An hour and a half later,freshly shampooed, cut, highlighted under protest, waxed, and tinted, I leave the salon. It felt good to have some girl time. To talk to someone I truly like and enjoy. It’s easy enough now to see that I had curled up into a ball like a dog that had been kicked one too many times. I went into self-protection mode, and that meant isolating myself from anyone and everyone. I bailed on friendships. I bailed on my damn self. And it’s a full circle. Because I’m back to an uncomfortable truth. I bailed on Quinn too. When he joined the military and last night, in my very own kitchen, when I all but dared him to kiss me and then ran like a scared little girl.
Heading for home, I pull up out front and see Quinn just getting into his truck. “Going somewhere?”
He shrugs. “Wasn’t sure you’d want me to be hanging around all night,” he says. “I gotta tell you, Cec, if the signals you give me were any more mixed up, they’d be in another goddamn language.”
I’m not confusing myself any less. “That’s fair… Take me for a drive. Let’s see if we can’t uncross a few wires.”
He cocks his brow. “You know what happens when we go for a drive. Every damn time we’ve ever been alone in a vehicle. That always leads to trouble.”
“Does that mean you don’t want to?”
He shakes his head. “Never said that. Just making sure we’re on the same page.”
“Quinn Carter, are you gonna just stand there? Or are you going to open that door for me like the gentleman I know your mother raised you to be?” I ask with all the sass my still broke and unemployed ass can muster.
He doesn’t grin at me. But I can see him fighting it as he lets the truck door swing open and then steps back. As I climb up into the seat, I know this is a bad idea. I know what I’m about to do is probably going to bite me in the ass later. But I tried doing everything right. I did what my dad wanted and it was a mistake. I did all the right things at work and still got fired for it. I did all the right things after I got fired and I’m still hovering on the brink of poverty and foreclosure. So I’m tired of doing everything right. And if I’m going to do something wrong, I’m by god going to have something to show for it.
7
Quinn
The truck's engine rumbles beneath us as I guide her down the familiar gravel road that winds through the hills outside town. These back roads haven't changed much since we were seventeen—still the same potholes that make Cecily grab the door handle, still the same curve where you can see the entire countryside spread out below like an aerial map. My hands grip the steering wheel a little tighter than necessary, hyperaware of every small movement she makes in the passenger seat.
She's always been the queen of gasping while I'm driving, and working her foot against the floor like she's pressing on her own brake. Instead, this time, she gives me a smile.
"Turn it up," Cecily says, reaching for the radio at the same time as I do. Morgan Wallen's voice fills the cab singing about the '98 Atlanta Braves. It's a weird parallel to our own love story, about how they came up short of winning the title, and how we came up short in our game of love. Her fingers brush mineaccidentally, and that familiar electric current shoots straight through me. Some things never change.
The late afternoon sun filters through the windshield, casting golden light across her face. She's got her window rolled down, one arm hanging out, hair whipping in the breeze. Seventeen years old or early thirties, she still does the same thing on these drives. Still makes my chest tight with wanting her.
"Remember when we used to drive out here every Friday night?" she asks, not looking at me but staring out at the rolling hills dotted with tobacco barns and grazing cattle.
"Yeah." My voice comes out rougher than I intended. Those memories are what got me through a couple bad deployments. "Your curfew was midnight. We'd park up at Miller's Ridge and talk until the last possible second."
"Talk." She laughs, and the sound is both sweet and full of mirth. "Is that what we called it?"
I can't help but grin, gazing over at her. My eyebrows lift up. "Among other things."
The memory hits me hard—her pressed against the bench seat of this same truck, my hands tangled in her hair, both of us breathing hard and whispering promises we thought we'd keep forever. We were so damn sure back then. So certain that what we had was unbreakable.
"We were idiots," she says quietly, like she's reading my thoughts.
"Were we though?" I ask, taking the turn that leads up toward the ridge. "Or were we just young and completely sure we had life figured out?"
She turns to look at me then, really look at me, and I feel it in my gut. That same pull I've always had toward her, like gravity. "Both, maybe."
The radio switches to something by Brooks and Dunn, one of those songs about red dirt roads and first loves, and Cecilyreaches over to turn it up again. This time when her hand brushes mine, it's not an accident. She lets her fingers linger for just a second longer than necessary.
"This song was playing the night you asked me to marry you," she reminisces.
"I remember." How could I forget? We were up here then too, seventeen years old and drunk on the idea that we could take on the world together. I'd saved up for three months to buy her that ring—nothing fancy, just a simple solitaire from the jewelry store in town, but it might as well have been the diamond from the Titanic the way her face lit up. To be clear, it was the smallest one they had.
"We thought we had it all figured out," she continues, her voice soft over the music. "Graduate, get married, maybe go to UK together. Have babies by the time we were twenty-five."
"Simple plan."
"Stupid plan," she corrects, but there's no real heat in it. "We didn't account for anything going wrong. Didn't think about how dreams change, or how people change. About how one mixed message could change it all."
I pull into the same clearing where we used to park. In front of us, the familiar oak tree where I carved our initials junior year. They're still there, faded but visible. QC + CH inside a lopsided heart. Christ, we were young, so fuckin' young.
