Parallel

by O'Roark, Elizabeth

  She grins at me. “You’re safe. Probably.” She hops out and leads me to the top of the hill where, far below us, a river winds as far as I can see, lit with starlight. I pull her close and for a moment we just take it all in. She was right—this is perfect.

  “I forgot how wet it is,” she says. “I don’t think we can sit out here.”

  “I have an idea.” I open the tailgate of the Jeep and spread the blanket out in back. The roof is already off and the back seats are down, so there’s just enough room for the two of us.

  “You’re pulling me into the back of your car but I’m the scary one,” she says as I lift her up.

  “You’re safe,” I reply. “Probably.”

  She looks at me from beneath her lashes and her mouth curves upward. “That’s disappointing.”

  Her words and that raspy little note in her voice send blood rushing to my cock. I flinch as I climb in after her, trying to will it back down to neutral. This is essentially our first date, even if it feels like our hundredth. I’m not going to try to get off in here like some sex-crazed teenager, no matter how hard it is. Literally.

  She pours us each a plastic cup full of wine, and then we lie on our sides, facing each other, since there’s really no other way the two of us will fit.

  “I like it here,” I tell her. “How’d you find it?”

  She puts her wine down. “My dad and I used to hike up here when I was a kid, and later I started coming on my own.”

  I hear a hint of something sad in her voice and it puzzles me. I don’t understand how it is that her childhood, when she describes it, always sounds so lonely. She looks like the kind of girl who would have had everything— too many friends and admirers to count, the adulation of an entire town. “Why’d you keep coming back here by yourself?”

  She hitches a shoulder. “It was hard growing up here sometimes. It was hard being in my own home half the time. But coming here reminded me how big the world was, and that in a world as big as ours, there was surely a person and place for me.”

  “A person?”

  Her lashes brush the tops of her cheekbones. “The person you’re meant to be with. The one who accepts you in spite of everything and matters so much that the rest of the world matters less.”

  I want to be her person. I already know she’s mine. “And did you ever find your place?”

  “Yeah,” she says softly. “That person I was talking about? I’m pretty sure it’s wherever he is.”

  I lift up her hand and press my lips to the base of her palm. My nose grazes the inside of her wrist, longs to continue a path on her velvet skin. I stop myself. The gesture might merely be romantic with someone else, but I want so much from her right now I think I could turn almost anything into an excuse to remove her clothes. “You still haven’t told me how you ended things with Jeff.”

  She sighs heavily. “It’s a long story. Just suffice it to say he’s very unhappy with me right now. He filled up my voicemail and spent most of the morning calling on repeat, which is why I turned my phone off. Based on the texts I saw tonight…he’s going to need some time to cool off.”

  “You’re not planning to go back to your house tomorrow, right?” I know it’s premature but if Meg wasn’t in the process of taking over my apartment, I’d ask her to stay with me when she gets back. I feel a sharp stab of desire at the thought of it. Of having her somewhere private, for an extended period of time. Her splayed out on my bed. Fuck. I need to think about something else, fast.

  She gives a small, surprised laugh. “It’s been so chaotic I’d barely thought about it. But no, I’ll avoid the house right now. I guess I’ll crash on Caroline’s couch for a while.”

  “And is Caroline Team Nick or Team Jeff? I’m just trying to figure out how many more enemies I have.”

  She blushes. “Caroline says I should sleep with you before I decide anything for sure.”

  Another stab of desire. “I like Caroline’s ideas. You should listen to her more.”

  She raises up on one forearm so she can see my face, setting the wine behind her. “How exactly is this going to work?” she asks. “So you don’t get in trouble?”

  I thought about it the whole way up here, without ever arriving at a perfect answer. In an ideal world we would hide this. We’d sneak around and lie to anyone who asks, but I’m not willing to do that, and I’m definitely not willing to ask it of her. “I’ll tell anyone I have to tell that I knew you before you were a patient, which doesn’t let me off the hook ethically but helps. And then, after you’re done with your degree, we could—” I stop myself with an embarrassed chuckle. “Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  She smiles. “You can’t leave me hanging like that.”

  “I was going to say that once you got your degree we could go someplace where no one knows us. So congratulations—you’ve turned me into the creepy guy who talks about the distant future on a first date.”

  Her smile widens. Even if it’s creepy, she doesn’t seem to mind. “I thought you were a commitment-phobe?”

  She is leaning over me with all that hair falling around her face and that perfect peony mouth begging to be kissed and suddenly I can’t stand to keep holding back. “Not anymore,” I reply, wrapping my hand around the nape of her neck to pull her face to mine.

  The kiss is gentle at first. I savor it, like the first sip of a really good wine, breathing her in and out, that smell of soap and summer. Lingering on the feel of it, memorizing that ripe, perfect mouth, and her skin, soft as rose petals.

  I roll her to the side, cradling her jaw as her mouth opens under mine. That first taste of her turns the kiss into something else. Something deeper and darker. Territory I’d planned to avoid tonight but can’t resist now that it’s here.

  My hands slide from her hair to her back to her hips, palming curves I’ve dreamed of touching for months. Her breasts, her waist, her perfect ass. She inhales when my mouth moves to her neck, the sound sharp and full of need. I want to drown in her response, in the way her body arches into mine, asking for more.

