Intersect: The Parallel Duet, Book 2 Page 5

  I can’t argue with him. And it’s not even for my protection—it’s for his. He’s so worried about being predatory, but I’m no longer sure he’s the one we should be worried about.

  * * *

  It takes a little over two hours to get to the small town where I grew up. I point out the road to the farm as we pass. I have good memories of my childhood there, but the bad memories are enough to kill any nostalgia I might feel.

  “I guess your mom is no longer there?” he asks.

  “God no,” I reply.

  “Why so adamant?” he asks.

  For a moment my pulse begins to trip and sputter, as I contemplate telling him the truth of what happened, but it’s too engrained, this habit of keeping those secrets to myself.

  “Farms are a lot of work. Although the storage-unit passcode is our farm address so maybe she didn’t hate everything.” I inhale deeply. “Shit. I hope she didn’t change the code.”

  He frowns. “Can’t you just call and ask her for the new one?”

  I take another deep breath. “No, because then she’s going to want to see me, which means she’ll see you.”

  “You’re doing wonders for my ego here.”

  “You expect me to believe a super-hot neurologist who’s also a former college athlete could get his ego damaged over that?”

  He laughs. “It might take one or two more serious blows, but you do intend to introduce me to her at some point, right?”

  I smile at him. It sort of thrills me to see my super-hot neurologist so adamant about meeting my mother. “Of course. Just not one week after I cancelled my wedding. Turn here.”

  He follows the direction of my hand and we pull up to the storage facility, me breathing a quiet sigh of relief when the code works. Nick lifts the rolling door and flips on the light…where we discover wall-to-wall boxes. My shoulders sag. “I moved most of these in here myself, but I forgot how bad it was.”

  He shrugs. “At least they’re labeled.” His face lights up as he grabs a box that says Quinn Photos on it. “I think we should start here.”

  “The sooner we get out of here, the sooner we get to the lake,” I remind him.

  “Right as always,” he says, putting the box back where he got it. In the end I have him retrieve a box labeled Photo Albums and two boxes labeled Files.

  I flip through the photo album of my father’s family. There are pictures of my father and Sarah as toddlers, two towheaded babies with sunny smiles. And then nothing.

  “Nick, look at this,” I tell him, drawing him away from the files. “There are pictures of Sarah as a baby and a toddler, but then they just stop.” His eyes follow mine to the remaining pages, which feature only my father, as if Sarah never existed. His life is documented thoroughly…each birthday party, his high school graduation and wedding.

  But nowhere in the entire book is there a picture of Sarah past her babyhood. Nick releases a slow breath. “Okay, yeah, that’s pretty weird.”

  I glance over at the stack of papers he’s set on the floor. “How’s it going with the files? You find anything?”

  He shrugs. “Well, I’ve discovered that your parents have saved their tax returns going back to 1980, which seems a little paranoid. But I did find this,” he says, handing me a file, labeled Quinn, Psychologist Reports. “I didn’t look.”

  I hesitate and then hand him a sheaf of papers from it while I take the other. “I’m not too worried about you discovering my innermost thoughts when I was five.”

  I read through the first few pages of mine. It’s mostly background and psychobabble about tests they performed. It angers me more than anything else. My parents didn’t have two pennies to rub together during most of my childhood. Yet I’m sure this psychologist had no problem insisting I needed a bunch of irrelevant tests. My IQ? A cognitive-motor assessment? How could these things possibly have made a difference?

  “Holy shit,” whispers Nick.

  My heart thumps hard in my chest. “What?”

  He’s still staring at the paper. “You really did remember everything.” His voice is empty with shock. “You told them my name and that I was a doctor. You told them our address in London. You told them I swim. My name is all over this, and not in some vague way. I can tell it’s me.”

  I still. Waiting for the look, the one I saw all through childhood. When these things happened, my mother would grow purposefully quiet, trying to hide her fear, and her eyes wouldn’t meet mine for weeks afterward. But when he finally turns to glance up at me, his eyes are gentle, awed. “It’s fucking amazing,” he says.

