Chapter Twenty-Two
QUINN
I did my best not to show that I had something else on my mind during the day while Sawyer and I went out and looked at houses. Well, looked at a house—he’d gone home after the first, seemingly set. I didn’t understand how he could live so far out in the middle of nowhere and be perfectly happy. I needed to live in a city with Chinese takeout and excellent cell service. It wasn’t that I was pampered, it was just my lifestyle preference.
Either way, the entire day I sat on the conversation that I’d had with Stacy the day before. When I got a call from Sawyer’s mom, I’d almost expected it to be about Stacy, but it wasn’t; she’d merely wanted to have me over for breakfast to talk about Sawyer. We hadn’t ended up talking about him, not much, but it was good to see her all the same.
I was too involved with him, a part of me knew. At this point, it wouldn’t be easy to just walk away. I’d made connections with his mother, talked to his ex-girlfriend, and had spent a large amount of time with him. Although I’d already deemed our patient-doctor relationship hopeless a few times, it was worth naming it hopeless once more.
Seeing him looking for houses, making progress, it was enough to keep me from sharing any details about Stacy. I didn’t want to burden him. I didn’t want to drop any bombshells on him unless I knew for sure he’d be able to handle it, and I didn’t know that for sure. He wasn’t seeing a therapist, after all—we hadn’t discussed it explicitly, but it seemed Sawyer wouldn’t be coming back. I thought about what Babs had said and wondered if I could still help him as a romantic partner.
No. Not the same way. There was a special part of the patient-therapist bond that brought many people to it—patients didn’t have to worry about their relationship with their therapists, for the most part. They could share whatever they wanted about themselves and not worry that the therapist wouldn’t like them, or that the therapist would be angry. Now, I was in a place where Sawyer’s perception of whether I liked him or not mattered. That threw everything out of balance.
I decided that the best place to go to work through the issue was the source of the original advice: Babs. I drove directly to her house, almost a little vengeful, needing more information. I’d trusted her advice, and now I felt more lost than ever. I didn’t know how to manage this anymore; Babs knew how to manage everything, always confident, or maybe she’d just stopped caring about anything anymore.
When I reached her house, the doorbell was broken, so I knocked, and then knocked again when I got no answer. I looked down at my phone to try calling her to see if she’d answer, and reprimanded myself for not calling her first, and then the door came open.
“I heard you. I was taking a piss,” Babs complained.
I rolled my eyes. “Thanks for sharing. Do you have a minute?”
“Yeah, yeah, come in.” Babs waved me inside, and I took a step in. It didn’t smell as strongly of pot, which led me to suggest that Babs wasn’t high this time. She’d also taken a shower, judging by the look of her hair, and so I had a feeling that I was going to be speaking to a much more level-headed Babs than I had last time.
“I have a complaint about the advice you gave me,” I told her.
She sat down on her couch and I sat down at the other end of it. One of her cats mewed at me from across the room.
“Excuse me?” Babs raised an eyebrow.
“Things are weird with Sawyer now,” I said. “Well, sort of. He doesn’t know I talked to Stacy.”
“Woah, what? She’s supposed to be in rehab right now.”
“I know, but she bailed. I don’t know if she like, escaped, or if her time is up, or what.” I honestly hadn’t even thought to ask. She came and went from rehab so often that it wasn’t so much a question of how she’d gotten out so much as when she’d be back in.
“Weird. When did you talk to her?”
“Yesterday. She showed up at my office.”
“What?” Babs sat back and glanced at her bowl on the coffee table like she wasn’t sure whether she was still high or not.
“I know.” I sighed. “She wasn’t mad or anything. Well, she was kind of mad, but about the same stuff. Fuck the system, I hate my parents, all that stuff. But she kind of made a point of talking to me about Sawyer.”
Babs cringed.
“Yeah. She didn’t threaten me or anything. She actually kind of gave me her blessing, even though I didn’t explicitly describe the relationship between us.” I shook my head.
“Yeah, but why would she turn up at your office just to say best wishes and then leave?” Babs asked. “It’s weird. What did Sawyer say about it?”
“I didn’t tell him,” I said.
Babs groaned and threw her head back. “Quinn, you’re killing me here.”
“Oh, you’re stressed?”
“Yes.” Babs brought her head back up and scrutinized me. “You have to tell him. You can’t deal with Stacy on your own. If she showed up at your office, that’s basically a warning.”
“A warning for what?”
“I don’t know.” Babs shrugged. “But when has Stacy ever been nice to you?”
I frowned. Stacy hadn’t ever been particularly mean to me, either, to be fair. But I knew what Babs meant—Stacy wasn’t the sort to drop by and see how things were going out of the goodness of her heart. She always had an agenda, and I’d failed to gain intel to see what her agenda might be.
“I don’t want to tell Sawyer,” I said. “I don’t know, Babs, he’s dealing with a lot right now.”
