more. We just decide things and they work out, but I think we could do better. But this, you should sign it. I support you all the way, no mater what you decide. But that is a lot of money they’re offering you.”
“It is.”
“Do you often think how things would have turned out if we hadn’t forgiven each other, if we hadn’t found each other again?”
“To be honest I don’t want to think about it.”
“Well, we wouldn’t be right here, right now, having this baby together and being in love with our whole lives ahead of us. I know it’s been hard, and I know there still a lot of hard to get through, but I’m glad were here. I’m glad we decided to do this. I’m glad that you love me. I wouldn’t be anyplace else. And you should know, after we first heard Rachel’s heart, and after Wade left me, I didn’t want to be with anyone else but you – and I’d probably be alone right now, heartbroken.”
“I couldn’t bear that.”
She passes back the contract and smiles. “Sign it,” she says. “I think you should see how far you can take this.”
I’m a little annoyed when we attend our weekly classes. That should have been a safe place. The people that we’d started to grow strong bonds with had kept our secret up until last week. Somehow that protection had been broken. I suggested to Quinn that we try another class but she’s adamant she wants to stay.
Ted and Sarah (*not their real names) had only joined the week before, and of course they were not back. Quinn insisted that I say nothing and I keep my promise to do so, even though I could barely contain my anger.
Quinn heads into the shower. I can hear the glass door close behind her and the water start. I wait a moment and take off my clothes quickly and slide in. She has her back to me. The water runs down over her head through her long hair that stretches halfway down, over her ass and legs to the floor. She turns a little, looks at me with an unspoken question, and then she smiles as the answer becomes obvious...
...She turns, presents her back to me again.
“Well, now you’re here, you might make yourself useful.”
“What the hell did I just do?” I say with mock outrage.
“That was you duty: to make your wife happy and satisfied.”
“Duty?”
“Ah huh. Now your job is to wash my back.” She hands me the soap and one of those sponge things that I’ve never been sure of their purpose.
Friday
“There she is,” Quinn says.
We pull up in front of Chloe and Wade’s building. She is standing there with a large bag next to her on the sidewalk. I jump out of my car and take her bag and dump it in the back. Chloe slides into the backseat behind me.
Quinn stretches her hand through to the back and Chloe takes it.
“How are you,” my wife asks.
“A little nervous,” Wade’s wife replies.
“Why?”
“I know I’m going to see him, and I want to, but then I don’t want to at the same time. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” Quinn says.
“No,” I say, which gains me a withering look. It suggests that I should shut the hell up and let the women talk without any of my stupid male comments.
The trip takes two hours with traffic. It is late afternoon when we pull into our motel.
“Is Wade staying here too,” Chloe asks behind us.
Quinn nudges me when I say nothing.
“Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know I was aloud to talk. No,” I tell our passenger. “He’s giving you some space. He’s down the road.”
The last time Quinn and I were in a place like this we were together, but not fully together. We didn’t make love those nights. The ghost of Wade was still ever present in our lives and in our bedroom. He was close to us, just beyond the wall behind our bed. So we were resigned to more nights of frustration. But not now.
I book us all in and we walk down to our rooms. Chloe is a few doors down and alone. Our room is small, so small that the front door barely opens next to the bed. I could afford a better room these days, but this has been on short notice and the only thing we could find. Quinn freshens up while I ring Wade to find out if he’s arrived safely.
“Has she said anything about me?” he asks.
“All the way here,” I tell him.
“And...?”
“You’ve got a long way to make up there, my friend. Okay, so not as much as I had, but still a lot.”
“Damn.”
“Just take things slowly. That’s my advice.”
“You’ve not steered me wrong yet.”
“Meet us here in thirty minutes,” I tell him.
“Got it,” he says and hangs up.
