Love in Slow Motion

8. Quinn

8 QUINN

I wake to the sound of violin music, very confused for a minute before my brain wiggles back into place and I realize I’m in the basement of the Lynches’ lake house. The room is still dark, but my alarm is reminding me that I need to get up to the ground floor before anybody wakes up and realizes I didn’t sleep with the man they all think is my husband.

I scramble out of the bed, and then I see Reed on the floor. I forgot he was there. He hasn’t shifted at all, clearly not bothered by the sound of my alarm or my moving around.

For a second, I just stand there, looking at him. I can’t believe how different he looks with his short hair and all his stubble. Reed has always been devastatingly gorgeous, but in a different way than Chase. They have different fathers, Reed being the odd one out of the siblings, and it shows. Where Chase’s features are small, delicate, and perfect, Reed’s are bigger, with thicker lips and a larger nose. But something about Reed has always been softer to look at.

I tear my gaze away from his peaceful form, one hand splayed across his chest in sleep, his chin tilted to the side so that I can see the curve of his throat, and carefully step around him to go upstairs.

The house is undisturbed, the floor cold under my feet and the air still around me. I rush down the hallway, careful not to make any noise as I move through the living room and into the room I’m supposed to be sharing with Chase. I quietly close the door behind me and turn to find Chase already sitting up in bed. He’s still wearing his clothes from yesterday. He clearly fell asleep the second he laid down and never got back up.

His golden hair is a mess, and his clothes are wrinkled. The sun has begun to rise outside the window behind him. There are no curtains, lest the view of the lake be sullied, so as soon as the sun comes up, the whole house will be awake. In the gray light, Chase watches me cross to the bathroom.

“Where were you?” he asks, his voice hard.

I spin around, my hand already on the bathroom doorknob. I want to tell him that it’s none of his business, but I can’t afford to antagonize him right now. I need everything to go right this week. I don’t want to rock the boat in any way and risk that money that I so desperately need.

“I slept on the couch,” I tell him.

He immediately frowns, and I’m startled again by how different his and Reed’s faces are. I’m not even sure Reed would be capable of a frown like that. “Someone’s going to see you. You don’t think anyone would find it odd if they caught you sleeping on the couch?”

“I’m being careful.”

He hasn’t moved, his face turned at an awkward angle to look over at me. He looks like something out of a sci-fi movie, an immovable robot. “You slept next to me for five years. You can’t manage one more week?”

Anger burns under my skin. I can’t believe he has the audacity to ask me that. “For those five years, I didn’t know you were screwing around on me. Now I do.” I slam the door between us.

I lay back on my pool chair and turn my head away from the sun. But that turns my face toward Chase, lying on the deck chair beside me. I roll my eyes and turn the other way. The chair beside me is empty, but on the other side of the yard, Reed is rocking slowly in the hammock, reading a book. When he sees me, he smiles.

“Well, this seems a little bit silly,” Madison says, walking by us with her purse tucked into the crook of her arm. She shields her eyes from the sun and points out past the boundaries of the yard, toward the lake. “Why are you all sitting around the pool when you could be in the lake?” she asks, as if she wasn’t the one who had the pool installed.

Sabrina takes the pool chair beside me, her white skin blinding in the sun. Seeing as how she and Chase are both relatively fair-haired, I don’t think they’ll be sunbathing for long. “Because,” Sabrina says, taking a sip from the margarita in her hand, a chunky yellow thing, “lakes have parasites.”

Madison lovingly rolls her eyes. “When I was a kid, my parents took me to the lake every summer, and we always went into the water. Nobody got parasites.”

Sabrina adjusts the giant, wide-brimmed hat she’s wearing. “Your generation is positively riddled with parasites.”

Madison scoffs and waves Sabrina off. “I’m going to run into town for the day. I’ve made reservations for dinner at the Crescent at six tonight, so please everyone, meet me there.” She wiggles her fingers in a wave and heads for the front of the house, where the cars are parked. Sabrina watches her go.

As soon as she’s gone, Chase groans. “God, I forgot how boring the lake house is.”

I roll my eyes, glad I put on sunglasses so Sabrina won’t get an unobstructed view of my utter exhaustion with Chase. “It’s not boring. It’s relaxing. You’re just not used to it.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Reed glance up at me and then back down at his book. I want to know what he’s reading, if he thinks it’s good or not, but it feels like the kind of thing Chase will criticize him for if I draw attention to it.

With a groan, Chase gets up and stomps past my seat. When he slams the back door of the house closed, Sabrina’s head whips toward me. “God, what’s his problem?”

