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“Close to ten.”
I try not to laugh when she sits up so fast she almost falls off the mattress.
“You were supposed to do breakfast with your mom today.” She rolls to her feet, on purpose this time, and drags a hand through the riot of her hair. I prop myself up on my elbow, wondering if I can tempt her back under the covers one more time, but she’s already twisting her red hair into a coil and her eyes look a little too wide. Our leisurely morning is over.
I sit up and reach for my sock and my leg. It’s second nature to slide the sleeve up over my knee and push the pin down into its socket. I hear the click that tells me everything is connected, and I plant both feet on the floor, getting my bearings. My clothes come sailing over the bed, smacking into my back, and okay, I was not expecting that. Quinn threw them.
“Are you trying to get rid of me?” I ask.
She braces her hands on her ample hips and her head cocks to the side. She isn’t frowning, but she gives a long-suffering sigh. The kind that tells me she thinks I should already understand what she’s about to say.
“I don’t want your mom thinking we were having sex all night.” She grabs a pair of light purple panties from the top drawer of her dresser and bends at the waist to step into them. I should one hundred percent look somewhere else. I don’t.
“First, I’m a grown adult and my mom doesn’t keep tabs on my whereabouts,” I say, and while Quinn blinks at me like she doubts every word out of my mouth, it’s true. My mother doesn’t keep tabs on me. Not after I’ve pushed her to the outskirts of my life. “Second, we were having sex all night.”
I duck as a pillow hurtles toward me.This violent streak of hers is new.
It’s cute.
I like it.
“We still need to get you home,” Quinn says, and I want to wrap myself in the curve of her smile. “I can’t monopolize all your time. I bet she still wants to see you.”
My immediate thought is to say that my mom won’t care, that we aren’t that close, but I don’t. She cares. She wants more than I can give her. More time, more togetherness, just more. She gave me space because I once demanded it, and after all these years of putting distance between us, I now don’t know how to bridge the gap. I still talk to her via text and email, but nothing deeper than surface-level interactions. Everything I could say leaves my brain and I’m that teenager in a hospital bed again, with nothing on my mind except my pain and fear and the knowledge that I can’t say anything because it will hurt the people I love.
How many times had Mom tried to connect only to say the wrong thing or ask the wrong questions? How many times did I bite her head off before she stopped trying?
It’s time to work on that.
Maybe we both can.
Quinn grabs a pair of jeans and hops from foot to foot as she pulls them up. I could remind her I have a car here at her house and she doesn’t need to get dressed to see me off, but she jiggles so nicely as she buttons the denim at her waist that I don’t have the heart to stop her. She picks another one of those delicate tank tops I could rip with my teeth, and shrugs on a plaid flannel. She looks casual, gorgeous, and I’m still sitting on the edge of her bed with my pants and underwear snagged around my ankles.
“Let’s move, Varg,” Quinn says, yanking her hair up into some form of impossible pouf of copper at the top of her head.
We’re in Vic’s car, halfway to Vic’s house, when she looks across the console at me and blinks her wide green eyes.
“There is no reason for me to be in this car right now, is there?”
I can’t help but laugh, head thrown back against the buttery leather headrest. “Maybe I need moral support,” I say, and wonder if she can tell I’m one hundred percent serious. Maybe it’s because I know Quinn and her dad are so close. Maybe it’s because one thing my mom keeps saying to me is how much she adores Quinn. Maybe it’s because I’m not ready to say goodbye just yet.
“The good news is that I like your mom,” Quinn laughs, too. “But if she asks, we spent the night playing scrabble, and you slept in the guest room.”
“Does your house even have a guest room? I thought the third bedroom was an office-library-lounge space?”
Her grin is blinding. “Your mom doesn’t know that.”
I can’t stop my smile. I don’t want to. Quinn is a light breeze over sweaty skin after too long stuck in a dank, dark basement. She’s the first sip of water, sweet and cool, after waking up with a hangover and cotton mouth. I spend a majority of my day cataloging things to share with her during our next conversation, and then when we talk…well time seems to poof out of existence like the social construct it is.
We pull into my brother’s extensive driveway, and I park the car in the middle of the circle. I open Quinn’s door for her, handing her out onto the shoveled path, and feel like the lowest of the low. Vic is on the road. I should have been the one here with a shovel, clearing the fresh powder and laying down rock salt. It’s likely that Vic pays someone to do it, even when he is home, but… I should have offered. The front door swings open and there is my mom. It hadn’t occurred to me to tell her I was bringing company with me. I’m sure this counts as rude, but I can’t bring myself to care. I’m not ready to let Quinn go. Not yet.
“Hi Erik,” my mom waves, “Hi Quinn. It’s nice to see you again. I’ll make myself scarce.”
“No need.” Quinn takes the steps two at a time and envelops my mother in a tight hug. “I forgot it was impolite to show up uninvited until we were already on the way, but we came because someone stood you up for a breakfast date.”
Mom looks over Quinn’s shoulder and pins me in place with her gaze. I expect anger, disappointment, or maybe just a blank nothing, but there’s something else in her hazel eyes. I try not to flinch at the worry I see reflected at me before she shutters her expression and turns a forced smile back on Quinn. Worry. I should have called. Shit. I didn’t think. For a moment I’m sixteen again in that hospital bed, tubes and wires hooked up to terrifying monitors and all I can see on my mother’s face is bone-deep terror.
I blink the memory away.
