Love in Slow Motion

54. Reed

54 REED

5 Years Ago

The first time I run into Quinn after Thanksgiving, she’s in the library, with a stack of books at her feet as she scans through the shelves. I consider turning and walking away, letting this be as painless as I can possibly manage to make it. But before I have a chance to make a run for it, she turns, catches sight of me, and smiles so big that she’s all teeth and sunshine.

“Reed! Hey. Just the person I wanted to see.”

My stomach feels like it’s being catapulted out of a slingshot. “Me?”

She nods and beckons me closer with a motion of her chin. When I’m standing beside her, she says, “Could you grab me that bright red book on the top shelf?” She points up over her head.

I tilt my head back, looking at the book on the top shelf. A glance down the aisle tells me that there are no stools around to assist her. I reach my arm up, snatch the book off the shelf, and hand it to her.

“Thanks,” she breathes out in relief. “I’ve been standing here for at least ten minutes, pretending that I was still looking for something, but this was the last book I needed. I just couldn’t figure out how to get it without scaling the shelf.”

“Glad I could help.”

She drops the book onto the top of her stack and turns to press her shoulders to the shelf behind her. “So, what brings you to these parts? Research paper? Study group?”

I glance down at my cell phone in my hand. Telling her the reason I’m here, in the library, in the middle of the afternoon, doesn’t feel like something I want to do. I’m meeting a girl for a hook-up. Both of our roommates are home, so we decided to rent a room at the library for a quickie. But there’s no way in hell I’m telling Quinn that.

“Just meeting up with someone.”

She nods and crosses her arms. “Yeah. Okay. Well, hey, maybe we could grab some coffee later.” She says it so casually, as if she isn’t dating my brother. And I realize that, for her, coffee would just be coffee and nothing more. She wants to be friends. She wants to shoot the shit over lattes in the student center as if we didn’t almost hook up two months ago.

Because that’s what she should think. Totally harmless to have coffee with your boyfriend’s brother if there are absolutely no feelings involved. Completely innocent.

Except I don’t want it to be innocent, I realize. I want her to tell me right now that this thing with Chase is just a fling and that she’s way more interested in me. I want her to tell me that she can’t stop thinking about me, the way I can’t stop thinking about her. Haven’t stopped thinking about her for two months.

But instead, she’s casually asking me for coffee because she no longer sees me as a romantic prospect. All of her feelings have vanished. Maybe they never existed in the first place.

“Yeah,” I find myself saying. “Chase really likes that place right off campus, the one that has the special milk. Has he taken you there? Maybe we could all three go.”

Her face shifts. If I wasn’t watching her closely, I might not have noticed. Her smile somehow becomes bigger while dimming slightly. Little crinkles appear on the outsides of each eye. “Yes. Chase. Absolutely. He would love that. I’ll talk to him and we can find a good time.” The offer sounds wooden.

It’s like…she wasn’t expecting me to bring up Chase. What does that even mean? “Okay, well, I can?—”

“Reed?”

I turn. There she is, outlined in sunlight in front of the big library windows. Amina. A girl I met at a party just after Thanksgiving and have been hooking up with ever since. In that month between Halloween and Thanksgiving, I spent a lot of time wandering around campus, hoping to run into Quinn again. But when I didn’t, I gave up hope. And then she showed up at Thanksgiving, and I realized I had to get over her.

There’s nothing wrong with Amina. She’s pretty. She’s smart. She makes me laugh. She’s really responsive and fun, sexually.

But she’s not Quinn. And that’s not her fault.

Amina comes to stand beside me, her smile taking up so much of her face as she looks up at me and then over at Quinn. “Hey!” she says, friendly as ever. “I know you. You’re in my social sciences class.”

Quinn is nodding before Amina is even finished speaking. “Yep. You did that project on that Tinder social experiment.”

Amina’s eyes light up. “Oh, yeah. That was a lot of fun. I, uh, I don’t remember what your project was about.”

Quinn makes this little sound in the back of her throat, something between a laugh and a cough, and tucks her hands into her back pockets, nodding. I’ve never seen her like this, like she’s trying to seem casual. From what I know about Quinn, she doesn’t seem to be a very casual person. She seems to really care about things. She’s exactly the kind of person who would listen closely to someone’s presentation while also not expecting anyone to be listening to hers.

“Oh, it was a market survey on coffee shops and their clientele. Nothing important.” She gives a nervous laugh that makes my skin crawl. She’s trying to make herself small. She’s trying to make herself seem less important than she is. I hate it.

But before I can say anything else, Quinn’s phone rings. She looks around, clearly worried she’s going to disrupt someone’s reading, and presses a button to silence the phone. From where I’m standing, I can see Chase’s face on her screen, and I catch the way her shoulders sag in relief, like she was waiting for an excuse to get away.

“I guess Chase is out of class,” she says, bending to pick up the massive stack of books from the floor. “I should probably get going.”

The stack wobbles in her arms, and I step forward to help her, but she swings the stack out of my grasp and sends me the fakest smile I’ve ever seen. “I’m good, thanks. I’ll see you around, Reed.”

She turns away from me as Amina reaches for my hand and gives me a tug in the opposite direction. “Yeah,” I say to Quinn’s retreating back. “I’ll see you around.”

Amina, her face lit up in the afternoon sun, pulls me toward the study rooms. “Come on. I don’t have a ton of time. Let’s do this.”

I laugh, following her back down the row of books. But before I round the corner, I glance back over my shoulder and find Quinn down on the other end, her arms full and her eyes on me.