Entirely, p.19
Entirely, page 19
Morning. How’s California today? I talked to Becca. And Leigh. You won’t be surprised—neither went very well. You still won’t answer; I still miss you.
This one didn’t possess quite the same lyricism. She was upset, he could tell, and despite him still being pissed off and his feelings still bruised, the tenor of her message made him want to go to her. He would wrap his arms around her and whisper that everything would be okay and kiss her cheek lightly and hold her head and . . . he was in a public place and so he would not think about how she smelled, especially her hair.
Not only did this particular text engage his dick; it also punched right through his chest, casting off whatever anger remained there.
Although he shouldn’t pick on that flight attendant, he kept envisioning the wedding band on her finger. It was possible she and her spouse had an agreement, an understanding—what happens in the air stays in the air—or an open marriage. But, whatever. Point being, he didn’t have to look far to see examples of people who had made a mistake, done the wrong thing.
He could, for instance, look in the mirror.
Don’t be so self-righteous.
He had told Quinn many times how important honesty and intimacy were to him now after what he had done to Delphine, and he had gotten both in spades with her. She bared herself to him like no one had before, and they shared a level of closeness he hadn’t even had with the woman he married.
Quinn was strong. She was thoughtful. She would go to the mat for people, for principles. That this issue stood between them was evidence of that. Maybe she hadn’t done the wrong thing after all.
Or maybe she should have told him, chosen loyalty to him over loyalty to Octavia’s and the other members. Maybe she should have told Becca—Charles, his double life at the club, and the rest of the community be damned.
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, suddenly restless. If he were honest, that alternate path didn’t feel right either.
His phone buzzed again. Not another one. He would need to go back to the bungalow and take a cold shower if she kept texting. It was ridiculous, this inexplicable physical response to her words, to her.
It was still buzzing—with a call, not a text. He turned the screen over as Becca’s name scrolled across. “Hey you!” he answered. “How are you feeling?”
“Big, heavy, and stir crazy. But it’s all good.” She sounded tired. “What’s this I hear about you and California?”
“It’s true. I’m in California. Malib . . .”
“Doing what exactly?”
“Working on a project with an old colleague. I . . .”
“Ran away.”
Another wave crashed; maybe he hadn’t heard her right. “What’d you say?”
“You ran away. Charles told me you canceled the deal. He told me a lot more, but let’s not go there just yet. He’s a great businessperson, with good instincts so you can’t do better than him. And he wouldn’t have agreed to invest our money if he didn’t believe your idea, your plans, would be super-successful. So you’re good for him, for us, too.”
Our money. Us. A good sign, but still.
“If you want to talk about why I backed out, we’ll need to talk about the rest.” As he said it, his chest sunk—the more his indignation faded, the less he liked how he sounded.
“Okay, Jonathan. First, I know you’re trying to look out for me, but I’m a grownup . . .” He smiled at her deliberate upward lilt at the end of the word, which made her sound anything but fully adult.
But, point taken.
“. . . and I don’t need you fighting my battles. Charles had his reasons for not telling me. We started to see a therapist, and I’m beginning to understand. Some days I want to leave him, like when I think about how often he must have lied to me. But—I know this sounds crazy—I know he really loves me, and I love him. I can’t just give that up, you know? Especially now that we’re going to be parents. Together or apart, we need to figure this out. We being Charles and me—no one else.”
She cleared her throat and waited for him to respond.
“Okay, I hear you. I understand what you’re saying.”
“Good. So butt out.”
He chuckled. “I’m out, I’m out.” Even with this on her shoulders, she was funny and tough.
“So, moving on to you . . .”
“Must we?” he asked sardonically.
“We must. Quinn shared some of your issues with me—how she discovered this thing about herself and you two worked out a way that she could be part of it and not violate the boundaries of your relationship. You guys are my model now, so you can’t break up.”
“I’m not sure about the boundaries part.” As he spoke, he gazed down the pier at the surfers.
“Jonathan, I was angry with her at first too, but she was caught in a really impossible situation. She did right by Charles and, honestly, if she—or you—had come to me, I’m not sure I would have believed either of you. Or I would have gotten totally defensive because how shitty would it be for a third party to tell you about some big ol’ issue in your new marriage you had no freaking idea about.”
She raised good points, but he kept quiet because she was not stopping.
“But no matter what happens, if Charles and I get through this or we split up, Quinn had nothing to do with it. If anything, she pushed me to consider possibilities for our relationship I never would have. Maybe I’ll get into it too, who knows?”
“Okay, moving into too-much-information territory,” he joked. But he, too, had been changed by Quinn. In the best way. He was the professional traveler, the expert on—hah!—people and places. And yet she had opened his eyes to a new world.
“Yeah, sorry. Hormones. Stress. Therapy. I’m an open book. So back to you again. You sought Charles out as an investor, and he wanted to back your business plan. Let him. Take the money, use him as an advisor, start your company. And you’re in love with Quinn.”
