Love in Slow Motion

29. Quinn

29 QUINN

The house is quiet when we get back from the shops. The back door is open, and Reed, Chase, and Madison are all lounging on pool chairs, laughing about something.

I set my bags on the kitchen island and watch Reed, the gentle way his shoulders move as he laughs, the way his sunglasses are barely even a shade darker than the dark hair on his face and head. Madison seems to be telling a story in sweeping movements of her arms, and Reed is enjoying it.

Sabrina starts to take things out of her bags. We stopped at a small corner market on the way in so she could buy her favorite smoothies. But when she opens the fridge, she pauses. There’s a whole row of smoothies that look just like the one in her hand lined up in the door. “Oh,” she squeaks. “Lydia must have gotten me more. I didn’t even know she left.”

“She’s looking out for you,” I say, only half paying attention to her as I fiddle with the handle on the bag in front of me, the bag from the lingerie store. I don’t know why I bought the outfit. I don’t even know how I’m going to keep Chase from seeing it. This was a terrible idea.

“Who’s looking out for you?”

I jump, startled by the sound of Reed’s voice. He’s halfway through the living room, making his way to the kitchen. He goes to stand beside Sabrina, reaching into the fridge that she still has open and pulling out a bottle of Fiji water. He keeps his eyes on me as he uncaps it and takes a pull. I watch his Adam’s apple bob.

“Lydia stocked up on my smoothies,” Sabrina says, knocking me out of my reverie.

“That Lydia’s pretty great,” he says, leaning back against the counter. He nods in my direction, playing casual so well. “What did you get?”

I pull out my dress for the 4th of July party and step around the island so he can see the entire length of it up against my body. There’s a smile in his eyes as he looks at it and then at me.

“It’s nice. I’m sure it looks great on you.”

I bite my lip, feeling a blush travel up my neck.

“Speaking of things that are going to look good on her,” Sabrina says in a sly voice. She reaches into my other bag. I lunge forward to stop her, but she has the piece of lingerie out of my bag before I can stop her. She whips out the lace underwear I bought, the thing with all the strings and the barely-there thong. She holds it up with a cheeky look on her face that I know she’s only wearing because she thinks this is innocent. She doesn’t know what’s been happening in the basement every night. She doesn’t know that I bought that slip of fabric with Reed in mind.

Reed has just enough time to see it, enough time to process that I bought it for him, before the sound of someone’s bare feet come slapping into the house. I jump the rest of the way to Sabrina, snatch the garment out of her hand, and shove it under the bar as Chase comes into the room.

The three of us are behind the bar, smiling innocently. Chase stops in his tracks and scowls. “What the hell are you all doing?”

I can’t do this. I definitely cannot do this.

After dinner, Sabrina announced that she wanted to hang out in the hot tub, and Chase immediately jumped at the idea. At first, an evening in the hot tub sounded great. But now that I’m here, pressed shoulder to hip with Chase, I’m not so sure.

Sabrina keeps making weird faces at me, and I know it’s because she thinks tonight’s the night I’m going to ask Chase to do things to me that he doesn’t even know I want. And of course, she’s wrong. But she isn’t wrong about the fact that I’m going to ask someone to do things to me they don’t even know I want tonight.

Reed has been pretty talkative, he and Sabrina comparing the many differences between New York, Boston, and Paris. All the while, Chase is pressed up against me, getting drunker by the moment.

“You look fucking hot in that bikini,” he says to me now, his voice low.

I resist the urge to shove him away from me. “You can’t say things like that to me,” I say quietly. Reed and Sabrina don’t seem to be paying attention to what’s going on over here, but I kind of wish they would. Maybe then Sabrina would make some joke about PDA and Reed would be on my side and insist that Chase not try to proposition me in the hot tub.

Instead, he’s kept his eyes steadily off of me, making me second guess everything I was planning for tonight. Now that we’ve had sex, has he gotten over it? Maybe he just wanted to know what it would be like to fuck me. Now that he knows, he can move on with his life. I thought there would be more, but maybe he doesn’t want that.

Chase shrugs at my brush off. “Just because you’re not going to be my wife anymore doesn’t mean you stop looking hot when you’re half-naked.”