  The relief is so sweet and sharp, I have to look away from him, worried I might cry.

  He continues to read, whipping through pages as if it’s the most fascinating thriller ever created, and I return to mine, skipping ahead to the final few pages—a transcript of what appears to be my last session.

  Patient was asked to draw a picture of her family, it says. Unlike previous drawings, “Nick” is excluded.

  JC: Can you tell me who these people are?

  QS: That’s Mommy and Daddy and me. And that’s Cocoa (dog).

  JC: You didn’t draw Nick this time. How come?

  QS: Nick can’t be part of my family. (Patient evidences notable sadness at this statement.)

  JC: Why can’t Nick be a part of your family?

  5-sec delay.

  QS: Because Nick is going to make me do a bad thing.

  JC: What kind of bad thing?

  Patient hesitates again, is uncomfortable.

  QS: I can’t tell you.

  JC: Did Nick ask you not to tell?

  QS: Nick doesn’t even know it’s going to happen.

  JC: Can you tell me more about this bad thing he’s going to make you do?

  Patient begins to cry.

  QS: I can’t. But it’s very, very bad.

  Ice slips down my throat, fills my chest. It’s impossible. I must have gotten something wrong. Nick would never, ever make me do something bad. Maybe I pictured sex and misinterpreted it. Except I told the doctor that Nick didn’t even know it was going to happen.

  Beside me he is still reading avidly. I take in his beautiful, bright face. I must have gotten something wrong.

  He looks up. “Anything there?” he asks.

  I slide the papers back into the folder. “No. All garbage.”

  * * *

  We leave empty-handed. Perhaps in one of the hundred boxes in that storage unit there exists a scrap of paper or an old envelope with Sarah’s number on it, but we’re never going to find it.

  I wish hadn’t gone, but Nick feels otherwise. He brings up the psychologist’s report again and again.

  “You even described your wedding ring,” he says, glancing at me with those stunned eyes before they return to the road.

  I hadn’t remembered the ring at all until now, but the moment he mentions it, I can see it clearly. “It was your grandmother’s,” I tell him. “Don’t ask me how I know that because I don’t have a clue. This oval diamond with tiny diamonds all around it.”

  He frowns. “There’s no ring as far as I know.”

  I grin at him. “Maybe the ring you gave me sucked so my imagination embellished things a little.”

  He gives me one long glance before his eyes return to the road. “The ring won’t suck, I promise.” My heart quickens and I swallow, uncertain if I’m thrilled or panicked by how serious we’ve gotten already. I suspect it’s a little bit of both.

  * * *

  We arrive at the lake late in the afternoon. Nick’s still insisting we sleep in different rooms, and after what he told me I don’t have the heart to try to change his mind anymore. He shows me to the master bedroom so I can change into my suit—a red bikini, naturally. As I open my bag I notice a picture of Nick and Ryan as babies on a nightstand, and it makes my heart twist painfully. I miss Ryan and I barely remember him. How bad must it have been for Nick and his parents?

  I change and head downstairs to fin
d Nick standing just inside the pantry—and wearing nothing but swim trunks. My God. How much swimming does he do? Because I could swim twenty-four hours a day and not even approach a stomach like his. The brain tumor isn’t what’s going to get me in the end. It’s this, trying to behave when Nick is shirtless.

  “What are you doing?” I ask a little breathlessly.

  He backs out of the pantry. “I thought we had more staples but—” His eyes sweep over me from head to foot. “Holy shit.”

  I grin. “It’s not like you haven’t seen it before. Sort of.”

  He coughs. “Let’s just say the experience of the red bikini is a little different in person.” He walks over to me but hesitates. I’m the one who bridges the distance, going on my toes to press my lips to his, waiting to feel his self-restraint lessen just a touch. When his hands grip my hips, pulling me tighter against him, the need for him sharpens—a pulse in my belly that is half pleasure and half pain. He breaks the kiss suddenly, breathing fast as he pushes a hand through his hair. “If you are going to make noises like that we will not get out of this house.”

