Chapter Seventeen
SAWYER
“Sawyer, don’t put those there. Those don’t grow in the shade.”
I blinked and looked down at what I was doing. I appeared to be placing a tomato plant in the wrong place, and I put it back in the pot and set it to the side.
“Sorry,” I said.
Pete walked over and picked the pot up. “You got something on your mind?”
“I’m having dinner with Quinn tonight,” I said. “I’m not sure where to take her. A bar is a little too… I don’t know. And I don’t want to take her somewhere super upscale for a first date. It’s overcompensating, you know?” I hadn’t been on a date in six years. Hell, it had been longer than six years. Stacy and I hadn’t gone on any dates. So it had been since college since I’d been on a date, and I couldn’t even recall it.
“You’re going to dinner with Quinn?” Pete asked.
“Yeah.”
“What happened to ‘I need to sleep with someone else or see a different therapist?’” Pete paraphrased what I’d told him a few days before, and I sighed, not surprised that he had it ready to throw back in my face.
“I decided I might as well try,” I said. “She’s a damn good therapist, and I don’t want to not see her. Someone else might not do as good a job, you know? And I also know that I don’t want to see another girl.”
Pete frowned. “It sounds to me like a conflict of interest. It’s messy, that’s all. I don’t think it’s a good idea to be her patient if you’re dating her.”
“Well, I think it’ll be alright.” Logically, I knew it was a horrible idea, but my gut told me that this was something I could pull off. “Besides, worst case scenario, I go see someone else. Might as well try.”
“I suppose.” Pete shoved his cap onto his head and went back to moving dirt around. I could tell that he still didn’t approve, but frankly, I couldn’t expect him ever to approve, and this was better than getting back into drugs.
When I got home, I spent a little too long trying to decide what to wear. I didn’t want to look stupidly overdressed, but I didn’t want to look casual, and my inexperience was starting to grate on me. I was almost thirty years old—I shouldn’t be nervous about going on a date with someone! I finally ended up with a clean pair of dark jeans and a button-down shirt, nothing too uptight but not my t-shirt from the day before, either.
The air was a little hot outside, so I rolled the sleeves of my shirt up to my elbows, careful to smooth out the cuff. I texted her to let her know that I was on my way, and she sent me her address with a smiley face. I tapped it into my phone and made my way to her house.
The fact that she lived so close to Austin told me she was doing well for herself. It was hugely expensive to live in the city—most of my professors from the University of Texas lived in San Marcos or San Antonio and commuted every day to work. The closer you got to Austin, the more money you had.
Her house was lovely. It wasn’t anything ostentatious, but it was a beautiful house with a green lawn and vivacious flowerbed. I stepped up to the front door and knocked carefully.
Quinn opened the door with a smile on her face. I took her in for just a moment—she wore a dress that hugged the curves of her body, and her hair had been curled. I remembered being told by one of my girlfriends in college that the effortless curls were the ones that took the longest to do.
“You look lovely,” I told her, and a blush came up to her cheeks.
“You don’t look too bad yourself,” she told me. I smiled and led her back to my car.
“Where are we going?” She asked.
I tapped my thumbs on the steering wheel. “There’s a little restaurant in Austin by one of the parks that does some live music and all fresh, local-grown food. There’s a lot of college kids, but if you can get past that, it’s nice.”
“I don’t mind college kids,” she said. “Sometimes they remind me I’m getting old.”
“You are absolutely not old,” I assured her. She was still in her twenties!
“Well, I’m not a college student,” she said.
“Neither am I,” I pointed out. “But I’m not old.”
“No, you’re certainly not,” she said, and it seemed we’d reasoned it out, both of us smiling. We pulled up to the parking garage, and I picked up my ticket on our way out.
It was too loud on the street to make conversation, so we didn’t say much of anything until we reached the restaurant. It was a small place sort of crammed up against the park, but the setting was beautiful, with an elaborately decorated interior and even candles at the dinner tables.
The hostess got us seated, and then, finally, we could have some conversation.
“This place is beautiful,” Quinn said. “It feels like I haven’t been on a date in ages.”
“Oh?” I found it hard to believe that someone like Quinn could go very long without finding someone or another to take her out. She was absolutely everything most people looked for in a person—or perhaps she was everything that I looked for in a person, and my opinions were skewed.
“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I guess I shouldn’t talk about it, but you know, it’s not a big deal. It’s just been some time since I was on a date.”
“Me too,” I said.
“You didn’t get up to anything overseas?” She asked. “You had women in the army, right?”
