Perfect Pairing (30 page)

“Here's an idea,” Hal said, a hint of sadness undercutting the tension in her voice. “Why don't you use your platinum card to get yourself a cab to the airport?”

“Please don't.”

“Don't what? Be honest? We had a great trip, but it's clearly over. We're back in the real world now, and in the real world, you and I are never going to work. So maybe it's time for you to go on your way and let me stay where I belong.”

The words hit her like a slap. “You don't mean that.”

“It's what you want, Quinn. You want to move forward with someone else. Go on.”

“What do you want?”

“I don't want anything.”

Quinn reached for her arm, desperate to reconnect. “Don't go back to that, Hal.”

Hal shook her off.

“Fine,” she snapped, “if you won't say what you want, I will.”

“You don't know what I want.”

“Yes I do, because you want the same thing I do. You want to build something strong and lasting, something you can depend on in the way you never got to depend on anything in your life. But you're scared, so you're going to keep telling yourself you don't want anything more than this broken-down truck. You've come to depend on the undependable to the point that you don't even believe anything can last anymore.”

“You don't know me.”

“I do. I know you better than you will admit to knowing yourself. This little meltdown isn't about the truck, and it's not about my money. It's about you being terrified you'll lose out again like you already lost too many things in life. And you don't like being reminded of that.”

“I don't want to hear anything else.”

Hal headed for the driver's side door, but Quinn followed her. If they had to have this out, they'd get everything out now.

“For someone who won't admit to wanting anything, you sure do have a long list of things you don't want.”

“I don't want to keep having this conversation with you.”

“Shocking. Well guess what? I do.” Quinn didn't even try to hide her frustration anymore, and it boiled into flat out anger. “You don't want me to go forward without you, but you don't want to go forward with me? I'm damned either way.”

“Why do you even care what I want?”

“Because I want you.”

“My turn to call bullshit,” Hal shouted as she wheeled around. “You don't want me. Not really. You want some vision of me you've created in your mind.”

Quinn shook her head. She wanted the real Hal. Why couldn't she make her understand?

“This is me. I break down. I fix my own stuff. I don't try to pay away my problems. I can't be bought, and I will not be sold. I am my own person, and I won't sacrifice my freedom for whatever set of golden handcuffs you lay on the table.”

“Freedom? Being stranded on a roadside? Not being able to pay
your bills? Having to bend the law and stretch your resources to survive? Being stuck? Not being able to go forward or back? Is that your freedom? I hate to break it to you. That's not freedom. It's poverty.” Quinn shook her head sadly. “Freedom is an illusion.”

“So is control,” Hal shot back. She'd had enough. If Quinn wanted to deal in hard truths, she had a few of her own she needed to hear.

“What?”

“The almighty control you think your business suits and your nine-to-five job and your platinum card give you—they won't buy back your family, Quinn.”

She winced and took a step back. The great and powerful Quinn Banning finally backed down, but Hal wouldn't stop now. Something inside had broken again, and this time it couldn't be healed with a few kisses.

“You can't reopen your dad's plant. You can't rebuild your parents' marriage. You can't rehab all the neighborhoods. You can't remake Buffalo into some silly childhood image you're clinging to, and even if you did, you won't get a do-over on the childhood you lost.”

“That's not what I—”

“Yes it is. You want to make up for all the stability you never had, but it won't work. No matter how strong your strategic planning skills, no matter how much money you make, no matter how many businesses you save, you can't control people.” Hal took a deep breath and hung her head. “People will always disappoint you.”

“So what? So we just give up? You want to just stop trying?”

Hal didn't have an answer. “I don't want anything from you.”

“Yes, you do,” Quinn shouted, “you want me to just . . . stay here, forever. You want me to be stranded on the side of the road with you indefinitely, and I don't want that life, Hal. We both got screwed as kids, and maybe you're right, maybe I'll never make up for that, but I have no intention of spending the rest of my life wallowing.”

“No one's forcing you to,” Hal snapped again. “No one even asked you to. We both knew this was coming eventually. Why drag things out? Just go.”

Quinn stared at her long and hard, but Hal wouldn't cave. The
walls she'd built against this kind of disappointment may have been breached, but they had obviously not been broken.

“Just go call a cab, Quinn. I've got work to do.” She strode quickly toward the gas station, refusing to so much as look over her shoulder as she went.

Chapter Nineteen

Quinn pushed open her front door just past midnight. She'd taken a cab to the airport, paid an unreasonable sum of money to fly standby, waited while five full flights left without her, then caught a back-of-the-plane seat on the last plane of the night into the Buffalo Niagara airport before catching another cab through the quiet city streets to her own dark home. And she'd been pissed off the entire way.

