Page 82 of The Best Part of Breaking Up

“Quentin… I…”

“It started with my mom,” he continues. “She left, but she didn’t take us with her. It was the only way my dad would let her leave without a fight. She didn’t have the money for one anyway, and she thought he was a good dad. I guess he was fine. He didn’t hit us or anything. We always had more than we needed. He said he loved us. But he is a disaster at relationships. Every time one imploded he always seemed to find a new one, and the cycle started over. Six months of bliss, a wedding, and then… a tectonic shift. We did our best to keep our heads down and ride it out. Like a goddamn earthquake or something.

“Eventually, I started trying to scare off the women he dated. I threw tantrums into my teens. I started outrageous arguments at the dinner table. When I got older, I targeted them with pranks and insults until I hoped they’d leave. That’s really how I got my start as the family fuckup. Scaring off potential stepmothers. They probably assumed I was just like him.

“I always wanted to be better. Stronger, I guess. At first I figured I knew how to handle his shit better than them. But ultimately, I wanted to help people fight back. I did, for a while. I worked my ass off in Texas, trying to prove that I wasn’t like him, that I was so much better than he would ever give me credit for. And I really felt like I was past so much of it, but I came back home, and there it was. A new woman. A new cycle. And I felt…”

He sighs.

“Melissa knew about my work in Austin, and she asked me to help her. That’s what she was doing that night at Maestoso – asking for my help. I didn’t know for sure why she was pursuing me at first, but I had a good idea, and I avoided her. I explained to her that I’m not a social worker or psychologist; I’m just an attorney. My grandfather told me to stay out of it, and I did my best. But I’m definitely not hooking up with her.” There’s a pause, and I can hear him sigh. “I want to check all the right boxes and do all the right things. And as stupid as it probably sounds, I want my family to realize they were wrong about me. To really value me. I want it all, even though I know that none of these things can coexist. Sometimes I’m not sure we can outrun ourselves. Lather, rinse, repeat.”

For a few moments, I’m quiet, barely breathing.

“Anyway,” he says. “I wanted you to know.”

There’s another long pause. So long I’m sure he might be asleep. And in it I’m fighting with myself. Maybe he’s right. Maybe we can’t outrun ourselves. Because I’m paralyzed with fear. I’m scared that Quentin Maxwell is my single biggest weakness. Scared that he has the power to ruin my career. Scared he’ll break my heart. That he’ll take everything. And the thing about me is that I don’t know that I’m willing to risk anything, let alone everything.

“Thanks,” I finally say. “For telling me.”

It’s a cheap line, and I know it. I hear the springs creak above me. I hear his breathing steady. Eventually, we both succumb to the quiet.

21.

“How’d you sleep?”

I turn from the kitchen table with a start. I’ve been staring out the window towards the docks of the marina, squinting into the early morning clouds and wondering if Teddy has managed to make it back to port yet, for so long that I seemed to forget where I was. The details of the bright yellow kitchen come back to me. Norma moves toward the turquoise cabinets and pulls out a pair of coffee mugs.

“Good,” I tell her.

It’s a lie. It turns out I can’t sleep around Quentin. I spent half the night listening to his breathing, and the other half turning over everything he said. I crawled out of bed around sunrise and decided to set up at the kitchen table with my laptop and get a little work done. I guess at some point I spaced out.

“Good,” Norma says. Her smile is a small, amused quirk of her lips, like she’s got a secret tucked between them. “Coffee?”

“That’d be great, thanks,” I offer.

In the brief quiet, my thoughts spin in circles. I just can’t figure out why Quentin said anything of the things he did. It’s one thing to trust someone with his secrets. It feels like another entirely to trust me – the person who is competing with him for a promotion – with secrets that I could use to quite literally guarantee he won’t get the promotion. He might as well have handed me a live grenade: the kind an enemy would probably use against him.

But are we enemies anymore? Were we ever, really? Every time I try to tally up the points and see which column he lands in, I feel like I lose track. Normally in situations like this, I would take a deep breath and go with my gut. I don’t know what my gut is telling me in this situation. My stomach flips every time I think about the way he looked at me across the table at Barnacle Billy’s, with that flicker of flame in his eyes and the ocean breeze in his hair.

There isn’t a single day I haven’t wanted to be irrationally close to you. Haven’t imagined what it would be like to…

I rub my eyes and consider showering soon, or taking another jog down to the marina and inspecting the rows of boats myself. Maybe we could charter one to track Teddy down, and then we could board his vessel and take him by force. Which I guess would mean I’d basically need to locate a bounty hunter. Or Captain Jack Sparrow.

“You’ll be excited to hear I’ve already taken the liberty of writing down the locations of all the good look-sees around here,” Norma says, rescuing me from this hopeless spiral.

“Look-sees?” I ask.

“Antique stores. Flea markets. Quirky little year-round yard sales. The kind of places where you have to take your time to look and see if there’s anything worth buying. Isn’t that what you said you were here for?”

I catch up in starts and stops.

“Oh. Yes,” I stammer. I tack on a smile for good measure. “Yeah, of course. All that sounds great. That’s why we’re here, like you said. To look and see!”

She gives me an uncertain sideways glance before turning to fill our mugs. I wasn’t one-hundred percent certain I was being a scattered mess, but that look solidified it. I’m losing my edge.

“I haven’t checked The Pole this morning, but you’ll also want to do that,” she adds. “You can’t miss it. It’s at the corner, by the bank. Any of the pop-up sales are going to be posted there.”

When she comes around to set a mug beside my computer, her eyes light up when she sees my screen.

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