Page 53 of The Lovers
What had she done? She hadn’t wanted to lose him, and now she lost him anyway. He would no longer be her friend, and that realization sliced through her like a knife. Not having Gabe in her life was one of the worst things she could imagine. Quinn grabbed her mobile and dialed Gabe, but he didn’t pick up. She heard his calm, authoritative voice as he asked her to leave a message. She disconnected the call. What she had to say couldn’t be said in a voicemail message. She wanted to speak to him in person, but Gabe needed time to cool down.
Quinn sank back down onto the sofa. She rarely cried, preferring to ignore her feelings of hurt, but hot tears poured down her face as the enormity of what she’d done finally sank in.
THIRTY-SIX
Gabe revved the engine and tore out of the parking spot, eager to put as much distance between himself and Quinn as possible. The rain had let up a bit, for which he was grateful. He was in no mood to drive like an old lady. His Jag had the capability to chew up the miles, and at a time like this, he craved the release of speed. He’d been brutally rejected twice in as many weeks and felt as if he’d been drawn, quartered, and left to die of shock as he watched his entrails burn just before his heart was finally cut out. Gabe chuckled mirthlessly. Even when heartbroken, he thought like a historian, and only Quinn would see the irony in that. But Quinn didn’t want him around.
Gabe merged onto the motorway, glad to see that it was practically deserted, and he had the road to himself. He stepped on the gas pedal and felt the Jaguar pounce as it responded to his command. The car flew towards London, darkened countryside and empty petrol stations flashing past the windows. Gabe enjoyed the sensation for a few minutes before easing his foot off the gas. Where was he rushing to? There was nothing waiting for him at home, save an empty flat and an even emptier fridge. He didn’t even have a few bottles of lager, and he was desperate for a pint. Gabe thought of calling his best mate, Pete McGann. Pete was always up for a few pints, especially on a Friday night, but Gabe didn’t think he could handle Pete’s rhapsodizing on marital bliss in his current emotional state.
Pete married his girlfriend the day after the university commencement ceremony, and although nearly the whole graduating class took bets on how long the marriage would last,given that Pete met a somewhat inebriated Jen in a pub only a month before and shagged her not five minutes later in the loo, Pete was still happily married nearly twenty years on. Pete and Jen had three strapping teenage boys who were always up for Sunday morning football or a trip to the arcade with their Uncle Gabe. They were fine boys, and Gabe secretly, or perhaps not-so-secretly, envied Pete his beautiful family.
Over the past few years, Gabe began to ache for a family of his own, the desire to have a child growing by the day, but despite always having women in his life, the only woman he could envision having a family with was Quinn. The thought of Quinn carrying his child filled him with such desperate longing that he nearly howled with the futility of his devotion to her. Luke was such an unbelievable wanker, a man who never put Quinn first and who discarded her like a piece of rubbish. Why couldn’t she see that and give Gabe a chance?
Gabe swung the car off the nearest exit and turned around, getting back on the northbound motorway. He wasn’t going to London, he was going to Berwick. He was too gutted to face spending the weekend on his own, and Pete and Jen’s well-meaning platitudes were more than he could handle at the moment. He wanted what every man wanted when he was hurting too much for words. He wanted Mum. His dad liked to retire early, but his mum was something of a night owl and would still be up by the time he made it home. Gabe was close with his dad, but it was his mum who truly understood him, and she understood about Quinn. Phoebe Russell was the only person he’d ever confided in about his love for his friend.
Pete suspected, and Jen certainly knew, but Gabe had never said it out loud, never revealed himself to that extent. He was generally a private person, who liked to keep his feelings to himself. Besides, what kind of man admitted to carrying a torch for another man’s woman for eight years? What kind of man was toohonorable not to make a play for her at some point? Well, perhaps he’d refrained from making a play for Quinn not out of a misguided sense of honor but from some deeper knowledge that he’d be rejected, as he had been tonight. He’d allowed himself to believe that Quinn cared for him, maybe even loved him on some level, but that dream was over now. She’d made her feelings clear.
Gabe felt somewhat calmer by the time he pulled into the drive of the manor house he’d called home for the first eighteen years of his life. He’d notice signs of dilapidation come morning—his father had done little to maintain the family home since suffering a heart attack a few years back—but at the moment, the place looked like heaven. Warm light spilled from the library windows, where his mother was no doubt reading some juicy novel. His septuagenarian mum had discovered a liking for racy novels in her old age but diligently hid them from her husband for fear of giving him another coronary. Gabe didn’t think his father would be particularly shocked. They hadn’t been married for over forty years without learning something about each other, and Graeme Russell knew exactly what his sprightly seventy-two-year-old wife was into, just as his mum knew all about the online gambling his father liked to dabble in when no one was looking. Gabe suddenly realized how much he’d missed his parents. He didn’t visit them nearly often enough, perhaps because he felt like a little boy the moment he walked through the door, but at times, that wasn’t such a bad thing.
