Take the Long Way Home (14 page)

“What kind of speech? I’m not really good at
public speaking.” Especially when he had nothing to say beyond,
“Thank you.”

“Why don’t you tell the story about the
division championship game your senior year, when you broke two
tackles and took the ball in yourself for the winning touchdown?”
Kozlowski suggested.

Christ, he remembered Quinn’s football
history better than Quinn did. That had been an exciting game, and
he supposed the touchdown he’d taken in on his own had been the one
that put Brogan’s Point ahead for good, although they’d gone on to
score two more touchdowns, so he hadn’t really thought of that
particular play as the game winner. Besides, no one, with the
possible exception of Kozlowski, could care less about a high
school football game played ten years ago.

He must have made a face, because Ashley
gave his arm a gentle yet firm touch. “You’ll be fine,” she said.
“Just thank everyone. They’re going to be cheering for you. Just
bask in the love and say thank you.”

Her hand remained on his wrist, as light as
silk yet strong enough to feel like a manacle, locking him to the
arm of his chair. Locking him to her. He couldn’t think of a way to
shake her hand off him without the others at the table noticing. He
shot her a sharp look, but she was busy smiling at the others. All
these years later, she still had a mesmerizing smile.

“So,” she was saying, “The band will play
the school song while Quinn marches onto the field. He’ll have to
march slowly so the music doesn’t last longer than his walk. If
you’re set up on the fifty-yard line and he walks slowly enough, it
should time out well.”

“I don’t want to march out there slowly,” he
muttered. He just wanted to race to the fifty-yard line, accept his
plaque, say thank you—that was all the speech he wanted to give—and
get the hell off the field.

“Everyone will be singing
the song. I don’t know about you—” she sent him a kittenish smile
“—but I still remember all the words.
Brogan’s Point, our lovely town, land of seafarers on solid
ground. Work hard, play hard, always do your best. Brogan’s Point
High School, we are truly blessed...
”

God, what an inane song. At
the start of every game, the team used to storm onto the field from
the locker room while the band played that song and the fans in the
bleachers sang along. But he wasn’t on the team, and he wasn’t
going to storm anywhere. If he had to be accompanied by a song as
he accepted his honor, he’d rather it be something appropriate.
Like
Take the Long Way
Home
.

“It’s going to be beautiful,” Ashley said,
and he could actually see a few sentimental tears glistening in her
eyes. Then again, she had always had a knack for producing tears
when she felt they would enhance the moment or win her some
points.

Tomorrow’s ceremony was not worthy of tears,
Ashley’s or anyone else’s. He had to keep reminding himself to be
grateful that this group of decent folks wanted to honor him for
his past achievements, but that was all those achievements were:
the past. He’d left town a sports hero. He’d come back a medical
resident who’d been through the academic grinder several times,
who’d set broken bones and diagnosed bursitis, who’d assisted on
several dozen ACL repairs and splinted jammed fingers and injected
cortisone into inflamed joints, and who still felt awed by medical
science, what it could do, how it could help injured people become
whole again.

A has-been high school football star was not
worthy of the esteem Ashley and these men were lavishing upon
Quinn. Not even if he’d been recruited by a Division One
university. Not even if he’d set a bunch of school records and led
the local team to a state championship.

But they were so into it. To dismiss the
whole thing would be rude, and Quinn was trying hard to be a nicer
person than he’d once been. How ironic that allowing his one-time
athletic mentors honor him was in fact a kindness to them.

He managed to finish his prime rib and iced
tea. When the others suggested dessert and after-dinner drinks, he
politely declined. Ashley did, too. Of course she would. She’d
never allow all those excess calories to pass her pretty pink lips.
As it was, she’d consumed less than half of the poached salmon and
steamed vegetables on her plate.

“I really do have to be going,” Quinn said,
easing back his chair. “I’ve had a long day.”

“I’m sure you have,” Coach Marshall
said.

“So busy saving lives,” Ashley added, giving
Quinn an admiring gaze that made him wince inwardly.

