Over the rest of our feast, I explain to her why Nick has been stripping in the first place—not to make her feel like an ass but to clear his name and show her that he might not be all bad. When I’m done, Valerie’s eyes are the size of the blueberry muffins on the pastry table.
But I assure her I’m not upset about it. It is what it is. I’ve tried to apologize to him and he hasn’t responded, so it doesn’t matter anyway.
“It’s a shame you can’t tell him how you feel about him, though. Why can’t you?” Her tone takes on the cheerleader I’ve always known her to be. Team Rae! Love conquers all!
But I shake my head and glance at my empty plate. “Meh. I think I’m going to leave well enough alone.”
Somehow we’re still sipping cocktails, and I recline in my seat. Rub my belly like the lady ogre that I am.
“I’m glad we did this,” I say, stretching my arms overhead.
Food coma in three…two…
“Me too—thanks for messaging. Sorry I was too spineless—”
“Oh gawd, we’re so nauseating right now.” I laugh.
“So what now?”
“Well…I guess I need to text Quinn. Maybe even call her. Crazy, I know.” I do the one-finger cuckoo windup at my temple and reach for my phone. “There’s just one more thing I want to ask you before I do.”
“Of course,” Val says, finishing off her coffee. She looks at me with hope in her eyes. “What is it?”
“What the hell is with that hat?”
* * *
Chapter 22
Want me to go with you?” Val asks as we leave the café and I’m about to go to Quinn’s.
I think about that a minute but ultimately decide no. “I need to do this on my own.”
We stand, sunshine beating down on us, and hug the circulation out of each other’s arms.
Quinn hasn’t answered my phone calls or text messages from the restaurant or on the drive over to her apartment, but that doesn’t stop me. I have to make her listen. Irrational Quinn stubbornness be damned.
Like that time senior year when Valerie and I had to physically pick her up and carry her out of the art room during the Homecoming dance because she was convinced her date was hooking up with some sophomore in the boys’ bathroom. She had broken into Miss Rombalski’s class and was ransacking the place for a pair of scissors, determined to burst into the bathroom. Catch her guy in the act. And cut his balls off.
We had to talk her down then, and that’s exactly what I’ve got to do now.
When I get to her place, Phil answers the door all wringing hands and twitchy mouth, like he’s gotten into the strong stuff. He envelops me in an unprecedented hug, his beefy man arms all but squeezing the life out of me.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” he says.
“You been smoking something?” I pull back, dust off a shoulder.
But he doesn’t laugh. He offers a firm shake of the head and takes me by the arm into Quinn’s kitchen.
“I don’t have your number.” He sounds winded. He’s glancing all around the place, everywhere but at me. “I should get it. Will you write it down? I just never thought—”
“What’s going on, Phil? Where’s Quinn?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you: I don’t know. We had breakfast. Everything seemed normal. Then I jump in the shower, and when I get out, she’s gone. Her car’s still here, but she’s not answering her phone, she didn’t leave a note. I’m just freaked out. Do you think she could have been kidnapped?”
I try not to cock my head like some bewildered spaniel, but I can’t help it. It’s Quinn. Does he really not know this?
“How long’s it been?” I ask instead.
“Just over an hour. Should I call the cops?”
His eyes are edged with red, deep with distress, so I try to sound soothing. “It’s way too soon.”
“Right, right. I just…don’t know what to do.” He plunks himself down at the breakfast bar, head in hands.
Something about his concern, even if dramatic concern, warms my cold, dead heart.
“I do,” I say, and I give his arm a pat. “Don’t worry. I think I know where she is. I’ll bring her home.”
And, well, it’s only a teensy lie, but it makes his ginger features go from ashen to pink in two seconds flat, so I’m determined to find Quinn and see what the hell she’s thinking.
Return her to her senses before I ruin her wedding too.
