by Reid, Penny
The police arrived not ten seconds later. It was a good thing, too. Marie was holding a broken bottle of tequila, shards of glass in every direction, and Sandra was holding a gun; they were arguing about the apparently very expensive and hard to find skein of yarn that Sandra had stuffed in the mouth of one of the skinheads.
Quinn turned toward me as soon as the police entered. His eyes met mine, and what I saw there was a potent mixture of tension and relief. Nevertheless, he didn’t come to me. Instead, he placed his weapon on the ground then moved his hands to the back of his head, waiting for the Chicago police. The room felt unbearably large, and the distance between us felt impossible.
It wasn’t until hours later, after statements and questioning and a pseudo-physical administered by an EMT, that we were all released; actually, all of us but Quinn. Soon after the police arrived, they handcuffed him and took him to the police station despite protests from Kat, Elizabeth, Sandra, Marie, Fiona, and of course, me.
Ashley arrived exactly when she said she would, and she was quickly filled in on the details by Sandra. As she listened to the story, I watched a spectrum of emotions flicker across her features.
Finally, she settled on exasperation. “Why does everything good happen when I’m not there? I swear, the next time Janie’s hot boyfriend saves y’all from neck-tattooed skinheads, y’all better wait ‘til I’m done with my shift or else I’m gonna be pissed.”
“He didn’t save us; haven’t you been listening?” Elizabeth held an icepack to her chin where she’d been hit by a meaty elbow. “Fiona stabbed one of them with a Susan Bates needle, Marie was wielding a tequila bottle, Sandra pistol-whipped the other, and I shot the third.”
“Where were Janie and Kat?” Ashley looked from me to Kat.
“Hiding behind the couch like sane people!” Kat said before anyone else could speak.
Ashley gave us a sudden watery smile. “Damn it, if something had happened to any of you, I would have been very upset. What were you thinking?”
She initiated a group hug, which lasted well past what would have been considered typical, as none of us wanted to let each other go.
* * *
After all the ladies left, Elizabeth leaving with Marie, but before the last police car drove away, I approached a short, stocky guard who I instantly recognized and who’d been watching me since the police escorted us all out to the ambulance for our EMT checkups. It was Dan, the security man from the Fairbanks Building.
We walked toward each other, meeting halfway. His large brown eyes were big and kind, and he gave me a small smile; it almost looked apologetic.
“Ms. Morris.” He nodded to me.
“Dan, the security man.” I nodded to him.
He sighed. “Are you ok?”
I continued to nod. I didn’t want to say yes because I wasn’t sure how I was doing. However, I didn’t want to appear to be a basket case when I needed his help.
“Listen, Dan, I was hoping you could take me to Quinn—um—Mr. Sullivan’s place.”
“It’s ok; I call him Quinn, too.” Dan pointed with his thumb to a car behind him, a black Mercedes coupe. “That’s actually why I’m here.”
I smiled and released a short breath. “Of course.”
“Come on.” He motioned with his head for me to follow.
When we were settled in the car, and he’d pulled into traffic I noticed he was giving me long, sideways glances, as though he wanted to say something, ask something, but he wasn’t sure how to start.
Taking pity on him, I prompted, “Is there something you want to say?”
“Yes.” The word tumbled out of his mouth. “Yes, I wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”
I blinked at him, wondering how I’d missed his very distinctive Bostonian accent during all the times I’d talked to him before now. “Sorry? Why are you sorry?”
“Because Seamus is my brother, and he is a complete fu—er, he is a very bad guy.”
I shifted slightly and pressed my back to the passenger door so that I could study him more fully. “Yes, well in that case, I suppose I should apologize for my sister. She is also a very bad…guy.”
He chuckled. “Yes. Yes she is.”
I squinted at him. “Did you know Jem?”
He nodded. “She is still just as crazy as she was when I knew her.”
“Oh—you saw her recently?”
He nodded. “This afternoon when you came to the new building with your friend, I was in the apartment with Quinn and Jem.” He glanced at me as he turned the steering wheel to the right and merged onto Michigan Avenue.
I stiffened. “So, you were there?”
“Yep, that bitch—er, your sister—is crazy, but you know this. Quinn was trying to help her. He offered her money to disappear, but she started ranting and shit, and taking off her clothes. I swear, if I didn’t know her already—how nuts she is—I would have thought she was on something. Then she bit him and burned him with her cigarette, right through his shirt. It was crazy; blood was coming from his neck.”
I winced, thinking about Jem biting Quinn with such force that she drew blood. “Why was she taking off her clothes?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I dunno. ‘Cause she’s crazy? When you got there, he was cleaning the bite mark and all the blood. He was leaving to get some new clothes. I would have taken a bath in alcohol and hydrogen peroxide if she’d bit me.”
I chewed on my lip as I took all this in; I felt relieved, stupid, and anxious. Dan parked the car in the basement of the building and escorted me up to Quinn’s penthouse. He opened the door for me but didn’t go inside.
I’d been quiet since the car, wanting to sort through my tangled mess of emotions and the evening’s events. But I was restless to see Quinn and not really capable of dwelling on anything until I wrapped my arms around him and felt, rather than saw, that he was safe.
