Love in Slow Motion

33. Reed

33 REED

The sun seems brighter today. We’re all lounging in the living room, and I swear, Quinn is glowing. She’s wearing this tiny pair of shorts that are driving me crazy and reading the book I brought with me, a sci-fi novel that I stuck in my bag last minute before heading here. My bookmark is still sticking out of it at the halfway point, her hands wrapped around the spine, and even though it wasn’t a book I was particularly loving, I know I’ll never get rid of it now. She looks like a woman in a Victorian painting…if women in Victorian paintings wore shorts so short you could see the curve of their asses. She’s turned sideways on the couch, her bare legs stretching out toward me but not quite reaching.

“I was thinking I might go for a hike today,” Sabrina says in an absent-minded way. She turns her face away from the window, towards us. “It’s a really beautiful day, and I’m starting to feel a little antsy.”

Beside her on the couch, Mom chuckles. “I swear. People your age can’t sit still, can they?”

Sabrina rolls her eyes. “Isn’t that a good thing? I’m a hard worker; I like to keep busy.”

Mom brushes a strand of Sabrina’s hair behind her ear. If I didn’t know perfectly well that my mother doesn’t pick favorites, I would think she likes Sabrina better than me and my brother. But I know it’s not true. “It’s a good thing to have a work ethic, but if you don’t slow down every once in a while, you’re going to wreck your health.”

Sabrina sighs dramatically. “I’m pretty sure the experts would agree that a hike in the fresh air could only improve my health.”

As she says this, Chase comes into the room and plops down on the couch between Quinn and me. Quinn scrambles to get her legs out of the way in time and then glowers at Chase. I don’t think anyone but me notices.

Sabrina stands, stretching out her long limbs. She’s the tallest of the three of us, with arms and legs that go on for days. “Anybody want to join me?”

Chase stretches his arm out along the back of the couch, his fingers dangling into Quinn’s space. They brush the curve of her shoulder, and she flinches, almost imperceptible. I grind my teeth together. I get it; he wants to make sure everyone thinks they’re still a couple, but how is putting his hands on her when virtually nobody is going to notice helpful in any way?

“Join you where?” he asks, tilting his head back to look up at our sister.

“Hike,” she responds, already halfway out of the room. “I’ll wait for anyone who wants to come, but I want to go before it gets too hot.”

“That seems really nice,” Mom says, pushing up off the couch. “Anyone else want to come? Chase?”

I’m not sure why she singles him out, but he looks at her with his eyebrows raised. “Huh? Me? Nah. I actually need to go into town to do a little bit of work. Have some phone calls to make. You guys have fun.”

Quinn watches him go, and I can’t quite make out her expression. Does she want him to come with us? I would have thought having him gone for the afternoon would be a good thing.

Mom shrugs and then smiles at both of us. “You two coming?”

I should have stayed back at the lake house. With Quinn walking up the hiking trail in front of me in a pair of athletic shorts that’s tight against the shape of her ass, I’m having a really hard time convincing my dick not to stand up and salute.

“You seem awfully distracted today,” my mom says, walking beside me. I can see the house past her shoulder, down the slope that leads to the lake. At first, I think she’s caught me salivating over Quinn’s ass, but then she says, “Is it because you had to leave the restaurant for the week? I know how nervous that makes you.”

She’s right. It did used to make me nervous to leave the restaurant. That’s because it always felt like if I wasn’t there to chase everyone around and make sure they were doing what they were supposed to that things would start to fall apart. And maybe my fears weren’t so unwarranted, considering I turned my back for a second and my partner tanked the entire thing.

But if I had kept any closer of an eye on the place, I would have had to live in the backroom.

“I’m actually doing okay,” I tell her, guilt gnawing at me for lying to her. But I don’t think anyone understands how hard it is to live in the shadow of Madison Lynch. If she finds out that I let someone else put the restaurant under their name, that I gave someone else control over something that I should have been watching like a hawk, I’m afraid she’ll tell me I’m a terrible businessman. And she would probably be right. Yes, I have a business degree, but I’m a pastry chef first and a businessperson second. An overly-trustful, idiotic pushover third.

As I think this, Quinn glances over her shoulder at me, and my stomach dips.

She doesn’t think I’m an idiot. She believes in me. And that knowledge is enough to keep me going.

In the break of our conversation, I hear Sabrina up ahead ask Quinn, “How did he like the outfit?”

