by Drew Elyse
He ignored me, getting out of bed. I watched as he walked across the room and noticed my bags sitting near the door just before he bent over them. With no thought to how rude it was, he dug right through my things. If I’d thought of it a second sooner, I would have flown across the room to stop him. As it was, the realization of what was in those bags didn’t hit until he was already striding back my way.
By that point, there was nothing to be done.
I had my trump card—one Quinn hadn’t even realized she’d given me. Fuck, if anyone but Ember had gone to get her things at the hotel for me, I might not have known. Lucky for me, I sent a nosey ass woman who was all too happy to report back what she’d found.
The box was right on top, where Ember had put it, and where I’d left it after already taking a look for myself. I took the time to dig through her bag because I had more than one statement to make.
Turning back to Quinn, I realized she knew what I was doing. It was there in her widened eyes and the way she bit her lip. She was already spinning a hundred fucking stories in her head to explain this away. It should have pissed me off, but I was starting to find her bullshit amusing. If she were a better liar, maybe it wouldn’t have been, but watching her flail around and not come up anywhere near convincing was just funny.
I shoved one item into my back pocket, but Quinn didn’t notice. Her focus was on the box in my hand—a box I set down on the bed in front of her.
“You want to tell me you’re leaving when you still wear my ring?”
Her eyes stayed on the black velvet box, taking nearly a full minute before she fashioned a response. “I brought it to give it back to you,” she finally settled on. “It doesn’t matter to me anymore.”
That lie, no matter how obvious it was, I wouldn’t listen to. She wanted to be pissed, fine. She wanted to demand I give her a fucking divorce, fine. I’d fight all that. What I wouldn’t do was stand there and let her spit out bullshit about what we had not meaning anything.
“Don’t fucking lie about that, Quinn,” I warned.
Her head came up, her eyes like fire. “It doesn’t. It meant everything—everything—to me once, but you left. Now, it’s just a piece of jewelry.”
I lashed out before she knew what was happening, grabbing her left wrist and lifting her hand between us. There, on her ring finger, was a pale indent right where my ring should have gone. “How long did you keep wearing it? Because this,” I said, giving her hand a shake so she didn’t miss my point, “tells me you wore that fucking thing probably until the day you drove up here. Fuck, you might have been wearing it then, just took it off before you saw me.”
I’d been in too much shock to notice whether she’d had it on when she came to the clubhouse, but it was off when I visited her hotel room. I’d looked with a purpose, and I’d suffered that blow. She’d gotten exactly what she’d wanted.
Or, she had, until Ember told me the ring was in with her stuff—until I took that as the sign it was and got a better look at her finger while she slept. She could say whatever the fuck she wanted, but her skin didn’t lie. For two years while I was gone, she wore that fucking ring every day. She walked around with that symbol that she was mine displayed for the world.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” was the feeble response she landed on. I almost smiled at her attempt, but this was too fucking serious.
I put a knee on the bed and leaned in to her. “Baby, I promise you, you’ll be wearing that ring again soon. You can try to land your blows by forcing me to see you without it on, but it’ll be back where it belongs soon enough.”
“Too bad your promises mean nothing,” she spat.
I hated that. Not just what she’d said, but how I’d put that kind of venom in my sweet girl. She hadn’t had that before. Now, it was on me to suck that shit out.
First, I had to get her out of the fighting stance. It was low, but I played the only move I had to make her stumble. Reaching into my back pocket, I threw her contacts case next to the ring box.
“I fucked up, babe. There’s no denying that, but you lied every fucking time you looked at me.”
Panic stole through her features, her hand coming up to her cheek like she might have been able to tell that her little secret wasn’t hidden any longer.
“Thought I had all of you, but I didn’t even have your real eyes. Why the fuck were you hiding that from me?”
Her response was to hide them even then, tilting her head down so I couldn’t see. With uncoordinated movements—whether because of the fear or being sick, I didn’t know—she got up off the bed and rushed past me. I’d expected her to go for her bags, so when she ran straight to the door, I wasn’t able to stop her. I had no idea what she was doing until I looked to the bed and noticed the case was missing.
She was in the bathroom, the door not all the way closed behind her, leaned over the sink, attempting to put in one of the lenses with a shaking hand. That sight shook me past the anger that had been simmering since I’d realized she hid her real eyes from me, and the question I should have been asking all along came to me: why was she hiding them?
“Babe,” I called, making an effort to soften my tone. “You don’t need them.”
I watched as she forged forward. Her trembling hand caused her to miss her eye and the mostly clear piece of whatever-the-fuck they made those things from fell and all but disappeared. Quinn’s hands dropped until she was clutching the edge of the sink, her head hanging.
It might have been the wrong move, but it was killing me to keep my distance, so fuck it. I went to her and wrapped her in my arms. She didn’t turn around and face me, but her body sank back against mine. She didn’t try to push me off or move away.
“You don’t need them,” I repeated.
“It’s weird,” she whispered.
“That’s what you think?”
She shook her head. “I know my eyes are weird, Jack.”