She'd been angry with the first cabdriver who drove too fast and charged too much. She'd barely kept her frustration from boiling over at the massive amounts of people who stood before her in line at the airport. She'd had murderous fantasies about the flight attendants who chattered loudly and kept bumping their beverage cart into her seat, and don't even get her started on the people who queued up waiting to flush the airplane toilets loudly behind her. Finally, the cabdriver in Buffalo incurred her wrath by driving too slowly and having the gall to try to make conversation with her at this time of night. The only person she hadn't allowed herself to feel angry toward in this whole scenario was Hal Orion.

Silly or not, she wouldn't give her the satisfaction of knowing she'd struck a nerve. Sure, there was no way Hal would ever know how Quinn felt, as she was likely still sitting on the roadside five-hundred miles away, but Quinn would know the truth. No, she wasn't upset about Hal or any of the things she had said. It was just every other moron in the world who happened to light her fuse tonight.

“Fuck,” she said for absolutely no reason at all as she dropped her bag just inside the doorway and flipped on the lights to her foyer. Then she screamed, “Fuck,” with a very legitimate reason as two people popped up from the couch, scaring the living shit out of her.

“Hey, Quinn. Sorry. It's just me,” Ian said in his most soothing tone. “Me and Megan.”

Quinn's startled gaze swung quickly from her baby brother's flushed face and dark lips to the young woman whose lipstick he seemed to be wearing. She blinked a few times, her heart rate lowering to something that wouldn't quite induce cardiac arrest as she struggled to make sense of what could possibly be happening here. All signs pointed to a scenario that involved Ian making out with a girl on her couch.

“Hi,” the girl finally said, shyly. “I've heard a lot about you. I, um, I'm sorry we scared you.”

Quinn nodded to the girl, Megan apparently. She was cute, in a punky kind of way, with her shaggy cut hair clearly dyed to a dark auburn and her jeans purposefully ripped. “Hello, Megan.”

“Hi,” the girl said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear only to have it immediately fall out once more, “again. I already said that, didn't I?”

“You did, but what else is there to say, really?” Actually she could think of a few things to say, or at least ask, but she had neither the energy nor the inclination to embarrass Ian right now, so she'd save the inquisition until the morning. “I'm very tired. I'm going to bed.”

“Oh, okay,” Megan said. She smiled nervously. “I should probably go, too.”

Ian's frown, combined with the accusatory look he shot Quinn, drew only the smallest sigh from her.

“No, please, don't let me interrupt, your, um . . . evening.”

“Sleep tight,” Ian said, not unkindly, but clearly not sad to see her go.

“Nice to meet you,” Megan added.

“Likewise,” Quinn said with the most polite smile she could muster and added a mumbled, “I'm sure,” on her way up the stairs. They probably didn't hear her, judging by their whispered giggles.

Giggles?

Ian was giggling . . . with a girl . . . on the couch . . . in the dark. The same couch where she and Hal had—no. She had to slam the door on that train of thought. She didn't need those memories, and
she certainly didn't want to think about Ian's romantic prospects for the night outmatching her own.

Ian. Really? A week ago he'd practically flipped out at the hypothetical prospect of asking a girl to dance, and now she got the sense he was minutes away from having sex on her couch. She loved her brother but, ew. She liked their roles much better when they'd been reversed.

She'd felt as if the whole world had been slightly off-kilter since early that morning. Now she suspected it might have flipped upside down completely. She bypassed the bathroom, not wanting to see herself in the mirror, and, kicking her shoes off, climbed straight into bed, clothes and all. She didn't have it in her to undress or brush her teeth or even get all the way under the sheets. Curling around a pillow, she tried to pretend she didn't care about how cold and empty she felt without the heat of Hal's body beside her. She was simply too exhausted to go on. Yes, only exhaustion weighed on her limbs and her mind, numbing her senses and driving her to close her eyes tightly against all the horrible images threatening to overtake her. She didn't hear the echo of shouted voices either, didn't feel the sting of words that couldn't be taken back. All she felt now was tired. Only, as she drifted off, she realized this kind of tired happened to feel an awful lot like sadness.

“Ha!” Hal said triumphantly as the engine of Cheesy Does It roared to life. “I told you I could do it.”

She said it to herself, only not to herself. She'd been talking nonstop since Quinn left, partially because she couldn't stand the silence, and partially because the only thing worse than silence was the echo of all the things she wished they'd kept silent about in the first place. Still, sitting there behind the wheel of the only thing in life she'd ever really called her own, she wished she could've said the last “I told you so” loud enough for Quinn to hear all the way back in Buffalo.

At least, she assumed she'd made it back to Buffalo last night. She'd obviously gotten no text or phone call to let her know she'd caught a
plane or gotten home safely, but Quinn generally got what she wanted, and she couldn't imagine something as insignificant as holiday traffic or even the FAA getting in her way. If she had to lay money on Quinn's whereabouts, she'd wager even the truck itself that Ms. Banning had gracefully returned to her role as banker and even now commanded the full attention of the underlings trying to replace Hal. Then again—she glanced at the clock—it was nearly ten a.m. Maybe they'd already replaced her.

