Chapter 14
Naomi
The flowers came to the house on a Tuesday.
I knew before I read the card who it came from. Aaron. Flowers, the expensive kind, arranged by someone who'd been told what I liked and had gotten it half right. We were good together, N. Call me. — A.
I dropped the card and the flowers in the trash.
It wasn't the first. There'd been the texts, at first casual, then wounded, then long. There'd been the voicemail he clearly thought was charming. And two days ago, he'd been standing outside the coffee place I go to, hands in his pockets, wearing the coat I used to love and had picked out for him.
"Naomi," he'd said, like my name was a key that still fit.
I'd stopped, because there was no graceful way not to. "Aaron."
"You look good." He said it carefully, like he'd practiced it, like it was the first move in something.
"Really. You look—" He shook his head, going for rueful.
"You painted the house," he said, when I didn't answer.
Softer now, reaching for the one thing that had ever been ours together. "The outside, I mean. I drove by."
"That's usually what people do," I said, "when a house is theirs."
"I keep meaning to catch you,” he said changing the topic. “You never call me back."
"No," I agreed. “I didn’t.”
That threw him a little. He'd wanted, I think, a reason he could argue with. He recovered with a smile, the old one, the one that used to work. "Come on. Ten minutes. Let me buy you a coffee. For old times."
This was the man who had once organized my entire nervous system around the question of whether he was pleased with me.
I had spent years reading his moods like weather.
And now he stood on the sidewalk in the coat I'd chosen, saying we were good like it was a fact I'd simply overlooked, and I noticed he'd gotten a haircut, a rather crappy one, and I noticed nothing else at all.
Something flickered across his face — the first real thing I'd seen there. Not charm. Not nostalgia. Just the dawning understanding that none of it was landing, that there was no lever left to pull, that the woman he'd come to win back wasn't standing in front of him at all.
"I have somewhere to be."
He glanced past me, down the street, jaw tightening. "It's him, isn't it. You're seeing him." He said Quinn's name like it tasted bad. "You know what he's after. A woman like you on his arm — that's the whole appeal. He only wants what I have. That's all you are to him."
If that was meant to hurt me, but it almost worked.
I wasn’t sure what would happen now that the wedding was over.
The only thing keeping me from spiraling was the fact that I’d gotten the same good morning message from Quinn that I’ve been getting since that first date. And I didn’t know what to think of it.
“Quinn’s successful in his own right. You should know that. You always brought him up before. What was it you’d say about him? That he didn’t deserve all his success? That it was all luck?” I shrugged. “I guess he’s just a lucky guy.”
His mouth moved but no words came out
“Goodbye, Aaron.” Then I walked away.
He'd expected a fight, I think. Or tears. Something he could work with. What unmoored him was that I simply didn't have anything for him. You can't win back a woman who isn't playing.
Quinn messaged again that evening to say goodnight. I was almost embarrassed at how relieved I was that things weren’t just ending now after the wedding.
He asked me to be his plus one for a gallery opening on Friday. “I didn’t want to go alone,” he’d said. And I said yes.
He picked me up and we drove in together.
It was a friend of his showing — big canvases, white walls and a room full of people who might have been there just for a free champagne.
He'd been quietly proud to bring me. He kept a hand at the small of my back as we moved through the rooms, and every so often someone would stop him to talk and he'd introduce me as his future better half. I didn’t once protest.
We were in front of the largest piece, a wash of deep blue that Quinn liked and I was pretending to understand, when I felt the temperature of the room change.
Quinn's hand moved from my back to my hand.
"Don't turn around yet," he said quietly.
But she was already crossing the floor.
Tia. In a dress that was trying very hard, moving too fast for a room built for slow drifting, a glass of wine in one hand.
I recognized the look: envy. Spades of it.
And wondered how it took me this long to figure out.
She’d always been envious of me. When we were younger it had been my clothes, then Aaron, then the house.
I’d thought of her as my best friend, shared everything with her. But she’d been secretly hating my success. She had wanted, always, to stand where I was standing.
If I had to be completely honest, losing Tia was harder for me than losing Aaron. Her betrayal stung harder. She was supposed to be my best friend.
There was no artifice now as she stomped toward us with a sneer.
"Well," she said, arriving. Loud enough to carry over the low gallery hum. "Isn't this cozy?"
"Tia," I said.
She wasn't looking at me. She'd come the whole way across the room and she wasn't looking at me at all. Her eyes were fixed on Quinn, bright and wet and furious.
"Quinn Holland," she said to him. "I guess I was wrong about you. I thought you had taste.” She laughed, high and wrong. "I was right there. I've been right there. And you pick her? You pick Aaron’s leftovers?"
"Tia." Quinn's voice was level. Not unkind. Just closed, like a door with a lock in it. " I was never interested." He held her eyes. "I never will be."
