by Eden Butler
“That’s fine,” I’d said to my best friend, returning the smile she’d given me when she told me, and glaring at Quinn as he and Declan argued in Joe’s backyard while stacking bricks for a new fire pit Joe wanted to build.
“It might humble him,” Autumn had offered, nudging my elbow when I stared a bit too long at Quinn’s shirtless chest.
“Maybe,” I’d said, sipping from my beer. That day I’d been unable to keep my gaze from Quinn’s body and had spoken the smallest prayer of relief when he turned his back on me. But the smug asshole that he is, he’d noticed my attention, throwing me a wink over his shoulder. “But I doubt Quinn has ever heard the word ‘humility.’”
It was a notion I still held firm to, especially now as I caught Quinn’s frown, and his barely-contained glare as Rhea flipped to a new page in her sketchbook and leaned against my shoulder. Her smile was infectious, but I couldn’t enjoy it, not with the glare that Irish asshole shot my way.
“Sayo,” Quinn starts, his voice even, calm. I answer with a shift of my eyebrow, distrustful of how polite he sounds. That asshat knows he sounds like a twit. In fact, he’s likely getting a kick out of being sweet to Rhea, by the thick levels of metaphorical bullshit he piles into the room. “Give us a chat, yeah?”
“Of course,” I say, stretching my lips in an overdone smile, not blinking once or letting that smile waver in the slightest until I am out of the room with Quinn trailing behind me. I don’t, in fact, relax my mouth until we are nearly to the nurses’ station and down the empty corridor on the far side of the desk. Then I drop all pretenses. “What the hell do you want?” I ask him, my voice like a hiss.
“What the bleeding hell do you think I want? You’re well early, aren’t you? Who the feck do you think you are, creeping in on my time?”
“Who am I?” He doesn’t move when I step close to him, having to cross my arms to keep from smacking him. “You’ve got a lot damn nerve.” When he only glares at me, the hiss turns into a snarl. “She’s my damn cousin, Quinn. Besides, creeping on my time hasn’t bothered you for a solid week.”
None of that warrants his sympathy. Quinn simply rolls his eyes, grunting as though what he and Rhea do together is far more important than anything I choose to do to entertain her. “We’re working on something. What we do whilst I’m here is a feck of a lot more important to her than reading bloody Potter books yet a-bloody-gain.”
The grit in his tone and the contempt on his face has me stepping back, more wounded than I’d ever admit to him. “Did she… did she say that?”
Quinn’s frown doesn’t leave his face and he keeps his mouth and eyes tight. “She didn’t have to. I’ve seen the way she carries on with you. I see how she is with me. She likes the drawing bit.”
“That doesn’t mean anything other than the fact that she has a crush on you.”
“Does she now?” I hate the look he gives me. It’s all amused and almost hopeful. It makes me hate him even more than I already do. “What’s wrong love, you don’t like me giving my attention to another girl?”
“Would you get over yourself, you asshole?” Quinn’s attitude remains. He finds my upset funny, as though I’m beneath him and no insult I fling at him will even register. I don’t care if it does. But I do know he’s up to something, a fact he should know I’m onto. “And anyway I thought you were reading to her too! What project are you talking about?” When he doesn’t answer, I step back, frustrated, worked up over the secrets Quinn keeps from me.. “I don’t know what game you’re playing, Quinn O’Malley but I swear to Christ if you fuck her over even once, one damn time, that’s it. You’re gone. You won’t put a toe into that room. I can promise you that much.”
His laugh is quick, a small sound that tells me he’s insulted but pretends he isn’t. “You think I’m plotting something?”
“Why else would you be here?”
Quinn moves his jaw, grinding his teeth as he stares down at me and I can’t help but get the impression that I’ve somehow insulted him. But his attitude has always been biting and cruel. There is nothing I can do or say that would hurt his feelings. So why does he look a little off? Why isn’t his glare quite so severe?
