Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger (20 page)

Something in me deflated. What if he was right?

“So that’s not really what this is about,” he went on.

“Why not? Why can’t it just be simple? Why can’t I just be
right
?”

“Because you’re not happy. You have shut down whole huge parts of your emotional life, just boarded up the windows, and you’re hiding inside. You yourself just said love is one of the most elemental wants or needs we have, but you
refuse
to experience it because of the experience you had with
that
guy, in
this
town.”

Maybe. “If you’re right …
if …
what do I do?”

He tipped his head and considered me. “I wish I knew exactly what you need and could say it, so you can have that forehead-slapping moment of realization, but I honestly don’t know. I don’t believe you want to be alone forever.”

I smiled. “This is the part where I’m supposed to argue that I’m perfectly fine and self-sufficient and don’t need a man or anyone else to complete me, but”—I shook my head—“you’re right, I don’t want to be alone forever. Over all these years, a small part of my brain has been entirely devoted to these echoey watercolor memories of my time with Burke, and I don’t think anyone else could have had a chance of pushing that out of my brain even if I’d let them try.”

“But you don’t
know
that.” Glenn looked at me intently. “You don’t
know
that because you never let anyone anywhere near. You
have
to get out of your head, you
have
to get out of this fantasy world that’s composed of bits and pieces of the past, real and imagined, and you have to
live
. Meet new people. Have new experiences. You’re basing everything that you think you want on an ideal you formed when you were fifteen, and there could be so much more to your life than that.”

I heard him. I honestly did. There absolutely was wisdom in what he was saying, but my heart kept saying that what I needed was right here at home. That I didn’t need to be the girl who went out and traveled the world and had adventures with many men. I’d been born into this small part of the world and this was where I was supposed to be.

But that argument wouldn’t hold water with Glenn, and if he’d lobbed it at me, I would have rejected it as well. I would want better for my friend, just like he did.

Why didn’t I want better for myself?

*   *   *

Leave it to Glenn to take a potentially decent plan—his “do something every day that takes you out of your comfort zone” plan, which had
pretty much
gone well so far—and make it into something straight-up undoable so, basically, the entire thing was blown.

Like a diet foiled by Girl Scouts Thin Mints cookies.

The instruction paper lay on the counter of my shop next to its little red envelope:

Have a one-night stand.

“This was a Partridge Family song, right?” I asked, not bothering to say hello before launching in when he answered my call. “You’re telling me to listen to a song, right? Because I
know
you’re not telling me to have random sex with someone just one night.”

“Of course I’m not!”

I sat down. “Thank God.”

“Not just
one night
, that’s way too random. You don’t have that sort of time. No, I meant
tonight
. I happen to know you don’t already have plans, because tonight is like
every other night
for you.”

“There’s no way I’m doing this.”

“You have to. You agreed to my terms.”

“Show me where I signed off on this, devil.”

“It was an oral agreement,” he said. “That is just as binding in a court of law.”

“And you’re going to sue me if I don’t get laid tonight?”

He made a noise of sarcastic derision. “People have sued for dumber things than that.”

I closed my eyes. “You’re ruining this whole thirty-day plan of yours. You know that, right?”

“No, Quinn, no joke, this is important. I think it’s going to really help you.”

“Not gonna happen,” I said, with absolute conviction. Even if I
wanted
to—which I totally did not—it wasn’t like I was going to go man-hunting in the D.C. metro area with an eye toward activity that at the worst could give me a disease and at the very best could make me feel weird about myself.

Well, okay, I guess “at the very best” could, arguably, be that it did what Glenn thought and took me further out of my cocoon. But I couldn’t see that happening. Lone girl in the big city, looking for a man? I was likely to find too much more than that.

And I most definitely wasn’t going to find someone suitable sticking around in this tired old town.

Uh-oh. There it was. The proof of Glenn’s point.

I was glad I hadn’t said it out loud.

“Think about it!” he implored, his voice rising with his vehemence. “What a shake-up that would be!”

“I’ll say.”

“From an energy standpoint, you would be shifting everything! This could be spiritual Drano for you!”

Spiritual Drano? Where did he come up with this stuff? “That is too wildly inappropriate for me to even answer, Glenn.”

He laughed uproariously. “Okay, so it was a pun-laden example. But I mean it!”

“Sorry, can’t hear you!” I scratched my nails across the tiny microphone area of my phone. “The connection’s breaking up. I’ve got to go!”

“Quinn Barton, don’t you dare hang up on—”

I pushed the button. It didn’t have the same old-fashioned pleasure as slamming a receiver down, but he got the point.

A one-night stand.

Who did he think I was?

The only time I’d come close to doing that was, in fact, the
two
-night stand with Frank. And that was
Frank
, not some stranger who could land me in some weird place physically, emotionally, or, god knows,
geographically
.

Then again, Las Vegas wasn’t my usual stomping ground geographically.

I took a moment to think about that. It really had been fun, truth be told. It was
sinful
, in a way. Not my usual way of life, not the way I was raised, not something I’d generally say was the mark of a dignified woman, but, damn, it
had
been fun. We’d driven something like seventeen hours a day for two days, stayed in Vegas one night, then turned and came back.

It wasn’t the destination, it was the journey. I’d hoped to shake off all the vestiges of Burke along the old and new highways of America. And, yeah, wherever you go, you still have your own head to contend with and obviously I couldn’t just completely forget the man I was in love with, who had hurt me so badly, but there had been some genuinely cool moments out there on that long ribbon of highway.

I remembered stopping at a weird little diner near Albuquerque. The waitress was strangely beautiful, but her makeup was too heavy and I just knew she’d never get out of that small town and learn that she could have looked like—no, she probably could have
been
—a serious movie star. Anyway, everyone else in the diner had been old, and everyone was fond of her, no one was making moves on her, and Frank and I talked later about how if she didn’t have a boyfriend already her chances of meeting someone and being swept off her pretty feet looked slim.