I ignore him, burrowing deeper down into the steaming water so that not so much of me is in direct contact with him. “Let’s just sit here quietly,” I whisper, setting my head back against the lip of the hot tub and closing my eyes. It’s a relatively cool night, all things considered, and I focus on the way the bubbling water tries to pull me down and then lift me up, over and over again, like ocean waves.

Chase shifts beside me and then I hear the splash of him getting out of the water. I open my eyes and watch him wrap his towel around his waist. “I need another beer,” he says to no one in particular and then disappears inside the house.

Sabrina and Reed’s conversation trails off. Sabrina relaxes back into the water, eyes closing, and Reed very quietly and very gently crosses the diameter of the large hot tub. He sits beside me, not looking at me, just staring straight ahead.

Low under his breath, barely audible over the bubbling of the water, he says, “Did you buy it for him or for me?”

My breath catches in my throat, heat moving through me like molten lava. I don’t have to ask him what he’s talking about. I know he means the lingerie. “For you,” I say quietly, knowing that Sabrina can’t hear us from the other side of the hot tub, not with the jets splashing as loud as they are.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see the way his jaw hardens, like he’s holding himself back from saying something.

Something brushes my leg, and I have to suck my lips between my teeth to keep from making a sound. Reed’s fingers trail slowly up my leg, curving around the inside of my thigh, so close to the juncture between my legs that I have to grit my teeth.

I keep my eyes firmly glued to Sabrina. If she so much as moves, I’ll have to pull away fromReed. I try to control my breathing as his fingers inch higher, brushing the fabric of my bikini bottom.

“I was thinking about taking the jet skis out tomorrow,” he says without looking at me.

My mouth falls open, an answer right on the tip of my tongue as he shoves the fabric of my bikini aside and rubs one thick finger against my clit. My mouth snaps closed, and I grit my teeth not to let out a sound.

“Mom said one of them needs a little work, but I’m feeling pretty confident I can get it running. What do you think?”

God, why is he doing this to me? He knows that if I don’t answer, it’ll be suspicious. But if I try to answer, I have no idea what kind of sound is going to come out of my mouth. Reed presses my clit harder and I manage to squeak out, “Are jet skis and motorcycles similar in design?”

He smiles and turns his face toward me to answer, but from somewhere behind us, Chase says, “Jet skis are way more like 4-wheelers than motorcycles.”

I jump, but instead of whipping his hand away from me, Reed moves slowly, shifting only what’s under the water, until his hand has left me completely. “Yeah, but some things are the same, no matter what vehicle it is. I can fix most things.” He’s not even saying this to me. He’s saying it to Chase, carrying on a conversation with him as if he wasn’t just fingering me.

“Right, Mr. Fix-It,” Chase says, climbing back into the hot tub and settling beside me, a beer in one hand. “If you were so good at fixing things, why couldn’t you figure out what was wrong with the Mini Coop?”

Reed grimaces. “I did. It needed a new transmission. Some things aren’t worth taking the time to fix.”

Chase nods in this condescending way, like Reed is lying.

I’m starting to feel feverish. It was bad enough that hot tubs are always a little uncomfortable to me, but between what Reed can do with his hands and the anger that’s always simmering beneath the surface toward Chase, I’m starting feel queasy.

“I’m going to head in,” I say over the boys’ brewing argument. They can argue all they want, but I’m not going sit here while they do it. Who cares what kinds of cars Reed can and can’t fix, for God’s sake?

“I’ll see you in there,” Chase says, raising the bottle to his mouth as I try to gracefully step out of the hot tub. Sabrina’s eyes are still closed, and with Chase’s back to me, I smile at Reed and turn, bending over to snatch my towel off a nearby pool chair, giving Reed a show.

If he wants to drive me crazy when I can’t do anything about it, two can play at that game. When I straighten up to wrap my towel around myself, Reed’s eyes aren’t on me. They’re glued to Chase. But where Reed’s arm are thrown across the edge of the hot tub, I see that his hand is curled into a tight fist.

While I’m in the kitchen grabbing a bottle of water, I hear the very distinct sound of someone vomiting. My eyes immediately go to the window. Outside, I can see Sabrina, Reed, and Chase, all still sitting in the hot tub, their wet skin shimmering in the moonlight. I close the refrigerator and step toward the hallway that leads to the basement and to Madison’s bedroom.

There’s the sound again.