  It continues and the world starts to narrow—to our mingled breath, to her sounds, to the need inside me that coils and grows until I can barely stand the pressure. I stop thinking of anything beyond what I want from her. Where I want my hands and mouth. Where I want hers.

  Our movements become frantic. The desire for her grows vicious, swells inside me until it feels like my skin is too tight to contain me. It’s been too long. I’ve waited too fucking long for this and I can’t keep waiting.

  I start to push her on her back, ready to take everything from her, heedless of my good intentions—but beneath my hand I hit the Jeep’s cold metal floor where the blanket has pushed away. My eyes open and reality comes crashing in, an unwelcome guest. We’re in the back of my car, her back pressed to bumpy metal, my toolbox an inch from her head. My body is straining for friction, my cock throbbing and wedged between her thighs, and I’ve never needed to come as badly as I do right now. But this is the woman I want to spend my entire life with, and this is not how our first time should go.

  I somehow force myself to stop, rolling to my back and pulling her against my chest. “Now I’m the creepy guy who tells you we’re just going to look at some stars and then tries to molest you.”

  Her mouth curves up. “I wasn’t complaining.”

  Her willingness is not helpful right now. I’m still fighting with myself not to pick right back up where we left off. “I don’t want half measures,” I tell her, pressing my lips to the top of her head. “I need everything from you. And that shouldn’t happen here, no matter how badly I want to convince myself otherwise.”

  “I think this is all harder because it feels like we’ve already waited forever. It’s like I’ve been missing you and craving you my entire life, at some level.”

  Yes. That’s exactly what it is. Some part of me, the part that existed in another life with her, has waited all these years to get here. I’m like a man w
ho’s been deprived of water for too long. When I finally get it, I want to drink until I drown.

  “If we’re going to get through tonight successfully, some precautions are in order,” I say, grabbing a spare blanket and wrapping her in it twice.

  She raises a brow. “Your precautions involve turning me into a human burrito?”

  She doesn’t know about the night in Baltimore yet, but even what just happened here should be reason enough. “It’ll help make sure I don’t change my mind. Or at least it’ll slow me down if I do.”

  She tucks her head into the cleft of my shoulder. She fits perfectly, as if she was made to be pressed against me like this. “You should have been right here all along,” I say quietly.

  “I’m just happy I’m here now,” she says, nestling closer.

  * * *

  It’s the rain that wakes us.

  A light mist, fortunately, but even a light mist isn’t something either of us could sleep through.

  I drive her back to her mother’s house and walk her to the door. So much about this feels like high school again, but high school as it should have been: spent with a girl I can hardly stand to leave. “I think I kept you out past curfew,” I tell her. “If you get grounded, your mom won’t let me take you to prom.”

  She grins. “She’ll have a bigger problem with the fact that you’re thirty.”

  I kiss her one last time and then I pull her close. “Seriously, Quinn,” I say. “Don’t let your mom guilt-trip you into changing your mind.”

  She goes on her toes to press soft lips to my jaw. “I somehow found you once in London, and then I found you here, when I didn’t know who you were,” she says. “And nothing can keep me away from you now that I do.”

  36

  NICK

  I arrive at my building just after five. I decide to skip my morning swim in lieu of a few more hours of sleep. In truth, what I’d like to do is just sleep until Quinn is back, and safe. It’s new for me, caring like this about someone else. As if my heart is now somewhere outside my body, completely beyond my control. What will I do if we don’t find a solution to the tumor? We’ve only been together for a few hours and I already feel like I won’t survive losing her.

  I unlock my door and stagger to a halt when I step inside. Meg is sitting in a chair at the kitchen table, looking at me like I’m a cheating spouse caught tiptoeing home.

  “I went to the lake yesterday,” she whispers, her eyes red-rimmed and raw. She looks from me to the window and stares at it blankly. “I really thought that if I just did things your way, did the stuff you like for once, you’d see how good we could be together. But you weren’t there, and you didn’t sleep here either. So I want to know who you were with.”

  I exhale both guilt and irritation. We aren’t together anymore. I broke up with her for the right reasons, and I shouldn’t have to feel bad about it. I shouldn’t have to come home at five in the morning with her waiting to confront me. But I don’t want to hurt her either, and the way I feel about Quinn would definitely do that. It could also get me in a lot of trouble if she were to ask about it.

  “I was at the lake,” I tell her, forcing myself toward the table and taking the seat across from hers. “I must have missed you there.”

  “Alone?”

  I should lie but somehow the truth slips out instead. “Most of it.”

  “So you took someone to the lake,” she says, voice warbling now, heavy with tears, “but you never took me.”

  “You wouldn’t have wanted to go to the lake.”

  “That’s not the point!” she cries. “The point is that you never asked! I had to drag you kicking and screaming into this relationship, and this girl—this stupid, stupid girl you barely know—gets everything I had to fight for. She’s the one you stayed out with last week, isn’t she?”