“So…” Dan handed me the keys to the penthouse. “Quinn should be home sometime tonight. When he called me they hadn’t charged him with anything, and they shouldn’t ‘cause he has a license to carry that gun.”
I stopped him as he turned away. “Dan, can I ask you something?”
His eyebrows lifted as he nodded his assent. “Sure.”
I shifted the keys from one hand to the other and tucked my hair behind my ears. “How long have you known Quinn?”
He shrugged. “Since we was kids.”
“Do you know why Quinn left Boston?”
He hesitated; his eyes narrowed as his lips twisted to the side. “Yes.”
I couldn’t help but smile at his one word answer, the very picture of cautious loyalty.
“So do I…I think.”
He stood very still, watching me, his eyes moving over my features with concentrated intensity; at length he said, “You know, he is really crazy about you; not crazy like your sister Jem crazy, but trying-to-become-a-better-person crazy.”
I pressed my lips together, and my heart, now whole again, skipped wildly in my chest before I replied, “The feeling is mutual.”
* * *
At first, I didn’t even contemplate sleep. I did laps around Quinn’s bare apartment, wishing I’d brought a comic book with me, realizing I didn’t even have my stupid cell phone. In a fit of petulant annoyance, I threw myself onto the bed and promptly fell asleep.
When I awoke, I was confused. The panorama of the park and the lake and the city told me that it was still the middle of the night, but I had no idea how long I’d been asleep. I stretched, planning to get up and check the time on my watch via the light of the bathroom, but I acutely realized that I was not alone.
There was a body next to me.
In fact, I was curled around that body.
And the body was not asleep.
My breath hitched. “Quinn?”
The arm around my shoulders squeezed gently before he removed it then shifted on the bed and propped himself up on an elbow so that he was facing me.
“Hey.�
� His other hand immediately entangled itself in my hair, and he was tugging my head back so that he could cover my mouth with his. I leaned into his kiss, pressing my body to his, and feeling an overwhelming mix of indescribable joy, relief, and gratefulness.
We kissed, just kissed, for a long time; sometimes I was over him, sometimes he was over me, sometimes we were sitting up, sometimes we were lying down. It went on and on, and if it weren’t for the necessity of air, we might have kissed for the rest of our lives. I would not have complained.
I was straddling his lap and we were on the middle of the bed when he pushed my hair from my face and rested his forehead against mine.
“Oh, Quinn, I am so sorry.” I hugged him to me, my arms around his neck.
“Janie, there is nothing to be sorry about.”
“But I assumed the worst. I saw you with Jem, and I assumed that you…that you and she…”
His arms tightened around me. “You assumed we were playing ‘hide the salami,’ as Elizabeth called it.” Despite the evening’s events, this made us both laugh.
When the short burst of laughter ended, I nuzzled my head into the crook of his neck, careful to avoid his injury. “Dan brought me here and told me what happened with Jem. I am sorry she bit you.”
His hand rubbed circles over my back, and with each pass his hand moved lower until he was stroking the base of my spine just above the curve of my bottom. “It’s ok. I don’t care about Jem.”
I pulled just far enough away from him to see his face. He looked tired and weary.
“I don’t either,” I said, and then I sighed at the memory of all the trouble my sister had caused. “You should know that I do trust you.”
He offered me a small smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “We can talk about it in the morning.”
“No…no, listen.” I shifted backward, and at first, he didn’t let me go, but then he finally allowed me to move to the edge of the bed and stand. I reached into my pants pocket and pulled out the folded email, my voice was still thick with sleep, “Olivia—at least I think it was Olivia—left this on my desk yesterday. I was going to show it to you today.” I shoved the paper at him.
He looked from me to the paper, and then with clear hesitation, he took it from my hand. I crossed to the bathroom and flipped on the light, which gave him just enough illumination to read the contents. He pushed to the edge of the bed and stood, his long form unfolding, straightening, then stiffening as he read. A rush of breath escaped his lungs and his eyes flickered to me.
“I haven’t seen this, but Janie, I can tell you…”
I covered his hand holding the paper with mine. “No; it doesn’t matter. What I wanted to say was…what I want to say is that I saw this yesterday, and yes, admittedly, I had a momentary freak-out, but then I thought about it, and I realized that I trust you. I knew there had to be a reasonable explanation, and I was going to show it to you today, tonight, before everything went from Judd Apatow harmless to Quentin Tarantino horrifying.”
Quinn took a step toward me, shaking his head. “I asked them to.”
“You don’t have to explain. I trust you now, and I trusted you when I read it. I just wanted you to know that I wasn’t worried. I-I-I have faith in you.”
This time his small smile did reach his eyes, and he looked almost proud of himself, and a little mischievous. His gaze moved over my face in a slow sweep as he licked his lips. “Let me tell you what this is about, ok?”
I nodded. “You don’t have to.”
“I want to.” Quinn dipped his chin and leveled me with a measured stare. He glanced briefly at the email and handed it back to me. “After you and I talked on Tuesday, when you told me you didn’t want to take the plane back with everyone else, I knew that you felt uncomfortable leaving things undefined at work. I called Betty and tasked her with asking the lawyers to put a proposal together to define our work expectations in such a way that would allow us to continue our relationship outside of work.”