  I’m dazed and desperate to continue. “I didn’t make a noise,” I argue weakly.

  “Believe me. You made a noise.” He blows out a breath. “Let me feed you before I take this in a very different direction.”

  I’m tempted to object, but lunch was hours ago and it’s not going to hold us forever. I need to let him move at his own pace anyway. “So there’s no food?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “My parents’ housekeeper must have tossed the food I bought last weekend. I need to run over to the Captain’s Market.”

  “I’ll go with you,” I tell him. “I have to call Jeff really quick but then—” His face falls and I put up a hand before he has time to object. “I have to. His mother texted twice today, begging me speak to him. He drove home yesterday, and it sounds like things are going poorly.”

  Nick’s jaw hardens. “You don’t owe them anything.”

  I wish I agreed with him. It would be such a relief just to wash my hands of the whole thing. Nick and I were meant to be. I just wish it hadn’t left so many people damaged in its wake. “That’s not true,” I say softly. “Abby was there for me after my dad died. And Jeff was too. I…I do feel like I owe them this.”

  He sits on the counter, staring at the floor, his teeth grinding. “I can’t tell you what to do,” he says, a hard edge to his voice that wasn’t there before. “But all these calls and these visits of his—he’s not looking for you to explain. He’s trying to bully you into coming back, and he’ll use guilt and fear and anything else at his disposal to do it. He’s gotten his way for a long time, just by playing on the fact that you were too nice to draw blood.”

  I think of the house in Manassas. The way Jeff returned to the topic again and again, trying to persuade me. Is this any different? “Maybe,” I reply. “But I do still need to call.”

  “If he gives you shit,” Nick warns. “Draw blood. Because if you don’t, I will.”

  * * *

  I walk to the grassy hill leading down to the dock, taking a single deep breath before I hit Jeff’s name on speed dial.

  He answers immediately, and my stomach sinks a little. I guess I was hoping he might not answer at all. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he asks, in lieu of greeting. His words are overloud, slightly slurred as if he’s been drinking. “Six years together, our wedding invitations already out, and all I get is a two-second conversation in your lobby? That’s all I deserve?”

  No matter how much I wish it wouldn’t, guilt is mounting inside me, a small shrill alarm in my blood that is only going to get louder. “I’m sorry,” I begin. “I—”

  “No,” he cuts in. “It’s not your turn to talk, it’s mine. And this is some crazy fucking bullshit. You’re going to tell me to my face you don’t love me. Do you? Do you love me or was it all a fucking lie?”

  I’ve never thought of Jeff as a bully before, not until Nick said it, but as Jeff unloads on me it’s striking a chord. “I don’t love you in the right way,” I reply, each word meted out carefully. “I care about you, but this isn’t what I want.”

  “What, precisely, don’t you want? Name one goddamn way in which I’m not what you want.”

  A voice inside me whispers bully, bully, bully. And it’s not Nick’s voice, oddly enough, but my own…a voice I didn’t know existed until this moment. “I—”

  “Because everything I am I did for you. I moved to D.C. for you. I took this job for you. I gave up everything for you and you don’t even appreciate it.”

  “I never asked you to do those things,” I tell him. I didn’t want him to do those things. I remember the sick resignation I felt when he showed up on my doorstep, telling me he’d gotten a job in D.C.

  “You sure didn’t complain about it, though, did you? You were more than happy to let me give up football and move from one shit job to the next, all so you could stay in D.C. So I want you to tell me what’s so wrong with our life. What is suddenly, out of nowhere, so terrible you just can’t stand to be with me anymore?”

  I never asked you to give up football. If you hadn’t moved to D.C., I’d have gone back to school. I wouldn’t have gotten talked into a mortgage I wound up paying on my own most of the time, a mortgage that took school off the table entirely. All the things I thought during our worst moments but kept to myself…those words are bubbling in my throat, demanding to be released. But I’ve done him enough harm without that, so I force them back down. “Nothing is terrible,” I tell him. “It’s just not what I want.”

