making fajitas. Is that alright?”

  I liked how she came into my house and informed me what was for dinner. I couldn’t help but smile. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She grinned. “I can’t help but feel bad. You’re out of homecooked meals unless you learn to do it yourself.”

  “I can learn!”

  “Not according to your mom!” she said. I shook my head, betrayed again by my own mother in these matters. What all did they talk about?

  “Speaking of your parents,” she said, placing some of the meat on the skillet. “How have things been with your dad? Any updates?”

  “Not really.” I hadn’t seen much of him. He hadn’t said goodbye when I moved out. I didn’t know what to make of the last small fight we’d had, and I didn’t want to get into it with him again. It was hard at this point to tell who was avoiding who.

  “Really? Not even when you moved out?”

  “Not really,” I repeated. “Nothing I do seems to help.” And that was a bit misleading. I didn’t do much to help, after all, but then there wasn’t much t
hat I could do. I wasn’t telling him to fuck off; I wasn’t actively pushing him away. I wanted him to want to talk to me, and in my mind, there wasn’t anything wrong with being upset that he wasn’t.

  “Really?” Quinn raised an eyebrow like she was on to me. I couldn’t hide much of anything from her.

  “There’s just no point,” I said. I shrugged and shook my head. “There’s no point, Quinn. I can bust my ass and worry about it for the rest of my life, or I can move on. I think I’m ready to move on.”

  She moved some of the meat to the side and started warming tortillas.

  “If you say so,” she said, seemingly unconvinced.

  I helped her set the table, and we assembled the fajitas at the stove and took them to the table.

  “I wish I had some more interesting drinks to offer you,” I said, glancing into the empty abyss of my fridge. “All I have is water.”

  “Water is fine,” she said. “I need to drive home tonight anyway.”

  I hadn’t planned on getting her drunk by any means, but I appreciated her compliance.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, and then she finally spoke her opinion on the issue, setting her fajita down in indignation.

  “I think you ought to talk to him,” she said. “Like, really sit down and talk to him. Air it out. Talk it out. Something like that.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her and took a sip of water. “I don’t think so,” I said. “It can’t go well. So it can only go badly.”

  “That’s no way to think of it. You don’t know that.”

  “Well, you don’t know my father,” I said. “He’s not going to want to talk to me. Why pry into it and make a scene and cause a fuss when I could, hear me out, just walk away from it? Live out here and mind my business forever?”

  “Because he’s your father and you care about him,” she said. She looked almost triumphant when I didn’t have anything to say to her immediately after.

  “We used to get along,” I admitted.

  “So try to get along again. It’ll feel better not to have that hanging over your head. You’ve put so much shit behind you and healed from it—why let this bog you down?”

  I sighed. “Because I’m sick of putting shit behind me and going through the healing process. I’d rather just let sleeping dogs lie. I still get along with Mom, and Dad’s not hostile. It’s best to forget about it.” I was starting to feel a little irritated.

  As though she could sense my irritation, Quinn relented. “If you say so,” she said, echoing her earlier sentiment. “I don’t know your family.” And that in itself held a bit of a patronizing tone; she didn’t know my family, but we both knew that she was an expert in people and how people’s minds worked. She basically knew my family just by knowing me.

  Either way, we were willing to let it go for the sake of the evening.

  “So, are you still going to work at Pete’s?” she asked.

  I nodded. “For now. I’m thinking about getting a different job. Not that Pete’s a bad employer, but I don’t know how long he’s going to have money to pay me with, and I need money now to make payments on the house.”

  “That’s fair. Do you think you’ll tell him?”

  “Nope. I think I’ll still work for him when I can and work another job around that.” Pete was my friend, and I frankly preferred working out there to anything that I might do anywhere else.

  “He’s a good friend,” she said. “Didn’t he introduce me to you?”

  “Sort of. He pointed, got you to walk over, and then ditched me when I needed a wingman,” I said. “So he kind of screwed me.”

  “You didn’t need a wingman,” she said. “You were just fine the way you were. Besides, it gets old, having the same schpiel from two guys over and over again. It’s better to make judgments for yourself.”

  “Maybe.” I smiled. “And I can’t say that things didn’t turn out well.”

  “They turned out a little weird,” she admitted. “I mean, really weird.”

  “Yeah, but who cares?” I shrugged and leaned back in my chair a little. “If we’re happy. If you’re here. Who cares?”

  She smiled at me, and I wanted to memorialize that moment, Quinn at my dinner table, eating a meal we’d made and sharing our time. I wanted things to be like this forever.

  “Who cares?” she agreed, and her face split into a smile.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  QUINN

  When I got to work, my phone had several missed calls. I made the mistake of waiting until I’d gotten into my office to check the messages and found that they were all cancellations. I hadn’t realized that the local college was having an event that day, and all of my patients that day were attending it. I found myself with nothing to do for the rest of the day and a lot of late fees to file.

