Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger (2 page)

“
Frank
.” She stood and continued pacing in front of him even though her bare feet were killing her. Her feet always swelled when she got really stressed out. It was weird, but it was her
thing
. Maybe weirder since she wasn’t really into shoes like her mom was. She’d spent a lot of time barefoot as a teenager, pacing her feet into a size that, as her father always said, was better suited for the box than for the shoes that came in it. At this moment, every tiny pebble of the street pavement felt like it was cutting into her feet like glass, but she couldn’t stop and try to wedge her Jurassic feet into her wedding pumps now. “I don’t believe you.”

He looked surprised. Hurt? Maybe insulted, maybe just worried that she’d dismiss something important. Ego or altruism, she didn’t know. But he went forward boldly. “I saw her
,”
he said. “I saw them. Together.”

“You saw her
,
” she repeated dully. A foreign student learning the language by repeating.

He nodded. “Yes. I saw her.
”

“
And…?
” She didn’t want to know. She really, really didn’t want to know. But she
had
to. She wanted every single awful detail. She was ready to hear it all and slice herself with each tiny detail again and again for the rest of her life, regretting it each and every time. “Where? How? Elaborate!”

“A few times, she was at the farm
,
” he began.

Her throat went so tight she nearly gagged.

Eight words that held so much. The shortest longest story ever told, at least to her.

A few times
=
there were too many to count. Not one single betrayal, possibly drunken, possibly mistaken, possibly—somehow—forgivable.

A few times …

But, worse,
the farm
=
her
place. The place she loved more than any other. His family’s farm went back generations. But she’d been going there since she was fourteen, so it was part of
her
as well. She grew up in town, but Burke’s family had a farm—actually, it was a huge horse farm to her, ninety acres of the most beautiful rolling green hills you can imagine, with stables so pristine Thurston and Lovey Howell could’ve moved right in. It was a place she’d always loved. Middleburg was horse country, and, as a girl growing up, she’d loved horses and always wanted one of her own. Her family weren’t particularly wealthy, despite their zip code, so that dream remained an impossibility for her.

But when she’d begun dating Burke at age fourteen—which was still young enough to cling, if only in some vaguely subconscious way, to those childhood dreams and wishes—the place might as well have been Disney World to her.

There was a five-page entry in her high school diary describing the farm from the first time he took her there. Every detail was still correct, from the ebony bookcases in the den to the crocheted bedspread in the guest room. And everything she wanted to change, on the day she was certain she would eventually move in, was also still in line with who she was and what she wanted. It seemed so much like fate.

It wasn’t just a place to live out her childhood fantasies of horses and stables and whatever old
Spin and Marty
episodes were shown on
The Mickey Mouse Club
reruns they played on Channel Five. When Burke and she started to date and fall in love, it became
their place
. Burke and his grandfather and often his brother as well, would work around the place while Quinn would sit on the patio with his grandmother Dottie, drinking iced tea and hearing tales of the old days while the wind hushed across the long stretches of green nothingness that were increasingly rare in the D.C. suburbs.

The farm was sacred space.

Surely Frank knew how much it would hurt her to bring this up this way. Surely he wouldn’t do it if he didn’t think he
had
to … would he?

“He took her
there
?” she said. Her voice sounded so much stronger than she felt. Her throat was so tight she felt like someone was strangling her, yet it sounded like she had the conviction and anger appropriate to a woman who has found out,
just in the nick of time
, that she’s been betrayed. She’d ask the questions she had to ask, even though she didn’t want the answers. She
needed
the answers, and she’d get them. She was a detective, she was fucking Columbo or something, with a pretend pad and pen in her hand, saying,
And what, exactly, do you know about that?

“I really don’t want to say more. You know enough. Ask him now. How could he deny it?”

“Apparently he has for some time!”

Frank shook his head. “I can’t betray him anymore, it goes against Guy Code.”

“
Fuck Guy Code!
” How could anyone look at a woman in the pain she knew was contorting her face and burning in her eyes, and think it was sufficient to give a small, yet powerful, detail without follow-up? “What. Else. Do. You. Know. About. Her?”

Long pause.

“She’s a stoner,” he finally said with a shrug, though his tone was one of disgust.

Ah.

That should make her feel better.

She was lesser than Quinn, because Quinn wasn’t a stoner. Quinn was the opposite. How comforting. She was totally anti-stoner. But so was Burke! Burke was as straight and narrow as they came! She’d never seen him have anything stronger than a beer, and he usually opted for milk at that.

Yet he’d taken some stoner chick to the farm and banged her there? This was either a huge flaw in Frank’s story or it was the detail that dropped the
Price Is Right
Plinko chip into the $5,000 slot of her lingering doubt about Burke’s faithfulness.

Her throat tingled and she thought she might pass out, a big white unidentifiable splash in the street gutter that people wouldn’t even slow down before running over.

What was that? A sack of sweet feed?

She straightened, with some effort in the now-ridiculous dress, and tried to breathe and walk off the shaking that emanated from a spot in the center of her being.

Her heart.

Then Frank delivered his final blow, which she’d never have time to figure out whether it was an incredibly clever manipulation via lies-so-weird-they-had-to-be-true or just truth-is-stranger-than-fiction.

“Actually, she got stoned there with Rob.” He looked at her earnestly, his wavy dark hair short and controlled just like his demeanor, versus Burke’s wild mane. And Frank’s eyes were a serious amber brown, in contrast to Burke’s heartthrobby blue.

It made Frank easier to believe somehow.

He considered for a moment before adding—as redemption for Burke?—a lame, “That did piss Burke off.”

