Chapter Fifteen
SAWYER
The day after my meeting-turned-encounter with Quinn, I was still reeling a bit. I’d done my best to work until I was too tired to think about it, but when Saturday morning rolled around, I still felt disoriented. The whole thing should have left me feeling relaxed, confident, satisfied: the things I was used to associating with sex. Instead, I felt confused.
I was more than eager to get dressed and go to Pete’s to get more work in. He’d started to trust me with more of his equipment, and now I could maintain his personal vegetable garden while he ran some of the machinery around the fields. I pulled into the driveway and made my way to the garden, grabbing a hoe and some gloves on the way.
Pete was already out there, knees in the dirt. He gave me a grin when I walked up to him.
“Hey, there!” Pete wiped his forehead, leaving a thin layer of dirt in the wake of his glove. “I thought I’d join you out here today. We’re gonna get off early and go down to George’s for some drinks.”
I smiled at the proposition. I hadn’t gone out with Pete in some time, and he’d suggested we go get a drink the day I got back.
“Sounds good,” I said, and I knelt down next to him to start potting some tomato plants that needed to be put in the ground.
“You don’t have an appointment today, do you?” Pete asked.
“No,” I said. “Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.” The mention of the therapist nearly made me blush. I felt like I’d broken some kind of law—except in my lifetime, I’d already broken the law, and I hadn’t felt nearly this bad about it.
“Shit, that’s a lot,” Pete shook his head. “They giving you medicine?”
“Nope. Not yet.”
“How’s the therapist? Quinn better be one hell of a doctor if you’re seeing her three times a week.”
I patted the dirt around the newly planted tomato plant. “She’s, uh, she’s good.”
“Good? You still having trouble with her? Your emotions and all?” Pete seemed to remember the conversation we’d had when I’d admitted I liked her. Hell, he’d been the one to point her out to me in the first place. Part of me wanted to blame the whole situation on Pete and claim total innocence.
“Sort of,” I said. “It’s a little complicated.”
“A little complicated? What, it’s not like you’re sleepin’ with her.” Pete sniffed and, when I didn’t say anything, he whacked my shoulder.
“Shit, Sawyer!”
I cringed.
“That’s gotta be against some type of law! You’re sleepin’ with her?”
“Just once,” I said. “Yesterday, it was… it was weird.”
“What the hell happened?” Pete’s eyes were wide, and I could tell he didn’t entirely believe me.
“We’d been sort of talking outside of the session. I asked her to dinner, she told me no, and we sort had a short talk about that. She wanted to keep things professional.” I couldn’t shake the sight of her tight against my body in a moment of complete forgetfulness. “I went in yesterday, and it was just… different. At the end of the session, she told me I ought to see someone else since she likes me.”
I cut off, and rubbed the back of my neck, trying to tactfully put what had then gone on. “And we slept together.”
“In her office?”
I nodded.
“Shit.” Pete shook his head. “Goddamn. Did you take her back to your place or did you just leave?”
“Left,” I said. “Well, she made sure I was still coming for the appointment on Monday.”
“Are you?” Pete asked.
I thought about what it would mean to go back. I didn’t know if she expected to have sex again or if she genuinely wanted to go back to having a patient-doctor relationship. “I will, but only to clear things up,” I said. “I can’t sleep with her if she’s going to be my psychiatrist. I need to either see a different therapist or sleep with somebody else.”
“That sounds like the best thing to do,” Pete said. “You can’t get any mental health recuperation if you’re sleeping with the doctor.”
“Exactly. And I can’t have a healthy relationship with her if I’m her patient.” The two things simply couldn’t go together, and I’d rather have an entire relationship or an entire doctor. Frankly, I wasn’t sure that it was still possible to go back to being just her patient.
A few hours later, Pete let me use his restroom so I could wash up—we both needed to at least get a few of the layers of dirt off before we went anywhere. The bar we were going to was one I was familiar with. George’s had been around as long as Austin had, I was pretty sure. It was the place we used to go when we were in high school, parading in with fake ID’s and thinking it was our smarts that got us in rather than the bartender’s apathy.
Now, of course, we didn’t need to worry about whether we could get in. It was a little too early to be out drinking; the sun had only barely started to set over the hills. But we didn’t want to go into Austin, because Sixth Street was meant for parties and not for quiet, calm drinks, and Pete and I both tended to go to bed early.
Not long before I’d joined the army, I could go all night drinking and partying. It seemed I was already an old man inside.
When we walked in, the bartender’s face lit up.
“Sawyer! By God, is that you?”
“Hey, Jim.” I wasn’t terribly close to Jim, but we knew each other’s names and I’d certainly been a paying customer of his for some time. I shook his hand.
“Where the hell have you been?” Jim asked. “Your usual?”
I couldn’t help but feel glad that he remembered my drink after all this time. “Yeah,” I said. “I was in the service for a while.”
“I thought I told you,” Pete interjected. He hopped up on the bar next to me and took the glass that came his way.
Jim shrugged. “In any case, it’s good to have you back.” Then he had to go and attend to other patrons, leaving Pete and me there with our glasses.
I took a drink and sat back in my stool slightly, looking out over the bar. “It’s weird. I don’t feel like I left. Everything’s the same, but it’s all totally different at the same time.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Far as I’m concerned, you couldn’t be more different,” Pete said.
I raised an eyebrow at him, unsure of what he meant by that.
“I mean you’re better now than you were,” he clarified. “At least you’re healthier. Still kind of an asshole.”