  “Then what do you want? Because I think you don’t have a fucking clue. That brain tumor is making you crazy and you’re the only one who doesn’t see it.”

  I pushed everything down for so long, and when I finally act on my own behalf he tries to convince me I’m not sane? For some reason this is the last straw. “What I don’t want,” I hiss, “is someone who insists on moving to Manassas or back home when he knows I’ve got no desire to do either one, and who discourages me from following my dreams. I don’t want to be with someone who talks over me in the hospital and tries to start a fight with my doctor. I don’t want someone who suggests I’m insane the second I speak up for myself. And you know what, Jeff? No one would want that. So instead of blaming the brain tumor, take a look in the mirror.” The words tear out of me, with a thousand more behind them that I manage to keep to myself, and I don’t feel scared, the way I thought I might. I feel strong.

  “Do you hear yourself?” he demands. “Tell me you hear yourself, because this is not you, and if it’s not the tumor I don’t know what it is.”

  I laugh. It’s his default, I realize. Blaming me, blaming my tumor, is way easier for him than accepting a shred of responsibility. “I can assure you it’s me. You just might not recognize it because I haven’t been me in a long time with you, if I ever was.”

  “Believe me,” he snarls, “if it weren’t for that tumor, you’d be humiliated by what an absolute cunt you’re being right now.”

  I’m so stunned I nearly drop the phone. I’ve known him since I was a little kid, and I never dreamed he’d use that word, much less direct it at me. But it’s freeing, seeing how low he will sink when he doesn’t get his way. Any lingering guilt I felt releases into the air like a balloon. “You have no idea what a cunt I can be. Keep harassing me and you’ll find out.”

  I hang up and turn to find Nick standing a few feet behind me with a shirt on and keys in hand, eyes narrowed to slits.

  “Tell me he didn’t just call you that,” he says, his voice flat. It would be easy to mistake him for calm, but there’s nothing calm about him right now.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  His nostrils flare and his fist is clenched so tight I’m worried the keys are going to cut into his palm. “The fuck it doesn’t.”

  “Believe me—if you intervened, it would just make things worse for everyone involved.” My mouth twitches upward. “A
nd I took care of it.”

  “Why are you smiling?” he demands. “Because I’m fucking pissed.”

  I laugh and close the distance between us, wrapping my arms around his neck. “Did you hear me? I was kind of a badass for the first time in my life. I was feisty.”

  He grins reluctantly. “Yeah? And? Did you enjoy it?”

  I go on my toes to press my mouth to his once, quickly, before I drop back to the ground. “Yeah, I really did.”

  He pulls me back to him. “Good,” he says, his lips a whisper from my mine, “because I think seeing you feisty is unbelievably hot.”

  Desire spasms low in my stomach at the look on his face. “You might not like it so much when it’s directed at you,” I reply, my voice suddenly breathless.

  His lips graze my temple, my cheek, the corner of my mouth. He teases me, avoiding them, moving down to my jaw and my throat. “I think I’m going to like that even more. But I’m going to fuck you until you can’t climb out of bed afterward, so wait until that’s an option.”

  I groan. The combination of his mouth on the side of my throat, and his words, and the image of him doing exactly what he said…I want it so badly I don’t know how we’re ever going to avoid it. “You can’t say things like that.” I feel winded. “Or I’m going to beg you to do it.”

  He is hard against me, and his hands now contain a tension on my hips they didn’t have before. As if the rage that was boiling in his blood only moments ago has suddenly been channeled elsewhere. “Jesus. You have no idea how badly I want you to.”

  I vibrate with the need for more. His hand slides from my hip to my thigh, beneath the bikini bottom. His fingers glide over me, slip inside, and he groans low in his chest—a stifled, desperate sound. This isn’t carefully planned like we’d intended, but it no longer matters. I can’t be content with just his fingers. He could make me come ten times, just like this, and it still wouldn’t be enough. My hands are at the button of his trunks, sliding them down even as he lowers me into the grass. On an open hillside, in daylight, for all the world to see, and it just doesn’t matter.