When he excused himself with the promise
that he’d meet everyone at the high school stadium before the game
the next day, Ashley excused herself, too. She tucked her hand
through the crook in his elbow as they left the elegant dining
room. It was a proprietary gesture and a presumptuous one, but just
as when she’d pressed his wrist at the table, Quinn didn’t want to
embarrass her by jerking his arm out of her clasp.

As soon as they reached the inn’s broad
front porch, however, he took a decisive step away from her.
“Ashley,” he said, his voice as firm as her grip on him had been.
“Enough, okay?”

She gave him a wide-eyed stare. In the
golden light from the lamps illuminating the porch, she seemed
radiant. She was almost too beautiful—yet her beauty left him cold.
“Enough what?” she asked innocently.

Be kind
, he reminded himself. “The way you keep touching me,” he
said, his tone as gentle as he could manage. “We’re not a couple.
We haven’t been a couple for ten years. We’re never going to be a
couple again. I wish you wouldn’t keep touching me as if we
were.”

“Never say never.” She sounded almost
chipper, like the cheerleader she’d once been.

“I’m saying never. It’s not going to
happen.”

“We were in love once, Quinn. I was stupid,
thinking our love no longer existed. But it does. I know it does.”
She rose on tiptoe, planting her hands on his shoulders, about to
launch into a kiss.

He took a long step
backward. Hell, she was harder to evade than some of the
two-hundred-fifty pound linemen he’d faced during his playing days.
A vision of Maeve Nolan flashed across his mind, and he blurted
out, “I’m seeing someone, okay?” He didn’t want to use Maeve as an
excuse to escape from Ashley. But…he
was
seeing Maeve. He’d kissed her. He
would be heading to her apartment as soon as he could extricate
himself from Ashley. He would take her out for a drink, and he
would talk to her, and listen to her, and—if he was lucky—kiss her
again. More than kiss her, if he was very lucky.

The odd girl from school, the loner, the
freak… He was seeing her. And right now, he couldn’t think of
anyone he’d rather be seeing. Even if seeing at her—looking at
her—was all he did.

Ashley’s eyes filled with tears again, and
this time he could almost believe they were real. “First love is
true love,” she said. It sounded like a line from a bad poem.
“You’ll never love anyone the way you loved me.”

He couldn’t argue that. First love was what
it was. He’d been with his share of women since Ashley had broken
up with him—not that he’d had a wild sex life, given how much time
and energy he’d had to devote to pre-med studies, medical school,
and his internship. But he’d loved a few of those women. He hadn’t
had enough spare time to waste on women he didn’t love.

Each love had been different. Each love had
taught him something about himself. Each love, he’d like to think,
had made him a better person. Like aerobic exercise, each love had
strengthened his heart.

Ashley was right. No other love he’d
experienced had been like the love they’d shared in high school.
But they weren’t in high school anymore.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. If he were a true
gentleman, he would walk her to her car. If he walked her to her
car, though, she might try to kiss him again. He just wanted to get
away.

Maeve was waiting for him. Maeve with her
modesty, her honesty, her lack of pretension. Her cookies. Her
piercing hazel eyes and her soft, sweet lips.

He headed down the porch steps and across
the parking lot to his car, his footsteps crunching against the
crushed seashells and pebbles that surfaced the lot. Ashley shouted
something after him, something much too crude to have come from her
lovely, well-bred mouth. The incongruity of her using that language
jarred a laugh from Quinn.

Settling behind the wheel, he let out a
breath. The woman had exhausted him. Yet he knew seeing Maeve would
rejuvenate him. She was so fresh, so direct. He wouldn’t have to
knock himself out trying to figure out tactful ways to keep his
distance from her.

The address she’d texted him was on Atlantic
Avenue, the road that ran parallel to the town beach. The houses
lining the road were older, many of them broken into flats. They
weren’t quite gentrified enough to qualify as charming, but living
across the street from the beach—even if the street was a broad,
heavily trafficked avenue—made up for the weariness of the row
houses, their clapboard siding faded by the constant salty sea
breezes, their porches and roofs weathered a few degrees beyond
picturesque.