  I thought about what I’d talked about with Sawyer regarding his father. He seemed insistent that he didn’t want to talk to him. I thought of the times I’d interacted with him. I hadn’t talked to him much, and never alone, but I didn’t remember him as a cold, mean person. It sounded like Sawyer’s father was just a person who had experienced something rough and didn’t know how to heal from it.

  In any case, I was irritated with my own inability to do anything. I wanted to be proactive, and I knew what I needed to do to help Sawyer. I made sure I didn’t have any meetings for the rest of the day and got back in my car and headed for Eugene’s place of work; if I had my facts right, he worked at an accounting firm just outside of town. I didn’t know exactly what he did, but I didn’t need to. I just needed the address.

  Sure enough, his name was listed on the list of offices painted on the building’s door. I marched myself in and walked up to the front desk. The building was painfully quiet, and I felt like an elephant barging in and disrupting the peace. Across the hall, someone clacked on a computer. Downwards, someone coughed and then blew their nose.

  “Hello,” I said, voice lowered to the woman at the front desk.

  She looked up at me with an almost nauseatingly sweet smile. “Hi, welcome to Halloway Accounting. Do you have an appointment with one of our accountants?”

  “No, no—”

  “Would you like to set an appointment up?”

  “No, I’m just looking—”

  “We also offer walk-ins from three to five on Wednesdays, Thursdays—”

  “I’m looking for Eugene Gains,” I cut in. I didn’t want to be rude to this woman, but she seemed like an automated phone sequence brought to life. Something must have clicked because she nodded eagerly and pointed with a manicured finger down the hall.

  “He’s going to be in two forty-eight, just down the hall and to the left. He leaves for break in about an hour if you want to wait until then,” she said.

  “No, that’s alright,” I said. I didn’t want to give him the chance to bolt. This was horribly strange of me, walking into someone’s office and demanding to talk to them. But then, I was hardly demanding, and I would certainly leave if Eugene told me to.

  I was just worried about Sawyer, and it seemed that my worry about Sawyer led me to do enormously strange things. I stepped down the hallway carefully, even though I wasn’t wearing heels, until I reached two forty-eight, and then I wasn’t sure whether to knock or open the slightly open door.

  I decided to be safe and tap gently on it.

  “Come in,” said Eugene.

  I stepped into the office carefully. It was a small space, certainly not a cubicle but not as big as my own office. He was sitting behind a desk, slouched comfortably in the desk chair, pushing back slightly from his computer. Fluorescent lights overhead cast an eerie glow on the place. He took his glasses off his nose and set them on the desk.

  “Quinn, I wasn’t expecting you. What exactly brings you by? Did you have an appointment?” Eugene was quick to express his confusion at my presence and even quicker to diffuse any idea that he wanted me gone. “Please, please, take a seat.”

  “Sorry, I sh
ould have called ahead.” I’d gotten so caught up in my own rescue narrative that I’d forgotten to consider that he had a full day of work to do, and might not have time to see me.

  “It’s alright. I’m not busy. But what brings you by?” Eugene leaned back slightly. It was hard for me not to draw similarities in his face with his son’s. They had the same jawline, the same straight nose, the same heavy brow. Eugene had significantly less hair, though for his age it was just as dark.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Sawyer,” I said.

  Eugene’s expression faltered. The smile disappeared from his face, and he cleared his throat. “Oh,” he said. “I’m not sure I have anything I can tell you about him.”

  “Well, I think you might,” I corrected carefully. “See, I know some of what happened. I know Sawyer really, really messed up before he went overseas. And… well, I can’t tell you a lot of it, because it’s confidential.” Even if we’d been talking at a restaurant and not in therapy, it would be horrible of me to divulge specifics. “But I think that improving your relationship with him could really go a long way in helping him.”

  Eugene stared at me for a few moments before pushing his glasses back on his nose. “Do you know what he did?” he asked me. “He disgraced the family name. He nearly got me fired; I got demoted two positions.”

  I stayed quiet, prepared to do what I did best: listen.

  “I wanted to think that it was all his girlfriend’s fault,” Eugene said. “But they weren’t even together at some point. He stole from us, he lied to us, he treated us like… wel, his mother, Quinn, he broke her heart. I couldn’t just forgive and forget on the spot like nothing ever happened. And then he tore off to the military.”

  I frowned. “I think he went to the military to recover,” I said. “I think in his mind, going to the military was going to teach him discipline and self-respect. He’s certainly shaped up from what I’ve heard.”

  Eugene frowned, too. “I hadn’t considered that. I suppose the military would teach a fair amount about discipline and the like. But he didn’t talk to us much when he was overseas. It was like he could tell that it was going to be difficult, and so he didn’t want to bother.”