Oh, fuck. This is definitely not going to help me not pop a boner. I have to avoid imagining Quinn in that little string and lace thing she wore for me last night— bought for me—and focus again on my mom, who looks like she might be getting a little winded.

“I’ve been keeping up with things,” she says. “I saw that you got a few big celebrities in there a few months ago. That’s certainly good for business.”

I trip over my own Nikes. Mom is “keeping up” with Aeronaut? That means it’s just a matter of time before she finds out that it no longer exists. It’s a good thing she doesn’t believe in wi-fi at the lake house. By the time this trip is over and she gets back home, I’ll have a new place secured, and it won’t matter if she knows about the restaurant closing because there will be a new one set to open. I have to time this right, but I know that Jack is going to find me something today, if he hasn’t already. He’s the best. That’s why I called him to begin with.

By the time this week is over, I’ll have a space to start fresh. My eyes travel up to Quinn again. Hopefully, a space that she wants to share with me.

“Yeah,” I tell Mom. “We’ve made a lot of big changes. Once I get back, I think we’ll have a lot of things sorted that we’ve been meaning to take care of.” I don’t even have to lie. All of that is true. “You’ll have to come out when everything is done.” Another not-lie. When I have the new place open, the first thing I’ll want to do is have my mom there. And Quinn. The two people whose opinions I care about the most.

Quinn’s voice carries back to us on the wind as we head up a steep pass. “…never done that before. What are your favorite places in the city?”

I bite back a smile, even as worry settles in my stomach. When this is all over, and I ask Quinn to be with me when we leave here, what will Sabrina think? What will our mom think? Is it too much for me to hope that maybe life can go on like it always has, but with Quinn being mine?

Jesus, just thinking about it like that, I know there’s no way it’s going to be that easy. Maybe Quinn and I will have to keep it a secret for a little while. Maybe we’ll have to figure out how our life is going to work together before we can tell anyone else. I don’t want to lose my family, but I know I can’t lose Quinn either. If they can’t handle the fact that I want Quinn, that I’ve always wanted Quinn, then maybe they aren’t the people I always thought they were.

Beside me, Mom starts to huff a little.

I turn to her quickly, reaching out to pull her to a stop. “Hey, are you okay?” Her face is red and sweaty, her breath blowing out of her in billows.

“I’m okay,” she says. “I just haven’t done a lot of exercising these last few months. This might have been a little bit more than I could handle.”

Holding onto her arms, I lead her over to a big rock beside the path and lower her down onto it.

“Mom?” Sabrina rushes over, worry etched on her face. “Are you okay?”

Mom waves her off, bending over her knees to catch her breath.

Quinn stands off behind us, watching with her hands clutched to her chest.

“She’s going to be fine,” I tell her, looking around Sabrina, who’s producing a bottle of water from a very small backpack that she’s unslung from her shoulders. “She just overdid it.”

Quinn doesn’t say anything, but her sad, worried eyes meet mine. I try to smile. I don’t want her to worry. I know my mother. She’s strong and resilient. Everything she’s going through right now with the chemo and the treatments and the doctors, it’s all just a passing thing. In a few years, we’ll look back on this and be proud that she made it through.

“I’m going to take her back,” Sabrina says, helping my mother to her feet.

“We’ll come with you,” I say, but Sabrina puts up a hand to stop me.

“No way. You guys have been just as cooped up in that house as I have. Enjoy the hiking trails. We’ll see you back for lunch.”

I don’t argue with her. As much as I wish it was under different circumstances, I’m excited at the idea of getting to be alone with Quinn. Really alone. And in a place that means so much to me.

I move out of the way to let Sabrina and our mom pass, moving a lot slower back down the hill than we did climbing it. As soon as they’re out of sight, I step over to Quinn.

“Is she okay?” Quinn asks, her voice shaky.

“She’s fine,” I tell her again, taking her by the shoulders and turning her back in the direction of the trail. “I did some research on the chemo stuff after she told us about it the other night.” I step back onto the trail, comforted by the sound of the dirt under my feet. Down below, the lake shimmers under the sun, and the lake house is just barely visible beyond the trees. “The exercise is good for her. It keeps her from having anxiety and from feeling lethargic. She was fine until that last hill. It’s a steep one.”

She nods and steps onto the trail beside me. She doesn’t argue when I keep walking up instead of heading back down. “That all sounds reasonable in theory, but it’s so hard to convince your brain of all that when you see someone gasping for air and know they’re sick.”