We grinned at each other.
“Speaking of how you were,” Pete said, setting his drink aside. “You know Quinn’s related to Stacy, right?”
I wrinkled my nose. It must have occurred to me before, or she must have told me, or Pete must have told me. It sounded like something I’d heard before. Still, it didn’t sit well with me. “Yeah, I know.”
“How do you think that’s all gonna pan out?” Pete asked. “Her knowing Stacy and all? I mean, if she knows Stacy, she could very well find out a good deal about you.”
I furrowed my brow and shook my head. It was a lot to think about, and I didn’t want to consider the implications of this. “I hadn’t thought about it,” I admitted. And I didn’t want to think about it, but I was sure that it would be the only thing on my mind until I saw Quinn on Monday.
Thankfully, Pete didn’t get the chance to continue to talk about it. A few people walked into the bar, and I wouldn’t have noticed, except their faces were familiar. I instantly recognized my old friends—or, three of them, at least. The one I had been closest to, John, still wore a beat-up denim jacket. There was one guy I’d only met once or twice, whose name I couldn’t remember, and the other was Kent, who had been around as long as John.
They saw me, too, and their faces lit up.
“Hey! Man, we thought you were dead or some shit!” John walked forward and clapped me on the back.
I laughed. “Nah, just thought I’d take a nice vacation in Syria.”
“Shit, they let you out?” Kent raised his thick eyebrows and spat into his water bottle.
“Yeah, more or less,” I joked. I hadn’t seen these men in ages.
Pete didn’t say much to them, offering a sort of wave. He’d never been very close to this group; he walked off, presumably to go use the restroom or wait until the people were gone.
“Can I get you a drink?” John asked.
“Oh, I’ve got one, but you’re welcome to sit up here,” I returned. “What have you been doing?”
“More of the same,” John said. “Mostly we’ve been trying to get a bar of our own open in Austin. It’s been a bitch to do. The only place anyone goes in Austin is Sixth, and that place is pretty much locked down. Nothing’s for sale right now, and those bars are doing more than well enough for themselves not to need to close.”
“You could open something in San Marcos,” I reasoned. “San Antonio, maybe? Not too far from here.”
“Ah, but it wouldn’t be the same. Besides, Kent’s got a girlfriend in Austin he can’t move too far away from.”
“Shit, she’s impossible sometimes,” Kent agreed. “Been dating a year, can’t get her to part with the town. She didn’t even grow up there.”
“Women can be something,” John offered. He looked back at me, and he leaned in a little closer. “Say, we were all going to head back to Kent’s later. Keith here just got back from Mexico, and he’s got all kinds of good shit to try out. You wanna join us?”
I didn’t want to think about what he meant by ‘good shit,’ but it couldn’t be anything good. I shook my head. “No, I can’t, sorry. I have work tomorrow morning.” It was a reasonable excuse.
“That’s a shame,” John said. He glanced around, making sure no one was looking our way, and then he held a few baggies towards me.
It was idiotic, holding cocaine out in the middle of a bar for anyone to see. I raised my eyebrows at his boldness; did he have some kind of deal with Jim? Memories of the months before I left began to flood back. Doing coke with Stacy and laying around the house all day, listening to my father shout at me, staring at my bank account after nights of partying and wondering what the hell had happened to me.
“You can take some for the road if you’d like. Think of it as a welcome-home present,” John said.
“Hey, Sawyer.” Pete materialized behind me. I thought for a second that he’d only just walked up, but there was a glint in his eye that suggested he’d seen what happened. “It’s about time we got going. I think I left the shed unlocked and I’d prefer to get back and fix that.”
The shitty excuse only solidified that Pete knew what was going on.
“Is there some kind of problem here?” Kent asked, setting his water bottle down. He stood next to John, both of them puffing themselves up a little.
“Nope,” Pete said. “Not so long as you shove off and go bother somebody else.”
“What exactly are you implying?”
“You need to stay the hell away from him with that shit,” Pete snapped. He was never one to hide what he was thinking.
“You need to back the fuck up before you make a scene,” John retorted. I could see them starting to advance forward, and I decided to intervene.
I grabbed Pete and forcibly pulled him back. I was much stronger than he was and it wasn’t difficult to pull him back; it would be easier to pull him than fight off two men. “Pete didn’t mean anything,” I told them. “Got it? He didn’t mean anything.”
The men nodded slowly, and I walked out of the bar with Pete in my grip. I didn’t stop until we’d reached the car, and then I let him go so he could get in the driver’s seat.
“Shit, Sawyer, what the hell was that for?” Pete burst.
“I didn’t want to see you get the shit kicked out of you,” I returned. “Honestly, you should have known better. There were three of them and one of you.”
“I couldn’t see them leading you back into all that bullshit!” Pete barked. “For a while there, before you left, Sawyer, we didn’t think you’d make it. We thought were going to end up like Stacy, and you… you made something of yourself, goddammit. You got better.”
I fell quiet, ashamed that I’d made Pete feel like I was angry with him.
“You need to stay the hell away from that,” Pete said to me. His voice nearly shook with how angry he was. “You understand? You need to stay the hell away from all of those bastards. You had the army to bail you out the first time.”
I swallowed hard and looked back at the bar. I was wrong; it felt like a million years had passed since I’d gone to war. “You’re a good friend, Pete,” I said to him.
“You better fuckin’ believe it,” Pete said. “Get your ass in the car. We’re going home.”