Quinn comes from the bathroom. She’s changed out of her stretchy jeans into a floral dress that goes halfway to her knees. I can see her cleavage and I want to take the dress off and get a head start on tonight. But I don’t. There’s no time. She starts to put on her flats, sitting on the bed, her lovely toned legs stretched out. Sometimes I have to help her and I get to run my hands over her sweet skin, up and down.
“There’s my girl,” I say.
She stops, looks up at me. Her hand goes over her mouth and tears form in her eyes.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
“You haven’t said that in a long time.”
“Said what?”
“That I’m your girl. You used to say that a lot, but not since after our anniversary last year.”
“That can’t be true.”
“It is. You stopped saying it.”
I shake my head. “No.”
She nods. “Not even after we’d got back together. I’d kind of given up waiting to hear those words again.”
“Really? I haven’t said that? Not at all?”
“No.”
“But you are my girl. You always were and you always will be.”
She comes to me, wraps her arms around me and puts her head over my heart. Maybe she wants to hear it beating just for her. “I know. But now I’ve heard those words it’s become more real than before. Does that make sense?”
I nod. “It kind of does. I suppose I’ve got to the point that I can’t just call you ‘Quinn’ anymore.”
“But it is my name.”
“Yeah, but everyone calls you that. To me you’re ‘my girl’, my darling, my love. And no one else calls you that.”
“No. No one else.”
The three of us head down to the lobby. Wade is nowhere to be seen, so we go into the conference room. It’s already full of people. There is a line to the registrations desk, ten deep. Already chairs are starting to be filled. I can’t see Mary anywhere.
“Hey,” Wade says behind me. The three of us turn to face him. He ignores Quinn and me, concentrates on his wife. She looks instantly angry, sad and worried all at once. “Hey, babe,” he says to her.
She takes a deep breath, let’s it out.
“You know what my name is,” she says with the faintest of edges.
“Chloe,” he says, like a prayer. “You look great.”
She does, she looks stunning, and I think she’s trying to drive him crazy. If that is her intention, then it has worked. Then I think back to all the times that Quinn and I have met and danced around each other and how she has looked. She knows me well, she knows what I like. Did she set about to deliberately and systematically draw me in to her all those months? And when I consider it, I really don’t care, not at all. If she did, then clearly her intention was to reconcile from the very beginning, and I was powerless to stop it, let alone realise what she was doing.
Chloe shrugs. “You look like crap.”
“Judd said exactly the same thing last week.”
“And you still haven’t pulled yourself together. Really, Wade, you’re not inspiring me at all to allow you to come back.”
“I’m trying to look contrite.”
“I don’t need contrite. I need my man to start living what he preaches.”
<
br /> “I can do that,” he says with a slight smile.
“We’ll see, Wade. We’ll see.”
Rex Jackson is his name.
He is a little older than me, late thirties. He’s not dressed in what I would consider uniform for this kind of vocation. He’s in jeans, cool t-shirt and leather jacket, cowboy boots. He looks like he’s never had time to grow up, a little like Wade, but I know that’s not true.
“Now we talk a lot about being intentional at these seminars,” he says. “Throw me some definitions of that word.”
The audience does and he writes them on the white board behind him. I know what the word means, but I don’t say anything. I keep quiet in these things. I always have. Some things never change.
“So this weekend we’re going to look at how we might intentionally create the kind of future we want but engineering all the steps in between here and there. Now,” he continues, “software engineers call this ‘reverse engineering’ which is a technical term for starting at the end result and working backwards to identify all the processes between the start and the end.”
He walks back and forth. He has some fancy microphone wrapped around his head so that his hands are free. He waves them expressively with each word. I have to admit he’s got me interested. His voice is low but soothing and I’m being taken away with him on some journey of discovery before my defences can hold me down.
“Tonight I’m going to give you a little overview of the skills that I’m going to teach you this weekend. You won’t need to take notes tonight, tomorrow there’ll be plenty of time.”
...which is good because I didn’t bring my notebook. I think back to the pad that I started scribbling notes upon five or so months ago, and the to-do list that I added there. I wonder if I