24. Kelsey
Chapter twenty-four
Kelsey
Quentin had given me the hint to dress nicely for our upcoming date, so I delivered. I wore my favorite dark-green dress, which complimented my eyes, and my nicest pair of shoes, and I redid my makeup four times because I was so nervous that I messed up my eyeliner over and over again.
I took over an hour to get ready, but when I walked over to his apartment, I felt good about myself: confident, sexy, ready to seduce my man.
Quentin opened the door in a gray suit and a white shirt with the first button open. He looked handsome as hell, and I was almost ready to stay home instead and rip the suit off him again.
“You look stunning,” Quentin said. “I’m almost afraid to take you out in public like that. Someone will steal you off me for sure.”
“Don’t be silly.” I laughed and gave him a kiss.
We walked to his car hand in hand, and I felt giggly, like back in high school, when I was parading the corridors as a freshman with my very first boyfriend, Zachary Forrester, who was a junior with great hair and a linebacker on the varsity football team. I’d felt like the luckiest girl back then, for making such a good catch, and I felt the same way right then as Quentin opened the door of his car for me.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see. It’s a short drive.”
Quentin drove us into the town center and turned left toward Brightwater Lake. He parked the car in front of a restaurant I’d walked past a few times. The Lakeside Cafe was a charming little building with a white wood-slat facade and a dark-blue roof, right next to the lake.
Quentin walked me inside and told the waiter his name. We were led to a table right next to a large window, with a wonderful view out onto the deck. The deck was closed due to the cold temperatures, but the string lights decorating it reflected in the calm dark-blue surface of Lake Brightwater. It was a magical sight.
I studied the menu the waiter had given us and swallowed hard. The prices were not nearly as magical.
“Pick whatever you want,” Quentin said as if he’d read my thoughts. “My treat.”
“You know you don’t need to go all fancy-pantsy on me to get laid, right?”
Quentin laughed, but his cheeks flushed a little. “We ate lukewarm hot dogs on our last date. You deserve this.”
“Those hot dogs were amazing,” I said. “But no, really Quentin. I know you don’t sleep on a huge pile of money at night, and I don’t need any of this. I had this, and it all went bust.”
His expression went from amused to serious quickly. “What do you mean?”
my head. “I don’t want to start off our first proper date by talking about my ex. ”
Quentin reached across the table and took my hand. “It’s fine. I want to know. I want to know anything and everything there is to know about you.”
“You have a studious mind, huh?” I tried to keep my tone light, but Quentin remained stern.
“Tell me what happened between you and your ex. Please.”
I took a deep breath. “You want to hear all of it? The whole story?”
He nodded. “Start at the beginning.”
“The beginning,” I repeated, rubbing my forehead. “I met him when I was twenty, and I was a huge mess back then. Like, an even bigger mess than I am right now. We started talking because I was vomiting in front of a nightclub at four thirty in the morning, and he held my hair back. Still got some on my dress, though.”
Quentin remained quiet, so I continued.
“I was a high school dropout, floating from job to job, sometimes quitting, mostly getting fired. I spent the night with people whose names I couldn’t even remember the next morning. I drank way too much, and I occasionally popped some pills too. That was the state Ryan found me in.”
I had to pause to collect myself. Memories from that time were hazy and scrambled but intense—anxiety-inducing intense.
“Ryan was perfect. He was a student at the University of Arizona, marketing major. He came from a good family. His dad is a dentist, and his mother is an accountant. He had his own apartment and enough money to take me to places like this on a regular basis. Oh, and of course, he was extremely good-looking, which was very important for back-then-Kelsey.”
Quentin had listened quietly. Now, he cleared his throat. “What went wrong? ”
Before I could answer, the waiter came back and placed our food in front of us. It gave me an excuse to sort through my thoughts.
Once the waiter was gone, Quentin repeated his question. He didn’t sound pushy, but it was clear it was important to him to know these things about me, so I gathered my courage.
“I’m not… sure?” I said reluctantly. “It snuck up on me. The relationship started great, and then for a while, it was not that bad before it became really bad. First, it was small things. Checking my phone just to make sure I was safe. Suggesting my friends were bad for me and that I should cut contact. Making mean remarks but telling me he was just joking. In between, he was charming and generous and attentive, but I started to walk on eggshells around him. Then he proposed, publicly, and I didn’t have it in me to reject him, with people watching and all. He bought a house in the suburbs for us, and his behavior became worse. Everything I did could set him off. I never knew when the name-calling and the screaming would start because he constantly changed the rules.”