“Exactly. Sawyer’s dealing with a lot right now. The last thing he needs is to run into Stacy by surprise, especially if Stacy’s clearly planning something stupid.”
I hadn’t considered that. “Shit. I should have warned him.”
“Uh, yeah. You still probably should. It’s not…” Babs frowned. “It’s not really my business to tell you what Sawyer and her got up to. So I won’t. But what I can tell you is that she did with him what she does with all of her boyfriends. She traps them and reels them in and fucking ruins their lives.”
I grimaced at the implication that Stacy had totally wrecked Sawyer’s life. The only ideas that I could gather were ones that were linked to the limited information I’d gotten from Babs before—that he did some of the drugs that Stacy did. That wasn’t what Babs meant, though, I was sure—at the same time, I didn’t ask for clarification.
“She has an effect on these people,” Babs warned. “It’s unreal. It’s like… bug pheromones, or something.”
“What?”
“Bugs release pheromones. You know ants and stuff?” Babs shook her head. “Never mind. It’s not important. I mean that she has an effect on them, and if he really is dealing with a lot like you say he is, you need to treat him a little less like a glass vase and a little more like a vulnerable person.”
She was right, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that. I did know, from observing from afar, the way she treated the people she dated. Based on that alone, I should have made the connection that Sawyer wasn’t up for communicating with her again.
“Oh, come on, don’t beat yourself up about it,” Babs said. “You’re trying your best.”
“Yeah, but it’s not going very well,” I said, offering a smile. “So what do I do? Tell Sawyer Stacy’s out and looking for him? Tell Sawyer everything? Demand answers?”
“A little bit of everything,” Babs said. “I think you should tell him about Stacy being out for sure. Let him know that she’s out and that she knows he’s home, so he can prepare himself for running into her. Or so you can help him prepare for it, whatever you’re doing with each other to help him emotionally.”
I wrinkled my nose at her phrasing, but she continued.
“And I guess if he wants to tell you about Stacy, he’ll tell you. If not, he won’t. You can ask if you want, but I don’t know if he’ll tell you anything he doesn’t want to.” Babs shrugged. “I’ve only seen the guy in group settings, and from what I’ve observed, he’s not exactly inclined to talk on his own.”
He certainly wasn’t. Sawyer had to be badgered for any little detail unless he was comfortable or in the mood for sharing. It was the reason why therapy would be such a good idea for him—therapists were trained to badger specifically, extracting the pieces that hurt the brain as a whole.
“Is… is totally gross of me to be kind of still his therapist while we’re seeing each other?” I asked, thinking out loud in part.
“Probably, but what the hell are you gonna do?” Babs offered. “Different shit works with different couples. If you’re happy, who cares if it’s what the textbooks say is healthy? Define your own happy medium.”
It was a profoundly hippy answer to give, to let people be people and screw the statistics. Usually, it would sit wrong with me. There were studies that showed what healthy relationships looked like, and there was serious science to back up different behaviors and their link to a relationship’s durability. But in every study, there was an outlier, and I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t want badly to be the outlier in this case.
“I guess,” I said. “I’ll do my best. If he spooks…”
“He’s not a deer,” Babs said with a laugh. “He’s not gonna spook. Jesus. This guy was in the armed forces for six years, and you think he’s gonna spook at the mention of his ex-girlfriend?”
“He spooked the other day,” I pointed out. “He had some kind of nightmare and basically ran out the door. I think he was embarrassed for me to see him like that.”
“That’s not the same,” Babs insisted. “That’s just being annoyingly masculine.”
I liked how masculine Sawyer tended to be, the tough-guy attitude that he wore on his sleeve, but I knew Babs was right. It wasn’t so much him getting frightened as him not wanting to deal with the implications of having nightmares with me at that moment.
“I have to go get some stuff set up for our date tomorrow,” I said, standing up.
“It’s tomorrow. How do you do all this planning?” Babs asked incredulously. She, of course, being the girl who had barely even remembered to purchase a prom dress, whereas I had bought mine the winter before and continuously wore it to make sure it still fit.
I went home and went through my wardrobe, trying to keep my mind off the conversation I’d had with Babs. I knew what my game plan looked like: tell Sawyer about what went on with Stacy and leave him to decide whether he was going to divulge information. Any further fretting on my part was counterproductive at best.
As I leafed through my clothes, I thought back to the first time we’d slept together. Did it count as sleeping together if all we’d done was fuck a little crudely in my office? There had been a sort of animalistic lust, then, both of us coming a little unhinged. I’d never done anything like that before, and I got the feeling that he hadn’t, either. We’d simply lost control of our inhibitions.
I set aside a dress I liked and a pair of shoes that matched. For now, at least, it seemed that between Sawyer and I, things were fine. Despite my own issues, we were fine, and that was all that mattered for now.