“You want to know what I thought when I saw your eyes?” I asked. I wanted her to look up at me, but it was clear that wasn’t happening. What I got was another little shake of her head. She thought she was going to hear something shitty, even from me.
“I thought they were fucking amazing—the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. And I was fucking pissed. You had that beauty and hid it from me.” Her head came up, her gaze on me in the mirror, eyes wide, mouth open, her skin losing a little of the color it had regained. “You’d have shown me your real eyes the day we met, no way in fuck I’d have even let you leave that coffee shop without me. Not a chance. It was hard enough before with the contacts in.”
“Jack,” she breathed.
“I don’t know why the fuck you think anything else about them, but it’s whacked,” I went on. “Your eyes are gorgeous and unique. Baby, they’re fucking you.”
That made it through. She looked at her own reflection. Those incredible eyes were puffy and tinged pink from her efforts not to cry, but that did not one thing to minimize the impact of seeing them.
“They made fun of me,” she said. “As far back as I can remember, kids made fun of me because of my eyes. When I was in middle school, I found out I could get colored lenses to hide them. I begged my parents to get them. They didn’t like the idea, but they gave in eventually. I’ve worn them ever since.”
How the fuck did kids learn to be such assholes? I was a little shit most of my life until I grew up, but it wouldn’t have even occurred to me to make fun of someone for having Quinn’s eyes.
“No more,” I ordered. “I don’t want to see those fucking things hiding the real you again.”
Her small hands wrapped as much as they could around my wrists, pulling my arms from her with a light, but firm movement. She turned until I could only see her profile in the mirror.
“You can’t tell me what to do,” she said. It wasn’t angry, it didn’t even hold a hint of the attitude she could sometimes draw up. It was sad, resigned. “Even if we were still together
, you couldn’t order me around. Where we are now, you don’t have the right to ask.”
“You’re right,” I conceded. “But this isn’t about me, not really. This is about you. You shouldn’t hide, little bird.”
Her responding sigh didn’t even begin to have the effect the sound would usually bring. Particularly not when she walked away, leaving me standing in the bathroom alone. Leaving, just like I had once.
But I had an opportunity she didn’t. I had a chance to stop her, and I would. By whatever means necessary.
Back to the bedroom, grab my things, leave, I recited in my head as I returned across the hall. I’d walk if I had to. There was a gravel drive I could see from the windows. Eventually, it would lead to a road. I’d call a taxi on the way out, then walk as far as I could away from Jack.
It was a good plan. A little simple, but that was best. Playing at being cold, pretending he wasn’t affecting me—that was not working. He saw right through it, and giving him the opportunities to wear me down was proving dangerous.
I didn’t bother grabbing the ring box from the bed before zipping up my bag. He could keep it. It was best if he kept it. He was right, I had worn the thing every day for two years. No matter how many times Max tried to coax me to at least put it away if I wasn’t willing to run off to a pawn shop and hock the thing, I couldn’t bring myself to. I had an opportunity to finally leave that symbol of what we’d been behind in a way I thought I could manage. It was time to let it go.
I was arranging my bags so I could best carry them when I noticed Jack standing in the doorway. He leaned against the jamb, the image of relaxation. If I didn’t know better, I might have believed he would let me walk right past.
“I never told you,” he said, apropos of nothing, “how we ended up outside that courthouse.”
That got my attention. Seeing him there, I expected more macho statements about what I would and would not be doing. I’d braced for his babes and little birds. I didn’t expect him to take us back to California.
It caught me nearly as off-guard as the first time he’d brought up California…
Jack was on my couch, exactly one week since he’d approached me at the bookstore. We’d seen each other every day since. How, in seven days, he had become a fixture in my life, I didn’t know, but we just settled into it.
It wasn’t a whirlwind romance that came in hard and blew out fast. It was us settling in to something we’d both been missing all along.
When I wasn’t in class and he wasn’t at work—he worked at a local garage as a mechanic—we were together. Usually, this meant spending time at my apartment. Being alone in my place didn’t mean we were moving things forward quickly when it came to sex. We’d kissed, but nothing more. He was waiting for me to give him a sign I was ready for more, I thought.
The burn he ignited just from his kiss made me think it was time to do just that.
“Thinking of hitting the road for a few days next week,” he said, drawing my mind out of the dirty direction I was headed toward and back to the completely PG circumstances.
I tried to ignore the twinge of disappointment that caused. I had the upcoming week off classes and I’d already formed the habit of assuming I would spend at least some of that time with him.
“Maybe head down through California,” he went on.
“That sounds nice,” I replied.
“Don’t want to try going too far since you’re still adjusting to the bike. Maybe just down to Sacramento, take it in two days and make a lot of stops. Have a day or two in town before we do the same on the way back. Different routes, so there’ll be plenty to see,” he stated, like it was as natural a conversation as anything.
“What?” I asked.
“We’ll ride down Sacramento, take the trip slow,” he repeated like I was slow.
“I’m going with you?”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Babe, that’s what we’re talking about.”
“When you said you were thinking of hitting the road, I thought that meant alone,” I explained.