She hopped out and slammed the hood, wondering how long it took to replace someone Quinn had spent months trying to convince was indispensable. She liked to think the meeting should take at least until lunch, but Quinn never did anything without a plan B. She'd even gotten the sense she had someone in her back pocket as far back as the pop-up.

The pop-up. Shit. She should've seen even then what a massive clusterfuck their entire association was destined to be. Hell, she had seen. She understood exactly what Quinn could do to her, and she still hadn't been able to resist.

“Well played, Quinn,” she mumbled as she pulled on to the Massachusetts Turnpike. “You almost had me hooked. Almost.”

Would the guy Quinn went after next put up such a fight? Probably not. He'd likely jump at the chance to get an all-expenses-paid trip to some tiny stake in Quinn Banning's dream kitchen. A little voice in her head said her discussion with Quinn never actually progressed far enough to know exactly what kind of ownership stake her offer included. She wouldn't offer anything near the majority, probably not even close to half, and anything less was unacceptable.

She tried not to let herself think about what number might be acceptable, because she didn't want a slice of someone else's dream. Besides, the offer wasn't on the table anymore. Not after the way they'd left things. Not that she would handle things differently if she had the chance. Not the break-up anyway. Better to rip the Band-Aid off quickly than let it slowly take a piece of her with it.

Her chest ached.

Maybe it would be more accurate to say she didn't want to lose an even bigger piece of herself than she already had. No, that was crap.
Quinn didn't take anything from her she hadn't already lost plenty of times throughout her life. If anything, her actions had served as a valuable reminder, like an emotional tune-up, scheduled maintenance. If the walls she'd built around herself didn't get tested occasionally, how could she be sure they were doing their job? And this time they almost didn't.

She'd come so close to believing again. On their last night together, she'd actually let herself entertain the idea of a real future with Quinn. She'd said she'd wanted to be with her, to open up to her, and she'd thought Quinn had felt the same way. Sure, they hadn't made any plans, but for once in her life she wasn't thinking about the end, either. She'd let herself just exist alongside Quinn, without worrying about the inevitable crash. She hadn't quite thought about happily ever after, but she'd come close. Too close, clearly, since she couldn't seem to stop thinking about her even now. Which was shit. And totally unwarranted.

Quinn had nothing to offer her.

It was over.

Quinn, the great planner, had had no problem getting on a plane and going back to her job, her life, her plans for her own future. Why should Hal, the one who was born to live in the moment and take things as they came, have any trouble doing the same? In the grand scale of her life, this disappointment hardly even ranked. Nothing about her life had even really changed. She'd had a few good nights on a great vacation, and now it was time to get back to the real world, the world she'd built for herself, the world she loved. Food, friends, freedom. She had everything she'd ever let herself want. It had always been just enough for her, and
just enough
was going to have to be enough for her again.

“There are 250,000 people living within the city limits. Surely one of them can cook a freaking sandwich!” Quinn snapped as she threw a stack of papers across the booth.

“So, yes or a no on the refill?” Dom deadpanned.

“Yes,” Quinn said, “make it a double.”

“So you're going to be here for a while . . . again?”

“As long as I need to.”

“Lucky me,” he said as he tossed a bar towel across his shoulder and headed back to the front.

Quinn sighed. She knew she had to stop biting people's heads off, but she also knew she likely wouldn't be able to do so anytime soon. At least Dom could take it, unlike the young research assistant she'd made cry at work today. She lowered her head to the table with a thud. Who had she become?

No. She straightened up again quickly. She was a businesswoman, the same one she'd always been. Nothing about her had changed. She wanted the same things, and damn it, she intended to get them. If she had to find a chef, break them down, and rebuild them in her own image, she would.

You can't control people.

Hal's voice echoed through her frustration, and if she'd had any more résumés in front of her, she would have thrown them, too.

Thankfully the regular customers had grown used to her outbursts over the last two weeks. Perhaps they thought of her as just part of the local flavor now. But, hey, if they could shout at the television over their Mets games, she could yell at her papers.

Dom returned with her drink, but instead of dropping it and scooting away as quickly as he could, he pulled up a chair and sat down at the end of the table.

“I wouldn't do that if I were you,” Quinn warned.

“I've been in the line of fire before. I figure you're not throwing anything as heavy as Bin Laden's boys, so my other leg's probably safe.”

She rolled her eyes but got the hint. Her problems might not be that big in the grand scheme of things, but that didn't mean they weren't real. Still, if he could learn to walk again, surely she could overcome the loss of a food-truck chef from her business plan.

Dom spun a few of the résumés to face him and scanned the details quickly before looking up. “You know anyone can be taught to flip a grilled cheese, right?”