Her Best Friend (21 page)

He checked his watch. Nearly six-thirty. He needed to get going. While he was primping in the bathroom like a nervous teenager, Amy was waiting for him.

He grabbed his toothbrush and started brushing furiously. He leaned forward to have another go at the goofy bit with his free hand and groaned as toothpaste dripped down the front of his shirt.

“Bloody hell.”

He grabbed a towel and scrubbed at the mark but a faint white outline remained on his dark shirt.

“Great. Well done.”

Maybe he should change shirts. He looked at his watch again. It would take him ten minutes to drag out the ironing board and press another shirt.

Too long. Way too long.

Amy would have to put up with him in all his toothpaste-spotted glory. She’d seen him looking far worse, he figured.

He hustled to the kitchen and started loading up a carrier bag with the supplies he’d bought earlier. Brie, check. Pricey bottle of pinot noir, check. Gourmet crackers, spicy pear paste, antipasto, check.

He was showered, ironed, after-shaved and loaded to the hilt with fancy foodstuffs. He figured he was about as ready as he was ever going to be.

He reached for his car keys and saw that his hands were trembling.

Damn.

He let out his breath on a gust and braced his hands on the kitchen counter.

Okay. He needed to calm down. This was Amy, after all. His best friend. Whatever happened tonight, they could deal with it.

He grabbed his keys and strode for the door. If he hung around thinking for too long, he’d psyche himself out. He’d made his decision this afternoon. He wanted Amy. He loved her. He was going to take the risk.

He threw open the front door and nearly walked straight into Lisa. She had her hand raised, ready to knock, and she made a surprised sound when she saw him.

“Oh. You scared me.”

“Lisa. I was just on my way out.”

Her gaze took in his freshly ironed shirt and damp hair before dropping to the carrier bag in his hand.

“I only need five minutes.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

There was a low, emotional note to her voice. Quinn checked his watch again and took a step backward. “Five minutes.”

Not exactly gracious, but they were past the point of playing polite games with each other.

And Amy was waiting.

Lisa swept past him in a swirl of jasmine and spice, walking into the living room. He followed more slowly and stopped when she turned to face him.

Her shoulders rose as she took a deep breath. “I’ve been trying to work out why I felt so compelled to come down here. At first I thought it was about Amy, and our friendship. But then I realized…I want a second chance, Quinn.”

Her words hung in the air for what felt like a long time. He bent his knees and put the carrier bag down.

Five minutes, his ass.

“Why?” he asked bluntly.

“Isn’t it obvious? I still love you.”

“What about what’s-his-name?”

“Stuart and I broke up three months ago.”

That surprised him.

“You can’t just slot back into your old life, Lisa. It doesn’t work like that.”

“I don’t expect us to pick things up where we left off. I know I’ve hurt you. Betrayed your trust. I’ve been seeing a counselor, and I think I understand myself a little better now. I want to make it up to you.”

“Lisa.” He stopped and ran a hand through his hair. Until a few minutes ago, his head had been filled with nothing but Amy. He’d been thinking about the future, about what might be. And now Lisa was standing here, offering an alternative.

“We’ll take it slowly. We can date. Get to know each other again.” She took a step toward him and he belatedly saw he wasn’t the only one who’d dressed to impress this evening.

His gaze ran over her figure-hugging red dress and very high heels. She’d even worn her hair up, the way she knew he liked it.

“You’ve been gone a year,” he said. Three, if he counted the two years she’d been sneaking around behind his back. And he did.

“I know you’re angry with me. You have every right to be. But I understand so much more now, Quinn. My parents, the way they’ve always been with me, nothing ever being good enough or big enough or bright enough to get their attention. I’ve been busting my ass for years trying to get them to notice me. And they still don’t give a shit. And I’ve managed to ruin the one good and perfect thing in my life trying to prove to myself that I’m worthy of being loved.”

She clutched her hands together at her waist.

“I screwed up, Quinn. I was looking in all the wrong places for things to make me whole. Please, please give us another chance. I miss you so much.”

She was offering him answers to the questions that had haunted him, and she was offering him a way to right the biggest, most abject failure of his life.

A year ago—hell, six months ago—he’d have leaped at the opportunity. He’d have swallowed his pride and reined in his anger and done his best to salvage what he could from her betrayal.

Lisa gave a choked sob and pressed a hand to her mouth. “I’m too late, aren’t I? God, I’m too late.”

She started to cry, big, noisy, wrenching sobs, her shoulders hunched as though she could somehow contain her grief if she could only make herself small enough.

He hesitated a moment, then stepped forward and pulled her into his arms. She clutched at him, pressing her face into his neck, her body shuddering against his.

“I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to lose you,” she said over and over.

It had been more than a year since he’d held her. He was surprised at how comfortable she felt in his arms. In her high heels she was almost as tall as him. So different from Amy in so many ways.

He stood breathing in her perfume and felt the tug of shared history and emotion dragging at him. Not so many years ago, he’d stood before a priest and made promises to her. Promises he’d had every intention of keeping.

“I don’t want to lose you,” Lisa said.

She sounded so broken, so helpless. He slid his hand to the back of her neck.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

Endlessly.

Where the hell was Quinn?

