Twenty Four Weeks – Episode 4 – “Fifteen”
Written by J.D.Denisson.
A sequel to the movie “This is Where I Leave You”.
Characters and back story based on the novel “This is Where I Leave You” by Jonathan Tropper.
Copyright 2016 J.D.Denisson.
Previously…
“I don’t deserve this,” she sobs.
“That doesn’t matter. I still care for you, Quinn. I don’t know why after everything – or maybe I do. You have been a part of my life for so long. I’ve loved you so much but I lost that, I lost you. I’ve lost your friendship most of all and that’s the worst part, because you were my best friend.” I don’t know where any of this is coming from. It’s not anything that I’ve consciously thought. But as I’m saying it I know it is true - every word. “I just want to be your friend again, because right now I think you need one.”
She looks up at me. Her tears have stopped but her eyes are red. She’s been stripped bare of everything. She is real and raw and vulnerable and I love her.
I love her and I’ve lost her and it’s too late.
---
“Judd,” Wade says, standing.
I say his name evenly - then recognise the others.
“What can we do for you?”
“My job,” I tell him directly. “I want to get back to work.”
“You left,” Stewart reminds me, “and quickly. We barely got Kenny up to speed in time.”
“What’s your point?”
“Well, you’re not exactly an extemporary employee, are you?”
“Are you kidding? I gave this place everything for years, and what did I get in return?”
Stewart coughs nervously.
“He’s right,” Wade says, never losing his grin. “He was the best producer we had, and I was sad to see him go.”
“Is that right?”
“I was. I know we’ve had our issues but man, we did work well together, didn’t we.”
“Issues?”
---
“I know what you’re thinking,” Grant says. “You don’t know me and why should you just spill all your deepest secrets to someone you don’t know. But I am the best person for this. I don’t know you. I won’t judge or blame you. I’ll just listen. And I promise you, everything will be lighter after you unburden yourself. And this is a trust exercise. You need to trust me for this to work.”
I take a deep breath. Steady myself. I’ve come all this way. I knew that this would be hard. What hope did I have if I stumbled at the very first obstacle, the first test?
And so I start talking. I start with facts. They’ve never failed me, but maybe they have. There is no feeling in facts. They hold no emotion.
---
“Well,” I say to her, “I should get going.”
Quinn turns quickly and throws her arms around me and I’m trapped against the cold steel door of the elevator.
“Make love to me, Judd,” she says and kisses me hard.
My head is reeling. I want her so badly. I want her more than anything in this world. I need her. She needs me. But this is not right for us, not now, not any more.
I push her back slightly. “I can’t,” I say.
“Can’t? No! Make love to me!” she demands.
“We’re friends.”
“Are you serious?”
“Sorry,” I tell her gently.
And I feel suddenly guilty, because even though she’s broken our marriage and my trust, I’ve done the same and she doesn’t know about it. It probably wasn’t a good idea to tell her right then, but I’m a fool and the words just come out: “I slept with someone.”
---
“I suppose I don’t have any right to be angry with you,” Quinn tells me sadly.” I was still with Wade then, and we were separated.”
I nod.
“And I can’t make any claims on you now. I don’t know why I got angry, Judd. I think I got jealous. But after everything I know I don’t have the right to tell you who you can or can’t sleep with. It’s stupid and maybe a little unfair, but I guess I always thought it would only be me.” She looks down to the sidewalk. “This is all too hard. I’ve done things, you’ve done things. All the talking in the world isn’t going to erase that.”
“I know.”
---
“Judd, I think I’m ready,” she says into my shoulder. I pull away and she takes a deep breath. “I’m ready to talk to someone.”
I smile. I nod. “What made you change your mind?”
“You,” she says. “What’s happening to you - and what happened the other day. I’ve got all these feelings, all these emotions, and I don’t understand them, and I can’t control them. I don’t know what I want – do I want you, do I want to let you go? Do I want a life with you? Can I forgive myself? You see?”