I move down the hallway, my wet feet slapping against the hardwood floor. The door to Madison’s bedroom is open, and I peek around the corner just in time to see her wash her hands in her ensuite bathroom. She runs her wet hands down on her face and turns off the faucet. When she turns, she sees me in the doorway and sighs.

“I’m sorry. I thought that was closed. Was I too loud?”

My stomach twists. I can’t believe she’s apologizing to me right now when she’s the one who’s sick. I think about what Sabrina said, that maybe she’s lying about how sick she is. Could that be true?

“It’s okay,” I tell her, wrapping my towel tighter around me. “Do you want me to go get Sabrina? She’s just?—”

“No, no,” she says, sitting down on the edge of her bed. It didn’t really process until this moment how much bigger her bedroom is than the one Chase is sleeping in. Three times the size of the one in the basement. It’s like a queen’s chambers. “It’s perfectly normal. It’s the chemo. It makes me feel icky. But everything is fine.” I start to protest, but she holds up a hand. “Quinn, I promise that everything is fine. I know Sabrina is worried, but I’m going to recover from this.”

I nod. I’m not really sure what else to do. When Madison tells you to do something, you do it, so I’m not about to sit here and argue with her. “Can I get you some water or something to eat?”

She waves me off. “That’s what I pay Lydia a small fortune for. Come sit with me.” She pats the bed beside her.

“Oh, I’m wet.”

She waves me off again. “Sheets can be washed. Come here.”

I smile and perch beside her on the edge of the bed. It’s so tall, so soft and fluffy, that my feet almost don’t touch the ground.

Madison turns to me, and I see for the first time the crow’s feet on either side of her eyes, the tells that she’s exhausted and fighting and maybe a little anxious. She reaches out and tucks a strand of my wet hair behind my ear. “Quinn, you’re so beautiful.”

A lump forms in my throat. Something about the way she says it reminds me so intensely of my mother, who always used to say that I was the prettiest girl in every room, even when I knew it wasn’t true. “Thank you.”

“Sometimes I think my son has forgotten how lucky he is.”

I fight to keep my face straight. He definitely forgot how lucky he was.

“Quinn, darling, tell me you have everything you could ever want in life.”

“What?” I feel like she asked me to spell my name in Swahili.

She takes one of my hands in hers. “I know that what Chase wants is for you to be the woman at home waiting for him. He wants to be the breadwinner and the one to handle everything, but that kind of lifestyle only works if it’s what you want, too. But you went to school with the intention of having a career, and please forgive me if I’m overstepping my bounds, but I just want to make sure you feel fulfilled with the life you’ve chosen.”

I can’t find any words. When Chase and I were together, I was the furthest from being fulfilled with our lifestyle as I could possibly be. Chase wanted to prove to the world that he was all I needed…all while he was getting what he needed somewhere else.

And in this moment, I don’t know whether to be honest with her and tell her that the life Chase wanted for me was not one I wanted for myself, one that I let him force me into because I thought I loved him, or if I should just keep my mouth shut. Nod my head. Keep the peace.

Because in a few days, what will it even matter?

I’ll be gone, and Madison will forget I was ever once a part of this family.

“I’m okay where I’m at,” I say, because I guess it’s true enough. I need a job, yes, but after this week, I’ll at least have enough money to make sure the house is taken care of so that the pressure isn’t so intense. That will give me the time and energy to job hunt, to go out and network, all that good stuff.

Madison sighs, looking off into the distance. “Life should be more than just ‘okay.’ I know some people don’t have the luxury of going after what they want, but you do . Don’t let my son take the reins. Make your own choices. Go after what you want.”

What I want.

It’s so simple for her to say. Madison Lynch knew what she wanted as soon as she turned thirteen. I read the TIME article on her, the one that she has framed on her wall back in New York. She knew the kind of woman she wanted to be and kept her focus until her life looked exactly the way she wanted.

Chase never talked about his dad while we were married, but I know that he and Madison were married and that she divorced him because “his ego got so big that I realized he was trying to sabotage my career. Can you imagine a man with so little dignity?” She spoke about him in the TIME article, but not Reed’s dad. I can only imagine a young Madison Lynch, in love with a man but being forced to choose between him and a career.

She chose her career, and can I even blame her for it? I chose the man and look how that turned out.

“What if I don’t know what I want?”

I expect Madison to begin another soliloquy, another motivational speech, the likes of which made her famous. But instead, she just says, “What a beautiful thing to have the freedom to figure it out.”