by Ivy Jordan
We walked back to the car. Quinn looked out the window at the house.
“What if you get lonely?” she asked. “What if you want someone to talk to?”
“I’m not going to the moon,” I pointed out. “I can always drive into town.”
Quinn twisted her mouth to the side and adjusted the air conditioning vent. “Well, I would get lonely,” she said. “But it’s not my house.”
“You like the city?”
“I love it. It keeps me awake, in a way. Reminds me that I’m not quite so important.”
“I think you’re important.” I frowned at her insinuation.
Quinn didn’t say anything more a moment, and I worried that she didn’t want me to make any advances—and I hadn’t intended to make any advances in my remark anyway, but I wasn’t about to argue about that if she’d taken it that way.
Right as I was about to apologize, she spoke.
“You know, I think you should still see a psychiatrist,” Quinn said. She rubbed her wrist bone. “Even if you don’t see me, I think you should see someone.”
“I don’t know.” I put my blinker on and got on the highway. “I don’t think another psychiatrist can help me all that much. It’s rare for me to be able to talk to people.”
“You should at least try.” Quinn shook her head. “Look, it’s not… I’m not saying that you’re guaranteed a super great meeting with a different therapist. But I can’t help but feel awful with what’s happening. I basically ruined your shot at a professional therapy experience with me, and you shouldn’t not see one.”
“You did not act alone,” I reminded her. I was every bit as responsible as she was, if not more so.
“Maybe. Still, I… I can’t rest easy knowing that something happened that you’re not talking to anyone about.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Are you?”
I frowned. I’d been stupid to argue.
“Exactly.” Quinn ran a hand through her hair and sighed. “I don’t know. You don’t have to, obviously. But I think you should talk to someone.”
“Is that in your professional opinion?” I asked, attempting to lighten the mood.
“As a matter of fact, it is,” she returned, with much attitude and a smile.
“Well, then I guess I have no choice but to think about it.” And I would think about it, whether I was thinking about doing it or thinking about how I wasn’t going to do it.
“That’s a relief,” she said. “Thank you.”
I hoped she wouldn’t hold me to it for long. I didn’t want to deal with finding someone else, trying to adjust to someone else, and spending hours in a therapy office with a person I didn’t like burning money I couldn’t afford to burn. But most of those things were an insult to Quinn, so I kept them to myself.
“On one condition,” I said. I had an idea forming in my head.
“What?”
“I’ll give another therapist another go,” I said, “if you’ll agree to give me a second shot at dinner.”
“What do you mean? Dinner went well, I thought.” Quinn adjusted herself in the seat to face me more.
“Dinner itself, yes. But I recall embarrassing myself enormously shortly afterward.” As we drew closer to Austin, I turned off of the highway and onto a feeder road.
“Oh, that wasn’t so bad,” Quinn insisted.
“I want a shot at redemption,” I reiterated.
“Then you can have it,” she said. “I’d certainly like to go to dinner again. Tomorrow night?”
“Tomorrow night,” I agreed.
Chapter Twenty-Two
QUINN
I did my best not to show that I had something else on my mind during the day while Sawyer and I went out and looked at houses. Well, looked at a house—he’d gone home after the first, seemingly set. I didn’t understand how he could live so far out in the middle of nowhere and be perfectly happy. I needed to live in a city with Chinese takeout and excellent cell service. It wasn’t that I was pampered, it was just my lifestyle preference.
Either way, the entire day I sat on the conversation that I’d had with Stacy the day before. When I got a call from Sawyer’s mom, I’d almost expected it to be about Stacy, but it wasn’t; she’d merely wanted to have me over for breakfast to talk about Sawyer. We hadn’t ended up talking about him, not much, but it was good to see her all the same.
I was too involved with him, a part of me knew. At this point, it wouldn’t be easy to just walk away. I’d made connections with his mother, talked to his ex-girlfriend, and had spent a large amount of time with him. Although I’d already deemed our patient-doctor relationship hopeless a few times, it was worth naming it hopeless once more.
Seeing him looking for houses, making progress, it was enough to keep me from sharing any details about Stacy. I didn’t want to burden him. I didn’t want to drop any bombshells on him unless I knew for sure he’d be able to handle it, and I didn’t know that for sure. He wasn’t seeing a therapist, after all—we hadn’t discussed it explicitly, but it seemed Sawyer wouldn’t be coming back. I thought about what Babs had said and wondered if I could still help him as a romantic partner.
No. Not the same way. There was a special part of the patient-therapist bond that brought many people to it—patients didn’t have to worry about their relationship with their therapists, for the most part. They could share whatever they wanted about themselves and not worry that the therapist wouldn’t like them, or that the therapist would be angry. Now, I was in a place where Sawyer’s perception of whether I liked him or not mattered. That threw everything out of balance.
I decided that the best place to go to work through the issue was the source of the original advice: Babs. I drove directly to her house, almost a little vengeful, needing more information. I’d trusted her advice, and now I felt more lost than ever. I didn’t know how to manage this anymore; Babs knew how to manage everything, always confident, or maybe she’d just stopped caring about anything anymore.
When I reached her house, the doorbell was broken, so I knocked, and then knocked again when I got no answer. I looked down at my phone to try calling her to see if she’d answer, and reprimanded myself for not calling her first, and then the door came open.
“I heard you. I was taking a piss,” Babs complained.
I rolled my eyes. “Thanks for sharing. Do you have a minute?”
“Yeah, yeah, come in.” Babs waved me inside, and I took a step in. It didn’t smell as strongly of pot, which led me to suggest that Babs wasn’t high this time. She’d also taken a shower, judging by the look of her hair, and so I had a feeling that I was going to be speaking to a much more level-headed Babs than I had last time.
“I have a complaint about the advice you gave me,” I told her.
She sat down on her couch and I sat down at the other end of it. One of her cats mewed at me from across the room.
“Excuse me?” Babs raised an eyebrow.
“Things are weird with Sawyer now,” I said. “Well, sort of. He doesn’t know I talked to Stacy.”
“Woah, what? She’s supposed to be in rehab right now.”
“I know, but she bailed. I don’t know if she like, escaped, or if her time is up, or what.” I honestly hadn’t even thought to ask. She came and went from rehab so often that it wasn’t so much a question of how she’d gotten out so much as when she’d be back in.
“Weird. When did you talk to her?”
“Yesterday. She showed up at my office.”
“What?” Babs sat back and glanced at her bowl on the coffee table like she wasn’t sure whether she was still high or not.
“I know.” I sighed. “She wasn’t mad or anything. Well, she was kind of mad, but about the same stuff. Fuck the system, I hate my parents, all that stuff. But she kind of made a point of talking to me about Sawyer.”
Babs cringed.
“Yeah. She didn’t threaten me or anything. She actually kind of gave me her blessing,
even though I didn’t explicitly describe the relationship between us.” I shook my head.
“Yeah, but why would she turn up at your office just to say best wishes and then leave?” Babs asked. “It’s weird. What did Sawyer say about it?”
“I didn’t tell him,” I said.
Babs groaned and threw her head back. “Quinn, you’re killing me here.”
“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 pull
ed 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.