“I do. They’re all important questions.”
“But you’re answering them for yourself, aren’t you?”
I laugh. “I have no idea what I’m doing. I told myself that I wasn’t going to make a move on you and there I go kissing you on the street.”
---
“Have you thought more about the last thing you said in your story?” Grant asks me.
“What was it I said?”
“That you love her.”
“We keep coming back to that.”
“You still have strong feelings for her – you said so yourself. You’ve even used the word ‘love’ once or twice.”
“Well, I can’t afford to love her.”
“Because you’re afraid to get hurt.”
“That’s one of the reasons.”
---
“Thank you for this,” Quinn says. “It was really hard, but I needed it.”
“It’s fine.”
“I want you to know something.”
“Okay.”
“I know we’re friends, and I think that’s all we’ll be now. I get that. But, you need to know that I love you. I always have, and I always will. I guess it’s taken what we’ve been through for me to realise that. I think it’s important to say.” She turns to me, her eyes red and liquid, pleading. It was simple and honest and I saw the truth in it.
I nod. “I love you too, Quinn.”
Monday
I haven’t heard from Quinn after I dropped her off at her apartment two days ago. I know that she’s going through some things, very deep things, and I want to help her. But I also know that there are some things she needs to process by herself. So I’m giving her space, though it feels like it’s killing me.
So I throw myself in to my work.
Stewart calls us into his office after the show. He’s looking happy for a change and I’m instantly relieved.
“So, you two pulled it off,” he says.
“We did?” I say.
“Management says they’re keeping you on for the time being. You need to show you can keep the upward trend.”
“We can do that.”
“Yes, we can,” Wade adds. I’m expecting another fist-pump but it doesn’t come. That way he’s not disappointed I suppose.
“But this is temporary,” Stewart goes on. “You understand? You’ve got to keep going...” He’s making a plane with his hand, taking off into the sky. He needn’t have bothered. I get the message.
We’re out in the corridor when Wade corners me.
“Look, buddy, if you don’t mind, I gotta bail.”
I look at him with thinly veiled hostility. “You realise the last time you said that to me you went back to my home and stole my wife.”
He took a step back. “I th
ought we were getting past that.”
“Obviously not. So, you’re not going to go and sleep with my wife then?”
“No, man. I promised you. And Quinn... you know that was different.”
“I can’t see it.”
He holds out his hands. “Look. I’m sorry. I can’t say it enough. It was wrong. Even I know that. And it’s over, okay.”
“Fine.”
“But, if you must know, I’ve been seeing someone on and off for a few months, but we’ve been serious for a couple of weeks.”
“You actually used the word ‘serious’?”
“Yeah. I believe it is the word to use when you get ‘serious’.”
“You left Quinn two weeks ago.”
“Yeah,” he says.
“So straight from Quinn to...”
“Chloe.”
“Do I know her?”
“She was around after you...”
“So you were sleeping with Quinn and Chloe.”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t exclusive with either of them.”
“Do they know that?”
He doesn’t answer. I exhale deeply. It’s the only thing I could think of doing that didn’t involve me wrapping my hands around his throat and choking the life out of him.
Quinn. My Quinn. It’s staggering the things I’m learning. Its beyond belief how much we’ve all be hurt – and how we’ve hurt each other.
I wave him off. “Get out of here,” I tell him. I know it was letting him get his way but frankly I just didn’t want to look at him anymore.
Tuesday
I’m worried about her. I can’t stop thinking about her. I know she’s in pain and I can’t go to her because I know she needs space, and I promised that I would give it to her. And all the while I’m warning myself that she’s hurt me and I should keep my distance. I don’t know which voice to listen to.
I think of calling her, but I don’t want to pressure her. So I message her instead. I wait, maybe ten minutes and my phone gets her reply, simply: ‘thanks’.
Wednesday
We’re just wrapping up the show when my phone gets another message from her: ‘coffee after work?’