There was a raccoon in the bathroom of a rest stop near Memphis. That was the first time I used the men’s room without caring if someone walked in—there were no locks on the doors—as long as they were human.

Texas had been hot and so humid, even at night, that I felt like I’d been slapped in the face with a wet washcloth when I got out of the car to get a Coke from a Texaco food mart.

And the lights of Vegas had been more dazzling than I had ever even imagined. Honestly, everywhere we went there, I felt like I was on the set of a Miss America show. If my conscience had allowed me to stay longer, I wonder how much farther away from this briar patch of Burke I could have gotten.

Chapter 14

It was pretty safe to say that Dottie was trying to set Burke and me up at this point.

Whether she imagined there was some great reconciliation in the future or she was just trying to “heal” us, I couldn’t say. Her attempts were pretty ham-fisted, but there was nothing I could do about it easily. To refuse her requests to come do her fittings when she was physically up to it would have felt petty.

Unfortunately, when I arrived on the afternoon of One-Night Stand Day, she wasn’t there.

No one was.

I tried her cell phone number, but there was no answer.

Huh.

What was I supposed to do now?

I could have left, of course. If this was just an ordinary client who wasn’t there when I showed, I’d leave and let them come to me next time, but, for one thing, it was Dottie. And for another thing, it was Injured Dottie. She might have been hobbling as fast as she could to her car in the parking lot of the Safeway, fretting about the time and too deaf to hear her phone. Or maybe she was stuck in a doctor’s office, and had the ringer off. Or who knows? I’d left Becca in charge of the shop, so there wasn’t any reason I couldn’t wait around at least a little while.

I wandered over to the paddock and old Rogue came over to the fence where I stood. I touched his silky muzzle, then patted his forehead and ran my fingers down his rough mane.

“Where’s your mistress?” I asked him. “Did she lure me here to make me think about the past?”

I turned my face toward the sun, which was setting, predictably, in the west corner of the property. Amber light slanted through the trees, casting lengthening shadows across the perfect stretches of green grass. It looked almost like a golf course, the fields were so immaculate.

It was easy to remember why I’d loved it so much here. Why I’d thought this was going to be
It
for me, forever and ever. It was a beautiful place. Not everyone’s cup of tea, I guess. Lisa Douglas, from
Green Acres
, probably still would have preferred New York, but I doubt she’d have been as miserable here as she was in Hooterville.

This was definitely not Hooterville.

To me, it was heaven. And that fact would never leave me, so it hurt to be standing here knowing that before long it would belong to someone else and I wouldn’t be able to even visit anymore.

I took my phone out and tried Dottie again.

Again, she didn’t answer.

So I walked across the gravel drive and on toward the tenant house. Part of me wanted to resist. But most of me had to go, had to see, had to face it. Maybe it would be cathartic. Maybe I would surprise myself by not feeling what I thought I’d feel.

It was like that when my grandfather had died. I’d been so upset to begin with, and, on top of that, so afraid to go to the funeral because Michaela Whitney, who was a bitch even in second grade, had told me they would have his dead body lying out for everyone to see. Of course, she’d said it in even more graphic, Halloweeny detail.

And she was right, though it wasn’t quite like the picture she’d had me imagining. In the end, I’d even managed to go to him and whisper good-bye, even touching that familiar thatch of gray hair. After that, I was less afraid of death.

Maybe facing the past would make me less daunted by it.

I walked across a sweep of newly cut grass to the tenant house and to the front stoop. The wood thudded dully beneath my footsteps. Then, following an impulse I probably should have ignored, I pulled open the screen door, and gave a sad smile at the still-familiar creak of it. This wasn’t a place where anyone had ever spent much time, except for Burke and me, so it didn’t surprise me that no one had bothered to replace the old door. If things were still the way they used to be, once every other week Dottie’s maids came down and did a cursory dusting so it didn’t become a Disney-like haunted house, but other than that, no one came here unless it was to get the Christmas decorations out of the storeroom, or to put them back in.

I tried the main door and was surprised it was unlocked. Not that that gave me a license to walk on in like a thief. This was still trespassing, but I knew Dottie wouldn’t mind.

The floorboards groaned beneath my weight. That was something else that had always been true, even at my high school weight. In a way it sounded like an old song to me, played a million times so that I knew every subtlety of every instrument.

The thing that I didn’t realize I’d recognize was the smell. But it made sense. Ten years didn’t put that much age on antiques. They’d had that smell of old wood and furniture polish for decades, why would that be any different now? It was just something I’d never thought about back then, probably because we were always so eager to run inside and tear each other’s clothes off. The smell never registered on a conscious level.

For a moment I just stood there, breathing it in.

I used to imagine living here, once upon a time. I’d pictured myself passing birthdays and holidays here. Open windows with wind lifting lace curtains in the summer, a woodsy fire in the stone fireplace in the fall and winter, and a symphony of azaleas coming into bloom out front soon after the first crocus of spring.

This place felt like “home” to me in a way no other place ever had.

Why had he ruined that? He’d wanted it as much as I had, I was
sure
of it. Why would he ever have done anything that he knew could risk our future together? Had he imagined he could just insert someone else into my role if I didn’t work out?

Maybe he hadn’t thought at all. Maybe he’d taken me so thoroughly for granted that the intricacies of right and wrong, cause and effect, abuse and consequences, never even entered his mind.

I’d probably never know for sure. How could I ever believe him, no matter what he said?

All I knew was that we probably could have had a wonderful life together. We could have spent our whole lives living toward those wonderful words Robert Browning had written:
Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be, / The last of life, for which the first was made …