“Why indeed,” he finally says, walking away, back toward Rhea’s room. I catch up to him, intending to follow, but Quinn stops me, holding up his palm to keep me back. “I don’t think so. I’ve another twenty minutes before you’re due to start in with your boring books. Don’t creep on my time and I’ll stay clear of yours.”
JOE PLAYS POKER with his friends in the campus square every Wednesday afternoon at two. It was perfect timing really. He’d would be out, Declan had class and Quinn would be visiting with Rhea. This afternoon was the only time I could investigate Quinn and the things I know he keeps hidden.
But I’d need a thief to get me inside.
At least, the daughter of a criminal.
Mollie jimmies the back lock with little effort. A credit card, a jiggle of the doorknob and the lock releases and no sound emits from the alarm. Mollie had bypassed that too.
“All in the wrist and the intimate knowledge of the mark,” she’d told me as we leaned against the side of Joe’s house, trying to figure out the code he’d use to secure his alarm.
Mollie had waited a full minute, thinking to herself, likely wondering what Joe would use as a password and then, a calculating, dangerous smile—one that reminded me a bit too much of Mojo, her former biker father—inched across her face as she punched in six numbers. The system disarmed and the back gate opened, letting us onto the property with little problem.
“Autumn’s birthday,” she’d said, opening the back gate for us to jimmy the lock on the back door. “Remind me to have a casual convo with Joe about passwords.”
With Mollie’s stealth and skill we are in the house in under five minutes.
It is Wednesday, a work day and even if Autumn wasn’t in the thick of teaching class or holding office hours, the place would still be empty. We walk through the back door, past the kitchen and the clutter of dishes on the counter, thinking idly that the fundraiser and Quinn’s invasive presence has kept Joe and Declan off their cleaning. With another glance into the kitchen, at the empty beer bottles and the disgusting smoked butts floating inside them, I’d guess that Quinn is at fault for the additional mess.
“He’s a slob,” Autumn had told me just two weeks after Declan and Quinn had returned from Ireland. Between her boyfriend and her father, Autumn had heard her fair share of complaining. “He smokes in the house when Dad or Declan’s not there and leaves all his empties and old butts around the house.
“Joe needs a maid,” I offered, understanding that Joe and Declan hadn’t had to pick up much after themselves since Autumn’s OCD prevented her from letting her father and boyfriend live in squalor. But with Quinn joining the fray, even Autumn’s clean freak ways had been squashed.
“No,” she’s told me, frowning hard, “they need to teach Quinn how to clean up after himself.”
“Teach him? You act as if he’s a third grader.”
“He may as well be. Declan said he doesn’t even know how to work the washer or load the dishwasher. Until he came here, he’d never even seen a washer.”
By the state of the place, I guess that Declan and Joe hadn’t given Quinn the first lesson and my suggested maid service had yet to be obtained.
But it was the spare room, the one near the front porch where I knew Quinn slept, that had me covering my nose.
“Oh my God, this dude is nasty,” Mollie says, pulling her t-shirt over her nose.
“Tell me about it.”
The room was both foul and putrid with dirty socks and boxers crowded around the door. Leftover food, stained clothing, or other, um, mysterious items were strewn on every surface, both floor and mattress. Mollie kicks off a load of laundry from the bed, using her foot.
“I hope he doesn’t bring girls back here.”
“No decent girl would do him in that bed.�
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“Yeah,” Mollie says, sidestepping around a stack of dirty dishes, “O’Malley doesn’t strike me as the type that much cares for decent girls.”
The mess was overwhelming, but, over the stench of dirty plates, and sweaty socks, was the hint of Quinn’s cologne.
It takes several minutes of snooping but I finally find a small box among the empty suitcases at the top of Quinn’s full closet. It is a solid cardboard box with old packing tape loosened around the edges and threads of loosened adhesive hanging from the opened center.
“Anything good?” Mollie asks, then we both freeze as we hear the noise of a car door slamming outside the window. “I’ll go investigate,” she says.