Wade is still talking. There are no more calls on the board. I message her back my acceptance.
She’s already waiting for me when I get there, a little late. I’ve been on the phone all afternoon and couldn’t get off the last call. I’ve been watching the clock move along, get closer to our usual time. When I hang up I run out of the station and to the coffee shop. I’m hot and sweaty when I get there.
“Sorry,” I say, “held up.”
“Its fine,” she replies with a soft smile. “Just relax. I’ve ordered.”
I catch my breath, she watches me with a kind of amused expression she used in college with I was being a dumbass, which was fairly often. It occurs to me that she loved me even though I was an idiot. Maybe she still loves me, despite the fact that I’m still an idiot.
There’s a softness to her now, a kind of vulnerability that instantly draws me to her. Makes me want to protect her, but she’s not saying what’s got her there.
Our coffee arrives and we drink without speaking. She’s looking down, not making eye contact, mulling over her thoughts. When she looks up her eyes are pleading and I know we’re about to have a difficult conversation. I put down my cup and wait for her.
“What are we doing here, Judd?” she asks me finally.
“We’re having coffee,” I tell her.
“Don’t be smart,” she says, but there is nothing of her usual chiding for my stupid answers. “I mean with us. What are we doing?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know.”
“Please, Judd. I don’t need you to be evasive. Not now.”
“I don’t know,” I say again. And I don’t. We’ve been in the kind of limbo for almost a month, where we skirt around our feelings, deny them because we’re afraid, but simultaneously becoming addicted to the furtive hope that simmers under the surface.
I love her. I want her. I forgive her. I’ve just been hurt so much that I don’t know if I can trust her. And, if I were to trust her again, that was certainly going to be a long time from now.
“Judd...”
I sigh. “It’s come to this then. We’re both afraid to be the first one to say it.”
She leans forward. Her eyes are filling. “It’s going to have to be you. I don’t know anymore and I need my husband to make a decision for us. What’s it going to be?”
I have to confess that I’m stunned. She’s called me her husband, when I haven’t been that for years, not really. She needs me to step up. She doesn’t need a child, she needs a man. She needs me to ‘man up’, like Wade would say, but I don’t actually think he knows what that means.
I take a deep breath, steady myself. “Okay,” I say. “It’s like this: I still have feelings for you, Quinn – deep feelings. I still love you in a way, and that’s very inconvenient, because you’ve hurt me so very much. I’ve forgiven you, but that hurt remains and it’s confusing me. I don’t know if I can trust you again. And I don’t know if I can trust the way that I feel either, because we have this long and wonderful history and that’s what I’m remembering, not the last year that wasn’t real and was broken.”
Her head is bowed, she’s not crying but she can’t look at me either.
“And when I see you like this,” I continue, “I just love you all the more. I just want to hold you and protect you and try and make everything alright.”
I shake my head slowly. “I think that this is a lost cause, but Grant says that the lost causes are really the only ones worth fighting for. And I’m looking at you and I’m starting to believe that I can fight for this lost cause. I’m starting to believe that I can fight for you, because when you take everything away that stands between us, I do love you, Quinn Altman, and I’m a fool for doing it. But I don’t care about that anymore. I don’t want to protect myself.”
She looks up at me, her eyes filled and overflowing.
“You’ve been in my heart for so long that I guess I took you for granted, and when you were gone – ripped out so suddenly and so violently – that hole was raw and angry and painful. But it’s empty. I’ve tried to fill it again with someone new, but I won’t work. That hole is made for you. And until you’re back in there I’m empty and incomplete.”
“What are you saying?” Quinn asks me urgently, like her life hangs on my answer.
“I want to be open the possibility of an ‘us’ again. And I think you do too.”
She raises her brows in the middle, like what she’s saying is the most important words she’s ever going to say. “I love you, you know.”
I smile. I’m lowering my defences. “I know,” I tell her. “And I don’t want what happened between us to be the end of our story.”
