Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger (19 page)

“Maybe you’re not giving them enough of a chance,” he said.

I gave him a look. “Have you heard what I’ve been saying about Short Stops for the last half hour? Did
any
of those guys sound appealing to you?”

“Aaron sounded interesting,” he said with a smile.

“Exactly. One in ten guys is gay, if not more. Lucky for you. One in ten is a probably married creep, looking to have sex with a woman two decades younger than him.” I reiterated the stories I’d just told him, concluding, “And one has a case of the hiccups that he can’t get rid of. And so on.” I sighed miserably. “The odds are really against all the single women out here.”

“The point was to get out there and eyeball some different scenery. Think about something other than Burke and Frank and the whole Morrison clan. As far as I’m concerned, this is mission accomplished.”

“Burke.” I sighed and slumped back in my seat. “He marched through my head so many times last night you’d have thought he had one of those big high school band drums.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh,
yes
.”

“Keep reminding yourself that’s just sexual attraction. It’s not real. It’s not the most important thing.”

“Are you sure?” I challenged. “Because at the moment it feels a lot like the most important thing.”

“So Frank is forgotten?”

“Frank?”

He nodded. “You said he was hot. You can’t totally ignore that in your whole Morrison-fest here. Let’s not play games. You’ve been in bed with both of them.”

“Okay, fine. Yes. And, yes, that was one thing Frank was
very
good at.”

“Worth keeping in mind.”

No, it wasn’t. Yet, my heart beat faster just thinking about those two brief encounters we’d had. Young as he’d been—at least from my perspective now—Frank was gifted. Now that I had a fairly extensive list of comparisons, I knew it was true.

“Quinn?” Glenn snapped his fingers in front of my face. “You with me?”

“No, leave me alone. I’m basking in the memory. This may be my only chance to have sex again.”

“Stop it. You
will
have sex again.”

“With who? Some big fat idiot who can’t put his name tag on right side up but still has the confidence to think he can do better than me? A paper airplane engineer? A failed cartoonist who hiccups his way through a seemingly endless description of his main character while his eyes wander the room looking at other women? I’d rather just settle down with a vibrator and a Costco pack of batteries.”

Glenn laughed. “I know what you mean. I went through a long period of time where I was just stuck with
this
asshole.” He held up his right hand.

It took me a minute to understand, then I laughed. “Too bad you’re gay, huh?”

He shrugged. “Too bad you’re a woman.”

“Touché.”

“Is Frank really that great?” Glenn asked after a moment. “Or do you think maybe you’re romanticizing the past some here?”

I looked him in the eye. “There were things he did that no one else
ever
did. And the way our bodies fit together…” I actually sighed, remembering. “I can’t even describe it.”

“I’m not sure that’s as rare as you think it is.”

“Then I’m not sure I’m talking about what you think I’m talking about. In my experience, it’s rare. The perfect storm of physical chemistry and emotional combustion.”

Glenn nodded thoughtfully and, after a long moment, said, “That sucks.”

And after that, there was really nothing left to be said about it.

Chapter 13

“This was a complete waste of money.” I put ten lottery tickets in the drawer under the cash register. It was Buy Ten Lottery Tickets! Day, which Glenn had considered soft after Go Commando Day and Speed Dating Night, but he was right, I never bought lottery tickets. They were always a waste of money, but never more than on a day like this. “Money I can’t
afford
to lose right now, by the way.”

“Then there’s no gentle way to bring this up.” He took out a copy of
Washingtonian
and opened it to a page he’d marked. Society weddings. Markham-Beasley.

“So what?” I asked, too sharply, I knew.

“Look what it says.” He pointed. “
The bride wore an Augusta Jones original.…
”

I looked at the picture. “That is
not
an Augusta Jones! For one thing, Elizabeth Markham was in here a few months ago pricing gowns and she thought
I
was too expensive.”

“That’s because you work for more than six bucks an hour,” Glenn said, then nodded toward the front window.

