Page 10 of Parallel

I do what he says, but that seems to send me farther. I stand, balancing in the center and waving to him. “SOS!”

He smiles, sweet and sheepish in the same moment, and that dimple appears. God, I love that dimple. It makes me feel as if my heart has swelled until it is pushing against my sternum—my ribs stretched to the point of pain. I watch him dive in, all lean muscle and easy grace, the sunlight glinting off his back. His strokes as he swims toward me are long and even. He reaches the boat in no time at all, which amazes me, though it shouldn’t. He got a full scholarship based on that particular ability of his.

He pulls himself up and over the side of the boat in a single fluid move. We lean toward each other, and when he kisses me, I forget we’re on a boat, in the middle of a lake. All I know is him, warm and sweet and whole beside me. The past few months have been hard, for both of us, but I know in this moment we will be fine. There is something about the two of us that seems to survive all things. Tragedy strikes and we wobble like bowling pins but return to our places, upright and beside each other.

“Thank you for swimming out to get me,” I whisper.

His words are low and warm against my ear, his voice serious and perhaps a little sad. “I’ll never just let you float away,” he replies.

When I wake, Jeff is asleep, draped heavily around my back like a blanket, and for the first time in all the years I’ve known him, the feel of him against me brings with it a deep swell of panic. While I refuse to feel guilty about dreams I have no control over, the fact that I can’t stand my fiancé touching me afterward? Yes, I can and should feel guilty about that.

I quietly extricate myself, as my head starts to throb, and go to the living room. It’s still dark out, and in the dim light the room feels sort of foreign to me. Nothing has changed, yet it just isn’t mine somehow. I look around the room and try to remember why I chose this stuff—the staid furniture, heavy wood, dark colors. But then, I guess I didn’t really choose any of it. I just didn’t argue against it.

A traitorous voice in my head asks, for the first time, if that’s how Jeff and I ended up together too. It’s a ridiculous question, of course, because Jeff and I were bound to end up together eventually—our parents were best friends and he was our rock after my father died. But at the same time, it seems like part of a pattern: my life consists entirely of things that occurred by default or were chosen by someone else first.

I lie on the couch but remain awake until it’s light out, wanting only to be rid of this unsettled feeling, this sudden discontentment with everything. Jeff emerges from the bedroom just as I’m rising and regards me through half-lidded eyes, scratching his stomach.

“You having another headache?” he asks.

I am, actually. I’ve gotten so accustomed to them I barely noticed. “Yeah, they’re pretty much a constant at this point.”

He wraps his arms around my waist and I lay my head against his chest. His skin is clammy. Wiry chest hairs poke at my cheek.

“What’s going on, babe?” he asks. “Is it the wedding?”

I can’t tell him the truth. I can’t. “Maybe. It’s been a stressful couple of weeks.”

“Not having second thoughts, are you?” he asks, laughing. Of course he would laugh. Because it’s unthinkable. We are not the kind of people who have second thoughts. But we also aren’t the kind of people who fantasize about others. And now, it appears, I am.

5

QUINN

On Monday, it is Caroline who drives me out to the inn to finalize wedding plans, since Jeff was busy and I was nervous about driving alone, given what happened the other day. Caroline is able to take off work without a ration of shit since she’s her own boss, and not for the first time, I wonder what my life might be like if I hadn’t left school to take care of my dad. Would I have a job I love? Would I be able to set my own hours? If he hadn’t gotten sick, if my mother hadn’t fallen apart so completely…but what’s done is done. You can’t change the past.

“I love Trevor,” she says, “but his ideas for your bachelorette party leave much to be desired.”

“Such as?”

“Prostitutes, Quinn. I’m not joking. He wants me to bring in prostitutes.”

“Oh my God. To strip?”

“No. You hire strippers to strip.”

I give a choked laugh. “So for sex? How would that even work? Is he thinking I’d just, like…go into the bathroom with one of them?”

“He said ‘guys do it, so why shouldn’t she? I want her to see what she’s missing.’”

I sigh. “He seems to be under the impression that just because I’m not all ‘do me, Jeff, right now,’ that we’re missing something.”

I expect her to laugh but she’s oddly quiet. “But you’re like that sometimes, right?”

I slant a glance at her. “Et tu, Brute? Please don’t join the last-minute chorus of people telling me I’m making a mistake. I mean, you’ve had years to tell me this, so mere weeks before my wedding is just…rude.”

“I’m not,” she argues. “You know I think Jeff’s great. And to be fair, I have asked you about this before. Right before you moved in with him.”

I broke up with Jeff to move back to D.C., but when he followed me here—showing up on my doorstep with this impassioned speech straight out of a romance—it felt like fate, like the kind of thing I was supposed to give into. I was torn at the time, but it’s all kind of romantic, in hindsight. “I thought you just wanted to make sure I’d thought it through. I didn’t think you were trying to dissuade me.”