My attention moved back to the email as he explained, and I read it again with this information in mind.
“Obviously they misinterpreted the request. I wanted them to set up something tangible, something legal that you could feel good about, something that would protect you in case our relationship ever…ended.” One of his hands moved to the back of his neck.
“It reads as though they interpreted your request, your main objective, as protecting the company. They want me to resign so that you and I can date without putting the company at risk.”
“I’ll get it straightened out.” He shifted closer, running the back of his knuckles against the skin where my scoop-neck shirt met my chest.
I surveyed the email once more before stepping away from him to place it on the dresser. “I know you will.” I couldn’t meet his eyes. Part of me wondered if it would just be better for everyone if I did quit. Then I could date Quinn without making others uncomfortable about putting his company at risk.
“Hey.” He tilted my chin back until I met his gaze. “What are you thinking about? And don’t tell me it’s robots.”
Despite myself, I gave him a brittle grin. “Maybe I should quit.”
He shook his head. “No. That’s not acceptable.”
“Quinn.”
“That would be bad for my company.”
“But at least…”
“What are you so afraid of?”
“I’m afraid that if you get to know me, you’ll think I’m weird.” The words, words I didn’t even know I was going to say, blurted forth like a disobedient hiccup.
His gaze refocused and met mine directly. “I do know you, and you’re right; you are weird.”
“I’m afraid you’re laughing at me instead of with me.”
He shrugged. “There is nothing I can do about that. You’re funny.”
“I’m afraid that your money and my lack of money will come between us.”
He placed his hands on his hips. “It won’t. I won’t let it.”
“I’m afraid that I feel more for you than you feel for me.”
He shook his head slowly. “That’s not possible.”
“I’m afraid that we’re moving too fast and that this is just infatuation.”
“I don’t know what this is.” He breathed in as though he was going to continue, but then he paused.
Quinn studied me, held my gaze. He seemed to be considering his next words carefully.
I knew what I wanted him to say: I wanted him to tell me that this wasn’t infatuation, that he was certain we were meant to be together into eternity, that I looked pretty and ask me if I did something different with my hair, that I was the most beautiful woman in the world to him. It was what I wanted to hear because I was falling in love with him.
I’m not falling in love; I am in love with him.
Finally, his words deliberate and cautiously crafted, Quinn said, “I think about you all the time.” His gaze narrowed and his jaw ticked as though the confession had cost him. “And I can’t guarantee that this isn’t infatuation because sometimes I think it has to be. But…” His gaze moved upward then to the left and over my shoulder. “I don’t think of you as perfect.”
I frowned at him.
I don’t think of you as perfect.
“Oh…ok.” My eyelashes blinked in rapid succession, and my brain started compiling the list of all my imperfections. “Is it because of my height? My seepage of trivial facts? My granny panties?”
“No, listen.” His attention swiftly moved back to me. “That’s not…” He shook his head and swallowed. “If this was just infatuation, then I would, we would become disillusioned at some point, yes?”
I nodded, and I was sure it was unconvincing.
He continued. “I don’t have misconceptions that you’re flawless. And you don’t have any illusions about me. You’re too practical, and if you did, you wouldn’t have reminded me on Wednesday that I need to be a good guy.”
I nodded again
, this time more convincingly albeit more warily.
“I don’t think this,” he motioned between us, “I don’t think this is infatuation.” He shifted closer, and I thought he was going to touch me, but instead, he crossed his arms and his voice became softer and gentler. “I know that life, in general, terrifies you; I know that you are frequently oblivious to the obvious, and I know that you are completely irrational at times.”
I opened my mouth automatically because my brain was telling me to object, but surprisingly, I didn’t actually feel any outrage at being called terrified, oblivious, and irrational. His assessment was, more or less, on target. The fact that he knew these things about me, and he seemed to accept them regardless, made me feel better and worse.
“And all that drives me crazy. You drive me crazy.” His voice deepened, and he leveled me with a narrow glare as he continued. “But, in spite of how totally nuts you are, I wouldn’t change anything about you.”
I pressed my lips together and started biting the inside of my cheek. I bravely met his pointed stare. “You think I’m totally nuts?”
He nodded and sighed. “Yes. And I…” his eyes moved over my forehead, eyebrows, nose, cheeks, lips, and chin. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”
I inhaled deeply, trying to breathe him in, trying to understand this desire to take him within myself and carry him with me always. He lowered his head and my eyes drifted shut.
“Janie…”
I sighed. “Yes?”
“What are you thinking?” His voice was a whisper, his breath against my cheek.
My eyes fluttered open and I licked my lips, wanting his mouth on mine, driven to mad honesty. “I love you.”
I sensed rather than saw his self-satisfied smile. “Good.”
He softly brushed his lips against mine. My immediate confession-induced panic dissolved as his nearness blanketed me in a frightening sanctuary I never knew I wanted, but now recognized was necessary to my continued existence.
I lost myself to him and to myself; to trust and to faith; and in that moment, I was fearless.