She paused. He stayed silent, and she went on. “So why are you in California?”
He laughed and opened his mouth to speak, although he still wasn’t sure what he was going to say.
“Shh. Not finished. If she told you about Charles, or you told me, it wouldn’t have changed anything. It wouldn’t have helped, and I wouldn’t be thinking you were some kind of hero for bringing it to my attention. What I’m saying is, Quinn did the right thing. I want more friends like her.”
“You’re right, kiddo,” he said. “I do, too.”
17
Decisions
She hurried through the wooden doors and into the Grand Central Terminal foyer, as if physically getting away from Leigh could diminish the impact of what she had just said.
As she fed her credit card into the ticket machine, she noticed tiny arches across her palm, nail imprints from clenched fists. Her jaw was also clenched, and she relaxed that too.
She hadn’t expected Leigh to embrace her disclosure, but she did not expect that much judgment. Or the comments about her career. Tell me what you really think. Or the contempt. It felt terrible. She understood why Octavia kept her distance from people, tried not to get attached. And why Charles kept that part of his life hidden. Even to his wife. To see such disdain reflected in the face of someone you confided in, who you believed knew you? It hurt. A lot.
Even Jonathan had looked at her that way in the car on the way to the airport, for the brief few seconds he actually did look at her.
As the train rattled through the tunnel and north along the river, she looked on her phone at his social media accounts. He had posted a few photos of meals by the water, a beach with a bunch of surfers—Malibu?—funky building facades, a pod of dolphins in the Pacific set against a bright sky.
Maybe he wouldn’t come back to New York after this trip. Maybe he wouldn’t come back to her.
But still, she hoped. Her car ambush had been an ill-conceived disaster. She wished there was some other way to show him how she felt about him, about them.
But as the days went by and he didn’t respond to her texts, hope waned.
When the train arrived at her station, she bypassed the line of waiting taxis and walked to the farmhouse; she needed the movement and the cool air.
By the time she put her key in the front door lock, she had made several decisions.
She would not stop writing. What she had sent to Leigh a few weeks ago, “the smut,” she would turn into a couple of short fictional stories. Their names, she already had come up with on the walk home.
This new manuscript that Quinn had been working on—she suddenly realized how she could show Jonathan how she felt. She would focus all her energy on it and finish it as quickly as she could, because it was for two—no, three—incredibly important reasons: herself, him, and their future. This was how she could show him what he meant to her, and—she desperately hoped—help him find a way back to her.
She dropped her purse by the table in the front hall and threw her coat over the stair railing. In the kitchen, she made a cup of tea. Other than the trip to Paris with Octavia for Madame’s celebration, which hadn’t been scheduled yet, she would continue to spend a lot of time here.
Not at Jonathan’s. Not at the club. Here. Home. Writing.
Finishing.
Carefully, she carried the mug upstairs to her office. This would be her routine. Every day. A morning walk, a cup of tea, filling her notebooks with the rest of the story.
She took the top notebook off the pile on her desk and turned to where she left off yesterday.
That’s the routine she stuck to, day after day. Breaking only for the essentials and her rewards for especially good writing days—a candle-lit evening bath or a dinner with Octavia.
When writing the steamy scenes, she would think of how Jonathan touched her. She would make herself come, his effect on her still so strong, even in his absence. She missed him sharply in those moments; those climaxes, like much of their relationship, were bittersweet.
And every day, she took a long walk—through town, down to the river, in the woods after the first snowfall, each day a different route to discover something new, something she could tell him about someday.
She kept on sending him the texts. As with the manuscript, she would not let her determination wane. He had stood by her in her worst moments, and she would do the same while he worked through his anger and hurt.
The hurt she caused because she hid something from him. But she also knew the roots of that wound ran deeper and further back in time than the two of them. The ghosts of his past, his regrets, his needs borne of past failures—would they ever fully fade away? She had her own, that’s for sure, and she understood his need for time, but she also knew its preciousness; she would not waste any.
Yesterday, she had finally run out of the notebooks from Paris, so she took an old black and white marbled one from her desk drawer to start the last scene this morning. The real story was not over, but the manuscript was reaching its natural conclusion—for now.
When she finished, she placed her pen on the desk, sat back in her chair, and let that satisfying feeling of completion, of accomplishment, fill her. It was a rough first draft, very rough; she was far from done. But now she had pages to work with, a story to shape and to be shaped by.
She had written many books, but this story in particular—its characters, its events, its subtle as well as life-altering twists—molded the author as much as she, it.
Later, she would call Nely at Devon and ask for a meeting to talk about the future.
She would send pages to Hollinger to see about a new fellowship; she might even send the committee those erotic pages she had shared with Leigh.
And one day, after more time passed and her heart wouldn’t ache so deeply, she would write another story, about the past, about Harris.