He found her building and parked at the
curb. The front door had several doorbells next to it. He pressed
the one for her apartment and waited.

A long minute passed. He pressed it again,
trying not to get pissed. If she’d stood him up… No, she wouldn’t.
Maeve was the kind of woman who would have told him if she didn’t
want to see him. She didn’t play games.

She must have gotten delayed. She could
still be at her father’s. Her dinner might have lasted longer than
she’d expected. Her father was a cop; maybe he’d demanded that she
linger over coffee. A wise person didn’t argue with a cop, even if
he was her father.

Quinn pressed the button one last time, his
mind scrambling to come up with a strategy. He could wait for her
here, or he could look up her father’s address and track her down
there, or—

The door opened and she stood before him,
her cheeks tearstained, her eyes puffy. She wore jeans and a
sweater that looked unbearably soft, and in her arms she cradled a
gray striped cat who stared at Quinn with undisguised
skepticism.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

“No,” she said, and started to weep.

The first thing she noticed, through the
blur of her tears, was that he’d grown a scruff of beard. Nothing
thick and furry, just a dark bristle that emphasized the sharp
lines of his jaw and made his eyes look even bluer.

The second thing she noticed was that he was
just as startlingly handsome with facial hair as he was
clean-shaven.

He must have noticed her staring. He rubbed
his hand over his chin and shrugged. “It’s been a busy couple of
days. I worked extra hours so I could get the weekend off. I’ll
shave tomorrow for the big show.” He reached out and brushed a tear
from the outer corner of her eye. Cookie eyed him suspiciously,
then decided he posed no threat. She stretched her head beneath his
palm, inviting him to stroke her while he was stroking Maeve’s
face. “If you don’t want to go out for a drink, that’s okay,” he
said. “I gather your dinner was even worse than mine.”

That forced a smile out of her. “Yours was
bad, too?”

“Boring. Irritating.” He shrugged. “How
about we just take a walk on the beach? It’s a nice night.”

A walk on the beach sounded wonderful.
Quinn’s sensitivity to her ragged mood soothed her like a balm.

“Let me grab a jacket,” she said, lowering
Cookie to the hardwood floor of the hallway. The cat objected with
a whine, but the fact was, Quinn’s presence seemed like better
therapy than cuddling Cookie right now. She pulled her jacket from
the chair where she’d tossed it when she’d gotten home from her
father’s house and slid her arms through the sleeves. Patting her
pocket to make sure she had her key, she followed Quinn
outside.

The night was cool and dark, dry despite the
humid breeze rising up off the ocean. Quinn took her hand as they
crossed Atlantic Avenue, and he helped her over the sea wall that
separated the sidewalk from the beach. Then he climbed over it
himself, and took her hand once more.

Her sneakers sank into the pliant sand. The
ocean side of the street was noticeably cooler than the house side.
She shrugged her jacket more snugly over her shoulders, and he
released her hand and slid an arm around her, sharing the warmth of
his sturdy body with her. “You want to talk about it?”

She sighed. She wouldn’t have wanted to talk
about it with anyone else. But Quinn was easy to open up to. She
couldn’t imagine why. He was so far out of her league, his life so
different from hers. Yet she felt she could tell him anything.

Not that she had much to
tell. “It was my first time back in my father’s house since my
mother died,” she explained. “I kept telling myself it wasn’t my
house anymore—but when I saw my old childhood bedroom, I realized
it
was
my house.
And I felt…hurt. All over again.”

“How was your dad?” he asked. “Still the
scary cop?”

“He’s not scary,” she argued.

“When we were in high school, he was.
Everyone knew your father was a cop. We figured he’d bust us if he
ever got wind of the shit we were pulling.”

She laughed. “You could have been breaking
every law in the book. He wouldn’t have noticed. He was as much of
a wreck as I was.” Her smile faded. “My mother was the rock in our
family. She held everything together. And then suddenly she was
sick. The thing about ovarian cancer is, by the time you’ve got
symptoms, it’s usually too late. I guess I don’t have to tell you
that. You’re a doctor.”