Once I kick aside some empty boxes that litter the floor and use my foot to shove off a stack of black t-shirts from Quinn’s bed, I sit with the box in my lap, pulling open the folded tabs. Inside are photographs—most of Quinn with half-dressed girls, blondes, redheads, their arms draped around Quinn, their lips on his neck, his face. Those I set aside, not remotely curious about the partying Quinn had done back in Ireland or the girls he kept company with.
Behind the pictures are stacks of envelopes, some bills, some used airline tickets and then, in a leather satchel tied with a black, satin ribbon, is an official looking document that reminds me of the legal docs my dad sometimes brings home with him. It is very formal-looking, on expensive letterhead with a logo I know comes from an exclusive barrister group in Ireland. The dates and address on the thick paper tell me this has to do with Quinn’s estate and I scan the document, my gaze catching here and there at Declan’s name. It contains legal jargon that is familiar, but it wouldn’t give me any information as to why Quinn was hanging out with my little cousin.
Digging deeper, shuffling through other papers and documents, I find a small leather bound photo album. It is red with gold edging, and has the O’Malley crest stamped on the front cover.
The cover creaks when I open it and the thick pages tend to stick together, so I have to proceed carefully. Flipping through the photographs, is see image after image of a kid, thin and very pale, but they are still undoubtedly Quinn’s features. I go a bit further and come to the same boy, older, but even thinner, and in a hospital gown. At his side is a thin woman with dark hair and eyes that remind me of dimes—a little dull and very narrow. She has the look of a bird, underfed and unwanted, but she holds onto Quinn as though he were a lifeline. There is no smile on her thin face, but the expression of the man on Quinn’s other side is friendly, a little flirty. The elder O’Malley had been handsome, his eyes bright, his expression open and I pull the album closer, scanning the man’s features closely, seeing a thicker, broader version of Declan in those features. But where Declan’s eyes, and Quinn’s if I’m being honest, are bright and open, their father’s seem guarded, and even a little weary as though his smile is forced and the welcome he projects is one that isn’t sincere.
No doubt the elder O’Malley had been charming, that I could tell by that cheeky grin and the soft, gentle cast of his features. But it struck me as odd, not that Quinn’s parents who seemed so different had been together, but that they had produced a son that was equally as unfriendly and as charming as the both of them had been. The oddest thing, though, was how different their expressions were—hers, haunted, his, wearily coy.
Quinn had clearly been very ill for quite a while, a few more flips of the pages tell me as much, with Quinn in one hospital room after another and his parents posing with him, their expressions unchanging from page to page.
And then, just like that, Mr. O’Malley no longer appears in the pictures. A few more flips and Quinn grows older in the photographs, healthier, and then the scenery changes. There are no more hospital beds, no more hospitals and only Quinn and his mother on the beach, then in the mountains, at the theater or in front of some monument or another, until I reach the end of album.
Is that all there is to it? Quinn had been a sick kid and likely had hated every second of it. From the pictures, I gathered that holidays, birthdays, at least until he was ten had been spent in a hospital bed. No wonder he seems partial to Rhea. He can relate. Oddly enough, his behavior and these photographs prove that there is, in fact, something other than venom beating beneath his chest.
But Quinn’s motivations leap from my mind when I place the photo album into the box and my fingers brush across a thick sketch book. It is here where I discover who Quinn really is. It was all there in charcoal pencil. The paper is thick and the charcoal dust falls from the sketches when I move the book, when the pages turn from one image to another, each with his sloppy O’Malley signature at the bottom.
The sketches themselves are remarkable lines that arch and move into forms. Mountainsides, horizons that go on and on and then figures that become forms, forms that become women, lots and lots of women of all shapes and sizes. Women who are young, beautiful, stunning. Breasts that are imperfect, bodies full and voluptuous, some thin and waiflike. They all come to life on these pages, are so vivid and real that I find myself stopping on each one, looking into drawn eyes that should have been flat and crafted but were vibrant and almost alive. They are all drawn from life, all drawn with at least some small affection. Who knew? I didn’t believe Quinn had it in him.
