A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [40]
“Is it me?” Quinn asked. “Is it me—Quinn O’Connell’s personality or belching habits or nose picking that puts you off? Just say, ‘I don’t like you, Quinn,’ and I’ll split.”
“No, it’s me,” she said. “I threw you all that raw meat, and you’ve called my bluff.”
“Hey, Greer, baby…”
“Quinn, I’m not in my right mind about you, and I know what I know and what I know is that once I put my hands on you, we’re going to go for the championship.”
“We can start slowly,” he said. “Lots of weekends to know each other up at the ranch.”
“Dammit! I don’t want to go to the ranch with you. I don’t want to fall helplessly in love with you. Nothing is going to keep me from going to New York.”
“Well, can’t I visit?”
“Quinn baby, I’ve got a ten-week internship with a producer-director at Crowder Media in New York. If you’re there, it won’t be fair to me.”
Quinn digested it grudgingly. Her whole life had been geared to this opportunity. As a couple in Manhattan they could barely learn the bridges and tunnels in ten weeks. She was on a sacred mission. Quinn? Going nowhere, doing nothing. Since the trip East with his mother, Quinn had a mountain of second thoughts about that human blizzard called Manhattan, but he could see Greer relishing it, all right. Not himself.
“You plan to come back to Colorado?” he asked.
“Scenario one, yes. Scenario two, no. Maybe I’ll forget you, maybe I won’t. Maybe New York is going to grab me.”
“You’re gone,” he whispered.
“Quinn, maybe you don’t know how desperately I’m holding myself together at this moment. I want you, man, but I can’t stay home the rest of my life and bake cookies.” She thought. She had been thinking of it. The time had come.
“I’ll make you a deal. I swear I’ll come back from New York and take my next year in Colorado and live with you. Then we go our separate ways.”
“Why come back?” he asked, a bit acidly.
“Twenty years from now I don’t want to curse myself for passing this over.”
“Sounds a little Faustian to me. How free can we be knowing there is a time clock ticking away?”
“If it’s not for you, Quinn, I don’t come back. I’d go to NYU. God knows, a TV station might want me—no, wait, don’t butt in. Even if I get the scholarships and even if I see myself advancing, I’ll come back because I’ll know I can make it there. I’m not afraid of swapping my place in line for a year with you.”
He pulled her up to standing, and they walked tightly together. She cuddled so close he felt better than at any moment he could remember. “How about us making love tonight?”
“Oh, God!” she cried. “Don’t dangle wisps of paradise over me, driving me back to Colorado before my time.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I was trying not to be fair. Baby, when I think of you, I just forget to remember what I was supposed to be thinking of. It’s more powerful than anything I’ve known,” he said.
“Me, too.”
“I’ll be at the airport to meet you on Labor Day.”
It was the summer of great hurting and healing. Dan tried to hold his feelings of fear and urgency and to take their lives back ten years when peace and love prevailed.
Quinn realized how much it ran against Dan’s Marine Corps grain to take this path of compassion and was glad for it. They had a fine time together, the best, a retreat to Langara Lodge up on the Canadian-Alaskan border, where the salmon were an honest yard long.
Quinn read a lot and hung out with Maldonado, always coming out brighter than when he went in. Mal didn’t preach, he just spoke and a twisted U-turn in one’s brain suddenly straightened out.
Rita whipped through her seventeenth birthday looking twenty and feeling ridiculous with some of the pimple-faced young men she was dating. Quinn was a man! A man in his twenties! Her spirits dropped when she considered her chances.
In the first two weeks of vacation, the phone lines burned up between the Village