“I don’t either.” She takes a deep breath. “I think we’re going to take a chance,” she says in barely a whisper.
“I think we are.”
“So, we’re actually going to do this,” she asks me. “We’re going to fight for us?”
“We are. I think there is too much at stake not to. I think that there is too much to lose to let this go. We could, but I think that we’d regret not at least trying. And we have to consider our baby.”
“Well... maybe we should stop seeing the Uptons separately and start seeing them together, as a couple.”
“Marriage counselling,” I say. We laugh again and she wipes away her tears with her free hand.
“I’m scared out of my mind,” she confesses.
“I’m terrified.” And then I laugh a little. “Grant is going to get sick of us changing things around all the time.”
She shakes her head. “We won’t change our mind again, and I’m pretty sure he’s used to dealing with people like us.”
I laugh again.
“Can we make a promise to each other?” she asks me.
“Sure.”
&
nbsp; “Tell me the truth, the honest truth and I’ll do the same. Let’s be real with each other. I’m done with secrets and lies, Judd. I’m done with hurting you. I’m done with hurting the people I love.”
“Me too.”
“And let’s just trust each other, even when it’s the last thing we feel like doing.”
“Deal.”
“So,” she says with a deep breath. “This is it. We’re doing it.”
“We are.” It was so simple in the end. Just two words and the pact was sealed. We were going to stay married. We were going to sort out our differences. We were going to be a family.
“So what happens now? Do you move back in? Do we...” she laughs again. “Do we consummate this thing?”
I shift in my seat a little. “I think that we still need some space. I mean, we’ve still got a long way to go. And to be honest, I’m not ready to come back home yet. That’s going to be a big thing for me.”
“I get that.”
“And as for sleeping together again... I don’t know...”
“Why?”
“You don’t know how hard it was to watch the woman I love with another man. How do I come back from that?”
She looks down, shakes her head. “I’ve really hurt you. Every day I find out how much I hurt you, and it just gets worse and worse.”
“I didn’t mean to make you feel any guiltier than you do. I’m just saying that I have stuff to deal with, just like you. And while I do, things are going to be tough. That’s just how it is.”
She looks up, nods slowly. “I get that. I do.”
“Good. Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“How did we get here?” I ask her.
“We let our marriage fall apart. We lost each other.”
“That pretty much sums it up, but what I mean is: what changed?”
“I guess something Mary said to me made a difference.”
“What did she say?”
“Well,” Quinn says, “she noticed us holding hands when we came in to the house.”
“That was just me supporting you.”
“I know, but she said that it’s those little things that show that there is still some light left in us.”
“Light.” I say with a smile.
“I know. It’s poetic. But then I said I couldn’t risk everything on just a slim hope – and then she reminded me that I’d already risked everything for something that was only going to cause hurt and pain. And that’s the ugly truth about what I did: I risked our life, our marriage, for something that was only going to hurt the people I love. Not just you, but everyone and everything. You said that you lost everything – well, I did too. I lost everything that was ever good in my life – for what?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I see that.” And I do. Even when she was still with Wade she’d still lost it all. She just hadn’t seen it yet. I forgive her again. “So you decided to take a chance.”
“Well, to be honest, I didn’t know what to do. And that’s why I needed you to make the choice. I know maybe it’s a cop out, but sometimes I’ve needed you to take the lead and you didn’t.” She squeezes my hand. “And now I know I can trust the change in you because you could lead. You didn’t hesitate.”
“Well, I did a little bit.”
She laughed. “I must admit, I did enjoy watching you squirm a little. But, I knew what you were going to say before you opened your mouth.”
“Really? Was I that obvious?”
“I know you, Judd Altman. I know what you were thinking. You love me and you just can’t live without me.”
“That’s true,” I say. “That’s very true.”
We drink our coffee, smiling at each other. For some reason we’ve learnt that silence needn’t be filled with talk to prove that we are