Page 65 of Parallel

We walk into the house and I watch her face, hoping, praying, for a reaction. Some memory that will provide an answer we need.

Her mouth curves downward. “It’s just like walking into the home of your favorite childhood friend as an adult. Familiar, but meaningless. Why the hell did I ever think seeing it might heal a brain tumor? I was expecting miracles.”

I return and find my hands wrapping around her arms, forcing her to meet my eye. “Who says it would have to be a miracle?” I ask. “We can’t explain anything that’s happening. But there was a time when people couldn’t explain the change in seasons, or sunlight, or gravity. It doesn’t mean there wasn’t an explanation. It just meant it hadn’t been discovered. Why should this be any different?”

She looks away, pressing her lips together. “But the tumor—you don’t actually believe we can stop it.”

I tip her chin up, feeling a little desperate. She can’t start losing hope now. I need her to keep fighting until we find a solution. “Do I think it’s unlikely this can fix the tumor? Yeah. But your tumor is also unlike anything I’ve ever seen. And how could I say it was impossible anyway? Every day, you and I are witnessing the impossible. We’re having the same dreams, for God’s sake. You know things you couldn’t possibly know, and from the moment I met you, it felt like you were…”

“It felt like I was what?”

“Mine,” I reply.

The awkwardness of that word washes over us both. I’ve never called anyone mine in my life, and she is with someone else. But I also know what I said was right. She is meant to be mine, and somehow today I need to convince her of that.

She sits on the dock and keeps me company while I prepare to pull the jet ski out of the water. I throw my shirt in the grass and I’m just about to pull the trailer up the hill when I glance up and catch it—Quinn’s eyes on me, cheeks flushed, her full lips slightly ajar. I’ve never seen a female watch me with such blatant, unconscious lust. Probably the way I’m looking at her every time we’re together. God, what I wouldn’t give to act on it.

I catch her eye. “Remembering our honeymoon?”

“Our honeymoon was in December,” she says primly. “No one was wearing a bathing suit.”

I grin. “If it was a good honeymoon, I imagine we were wearing a lot less.”

“Yeah,” she breathes, her lids fluttering closed for a second. She’s fucking remembering it, right here in front of me. Today is going to be a test of my self-restraint, as it is, without having to watch Quinn when she’s thinking about sex.

“Jesus, don’t do that,” I plead, giving the waistband of my shorts a quick, desperate tug.

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t say yeah like that, as if you’re remembering it all while you sit there.”

Her cheeks turn pink. “Sorry,” she begins. “I wasn’t remembering our honeymoon, I promise.”

My teeth grind. I haven’t gotten laid in weeks and the only girl I actually want has her dress hiked around her thighs and is swinging her bare legs a couple feet from my face. “Well, you were sure as shit remembering something. It was written all over your face.”

“I had this dream about you,” she begins. “We were in high school, right after homecoming, and we were in the back seat of your car. In the parking lot. And—”

Her voice has gone low and breathy again, full of longing. She’s been with her idiot boyfriend for so long, she’s forgotten what a turn-on she is, even when she’s not talking. Add in that rasp to her voice while she describes a memory of something that was clearly sexual—with me, no less—and I’m a goner. She may not know she’s doing it, but my dick certainly does.

“Don’t do that either,” I tell her, and I turn away, pulling the trailer up the hill. I feel like an asshole almost immediately, but I just don’t know how to do this—how to balance being what she needs and restraining what I want all at the same time. I get the jet ski into the shed and return.

She watches me, her face solemn. “What did I do wrong?” she asks.

I push my hair off my forehead, racking my brain for any excuse I can make, before I give up entirely. “Nothing. But you were describing the two of us, together, in the throatiest, sexiest voice imaginable. Let’s just say I walked away for a reason.”

“Oh.” Then her eyes widen. “Ohhhhh.”

There’s something so innocent about her at times. I love that innocence and want to preserve it, but at the same time, I want to destroy it into a million pieces. The jury’s still out on which way I’ll go.

32

QUINN

Nick goes to the house and returns with our sandwiches and drinks in his hands. He hasn’t bothered to put his shirt back on, though I wish he would. I find my eyes going south far too often, resting on that trail of light brown hair below his belly button, imagining where it might lead if I flicked the button of his shorts to follow it.

I don’t want to be having these thoughts about him, thoughts I’ve never in my life had for anyone else. But how do you make yourself stop thinking the wrong thing, and wanting it? He swings the bag down behind us, sitting too close. The distance he might sit if I were his and he were mine.

I think of the way he said that word earlier—mine—and how it sent a visceral thrill through my chest. The way something inside me—that hard seed that began to flower the moment I met him—took another leap, came into full bloom.