But what he was or who he’d been before he came to Cavanagh would be left for another day, another time when snooping could be more thorough. Joe’s tires stop just outside of the sidewalk in front of his house and Mollie darts back in the doorway.
“Come on, Joe’s back.”
Joe jiggles his keys in the lock and I move as quickly and quietly as possible, stuffing the envelopes and album back into that box, forgetting for a second about the sketchbook, I pull on the corner and stuff it back into the box, then up onto the shelf and close the closet door with a small thump that I hope Joe doesn’t hear.
It’s only when I hear Joe’s low, soft voice humming down the hall and then muffled by the shower running in his bathroom that I follow Mollie down the hall and out of the back door, locking it carefully behind us. And as we leave Joe’s home, I try my best to put thoughts of Quinn and the kid he’d been out of my mind. That look in his young eyes had been too haunted. That expression too damn familiar. It matched the one Rhea had worn up until a few weeks ago, before her health had improved. Before Quinn had made his way into her life without permission, without invitation. But maybe, just maybe, for a good reason.
THERE IS ALWAYS chaos and activity at my parents’ home. But Mom and Dad, if not my brothers and sisters, are, at least, well-meaning. For example, inviting everyone, including Joe (who declined) and Layla and Mollie (who conveniently found something else less embarrassing to do), to their house for Sunday lunch, had been born from a desire to catch up with my friends who hadn’t been over for a visit in months. Joe, Autumn suspected, had a date he didn’t want to mention to her. And so it was only Declan and Autumn and Satan Quinn, who rang my parents’ doorbell precisely at twelve-thirty and as soon as they arrive, I grab her, greeting Declan with a kiss on the cheek and ignoring Quinn completely because he was a supreme asshat. Despite what I had learned about his childhood, my heart had not softened much to O’Malley.
It might have, had he not continued to greet me with an eye roll whenever our paths crossed at the hospital, and insist that whatever he was working on with Rhea stay a secret just between the two of them—not that I hadn’t tried to get to the bottom of it (without being too obvious, of course).
“What’s the project you and Quinn are working on?” I’d asked Rhea nonchalantly just a few days ago after she had hastily stuffed her sketch pad under her pillow as I walked into her room.
“Nothing,” she’d answered just as offhandedly, too young, too inexperienced to understand that avoiding my gaze only made me more suspicious.
“Nothing?”
“Well, Quinn says it’s no one’s business.”
“Not even mine, kiddo?”
She’s glanced
at me then, attempting a smile that was pathetic if she really thought it would charm me, and one that did nothing to hide her humor. “Quinn says, especially not your business.”
Hence, my standing O’Malley Can Suck It attitude.
Not welcoming him into my folks’ home ala the ingrained southern hospitality Mom had raised me on was highly immature. Still, it makes me feel better, especially since he hadn’t missed the chance to call me a wanker yesterday when Rhea and I hadn’t finished our reading of The Forest Again chapter in the final Potter book before Quinn came in for his time with her.
“Pathetic,” he’d muttered as I’d left the hospital room. It was an insult I now returned when I saw him curiously scrutinizing the obscene amount of family photographs in the den. He kept poring over them, which gave me the perfect opportunity to be an asshat, too.
“We don’t all have different fathers, in case you’re wondering, O’Malley.”
I shoot a grin at my brother, Booker, who laughs at the old family joke. Of course we have different fathers. Duh, adopted.
“Nope,” Booker calls as he flops into the recliner in the living room. “But Mom swears the sperm bank screwed each one of her pregnancies. Except Carver. We got him from the Freak Show.”
“Oh you mean your identical twin brother? What does that say about you?”
“I was the better looking one.”
“You wouldn’t say that if he was here.” Booker’s laugh is loud, welcoming as my friends and Satan follow me into the room and I kick his feet off the coffee table to make him sit up.