After a while, she picked up the pen again for one last thing. She always saved writing her dedications until the end, and that’s where she liked to put them in her books, on the very last page.
The clean white leaf of paper was cool against the heel of her hand as she wrote. There was no need to think about what this one would say.
18
Unfinished
Jonathan lay in bed, apparently done sleeping for the night even though the sun had yet to raise a bleary eyebrow over the horizon. The question Becca voiced on the phone surfaced in his brain, the question he had been pussyfooting around asking himself, Why are you in California?
It was becoming a good question. He needed to finish this gig—shooting at the glass house on the cliff had a couple more weeks to go—but then what?
Quinn was smart, compassionate, and kind, and he knew, since her discovery about Charles and all its fallout, broken-hearted. He heard that in her texts, the sadness, but also he heard her doggedness, her hope, her faith in the two of them. Yesterday, she texted him a single photo of delicate bird tracks in the lightest dusting of snow on her deck rail, tiny little footprints.
What’s it like where you are?
When he first left New York, he told himself they were over as a couple. But as the days turned into weeks, he knew Becca was right—he had run away. Because he was angry. Because he felt betrayed. And maybe also because falling—being—in love was scary, the risks of having your heart crushed omnipresent.
Quinn was strong and principled. If he were half the person she was, he wouldn’t have cheated. But her strength, those principles, also meant that if something like what happened with Charles were to arise again, she probably would make the same decision—she would not tell Jonathan everything. He would have to be okay with that.
Could he be?
He let the fantasy reel play in his mind. If he were in New York right now, he would pack a lunch and a heavy blanket and get on the next train to see her so they could talk. They would huddle under the blanket and look out together at the river, the edges beginning to freeze, ducks gliding in the warmer pockets, as they shared the food. Or if it was too windy, they would sit inside, in front of her fireplace. They would talk, guarded at first, but soon laughing softly, each of them reopening to the other.
When they finished eating, he would follow her upstairs. They’d make love, mess up the sheets in her sunny, white room, clothes strewn all around. When they finally got up sometime, oh, late in the afternoon, he would look in her mostly empty fridge, find a few eggs and whip them up for dinner so they wouldn’t have to put on real clothes and go out.
But that was a daydream. While his lizard brain and other parts wanted to mess up her sheets, the rest of him was well aware of the reality. Like she told him before, their relationship was what sparked her interest in the lifestyle. He could share it with her, including accepting that there would be secrets she might not be able to tell him, or he could let her go.
Although he didn’t have to meet the cast and crew at the house until seven thirty, he showered and grabbed his stuff for the day and left the bungalow early. The park near the glass house was a perfect place to catch the sunrise.
He knew the exact image he wanted to capture: the bluff with a single cypress in silhouette against the glowing golden-violet dawn light. He framed it with the Pacific in the foreground, reflecting the color burst in the sky.
The image was fierce and stark at the same time.
Hot-headed and lonely.
He opened a new text message and sent the picture. Just the picture. Her medium was words; he was better with images.
It was after nine in New York, so she was probably awake. Making coffee, or showering, which he would not think about. But then the three sequential bubbles darkened and faded a few times and he pictured her typing and deleting, second-guessing herself after his long silence. She had told him she loved him on that horrific ride to the airport. After what she had been through with Harris, acknowledging that, saying those words to another man, could not have been easy.
And how had Jonathan responded? He had been a cold son of a bitch. Got out of the car. Turned his back. Walked away. Then ignored her.
The bubbles stopped, but no text popped up.
What did you expect, a brass band? A red fucking carpet?
He put the phone back in his pocket, found a place to grab breakfast, and got his brain focused on the scenes they would shoot today.
By the time early evening rolled around, they had two scenes in the can and a third blocked so they could start shooting early tomorrow. They didn’t get as far as he planned today, but they had done respectable work. Bryan was right. They were a good bunch. The jokes passed easily among them, at least most of the time; they shared a real sense of camaraderie.
In fact, they were going out for drinks and dinner in Laguna Beach now, but he begged off, wanting to charge his dead phone.
When he got back to Bryan’s guest house, there was a thick envelope propped against the frame of the front door.
He recognized the handwriting immediately. For a second, he wondered how she found him here, but then he remembered a text from Becca asking questions about where he was staying. He hoped she was a co-conspirator in tracking him down; if that were the case, it meant she and Quinn were on speaking terms.
Inside the bungalow, he opened the envelope and slid out the stack of pages, bound in the upper left corner with a black metal clip. There was no note, only a blank cover sheet followed by pages and pages of handwriting, text scanned from a notebook. The notebooks she had showed him from Paris, he guessed.
Her tenacity brought a smile to his face. She had said she was writing again, but this, this was a lot of words. The scanning alone must have taken her half a day.
He turned to the first page as he sat on the bed and began to read.
At some point, he got up to close the blinds and order a burger to be delivered. Then he went back to reading.