I drive all over Plantation—past our old haunts, most of which aren’t open right now anyway, the dance club, the marina—and she’s nowhere. I rack my brain for something, anything, any whisper of a memory from our special time together that might trigger where she would have fled. What her next move would be.
But I come up with nothing.
I briefly consider that maybe she’s gone to burn down her ex’s place in the woods, but even that’s going too far for Quinn.
I think.
After a quiiiiiick detour just to have a look-see, I find the house still standing, palm trees flanking the fountain out front.
No smoke, no visible trip wires across any expanse of the driveway.
And I’m mostly not disappointed.
Dickface.
I give the place a flipperoo of the ol’ bird, just for old times’ sake, but Phil’s texting and calling since he has my number now and it ruins the moment, so it’s time to go let Billie out and think some more.
Where could Quinn be?
The mystery is solved, however, when I pull up to my place, and there’s our girl, perched on the sidewalk. Her knees make a tent of her maxi dress; her back is straight against my front door.
She dangles a can of wine from one noodle arm, sways it to and fro like the afternoon breeze.
Or, yanno. Like she’s a panhandler.
#potatopotahto
“Where’ve you been?” She squints up at me, her lips dry and in full pout.
I snort. “Where’ve you been?” I grab her hands, and she staggers upright. Clings to my middle like a baby koala to center herself, and sloshes some wine onto my peep-toe wedges.
“Good thing those are old,” I say.
We struggle inside and navigate our way through the labyrinth that is getting past Billie, Froggering our way through my living room furniture and out the sliding glass doors to the patio.
“How’d you get here?” I ask, once she’s properly plopped herself into a papasan chair, her legs pretzeled on the red cushion.
“Uber,” she says, and I roar.
“You’re nuts. You know that?”
I disappear inside to scrounge for some reinforcements, which ends up being Gatorade, a bottle of water, and a box of Cheez-Its. When I come back out, she’s asleep, sunlight dazzling down her dark hair—so I go back in for my laptop and opt to do some work until she wakes up.
Phil is relieved when I text him to say she’s here, safe and sound and sleeping, but I know we’re not out of the woods yet—not any of us—so I tell him to just give me some time with her and Try not to panic.
I decide to bite the bullet and send off a batch of six query letters, to six literary agents I carefully researched and feel might be a decent fit for my work. I’ve already received a rejection from one of them when Quinn awakens from her nap, but I’m out there. Chance taken. Rejection is part of the process.
Quinn curls her arms out in front of her in a stretch. She nearly falls out of the chair when she notices me.
“Holy shit—how—” Her face is pure horror. “Oh yeah.” And then her countenance goes sheepish, worry lines tugging at her mouth.
“Morning, sunshine. Drink this.” I slide on a smile as I scoot the bottle of water across the table.
“Thanks” is all she says and we sit without a word, nothing but the sound of some nearby hawks cawing away and the occasional car driving by as our soundtrack. We’re quiet until she finishes the snacks and looks a tad more human.
“So,” I singsong, “h
ow’s your day?”
“Shut up!” She laughs and lobs the empty water bottle at me and thankfully misses.
I miss catching it too. Yay sports!
“Look, I was way out of line. I should never have said those things to you. I just—”
“Quinn. Have you lost your damn mind?”
The question seems to have thrown her. Her mouth opens, but nothing spills out of it except a stray cracker crumb.
“What are you doing?”
She fixes her stare upon her fingers. “I don’t know.” She takes a long breath and eases her way back. “I was sitting there on the couch with Phil last night. We were watching HGTV. And I was just like Are you kidding me with this? This is life? This is it?”
I laugh. “Dude, HGTV is legit—”
“I know!” She rises and starts what, at first, is a wobbly pace of the length of the patio, but then she balances as her wheels keep spinning. Billie follows her zigzag with big eyes but never lifts her head from her paws, and I wonder how she’s not getting dizzy.