“But…
”
Her mind couldn’t compute. Couldn’t make sense of this. Couldn’t do the math. Yet couldn’t stop trying. Rain Man trying to add every single number in the phone book. Rob was a hired hand who’d moved out, what, a year ago?
Ages
ago. It was weird enough to say that Burke had somehow condoned this, but adding the detail—Rob—that conceivably had credibility
and
the vague insinuation of a time frame … well, honestly, she just would never have given Frank credit for being that creative. He was
very
smart, but in a left-brain, numbers sort of way.

Weaving these perfect, weird details for her just seemed out of his league.

Hell, it was even out of
her
league, and she was what she would normally consider a fairly wily woman.

“But he hates…
,
” she tried, then lost her voice. Or her point.

Or her soul.

This just sounded too true, if only in its very falseness. It didn’t matter what Burke hated or approved of, maybe there had even been some perverse fetishish pleasure in going for someone deliberately opposite Quinn. Still, it was the timing that stung like lashes from a whip. “It’s been going on
that
long?”

Frank gave a half shrug. In cynical retrospect, she would believe it was meant to look sympathetic. Or maybe
commiserative
was the better word.
Hey, I know, it sucks,
that shrug implied
. I’m so sorry you’re going through this, but give the jerk what he deserves.
Because he
clearly
expected her to be outraged by this news.

As pretty much any self-respecting woman would be.

But all she could think about were weird little clues, tiny things that she’d ignored—though consciously—time and again. There had been scratch marks on Burke’s shoulder once when she was massaging his back. She’d noticed them, thought the curve of them seemed pretty distinct and specific, yet she didn’t even
question
him about them because she
completely
trusted him. She just figured there had to be a reasonable explanation.

Because there’s
always
a reasonable explanation for things, right? How many times had she been worried about something and been 100 percent sure the only possible outcome was that something awful had happened, when, in fact, a little series of innocuous things had happened?

She didn’t enjoy being angsty and upset. She didn’t want to be Jealous Girl. Jealous Girl is just so uncool. She’s Walter Mitty’s wife, the harpy nag who gains power with a wedding ring, then demands an accounting of every moment her man isn’t with her. The fat actress in every old movie who lost her guy to Marilyn Monroe or Myrna Loy or Katharine Hepburn. Jealous Girl was Insecure Girl, and she did all kinds of ugly things that turned life into drudgery for everyone around her.

Quinn
wasn’t Jealous Girl! She honestly thought she was a good catch
because
she didn’t freak out about every little thing! Once upon a time, she would have been all,
Ugh, I
hate
those girls!

But here she was, pacing on hot, rough pavement in what was once a beautiful wedding gown, her mind racing with angry, suspicious, painful thoughts.

A couple of times he’s told me the same story more than once, without remembering he’d already told me. Is that because he thought he’d told her?

Those times he said he wanted to stay in because he was “tired,” even though he
obviously
would have had hot sex with me if he’d seen me—was he having hot sex with her instead?

Oh,
my God, hott
er
sex with her?

Was that even
possible
?

The pain of imagining it was awful. Him touching her, stripping her, her hands on him, her
mouth
on him—that was
Quinn’s
man, that was
Quinn’s
body to love, he reserved it for
her
. She knew every single millimeter of it, knew which muscles hurt just by touching him, he never even had to say a word. No one else would know, or care probably, that he held his tension in his shoulder blades; that the arch of his foot tightened when he ran, and that that turned his calves to tight painful ropes; that for some reason his left upper body was usually tighter than the right but his right lower body was tighter than his left.… All those meticulous little details that Quinn had so proudly believed proved she loved him better than anyone else ever could.

Had he cupped this other girl’s face and kissed her while he was on top of her, moving inside her? God, that was the worst of all. Him
kissing
her. Kissing was so much more intimate than the rest. Emotional.

Not that
the rest
didn’t matter. Not that the rest didn’t exist. Apparently it did. This puzzle had so many more pieces than she’d anticipated. Had he ever been with her the same day he was with Quinn? Had her kisses still been on his lips when
she
, Quinn, kissed him?

She felt like she was going to puke.

“Why would he do that to me?” she asked Frank, though she wasn’t really looking to him for an answer. How could he have it?

“You know him. He did it because he
could.
He did it because he always wants more. More money, more attention, more pizza, whatever, he’s like a six-year-old who thinks of no one but himself.”

And she did know Burke. She knew he was completely capable of being a child. Wild, irresponsible. His sense of humor was sometimes raunchy, his timing sometimes inappropriate. Sometimes he laughed too loud, drove too fast, pushed too hard. But in spite of that—perhaps even
because
of some of it—he was wildly charismatic.

And
she
had won his heart.
She
—Quinn Morgan Barton—whose Awkward Phase had gone on longer than many other girls’ in junior high, who had always thought just a little too much about things, and tried just a little too hard to do everything right—maybe sometimes erring on the side of being too dull for a guy like Burke—
she
had won his heart in ninth grade and had been with him ever since, almost seven years.

Yes, they’d had their challenges now and then. There
was
that time they’d broken up because he refused to go to the homecoming dance, and then, while they were broken up, he went with Tammy Thomas, whose stupid name made her sound like a brand of shoes and whose stupid face could probably model for the ads. That had sucked. But he’d done it to spite her for dumping him and, in some weird way, that was better than him doing it without regard for her at all.

At least he was thinking of her.

But for the most part everything had been good between them. No, they’d been
great
. The two of them were the best of friends, they had a long history, god knew they had amazing chemistry.

They
loved
each other.

He’d loved her enough to propose. She hadn’t even seen it coming, but he’d done it, he’d proposed, and here it was, their wedding day.

Or was it?