Playing Dirty (Stargazer #2)(48)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“This is great,” she said, voicing all her appreciation for the long, heady crotch rub with her handsome friend on her birthday. “Is the house yours?”

Quentin was kissing just above her bikini on her chest. He said without raising his head, “Owen bought it for his parents.”

“Where are they?”

He kissed above her other breast. “Last week he sent them to Australia for their anniversary.” Kiss. “At least, that’s what he said.” Kiss. “I think he just wanted to get them out of town because of Erin.”

Her eyes darted to Erin, lying unaware on the pier with her hand on Owen’s back. “Why?” Sarah asked. “What about Erin?”

Quentin kissed his way up Sarah’s neck. “Erin in general. Parents don’t like Erin.”

“Owen’s parents, or your parents?”

“All parents,” Quentin said in her ear. “I wish you could have heard what my stepmom said about her at the restaurant. Of course, you did hear it. I’m glad y’all don’t speak Hindi.” He sucked Sarah’s earlobe.

“Why don’t parents like Erin?”

He stopped and gazed over at the pier. “Are you kidding? Look at her. She looks like trouble.” He turned back to Sarah and slid his hands down to her ass. “Of course, my stepmom only had nice things to say about you, and look at you. This is how I like my women. Barefoot, pink ponytails, bikini, emerald necklace.” He stuck his tongue in her ear.

They spent the long, hot afternoon alternately lying on inflatable rafts in the water and lying on towels on the pier, spreading sunblock provocatively on each other’s hot skin, making out, and talking. The sun sank lower in the sky, and the four of them devoured the leftovers Quentin’s stepmother had packed from lunch.

Then Quentin and Sarah lay down together on the pier once more, and Sarah reviewed what she’d found out in the last few hours. They liked the same TV shows—and he told her about a few intriguing ones that had debuted while she’d been in Rio. They liked the same movies. They had voted for all the same presidential candidates. She had hidden her surprise that Quentin had voted. If she hadn’t known better, she would have basked in the glow of falling in love with him. She’d felt this way at first with Harold, except they’d never had the intense physical connection she and Quentin shared to back up the mental one.

And that was the problem, wasn’t it? She and Quentin might have similar tastes, but they weren’t intellectually compatible. She couldn’t pretend she’d really be happy long-term with Quentin. What if intelligence didn’t descend through the mother? She would wake up in the morning to the sound of birds chirping in the crepe myrtle and the children running into the walls.

Not that brains were everything. As her mother had pointed out, one had to weigh brains with such things as ability to play bridge and make quiche. And as Sarah and Quentin began to talk again, she forgot their differences, because they seemed to agree on everything that meant the world to her. They both wanted kids—and they laughed uncomfortably about the phantom baby Sarah had threatened Quentin with their first morning together—but they also wanted to keep their busy careers, and they weren’t sure how to balance this.

“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “I think I would make an excellent mother. I think I could do a better job than my mother. But my mother did a pretty good job. We misunderstood each other when I was a teenager. And our relationship hasn’t been good lately because life came calling. I mean, death. You know.”

She uttered this in a nonchalant way, with her eyes closed to the sun, so that he could take it or leave it. But he was quiet so long that she thought she’d offended him, even pushed him into defensive anger like the day before.

“Exactly,” he finally said. “My dad and I misunderstood each other, and death came calling, and it wasn’t his fault. I know that. But it’s hard to let go.”

She opened one eye and saw that his eyes were closed. She closed her eyes again. It was so much easier to talk with their eyes closed in the massaging sun.

“Your mom died of allergic asthma,” she said carefully.

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

“They were never sure whether it was something she ate or something she inhaled as we drove by in the car. They’d adjusted some of her medicines so the side effects wouldn’t be as bad. They probably shouldn’t have.”

Sarah asked, “You were driving?”

“She was giving me a driving lesson.”

“Oh.” Sarah sighed. “You were fifteen.” She took his silence for a yes. Poor Quentin. No wonder he’d never gotten over it.

“I managed to drive her to the hospital,” he said without emotion.

“But they couldn’t help her?”

“She was already dead.”

There was another long silence, punctuated by a speedboat zipping close on the lake, the lapping of waves against the shore, and Erin’s chipmunk giggle.

Sarah ventured, “You felt betrayed when your dad got remarried.”

“I did,” he said. “My dad and I made a pact to be strong for my sisters and keep ourselves together. And the next thing I knew, he’d brought five strangers into the house.”

She heard him moving and opened her eyes to watch him turn his beautiful body from his tanned back to his tanned stomach on the towel, eyes still closed.

“I mean, I get along fine with my stepbrothers and stepsisters now,” he said. “But back then, it was hard.”

“You see the parallel with the band, don’t you?”

He opened his eyes. “No.”

“Why you need such tight control of them, so they don’t betray you.”

He blinked.

“And the first time you lost control was in the car with your mother.”

Without taking his eyes from hers, he found her hand on the towel and took it in his. “It wasn’t my fault. There was nothing I could do.”

“Of course not.”

“But I feel guilty just for being there. Just for being alive.”

“I understand,” Sarah said.

“I know you do.” He brought her hand up to his lips and kissed her fingers. Then he smiled sadly. “This is awfully heavy for your thirtieth birthday.” His green eyes were as bright as ever, but for the first time she noticed the laugh lines at the corners.

He was a few months older than her, she knew, but suddenly he seemed older still. He wasn’t just the fun-loving playboy next door that he’d seemed at first. He was a man who had been through hell at a very young age and still struggled to make lemonade out of lemons.