“Well, the men and women’s units are separate, to begin with,” I said. “And the women who are native to the area… they either hated us, fell all over us, or wanted to sell themselves to us. Mostly they just wanted to be left the hell alone. It wouldn’t have been right to go over there and bother them.”
“Definitely not,” she said. “But you must have been lonely.”
I had been. I watched her across the table, dark blue eyes scanning me like she knew every thought in my head already. She leaned her head against her hand, and it was difficult not to trace the slender wrist to the pale arm, up to the shoulder, to the neck, every curve of her body mesmerizing in an unexplainable way.
“Sometimes,” I said. “But we’ve talked plenty about me. Why don’t you go out and find someone to take home? You could, if you wanted to.”
“Am I not?” The corner of Quinn’s mouth cocked up in a smile, and I bit the inside of my cheek. This woman was going to be the death of me, and we hadn’t even been served our food yet.
“I think that’s why we did what we did,” Quinn mentioned at some point.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s been ages since I’ve been on a date. You’ve been in the military for some years. I think we both just had a lot of pent-up tension,” she said. “A lot of the work around sexual repression is Freudian, and I’m not very keen on Freud, but some of it holds.”
“It did happen quickly,” I said. “But I can’t pretend I tried to stop it.”
“Someone might have seen us,” Quinn said, almost like she was teasing. When she moved her shoulder forward, the sleeve of her dress drooped against her arm, and she didn’t move to correct it. Like a bloodthirsty hound, I stared after that bit of exposed skin and met the smirk she gave me when I returned to her face.
“I’d have let them watch,” I said, struggling to keep my voice from betraying my intentions. “You have a way of making me forget myself.”
“I have several ways,” Quinn corrected. “And you’ve only seen a few.”
Her cheeks blushed pink, and I tilted my head to the side, intrigued by this sexual tension. We were in public, but the surrounding noise was loud enough that no one would overhear. The waiter could be seen coming from far enough away that he wouldn’t overhear it, either. I leaned forward.
“What am I going to do with you?” I asked her, shaking my head. I was still certain she’d be my undoing. I didn’t know how yet, or to what end, but I knew she would eventually drive me mad. Still, I was hardly leaving.
“I was hoping whatever you wanted,” Quinn returned. She was too good at flirting where I was terribly, terribly rusty.
So I sat back in my chair a little, frowning. “I’ll admit, I’m a little rusty with this.”
“You’ll pick it up in time,” Quinn said, smiling. “I think it’s sweet. It’s never good to go out with someone and find out that they’re terribly smooth. That always lends itself to nasty surprises later.”
“I think I’ll still be able to surprise you,” I mused. “But I wouldn’t call it nasty.”
“Some would,” she retorted and grinned. It was almost a game now to see what we could turn into an innuendo. It was a relief to have that pressure off; the tension was still there, oddly enough, but I didn’t feel pressure to be sexy or suave.
“You’re pretty good at this,” I conceded, taking a sip of my water.
“I’m better at other things,” she said. She made a face. “No, that one didn’t work as well.”
“It could have,” I insisted.
And so dinner went, naming innuendos and trying not to focus on her too blatantly in public. We laughed throughout the evening, and when we got in the car, the game continued; only now, with her so close, it became less funny and slightly more serious.
“When I was in high school, a lot of the girls would give their boyfriends handjobs while they drove,” Quinn said.
I winced. “That’s a terrible idea.” Then I made a point of shifting my hips out of her focus, and we both laughed.
“I don’t want to crash!” She insisted. “I just remembered that it was something that happened!” She laughed. “Teenagers are stupid.”
“Adults are stupid,” I said. “There were privates that stick firecrackers up every orifice of their body.”
“That’s just college!”
“Where did you go to college?”
We pulled up at her house, and I opened the door for her. I walked with her up to the front door, and she paused for a moment.
Her smile faltered, and she rested her hand against my forearm. “This is a really, really bad idea,” she said. She looked down like she was ashamed to meet my gaze.
I didn’t know whether she meant me walking her to her car, her standing so close to me, or us trying to have a date in general. Either way, she was completely correct. I could smell her perfume, she was standing so close, and out of a million things I could have done, stepping back and saying goodnight was the worst possible thing. I couldn’t step away from her.
“I think it probably is,” I agreed. I held her waist in my hands and pulled her close to me and kissed her. The world stood still when I kissed her. I felt like a teenager when I kissed her. She leaned against me, and despite what we’d only just said, I could feel her melting in my arms.