Gabe used his key to let himself in and walked toward the library, his footsteps echoing on the flagstone floor of the corridor. He should have rung, but he was in no mood to pull over, make the call, and explain to his well-meaning mum why he suddenly wanted to come home. Instead, he knocked on the library door gently, so as not to startle his poor elderly mother.
“Come in,” she called eagerly. “I knew you’d come tonight,” Phoebe Russell announced when Gabe stepped into thelibrary. She was sitting in her favorite chair before the fire, an open book on her lap, and Buster the Lab asleep at her feet. Her heather-gray twin set was an almost identical match to her iron-gray hair, styled in a fashionable pixie cut, and her cheeks were rosy from the heat of the fire. Phoebe’s blue eyes scanned Gabe from head to toe, checking, just as she did when he was a boy, that everything looked to be in the right place and that there was no cause for alarm.
“And how did you know that?” Gabe asked as he stooped to kiss her on the cheek and then sank into his father’s chair, stretching his legs before the fire.
“A mother always knows,” she replied cryptically. Phoebe gave Gabe another lengthy once-over, focusing on this face this time, and shook her head in disgust. “Foolish girl.”
“Mum, have you suddenly become clairvoyant?” Gabe asked, smiling despite his misery. Truth be told, when it came to him, she always had been.
“Is it necessary to be clairvoyant to see that your boy is suffering? And why is he suffering, you might ask?” Phoebe asked dramatically, as if addressing a roomful of people. “It can only be because the woman he’s worshipped for the past eight years is too much of a blind fool to recognize her good fortune when it’s presented to her,” Phoebe replied with a straight face, but her eyes twinkled with good humor.
“I’m not sure that Quinn agrees with you about the good-fortune part,” Gabe replied, staring miserably into the fire. Now that he was here, he wasn’t sure he really wanted to talk about Quinn after all, but his mother was already off and running, going from relaxing in her chair to leaning forward in her eagerness to console him.
“Gabriel, you always were an impatient child,” his mother scolded. “You could never wait for the right time. Why, I’d run out of places to hide Christmas gifts from you. Like a bloodhound you were, searching until you found every last one and ruining your own Christmas morning in the process.”
“I’m no longer seven, Mum,” Gabe sighed.
“No, you are thirty-seven, but you’re still the same eager beaver you’ve always been. Quinn needs time, Gabe. She’ll come around, you’ll see, but you can’t rush her. The man she loved just left her, for someone else, no less. She needs time to come to terms with that rejection before she can open her heart to someone new. Had she been the one to leave him, she might be ready to move on, but Luke’s desertion came as a shock. You said so yourself. Stop hounding her.”
“Is that what I’m doing?” Gabe asked, hurt that his mother would use such a harsh term.
“Isn’t it? How many times since she returned from the Middle East have you made your feelings known?”
“Three,” Gabe muttered, suddenly feeling like the biggest prat to walk the earth. His mother had that effect on him at times, but he didn’t mind. He needed to hear the truth, even if it made him feel like a right fool.
“And that’s two times too many. She knows how you feel, love. Give her a bit of time to come round. She has her reasons for not falling into your arms.”
“And what might those be, Mum?” Gabe asked, smiling at his mother over the glass of brandy she just handed him, taking one for herself in the process. His mum loved a nightcap.
Phoebe Russell shook her head, as if astounded by her son’s epic thickness.One never finishes raising a son, she mused as she resumed her seat. On some level, they remained little boysforever, always needing that little bit of guidance to come to the right conclusion, even when pushing forty.
“Gabe, you are not some random man Quinn met in a bar or at some dull archeological conference. You are her friend, her employer, and the man she’s known the longest, other than her father and the pillock who ran for the hills with that teenage bimbo. You two don’t have a clean slate; you have history already, and that history is holding her back. Crossing that line with you will jeopardize your friendship as well as her job, and she’s worried and scared of losing you for good. You mean too much to her to be discarded like someone she had a casual drink with and didn’t care to see again. I wager she’s said something along those lines, hasn’t she?” Phoebe inquired as she took a sip of her brandy, her eyes bright over the rim of her glass.
“Yes, she has,” Gabe confessed, hanging his head in mock shame. “How’d you get to be so wise, Mum?”
“It comes with having a womb,” his mother quipped. “You should know, my historian son, that women have always had to be wiser than men. Having no equal rights and being at the mercy of men their whole lives, they had to anticipate every eventuality and know how to deflect anger and injustice to protect themselves and their children. Women are not hotheads, my boy, they are thinkers and planners.”
“You don’t know modern women, Mum,” Gabe countered, thinking of all the women who had thrown themselves at him over the years, interested only in a casual shag rather than a meaningful relationship. Women were liberated and as brazen as any man these days, if not more so.