“No!” The Sneaky Seamstress struck again?

“Taney,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”

“Well, shit” was all I could say. “One more thing to worry about.”

“Honey, I think your livelihood should be the
main
thing you’re worried about. Forget the boys, that stuff will work itself out if you give it a little time.”

I doubted that. It had been ten years and apparently it hadn’t
worked itself out
so far. “I am so completely filled with horrible black energy right now, there is no way I could
win
anything. Except maybe a bet that not one of the numbers on these ten tickets will come up. Not one.” I raised an eyebrow. “Care to wager?”

Glenn put his hands up, the sign of surrender. “No way, sista. I’m not taking you on right now.”

“Wise,” I said, and shut the drawer. “Very wise.” I sat down and sank my head into my hands. “Oh, my
god
, he was
married
!”

“So?”

I had been all ready to dissolve into self-pitying tears, so this answer wasn’t exactly what I was going for. “What do you mean,
so
?”

“What was he supposed to do? Sit around and mourn over you forever?”

“That”—I jabbed a finger in Glenn’s direction—“would have been
excellent
.”

“When was the last time you got laid?”

I looked at him blankly. “I beg your pardon, sir?”

“It’s been months, right?”

“I have a perfectly healthy sex life.”

“Maybe I’m not remembering this right,” he said, in a way that suggested he was about to reenact something I’d done or said with such crystal clarity that I wasn’t going to be sure if he was him or me, “but I
believe
you had a very hot relationship with a certain Arlington bank president for several months earlier this year.”

“It was very casual.”

“If you do that kind of thing casually…”

“Good grief, Glenn, what are you getting at?”

“I’m just wondering if you were thinking about Burke while you were doing that.”

“Probably not.”

“So you actually”—he gestured like he was searching for the words—“
went on with your life
.”

“Okay, okay, yes, I get your point. I’m not saying he wasn’t within his rights, Glenn, I’m saying it makes me feel like total shit. Can’t you see that? He loved someone else enough to
marry
her!”

“Yet when he was going to marry you—first, I might add—and you rejected him, you contended that you did that because he didn’t love you. He, who was going to
marry
you.”

“My head hurts.”

“It should. You’re not being fair to him.”

“Maybe.” I groaned. “It’s just that he kissed someone else, had sex with someone else—oh, my god, what if it was better than it was with me? Is that possible?”

He splayed his arms. “I have not had sex with you.”

“We’re not talking
skill
here, Glenn, it’s about
passion
. If there’s one thing we had together, it was
passion
. I mean, even the night of Dottie’s dinner party…”

“What?”

I remembered the kiss and felt slightly twitchy at the memory. My heart pounded. “He kissed me. I kissed him. Whatever. We kissed. It was searing hot. And then I
hated
myself afterwards.”

“What?
Why?
”

“Because that’s not what I want.
He
is not what I want. In fact”—I meant this—“I’d even go so far as to say he is
exactly
what I
don’t
want. I don’t have the emotional cash to spend on that man again.”

Glenn assessed me. “I think there may be a certain wisdom in that, Quinn.”

“You do?”

He nodded. “I don’t know, but maybe—
maybe—
Burke represents, more than anything else, a past you are clinging to so hard that you cannot have anything new in the present or, worse, anything fresh in the future.”

“You’re right,” I said, the full impact of the misery hitting me. The very fact that I felt so melancholy about Dottie selling the farm, as if with it went all of my dreams of the future, was proof of that. That future hadn’t even been a
possibility
for me in ten years. “You’re right about everything. I’ve been stuck in this weird rut that allowed me to sleep through day after day after day until what happened ten years ago could have happened two years ago or yesterday. Nothing ever changed, didn’t get better, but it didn’t get worse, and I think that was the imaginary safety zone I was trapped in. Not getting worse.”

“Has it been good?” Glenn asked, without judgment. “That is, honestly, on balance would you say it’s been mostly good?”

