14. Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Thirteen
F red preened in front of the room’s full-length mirror, adjusting the collar and cuffs of his sleek black shirt. He gave a satisfied smirk at the final version and glanced over at Quentin.
“Annette and I are going to a club,” he said. ‘Want to join us?”
Quentin sat back in the office chair and considered his offer over a bowl of pad thai that he cradled in one hand. He poked at the noodles with a metal fork he’d commandeered from the breakfast bar downstairs–stripped of food but still fully stocked with kitchenware.
“Have fun, but,” he checked his watch for the time. “Joe said he’d give me a call if he got a chance after parents’ evening.”
Fred rolled his eyes. “God, you’re like one of those foxes that are supposed to be domesticating themselves,” he said. “It’s been what…three months?”
“Nearly seven,” Quentin corrected. He paused with the fork idly raised in one hand. “If we count the months he didn’t want anything to do with me.”
Fred grabbed his coat and shrugged it on. “That doesn’t make you sound great, Quentin.”
That was OK, he wasn’t wrong.
Quentin ate his noodles and watched Fred do the ‘keys, wallet, phone’ pat down. Once he was sure he had everything, he sat down on the edge of the bed to pull his boots on. As he tied the laces, he gave Quentin a curious look.
“And this is what you want?” he asked. “Because it’s the opposite of everything you ever said you wanted.”
Quentin swallowed a bite of tofu and licked spice off his lips.
“I know,” he said. “Surprised me too, but…yeah.”
“I don’t get it.”
Quentin smirked around the fork for a second and then pulled it out of his mouth. He swallowed a not-quite-ready-for-it mouthful of hot pad thai and winced as he pressed the heel of his hand against his breastbone. “Neither does he.”
Fred sat back, hands braced on his knees. “You’re really happy, aren’t you?”
“Why else would I do it?”
They stared at each other for a second. Finally, Fred rubbed the back of his neck and stood up.
“I forgot I was talking to you for a minute,” he said. “Huh. I guess Cupid knows what they’re doing after all. Have fun on Zoom and don’t worry about me interrupting. I will not be back until tomorrow at the earliest.”
Quentin stuck the fork in his noodles and reached for his milk tea.
“If you’re late for the flight, I’ll leave your ass behind,” he warned.
“And I was worried your boyfriend had changed you,” Fred said over his shoulder as he headed out. “Good to know the special treatment is only for him.”
“Yeah,” Quentin agreed. To be honest, he was slightly relieved to work that out as well. It was one thing to be in love, another to be someone else entirely. “It’s probably a good idea to remember that.”
Fred laughed, gave him the finger, and left. The door slammed behind him.
Quentin finished his noodles, wiped his hands on a napkin, and settled back to watch the Masked Singer and trade (very bad) guesses over text with Jessie about who Ms. Mac Nut was. He’d just finished his milk tea when the laptop pinged with an incoming call.
Tell me who it was, he sent Jessie. Then he leaned over to accept the call. The screen pixelated for a bit before it resolved into Joe slouched back in the front seat of his car. His hair was tucked behind his ears and, as Quentin watched, Joe reached up to tug his tie loose.
“Is it going to be that sort of call?” Quentin asked as he folded his arms on the desk.
Joe unbuttoned his collar and snorted. “I’m parked at the school,” he said and rubbed his face. “Three of the parents were late, and one was a no-show, so…”
“Is that a no?”
Joe gave Quentin a dry look through the screen. “It is,” he said. “I miss you, but with my luck, the no-show would turn up halfway through.”
“Any more complaints?” Quentin asked.
“Just the usual ones,” Joe said. “Apparently, I should be able to just install geometry in the kids’ brains like an upgrade to an app.”
The Gunns had made a fair effort to push for a custody hearing, but after a strongly worded letter, their lawyer must have sat them down to explain the consequences of that sort of slander. Especially when the other party had access to lawyers and was willing to be petty.
…Quentin had promised Joe that he wouldn’t be, but the threat was just as effective as the reality.
They seemed to have dropped the idea for now.
“I did say that Benjy could go and spend the weekend with them,” Joe admitted.
That was his business. Quentin wasn’t going to say anything, but his face must have given away what he was thinking.
Joe shrugged at him. “It’s his dad’s birthday.
They’re going to his grave and then going out for a meal… Benjy wants to go.”
It was hard to argue with that.