She’d thought about phoning him, but what was she supposed to say? “I still love you, what’s keeping you?” She figured she’d made herself vulnerable enough in this situation as it was.

Maybe he’d chickened out. Maybe she’d scared the hell out of him with her desperate neediness when he kissed her and she wrapped her leg around his waist and held on to him like a limpet on a log.

Maybe he’d simply changed his mind.

Maybe he’d had a car accident driving the three blocks to her house.

Maybe he’d hopped the first flight back to Sydney.

By a quarter to eight she had so many excuses and recriminations circling her mind she was seriously considering banging her head against the wall just to clear it.

“Damn you, Quinn. Don’t you dare do this to me!”

She grabbed her car keys. Enough was enough. She was going to find out what was holding him up. And if it was nothing, if he was sitting at home twiddling his thumbs while she gnawed her fingernails down to stumps and wore a groove in her front hallway…well, he was going to be walking funny for a while, that was for sure.

Her hands were tight on the steering wheel as she drove to his street. She turned into Lavender Lane and her parents’ house came up on her right. She slowed the car.

Then she saw it. Shiny and sleek and black. Lisa’s car, parked in Quinn’s driveway behind his rental sedan.

Right.

Of course.

She braked and stared at Lisa’s personalized plate for a long minute, the engine of her rusty heap idling noisily.

She should have known. And maybe, on some subconscious level, she had. Which was why she’d waited so long before she got in the car and drove over here.

She drove home and slammed the car door so loudly the neighbor’s cat bolted for cover, his night-eyes glinting brightly. She stalked up the path and shoved the door open, hearing it smash into the hall wall with a satisfying crash.

She was an idiot. A very foolish, very naive, self-deluded idiot.

She could see it so clearly now. Talk about twenty-twenty hindsight. All the years she’d spent mooning after Quinn, loving him in silence—wasted, every one. All the energy she’d expended over the past few days anguishing about kissing him and confessing to him—a huge waste.

Because Quinn Whitfield was never going to love her the way she loved him.

She’d said it to herself a hundred, maybe even a thousand times. But until this moment she’d never truly believed it. Not even when she’d blurted her feelings to him two nights ago and he’d simply stared blankly at her. Even then, faced with his lack of reaction, she’d still had a chink of hope in her pathetic, needy heart.

But not now. Tonight she had reached the end of her rope.

Sure, Quinn might want to kiss her. He might even be curious about sleeping with her. He might feel touched by her confession and obligated to do something about it.

But he would never feel the same way about her as he did about Lisa.

It had always been the two of them. Lisa and Quinn, Quinn and Lisa. From the first summer when the two of them had gotten together, Amy had always been the one on the outside looking in. And she still was.

They’d been
married,
for God’s sake. They’d woken to each other’s morning breath thousands of times. They’d shared intimacies she couldn’t even imagine. She could never compete with that.

“Done. I’m done,” she told her house.

She waited for the sky to fall, the earth to quake. Loving Quinn had been so much a part of her world that washing her hands of it felt akin to kicking the earth out of its orbit around the sun.

But nothing happened. Her hall clock ticked away another few seconds of her life. The neighbor’s dog barked. Her heart kept pumping blood and other vital matter around her body.

So.

Life went on.

How about that.

Her mouth firmed. She could do this. Get over Quinn. Move on, finally. She bloody could.

Then her gaze fell on an old photograph resting on her hall table: her and Quinn at nine years old, riding their bikes past her parents’ place, the two of them dressed as jockeys to celebrate Melbourne Cup day.

She reached out and pushed the frame over so that it fell facedown on the table. The last thing she needed to be looking at right now was a reminder of how entwined her life was with his.

She walked two steps and found herself staring at another picture, this one a Picasso print. Quinn had bought it for her for her eighteenth birthday. And next to it was another photograph: her mom standing with Louise Whitfield, both of them holding colorful cocktails high in a toast.

Amy stared at the Picasso for a long moment. She’d hung it opposite her bedroom door so she could see it when she was in bed. It was one of the first things she saw every morning. And every time she looked at it, she thought of Quinn.

Heat pressed at the back of her eyes. She screwed up her face, breathing deeply. She would not cry. She wouldn’t. She’d cried so many times over the years. But not tonight.

Please, not tonight. If she started, she was afraid she might never stop.

For a moment she teetered on the brink…and then the moment of danger passed. She sniffed loudly, blinked a few times.

Okay. All right. Good. Keep moving. Hold on to the anger.

She strode into the study and shifted things around until she’d found a large box. She brought it to the hall and grabbed the photograph off the table and put it in the box. Then she added the Picasso print and the other photograph. She went into her bedroom next. In went the silk robe Lisa and Quinn had bought her for Christmas three years ago. The earrings Quinn had given her last time she’d been in Sydney. Her ancient Midnight Oil tour T-shirt, bought when she and Quinn drove into Melbourne and braved the crowds to get front row seats.

Anything that reminded her of him. Anything that might keep her anchored in the past. Because she was done, and she was not going to waste another second of her life wanting someone who would never be hers.

She was thirty years old. Still young. Somewhere out there in the world was a man who would love her the way she deserved to be loved, a man she could love freely, without guilt and complications.

She looked around her bedroom.

She was going to need another box.