I shrug. “He’s just cranky. You know how addicts are when they can’t get their fix.” I know Sabrina will think I mean Chase’s work addiction, but I’m mostly talking about sex or women, whatever made it impossible for him to stay loyal to me. I’m sure it’s killing him that he’s going to go this whole week without getting laid.

Sabrina nods knowingly. “Right. Mom’s whole ‘no Wi-Fi’ thing.” She scoots closer to me until she’s sitting all the way at the edge of her reclining pool chair. She produces her cell phone from the pocket of her knit shawl. In a very quiet voice, she says, “Don’t tell Chase because he definitely needs to unplug a little bit, but I have a hotspot on my phone.” She pushes a few buttons and then turns the screen toward me to show me that she has full wi-fi access.

“No way,” I whisper back, scrambling for my phone, which I remember is all the way in my bedroom.

“I’ll write down the log in for you,” she says, stashing her phone away. With her this close to me, I can smell her coconut sunscreen and make out the tiny flowers on her orange bikini. It’s much more revealing than anything I could ever bring myself to wear, but that’s Sabrina, so confident. “So what’s going on with you?” she asks, scooting back into place on her seat. She adjusts her sunglasses. “How’s Boston?”

Lonely , I want to say, but I don’t. “It’s good,” I say instead. Classic stock answer.

“You still volunteering?”

My stomach sinks. “Not so much anymore. Life got…complicated.”

She raises an eyebrow in my direction, but thanks to the sunglasses, I can’t exactly read her expression. “I totally get you,” she says, arching her neck for the sun. “Sometimes you give and give and give, and you wake up one morning, and you realize you don’t have anything left.”

Yes. That’s exactly it. I was always giving to Chase, to my mother, to school, anything to make myself useful, but now that’s all over.

“Sometimes, you have to take .” Sabrina says this in a low voice, barely more than an exhale.

I sit back on my chair. What does it even mean to take? If I had any money at all, I’d pay Sabrina to be my life coach. “What about you? How’s New York?”

She shrugs. “You know how it is. Boston, New York, they’re all the same. Loud. Crowded. Insufferable.” She smiles over at me. “I love it. I just spent a week in Paris, too, for a small job. A glorious city like the rest of them.”

“Seeing anyone?”

“Nope. Hey, is your friend Brooke still single?”

I laugh. “Sorry, but she just met this great guy a few months ago. Pretty sure this is it for her.”

Sabrina gives an impolite groan. “Oh, well. Probably for the best. There’s no way I’m relocating to Boston for a woman , you know what I mean?”

I smile. “You’ll find someone.”

She nods, not looking at me.

Just then, Chase re-appears, stomping by my chair again, like a petulant child. He drops down into his seat and hands me a plate. It’s piled high with green grapes. I take the plate, about to thank him, when I get a look at the plate he brought back for himself. It has a very large slice of strawberry cake on it.

“Are you serious?”

Chase spears his fork into his slice of cake before looking over at me. “What?”

My mouth pulls into a line. I know I’m supposed to be playing this off like we’re the happiest of couples, but even happy couples get into arguments, right? “You brought yourself a slice of cake, but you brought me a bushel of grapes ?”

I don’t know why I’m surprised. This is classic Chase. A perfect wife should have his idea of a perfect body. That’s always how it’s been. A perfect wife eats salad, cleans the house, waits by the door like a puppy to greet him when he comes home by offering him a blowjob. Never stray from the path.

Chase is looking at me like he doesn’t recognize me, like I’m some stranger who just trespassed and is here by mistake. “But you love grapes.”

I set the grapes on the concrete beside my chair. The birds will enjoy them later, I’m sure. “I do love grapes. But I love strawberry cake more. Why do you get cake, but I get fruit?”

He shrugs. “Because I go to the gym more than you do.”

On my other side, Sabrina makes a choking noise. “God, Chase, you are such a dick.”

“I’m not a dick!” he insists, leaning around me to see Sabrina. “Quinn is watching her weight. She always has.”

Sabrina narrows her eyes at him, and I’m glad she’s here, saying all the things I wish I could. All the Lynch siblings have always gotten along, at least from what I’ve always been able to tell, but when Chase is acting like an asshole, I’m glad Sabrina can recognize it.

“Quinn is watching her weight, or you’re watching it for her?”

Chase opens his mouth, clearly intending to double down, when a shadow suddenly blocks out the sun. Before I can look up, a hand appears in my vision—a veined hand, with a silver ring on the thumb and a small raincloud tattoo on the fleshy part between the thumb and the index finger. The hand holds out a giant slice of strawberry cake toward me.

Taking the plate, I look up into Reed’s shadowed face. “Thank you.”

He doesn’t say anything, just nods and goes back to his spot in the hammock. I watch him settle, stretching out his long tattoo-covered torso before going back to his book.