“I suppose I should feel like a dick for thinking badly of them,” Quentin acknowledged.
Joe quirked an eyebrow. “Do you?”
“No.”
Joe laughed. It was a burst of delighted humor that made him throw his head back and banished any trace of worry or doubt from his face. He finally stopped with a snort and wiped his eyes on the heels of his hands.
“At least you didn’t call them stupid.”
“Not out loud.”
“I’ll take it.” Joe peeled his tie out from under his collar absently. And maybe it wasn’t one of those calls, but Quentin still watched that hungrily. Then his brain clicked in that Joe had said something he’d missed.
“Sorry,” he said. “I got distracted by you getting undressed. What was that?”
Joe flushed and spluttered for a second, as if that news caught him by surprise. He tossed the tie out of frame, as if it was its fault, and reached up to rake his hand through his hair. Dislodged from the already precarious hold of his ears, it fell in messy, sun-bleached waves over his face.
“I…I said that I’m going to start going through the storage locker tomorrow. It’ll be one less bill.”
Quentin scratched his jaw. “You know the way I’m not allowed to give you money to make your life easier?”
“You make it sound unreasonable,” Joe said. “But yes.”
“Where do you stand on assets?”
The question made Joe blink. Behind him, someone drove into the parking lot, lights bright as they played through the rear window of the old sedan.
There was a pause as Joe turned his head to check them out.
After a brief pause, the car did a U-turn and drove back.
When Joe turned back to the phone, he shrugged.
“On a case-by-case basis, I guess,” he said slowly, an edge of suspicion to his voice. “Why?”
“There are empty sheds on the airfield,” Quentin said. “If there’s anything you want to keep, or that Jessie might want, but don’t have room for…you could move it there? At least until things are back on an even keel.”
He was braced for resistance, prepared for it. The sudden gloss of tears in Joe’s eyes as he looked like Quentin had slapped him was not part of that. Quentin straightened up in the chair as he stumbled over himself trying to take the offer back.
“No,” Joe said. Then, more forcefully, “No. There are things in there that Jessie might want one day. I just…I will take you up on that, but I’ll pay for it.”
Quentin sighed and rubbed his hands over his face as he shoved that brief moment of panic back in the box.
“The point is—”
“A token,” Joe interrupted. “At least until I get back on an even keel.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“It is for me.”
…it was also about as good as Quentin was going to get, he supposed. With a sigh, he gestured his acceptance of the offer.
“I suppose it’s something,” he said.
Joe nodded. He leaned back in the driver’s seat and looked away from the phone. His eyes focused on something that Quentin couldn’t quite see.
“I’m going to put the house on the market too,” Joe said. It came out slowly as if he was test-driving the idea for the first time. After he listened to the words, he took a deep breath and nodded to himself as if saying it settled it. “I should have done it a while ago.”
Quentin hesitated as he weighed what his place to comment on was and what wasn’t. It was hard sometimes. Joe might think that Quentin just said whatever was on his mind, but he was careful. Or he tried to be.
“I thought you didn’t want to uproot the kids?”
Joe finally looked back and nodded slowly. “I don’t,” he admitted. “But it’s going to happen one way or another. At least this way it’ll be–”
“I could move in with you,” Quentin offered.
He would admit he didn’t always succeed with the careful part. Joe opened and closed his mouth a couple of times on the screen. Either the sound had gone off, or he didn’t know how to phrase his refusal.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Joe said. “All the parenting boards say you shouldn’t even introduce your children to a new partner before you’ve been seeing them for a year. Six months minimum. I haven’t even gotten to the parts where they tell you when your boyfriend can move in yet.”
Quentin wanted to push, but he bit his lip to shut himself up.
He thought the arguments for: the money, his company, and the fact that the kids wouldn’t actually see him much more than they already did, made themselves. But so did the arguments against, like the fact that they were skipping a few relationship steps to jump straight to living together.
Joe looked at him expectantly. When Quentin didn’t follow up on his suggestion, he asked. “Not going to pitch your case?”
“I…no,” Quentin said. “The offer’s there. There’s no expiration date, and there’s no wrong answer.”
“Really?” Joe asked. He held his hand up, finger and thumb pinched together. “If I say ‘no’, it won’t end up being just the tiniest crack that slowly gets wedged wider and wider by a dozen small infractions until the whole relationship falls apart?”
“No,” Quentin said.