  My ribs seem to pull in, constricting my breathing. It looks bad. Maybe it is. I should have ended things with Meg a lot sooner than I did. I should have ended them the first time I tried, months ago. “It’s not what you’re thinking.”

  “Then what is it, Nick?” she screams, standing and pulling at her hair. “Because I figured out weeks ago that you were interested in someone. I thought it was the patient Lynn said you were spending so much time with, and I figured it would pass because we both know that can’t go anywhere, so if it’s not what I’m thinking, please tell me what the fuck it is.”

  I sink low in my chair and rest my head against its back, cornered and suddenly depleted. I could lie right now, but I have a feeling it’ll come back to bite me in the ass. It’ll be easy enough for her to find out who Quinn is and assume the worst. “She’s someone I knew a long time ago, and now she’s here and”—I pause because the next words sit like something bitter, gritty on my tongue—“she’s dying. So I want to spend every hour with her while I can.”

  Meg’s mouth hangs slack. For the first time I see a hint of disgust in her eyes when she looks at me. “So she is a patient. Why didn’t you turn her over to someone else once you realized you knew her?”

  Because I don’t trust anyone else to take her case. “She wanted me to treat her.”

  Meg laughs, an angry, hysterical sound, loud enough to wake the neighbors. “Yeah, I bet she did. Who the hell is she? You said you’d never had a long-term relationship.”

  Cornered again. Jesus. For a guy who’s been generally truthful through most of his life, I’m getting called on a lot of shit right now. “I haven’t. It’s complicated…we didn’t date for long, but we’ve known each forever.”

  Her arms fold over her chest as she paces. I feel like I’m being cross-examined. “Where do you know her from?”

  The easiest answer would be London, except that’s also the easiest to disprove since Quinn’s never been. “College.”

  “We’ve talked about college a thousand times,” she says, throwing out her arms, “and you never thought to mention you were in love with someone there?”

  I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I wasn’t in love with her,” I say, though it feels like a lie. “I don’t know. Maybe I was. But I just ran into her again, and—”

  “Decided it would be fun to fuck someone behind my back while we were making plans to move in together?” she snarls.

  “No. Not at all. I didn’t sleep with her. I still haven’t.” Though God knows if we’d been anywhere but the back of my car last night I would have. Repeatedly.

  Her jaw tightens and she takes the chair farthest from mine. “You’re a smart man. You see what’s happening here, don’t you? This has nothing to do with some random girl from your past. You’re just scared of commitment. Tell me something: did this magical connection with a girl you fucking forgot take place before or after I suggested moving in here for a while?”

  I know what she’s saying. As an outside observer, I’d agree with her. But she doesn’t get the fact, and I can’t explain, that some part of Quinn has been living inside me this entire time. “After,” I reply. “And I know how that sounds. All I can say is that it’s real.”

  She stands, her eyes damp, pushing the chair back in with too much force. “How long does she have?”

  I swallow. “I don’t know. A few years, maybe.”

  “A few years, maybe? That means a year. And when that year’s up, or however long it is,” she says, heading for the door, “you’re going to be back where you started, with the same job, and the same life. And then what?”

  I flinch, unwilling to contemplate the answer. “I don’t know.”

  The door clicks as it closes softly behind her, leaving only her question ringing in my head. The idea of a world without Quinn is already unthinkable. I can’t imagine what I’m going to do with myself when she’s gone.

  Which means that, somehow, I’ve got to find a way to make sure she stays.

  * * *

  There’s no way I’m going to fall back asleep now, so I go straight to the hospital instead to take another look at Quinn’s scans. There’s g
ot to be something I’ve missed. There’s got to be a way to save her. It’s light out by the time I’ve showered, but the city is only beginning to rise. Birds and the clamor of garbage trucks in the distance are all I hear as I walk on silent streets.

  The night staff is still on duty when I reach my floor, heavy-eyed and paper-laden as they get ready to change shifts. A few brows are raised when I walk by the nurses’ station, but they’re too eager to get home to worry about why I’m here so early. I unlock my office door but freeze as I cross the threshold. There is a woman at my desk—inside an office to which only I and one other person have a key.

  I grip the door handle, stunned into silence. How? How could this woman possibly have gotten in?

  I’ve never seen her before but there’s something intensely familiar about her. The pale blond hair, the fine-boned beauty. There’s this feeling inside me when I see her face—rage, terror—that I can’t begin to explain.

  She takes in my shock, unimpressed, then looks back casually at the scans she has spread on my desk. Quinn’s brain scans, placed in chronological order. “It looks like nature’s done my work for me,” she says, her mouth curving into a smile. “Hasn’t it?”

  Stop her, my sluggish, stunned brain commands. I lunge, but before I’ve reached the desk she vanishes. Only the scrubs remain behind, sitting in a pile on my chair.

  37

  QUINN

  The woods behind Nick and Ryan’s house are finally free of snow. There are buds on the trees, tiny green shoots poking out of the dirt. Once we fix the steps, we’ll finally be able to get back into the treehouse.

  “I can’t believe your parents let you do that,” I say, watching Nick hammer a nail into the wood.

  “My dad had a treehouse when he was a kid,” he replies. “And he built the whole thing himself.”

  “Does he still go in it?” I ask.