I thought about that. Really thought about it. Because it was easy to say “okay” was “good” because it wasn’t
bad
, but those were three distinctly different states of being. Three.

And I’d only been living in one of them.

“I’m afraid of bad,” I confessed, worried about sounding like a basket case even though this was my best friend I was talking to. “I’ve been to bad before, I don’t want to go back.”

“What do you define as
bad
? What do you mean when you say you’ve been to bad before?”

I met his eyes. He hadn’t been there in my
bad period
. I didn’t have a more creative, artistic term for it than that, it was just a depression. Maybe not much different than anyone else ever had. “I went through a couple of months once where I just didn’t want to be alive,” I said. “Not in the bored teenager sort of way, but in the way that I had to remind myself that in a hundred years nothing I was doing or seeing was going to matter anymore. That was the only way I could get through it.”

He looked thoughtful. “So you’re talking clinical depression. Not just the blues. Or the mean reds.”

I would have laughed at the Audrey Hepburn
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
reference, had it not brought a vivid picture of Burke’s weirdly named wife to mind. But I wasn’t going to broach that subject with Glenn because it would start him on a tear about how lovely Audrey Hepburn was—it was one of his favorite topics—and that would just keep her in my head and it would all be one big mindfuck for me.

“Yes,” I said. “This was way beyond the
mean reds
. I felt like I was inside a car all the time, looking out at the world but not feeling the sun or the wind or the rain or anything. Just observing it from inside some transparent shell.”

“Was this after Burke, I assume?”

“Directly.”

He smiled kindly. It was sympathy. “How did I know?”

“You have a very keen sense of the obvious.”

He tipped an imaginary hat. “Thank you very much.”

A moment of silence passed, not uncomfortably.

“You know what I’d think about sometimes?” I asked at last. “Princess Diana.”

He frowned. “What did I miss? Are we in a different movie suddenly?”

“I mean, think about it. She was a regular person, given this great opportunity, or
seemingly
great opportunity, when she was just nineteen. Married the future King of England. Was supposed to be the future Queen of England. And I think she was in love with him, I really do.”

He screwed up his face. “Come on.”

“No, seriously, I used to get my hair done in Georgetown by the same woman who did Diana when she was in town. A Brazilian woman who did the ambassador’s wife, so I think she actually knew her pretty well. And she said Diana really loved Charles right up to the end.”

“So she was nuts, is what you’re saying.”

“Maybe. But whatever the reason, I think she really just wanted love. The simplest thing in the world, or at least the most basic. Think about all the stories that came out later. That she liked hanging out in her lover’s mom’s cottage in some obscure coastal town, or that she was in love with that doctor who didn’t give a shit how famous or beloved she was, he was your classic hard-to-get guy anyway.” I’d actually given this more thought than I probably should have, except that I thought it was a perfect example of how it didn’t matter what it looked like you
should
be grateful for: if you had a voice, you had a void. “I just think that all the worship was nice, and she enjoyed it, and she probably would have been blown away by the adoration around her funeral, but I also bet she would have given it all up to be a happy housewife in Dover.”

“Your point being that you don’t want to be the Queen of England either?”

“That is exactly my point.” I leveled a gaze on him. “I also don’t want to be queen.”

He smiled. “Your point,” he said slowly, “is that you don’t care about the glory, you don’t want the proverbial
big life
, you just want the simplicity of love, and happiness, and peace, and
that
is why you’ve stayed in this little life here without venturing too far away.”

“Right. Because I already know all that glitters is not gold.”

“You think that you’re in this rut because you know what’s out there and you know that’s not what you want, you want exactly what you already have here and now, so there’s no point in venturing out of the cave.”

It was times like this when I was so grateful to have a friend who really and truly understood me right through to the core. “Exactly.”

“Because that glitter might just be pyrite.”

“Exactly.” This validation felt good.

Until he said, “But, baby,
nothing’s
glittering here.”