That earned me one of his grins before he reached over and pulled me across the cushion. Before I knew how he’d done it, I was straddling his lap.
“Just got you, little bird,” he remarked, “not looking to be away from you.”
He was so freaking sweet. I didn’t say that, though, afraid of seeming more like a dork than normal.
“Little bird?” I asked instead.
“I’m gonna call you babe, sweetheart, shit like that. You’ll get that from me, and it doesn’t mean I don’t mean it, but those names belong to everyone. Little bird is yours—and it’s mine. You’re my little bird.”
I really needed to stop remembering those days when we were new. It did nothing good for me to go down that road. Even after he left, those memories weren’t tarnished for me. They were the time when we were good and right, when marrying him made all the sense in the world even though it made no sense at all. But only knowing each other for two weeks didn’t matter, not to the us we were then. Nothing could have spoiled the way we felt.
But remembering those feelings would only make me weak to him—something I struggled with enough as it was.
“I don’t want to talk about the past,” I stated.
“We could have wandered anywhere. That courthouse wasn’t at random,” he went on, ignoring me entirely. “I’d looked at a map and saw it, got me thinking. You were it for me. I knew that before I even put you on my bike for that trip. Walking by that courthouse was my way of seeing whether you felt it as strongly as I did. I’d meant to bring up getting married as a sort of joke, a way to get you talking about where you saw us. Like always, you didn’t do what I expected. You thought I was serious, and you didn’t shut that shit down. You didn’t say it was too soon.”
That wasn’t true. If my memory served, the conversation went like this:
“Must be a sign, babe. I find a woman who suits me and we end up outside a courthouse.”
To which, I stuttered out a, “What?”
“We could just save the trip later, go inside and make this official.”
“What?”
“You want to marry me, little bird?”
“It’s too soon.” If I were honest, it wasn’t a firm rejection. It was more me floundering around, having no idea how we’d ended up in that conversation.
“Is it?”
“Most people would say so.”
“I don’t care about most people, I care about you.”
We hadn’t gone right inside to get married. No, Jack took me to a jeweler instead. He bought the ring I’d abandoned on his bed a couple feet away, then asked for real.
We did make another trip to the courthouse—and it just so happened that trip was the very next day.
I didn’t argue his statement. Instead, I asked, “What’s your point?”
He shook his head as his frustration mounted, but he didn’t abandon his stance in the doorway. “Point is, I set that up. It wasn’t a whim. It was sooner than I’d planned, but I knew what I wanted from you.”
“Until you didn’t want it anymore.”
Any vestiges of relaxed disappeared. Jack prowled from the doorway to me, determination burning in his eyes and hardening his face. He cornered me against the bed, making me lock my knees to keep from falling back.
“You want to ignore everything I say, fine. But you need to understand this: there hasn’t been a single moment since the day I saw you that I haven't fucking wanted you.”
I couldn’t breathe. It felt like my chest was engulfed in flames. The room around us disappeared as my eyes blurred, and I could feel myself shaking my head without any thought of doing so.
Jack grabbed the back of my neck, stilling me and forcing me to face his way. It wasn’t hard enough to hurt, but it was unyielding all the same.
“I fucked up by leaving. I could live to be a thousand and never regret something more. I fucking know that.” The intensity of his stare, the v
ehemence in his voice, made it hard to sustain my doubt. “But my leaving had not one thing to do with not wanting you. I left because you deserved better.”
My knees lost their battle, and Jack didn’t fight as my body collapsed. Instead, he eased me down to sit on the edge of the bed. I didn’t focus on him, I wasn’t sure I could, so my next words were spoken to his t-shirt covered chest.
“Didn’t it matter that all I wanted was you?”
Jack knelt in front of me, his hands taking hold of mine. “Quinn.”
“You destroyed us over…what? Some hero complex? Was that worth it?”
“You’re killing me, baby,” his rasped.
My eyes leveled on his. I truly was numb, or else his expression would have seared though me. The agony there backed his statement, but I didn’t feel it.
“Now you know how I felt.”
His head dropped until his forehead rested on my knees. He stayed there while I marveled at the numbness. It was amazing not to feel it all, to not be weighed down by all the emotion I’d been carrying for two years. Well, I was numb if I ignored the alarm creeping in at this conversation.
I started to go back over my plan. Getting out of there was best. Feeling it or not, I’d struck a blow to Jack. It might have been something he’d deserved based on his actions, but that didn’t mean I wanted to be the person who did that. It served no purpose, this back and forth with us. It certainly wasn’t healthy if it led us to where we were right then.
It was time to go.
Coming to this realization when I wasn’t trying to flee made me see one glaring issue. It had been days since I’d been fit to shower. I’d seen myself in that mirror. There wasn’t a taxi on earth that would pick me up—if they did, it would come with questions of whether they should call the police.
“I need to shower.”
Jack’s head snapped up, looking more than a bit unsettled by my calm proclamation after the intensity that preceded, but I gave that little mind. When he moved back a bit, I took my opportunity and stood.
Unfortunately, it became clear I wasn’t going anywhere.