Something in her face came apart.
"You don't get it," she said, louder now, and a little of the wine went over the rim of her glass and onto the pale gallery floor.
Heads turned. "It's always her. Everyone always—" She rounded on me then, finally, and I saw all of it at once: the years of it.
"What do you even have that I— You did this on purpose. You knew I liked Quinn, and you seduced him just to spite me.”
I was about to open my mouth and remind her that she was the one who slept with my husband, while lying to my face
But Quinn spoke before I could, his voice soft and calm. “Actually, Tia. I called her. I asked Rick for her number.”
I squeezed his hand, quietly thanking him for stopping me from airing out my dirty laundry in a gallery full of people who were staring at us.
“Fine!” Tia exploded. “You can have your little whor—"
"Ma'am." A member of the gallery staff had appeared, low and smooth, one hand hovering near her elbow. A second person behind him. "Why don't we step out front for a moment?"
She jerked away from the hand. "Don't touch me."
The room had gone quiet in the particular way rooms do, everyone suddenly very interested in the nearest canvas.
Quinn had moved to stand between me and Tia. He didn't raise his voice. He just watched her the way you watch something you've already decided isn't really dangerous, only sad.
They walked her out. She was talking the whole way, though I couldn't make out the words anymore, only the pitch of them, thinning as the front doors sighed shut behind her.
Then it was too quiet for a beat before the room remembered its wine and champagne.
Quinn exhaled. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't see her come in."
"I know."
His thumb moved over my knuckles. "Are you okay?"
I thought about the peonies wilting on my counter, and Aaron's crappy haircut, and the two of them — my ex-husband and the woman who'd wanted everything of mine — both of them out there now, wanting things they'd never had a claim to.
"Yes," I said, and I meant it completely.
A server came by with more bubbly and we both reached for the same glass, laughed, sorted it out. Quinn handed me mine. "Tia has terrible taste in exits," he said, and I laughed for real then, and the last of the room's attention finally let us go.
"You knew she'd be here," I said, as we made our way to the car. "I should have known too. This is exactly the kind of thing she loves." I kept my voice light. "Is that why you asked me out again?"
Quinn hesitated, and something crossed his face I couldn't name.
"I knew she'd be there," he said finally. "But no. That's not why."
"Then how long?" I hated the small, stubborn kernel of hope in my chest — hated it, because I'd been wrong about a man before, and I knew what it cost to be wrong. "How long do you want to keep pretending?"
I held my breath, afraid of what I'd hear.
He swallowed hard. I could see his throat work, see it moving across that chiseled face, everything he wasn't saying. We'd stopped in front of the car and he reached out, cupped my cheek in one warm hand.
"I'll pretend forever," he said, "if you'll let me."
"Forever?" My lips were unsteady now. I didn't dare.
"Yes. Forever." His thumb moved along my cheekbone. "Or at least until it stops being pretend."
Until it stops being pretend.
I understood then what he was telling me, and what he was asking, and how carefully he'd wrapped both of them inside a word small enough for me to refuse if I needed to. He'd given me the exit even as he said it. That was the thing about Quinn — he never once made me feel cornered into wanting him.
Which was, of course, exactly why I did.
"Quinn," I said, and my voice came out lower than I meant it to. "It stopped being pretend a while ago."
His hand went still against my cheek. For a moment he didn't breathe, like he thought he'd misheard, like he'd braced so hard for the other answer that this one took time to reach him.
"Say that again," he said.
"You heard me."
"I did. I want to hear it again anyway."
I laughed — I couldn't help it — and the last of the evening's tension went out of me, Tia and Aaron and all of it, gone somewhere I no longer had to look. "It's not pretend," I said. "It hasn't been. I've just been too much of a coward to say so out loud."
Something shifted in his face, tender and sure, and he kissed me — there on the curb, in front of the car, with the gallery lights still spilling gold across the pavement behind us.
It was not a careful kiss. His hand slid into my hair and mine found the front of his shirt, and somewhere in it, I stopped keeping track of who had reached for whom first, because it no longer mattered.
Nothing else mattered. All that mattered was the way his mouth moved against mine, the way his body fit against me like it had been made for this moment.
Just the two of us, and the truth we'd both been carrying, finally set down between us where we could look at it.
When we broke apart he pressed his forehead to mine, and I felt him smile before I saw it.
"So," he said. "Not pretending."
"Not pretending," I agreed.
"Good." He opened the car door for me, the way he always did, but he was grinning now like a man who'd won something he'd never dared to enter for. "Because I was running out of ways to keep faking it."
I got in. He came around and slid behind the wheel, and before he started the engine he reached over and took my hand, and didn't let go.
He didn't let go the whole way home.