Glancing back over my shoulder to make sure there’s no way anybody would be able to see us from the lake house—even though the only person left there is Lydia—I reach down and take Quinn’s hand. It feels like a miracle, being allowed to touch her whenever I please.

She looks down at our clasped hands and then turns her face away, but I can see the blush traveling along the curves of her ears. I fucked her to within an inch of her life last night, but it’s the handholding that makes her blush.

“Did Chase ever tell you about Sabrina being pre-mature?”

Her face turns sharply toward mine. “No. He’s never really talked about any of you as babies.”

I nod. I figured as much. I can’t really imagine Chase taking the time to tell her about me and Sabrina. A man who’s been cheating on his wife since the beginning of their relationship is a man who doesn’t share any true intimacy with the woman he’s married to. On one hand, I’m sad that Quinn has lived with that kind of distance for so long. On the other, I’m glad that’s all she’s known because when I worship her, when I give her the world, when I share every single part of myself with her, she’ll know that’s how it’s supposed to be.

“All three of us were complicated for our mom,” I tell Quinn, guiding her up the slope. We’re almost to the very top. “But Sabrina was the hardest. Mom developed this pregnancy complication. I was young, so I don’t remember what it was exactly, and Mom isn’t one to talk about the past. At least, not the bad stuff. She had to have a c-section, and she almost died.”

Quinn’s feet skitter, and she almost trips. I tighten my hold on her, keeping her from falling. “Oh, my God. I had no idea.”

I smile, holding her hand a little tighter. “That’s because my mother looks at something like that as a speck in her past. Almost dying is like a normal Tuesday for her. Sabrina came out healthy and strong, and that’s all she cared about. She took her time recovering and then she went back to work because that’s who she is. The Unstoppable Madison Lynch.”

Quinn grins. “She’s amazing.”

We crest the top of the hill, and I pull her to a stop. “You’re amazing,” I tell her, and her face falls. God, I hate that.

“I’ve never done anything like your mom has. I went to college, abandoned my dreams of the future to get married and be what my husband wanted me to be, and now I’m on the verge of homelessness and I’m lying to the kindest person in the world to get her money.”

I sigh. “Come on, it’s not that simple, and you know it. You left your home and everything you knew to go away to college. You made sacrifices for a marriage and a man that you trusted and believed in. You came here, not to deceive someone, but to do what you have to in order to take care of yourself. You’re resourceful and strong. And you’re unstoppable, too.”

She turns her face up to me, and it’s like a sock to the stomach. Being here, in the place I love, with a woman I love, with things finally falling into place, is more than I could have ever imagined. Her eyes are shining, looking up at me, and I almost blurt it out right then and there. That I love her. That I’ve loved her for five years. That she owns every part of who I am.

She looks over my shoulder, checking for something, and then she fists her hand into my t-shirt and drags me off the trail and into the woods. I follow her with a smile until she stops, grabs me by both shoulders, and shoves me up against a tree.

Before I have a chance to say a word, she’s on her knees in front of me, tugging my shorts down to my knees. My dick pops out, and she immediately wraps her hand around it, running her tongue up the underside.

“Jesus,” I hiss, my vision going blurry. How can she be this perfect? How can I want her this much?

She smiles up at me, devious little thing. “Use me,” she says. “Fuck my mouth.”

I’m shaking so hard I’m afraid I’ll shake apart. She wants me to be rough with her. And fuck if I don’t want it, too. But I also want to keep her here just like this, in this place where she can be whoever and whatever she wants to be. I want this forever.

“Be a good little slut and open your mouth.”

Her eyes immediately lose some of their focus. She makes a tight noise in the back of her throat and her mouth falls open. I step forward, no longer held up by the massive tree trunk, and shove into her mouth. Her lips stretch around me, and I feel like I might die.

“This okay?” I ask, pushing a little further, until she gags and her hands come up to grab hold of my hips, not pushing me away but trying to find leverage.

She gives a little tip of her chin, and I pull back long enough to let her catch her breath before plunging in again. I wrap my hand in her hair and rock into her. She never takes her eyes off me, and I watch her for any signs that I’m going too hard or too deep.

“You’re taking it so well,” I say, my fingers trailing down her cheek. I know she wants me to be rough, but I’m also so in love with her, it feels like it’ll kill me, and that makes me want to praise her and adore her.