I took a break to swallow down all the feelings that had welled up. “Before I really realized what was happening to me, I was caught. From the outside, it all looked perfect, but I could hardly recognize myself in the mirror anymore.”
I pushed my food around on my plate, uneasily waiting for Quentin’s response. “It’s stupid, I know. I should have realized a lot sooner. I basically walked into it, eyes wide open.”
Quentin shook his head. “No, don’t say that. People like this are very manipulative. They make you doubt your own reality, make you think you deserve the abuse.”
I almost flinched at the word abuse . Was that really what had happened to me? I had never thought of my marriage as abusive. Unhappy, absolutely. Toxic, yes. But abusive? He had never hit me or pushed me or hurt me physically in any other way. Did it still count ?
Quentin sighed. “Thank God you didn’t have children with him. It would have made leaving him so much harder.”
“I’m thankful for that too,” I said. “In hindsight, at least. A few years back, I was desperate to have children with him, but he said he wasn’t ready.”
“You want children?” Quentin’s tone was casual, but we both knew it was a loaded question.
I took a moment to reflect. I hadn’t thought about children for years. My marriage with Ryan had become too unbearable to even consider bringing a baby into the equation. And after I had left him, I was way too busy putting myself back together. And of course, I was single. Or I had been single until a few days ago. “Yes,” I said slowly. “I do want children. I want to give someone a better childhood than I had. Prove to my mother that I can do it better than her.” I paused to drink a sip of water. “But not right now. I need to get back on my feet first. Making sure I can provide for a child. I think…” I took a deep breath because this was the first time I was saying it out loud in front of Quentin. “I think I want to go to college first. I might be overreaching, but I want to give it a try.”
I clenched my fists under the table, waiting for his reaction. To my relief, he didn’t laugh at me.
“This sounds like a very good plan. What do you want to go to college for?”
“Nursing,” I said. “It sounds so interesting.”
He nodded. “I think that would be perfect for you.”
“You do?”
“Absolutely. You do very well with chemistry, biology, and especially math. You stay calm under pressure, and you are good at taking care of people.”
I blushed a little. “High praise. ”
He reached over the table and took my hand in his. “I’m not praising, just stating facts. Everyone can see your potential. Arlene, Leah, even Izzy, I think. And me, of course. Anyone but you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. All those people kept encouraging me to follow my dreams, and I wasn’t sure why. I had a terrible track record with achieving things, and until then, everyone important in my life had always told me I was a lost cause. What had changed? Were they right about me, or would I disappoint them? I had to think about this some more, so I steered the conversation in another direction.
“What about you?” I asked. “Do you want kids?”
Quentin smiled. “I’m a teacher. You don’t go into that profession if you don’t like children.”
“Teaching them and raising them are two different pairs of shoes.”
“That’s true. Although it sometimes feels like I’m raising them for their parents. But… yes. I always saw myself as a father. Before Afghanistan, I wanted four.”
“Four?” I laughed. “Go big, or go home, huh?”
Quentin smiled. “Two boys and two girls. I’m an only child. Maybe that’s the reason I had this dream of a big family.”
I was about to put the fork into my mouth but paused at his words. “Had?”
Quentin’s expression changed. He shifted in his seat, and when he continued talking, he sounded a lot more somber. “I thought I was going to marry my high school sweetheart, Angela, and raise this family with her, but then I got injured, and Angela… left.”
I put the fork down so hard it made a clink sound on my plate. “She left you because you got injured?” I asked in disbelief.
“I don’t blame her. She was young, and she hadn’t signed up for… for the man I was after my accident.”
“I do blame her,” I said sternly.
“It was a long time ago,” he said. “I’m over it. I have long been over it.”
“Then why are you talking about having children in the past tense?”
He pressed his lips together. “There just wasn’t anyone afterward. I’m not a mushroom. I need a woman to procreate.”
I snorted out a laugh. “You are definitely not a mushroom.”
Quentin laughed too, and the heavy air around us lifted.