Quinn continues. “One of those Kennedy-looking Property Brothers was wearing something so insanely douchey and I turned to Phil and I’m like ‘Check that out,’ and he all lazes his attention over to me and goes ‘Huh.’ Can you believe it, Rae? Huh. Like this is the guy I’m supposed to be marrying in six days?”
She opens and closes her hands all jazzy, like she’s performing a Fosse routine. Like pop—pow. But when I say nothing, she presses on.
“Once I explained to him what I had said and what I meant, he just…laughed. As though he really didn’t get it and I was being ridiculous and…”
She’s doing the vapors now, fanning herself with stiff wrists, and I’m just smiling and shaking my head because #Quinn.
“He’s a guy.” I shrug. “He’s not concerned about what the Property Brothers are wearing; he’s probably trying to absorb techniques on how to, I dunno, open up a bathroom. Knock down some wall in his place. Or whatever goes through dudes’ minds when they’re watching HGTV.” I dismiss it with a swat. “It’s going to be okay. Trust me.”
“How do you know?” Her gaze, intense.
When I don’t have an answer right away, she groans and starts pacing again.
“I just think, it’s not too late, right? I can call this off.” She grabs my hands in a frenzy. “We can go somewhere. Like we did before. Get away.”
I search her face, and there’s a hopefulness there, a desperation.
She’s saying all the words I’ve wanted to hear her say since she and Phil got together: She chooses me! She’s just as terrified as everyone else! And yet I don’t feel any amount of satisfaction at all.
Her words tether me to my seat.
“You mean run away,” I correct, and snap my hands back. “Listen, I will respect whatever your decision is here, but taking some girls trip isn’t going to solve anything. Unless we’re moving to Ibiza this time, we still have to, yanno, come back. Do you not love Phil? Is that what this is about?”
She gives an exhale fit for a Greek tragedy. Sophocles himself couldn’t make this thing up. It reaches me from three feet away.
“I do love him,” she says. “I just—”
“Because he loves you. He’s been blowing up my phone all day because he’s worried about you. He thought you were kidnapped.”
She scrunches her nose.
“I know, I know.” I wave it off. “But he’s been sick to death about where you are. He wanted to come with me to search for you. It must have taken a lot for him to rely on me, your screwup friend, to find you and bring you back without him. But he did it. And that says a lot about his feelings for you.”
She cuts her copper stare to mine. “You’re not a screwup. I shouldn’t have said any of that. It’s not true. I don’t even think he really thinks that. He barely knows you. I just think he feels threatened by you. You know more about me than any other person, and that’s intimidating.”
“It’s probably better that way…” I squish my face and widen my grin.
“Truth!” She laughs. “But I shouldn’t let him say all that stuff about you, because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and it’s not true and—”
“Calm down.” I stir some aloe into my tone. “He’s just trying to be on your team. Have your back. You know, because of that whole love thing I keep talking about?”
She presses her lips together. “I know, and really, I’ve allowed it because I’m a petrified idiot.”
“How so?”
“I just…what we went through before. What you’re going through now. It’s not that I pity you—I don’t. But I don’t want to go through any of that again. Ever. And you, your stories, the memories that flood my brain whenever I think of you, whenever we’re together, are a constant reminder of all that. That’s why I’ve pushed you away, I guess.”
I let a beat go by. It’s weird to hear her admit what I’ve suspected for so long.
“It’s why I’ve resented you,” I say. “Why I’ve been defensive. I don’t want this marriage to be the death of our friendship. You think I want to be the last one out here, floating along on this stupid raft? It’s lighter without you. Unsteady. So I’ve been a little tough on you lately because of how easy it seems to have been for you to sail away without me. Dismiss my life as silly now because that isn’t your life anymore. Believe me; I get it. But I also think it’s crap. You think I don’t understand why? Think I don’t get that you’re scared? Of course I do. It’s scary every time I start to like someone. It’s hard to put yourself out there. But we’re in different spots now. And you can’t do what I’ve been doing and just not try. You can’t give up what you’ve got.”
She’s nodding over and over, tears dripping down her flushed cheeks, but she says nothing.