When I hold her head against me and feel her gag around me again, I almost lose it. I pull back, falling back against the tree and letting my cock slip from the wet paradise of her mouth.

“I’m not going to last,” I gasp. I’m ready to burst, and it’s been all of two minutes.

“Don’t stop,” she says, scooting forward on her knees and swallowing me down again, taking me all the way to the back of her throat.

I lose my grasp on reality. I don’t have time to ask her if it’s okay that I come in her mouth before my balls are tightening up and I’m spilling down her throat. “Swallow every drop like a good little whore,” I manage to grit out.

Her eyes fall closed, and her throat works, swallowing me down. When she finally lets me slide free, I sigh. My whole body is tingling, my nerves all overworked. Over the years, I’ve imagined having Quinn a million different ways, some of it rough and some of it slow and tender. I want it all with her. But if this is what she wants to do, I’m good with that.

She smiles up at me, running her hands up and down my hips. The feel of it is comforting. Her eyes trace my body, my softening cock, the tattoos on my skin. When she finds the tattoo on my hipbone, my stomach tenses.

She runs her fingertip over it. “I’d never seen this one before this week,” she says, and I want to smile because the reason she’s never seen it is because it dips below my waistband, most of it covered by clothing. But she knows the rest of them. She’s been looking at them all week, every time I take my shirt off. I love that she can’t keep her eyes off me.

But now she has her hands on my hip tattoo, a tattoo she probably couldn’t make out in the shadowed light we’ve been fucking in for the last two days. It’s in front of her now, at eye level. She traces the lines of the skeleton with her index finger gently enough to almost tickle.

I wait for her to ask. I wait for her to see right through me. I wait for her to understand.

She’s quiet as she looks at it, and then, without a word, she puts her hand out and lets me help her to her feet. I pull up my shorts and watch her fix her hair. As soon as she’s standing in front of me, I bend down and kiss her. This is the way I imagined our first kiss happening. Somewhere quiet, somewhere we didn’t have to hurry or hide. Just her and me, kissing softly at first and then deeper, our mouths opening and our tongues finding each other.

She wraps her arms around me, and I haul her against my body, wanting to get lost in her. She feels perfect in my arms. She feels right . She fits me like a puzzle piece. She puts me back together.

We pull apart, gasping into each other’s mouths. She puts a finger against my chin in a strangely sweet gesture. “I wish we could make everything else go away,” she says, and my heart squeezes.

I know that, for her, this has just been about sex. About coping with this terrible week. About finding herself again after her failed marriage. But maybe, just maybe, it’s starting to be about more.

“How many times do you think you’ve hiked this trail?” Quinn asks me as we walk back down toward the lake house. I feel sick to my stomach at the idea of going back, of having to once again share Quinn with everyone else, of having to once again sneak around and pretend not to be in love with her.

“I’ve probably hiked it at least twice a year since I was nine or so.”

“Until you stopped coming.” Her words cut through, slicing guilt into me. When I don’t say anything, she tips her chin toward me, curiosity in her eyes.

I’m not ready to tell her the truth. I’m not ready to tell her that I stopped coming to the lake house the summer after she and Chase started seeing each other. The year she started coming out every summer. I couldn’t take it. Seeing her and Chase together at family dinners and occasional get-togethers was one thing. We even went on a double date once, an activity that we thankfully never attempted to duplicate. But the idea of spending the week with the two of them was a different thing entirely. I didn’t want to have to know they were sharing a bed, watch them in the pool together and at mealtimes. The thought was unbearable.

“Life just got busy,” I tell Quinn now, feeling guilty for lying to her. She’s opened up to me so completely over the last few days, but I still have all of my secrets. All the things she’s not ready to know yet.

When we round the last corner and step back onto the dirt road that leads back to the lake house, Quinn gives a little sigh. “It’s been nice not having to pretend,” she says quietly as we approach the door. “But here we go again.”

I know exactly how she feels.

I hold the door open for her, feeling the relief of the cold air conditioning as soon as I step inside. Sabrina and Mom are in the living room, their voices loud as they speak over each other.

And that’s when I realize that it’s not just the two of them standing in the center of the sunken living room. There’s someone else here. And it’s not Chase.

My eyes meet Quinn’s. She’s figured it out, too, her face falling into a confused scowl.

Because my ex-girlfriend, Amina, is standing in my living room.

“Amina,” I say, my voice coming out a croak.