“Quinn. I don’t want to ever hold you back. Here you are, days away from marrying a good and decent man who loves you enough to fight for you, and if you’re thinking about skipping town with me to have some stupid adventure—all because he didn’t answer you ‘the right way’ about HGTV? Well, then I must be holding you back. And I’m sorry for that. If what you’re telling me means the sight of me brings up too much for you, then fine. I’ll go away. I’m not going to be happy about it, but I’ll do it for you because I don’t want you to throw away what you have. I’m not saying it won’t be hard. You’re my best friend, and we work together. But I want you to be happy. And if this is what you need, then this is what we’ll do. That’ll be my wedding present to you because I refuse to drag you down.
“I’m sorry my existence reminds you of all the bad times. That kind of…stings. Because, to me, so many good things came out of us dealing with all that together. But if all you see in me is a reflection of what you don’t want to be anymore, then—guess what—I don’t think that’s on me; it’s on you. Because we have twenty years of memories together. And I choose to remember those.”
We’re silent a long time. Until the mosquitoes start a-feasting on us, the hawks have flown away, and the sun has begun its descent toward the west.
The tang of the citronella candle burns in my nose, and I’m starting to get buggy. Twitchy. We’ve reached that point in a breakup conversation when there’s nothing left to say, unless you start talking in circles.
An impasse. A stalemate.
Time to go.
It’s that point when you know, if you walk out that door, this is it. And while you want to leave, you don’t want to too. Because then that will mean it’s really over.
“So is this what you want?” I finally ask, reaching for the goddamn cheese crackers because apparently I’m insatiable, even at a time like this. “Look, I get that you have your life preserver. But what can I say? We’re different people. For you, getting married again is your life preserver. For me? It might not be. And that shouldn’t make you sad, or sad for me. I don’t think I’ve ever realized it more than today that it doesn’t make me sad. I don’t consider myself down. I consi
der myself…full of possibility.”
Something in me brightens at my paraphrase of Val’s words.
When she said them at brunch, they didn’t quite hit me, but coming out of my mouth now, they kind of light me from within. Even in the face of losing Quinn. Because Valerie is right. And I’ve never really thought about my life like this before. I’ve conditioned myself to see the negative, to dwell on the failures, instead of recognizing all the opportunity—excitement—that’s yet to come.
“You don’t hold me down,” she says, voice hoarse. “It’s my stuff. You’re right. And I’m sorry.” Her face twists with emotion.
“Hey, if I had a guy who loved me like that, I’d be freaked out too. I wouldn’t be sure whether to run or to hold on for dear life either.”
I think of Nick.
Force a smile, but a C-clamp tightens around my chest. I rub at my sternum as if that will make it go away, but it doesn’t. Something squeezes, crushes my rib cage at what a coward I’ve been.
There’s something real between Nick and me, and I’ve basically messed it all up.
How stupid.
Without even realizing it, moisture has leaked its way onto my face and I’m telling Quinn all about what happened with him, our night together, all the things I’ve held back the last few weeks.
When I’m done, she’s seated, legs tucked up under her, and she reaches for my hand. “You really care about him.”
“What?” I psh air right out of my mouth.
“I’m serious. I’ve seen it before in you, but this is different. You’ve sabotaged it because you’re scared. Well, guess what. Take hold of all that ‘opportunity’ you’re telling me about and go tell him.”
I crack up. “This isn’t about me. Look. Can I promise you I know what’s going to happen with your marriage? Of course not. But I know what I see. And Phil loves you. It’s taking a leap of faith, but that’s what love is. And when you do it, and it’s right…it’s worth all the pain and all the loss from before.” And then: “He’s not going to do what that asshole did to you.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t!” I snort. “But he’s not. Because if he were, you would know. You’re different from that girl I went to Ibiza with. I’m different too. In a good way. We know better. We appreciate more. That’s why we’re so frickin’ nuts.”
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