Quest and I didn't say anything to each other as we walked out of the session with Dr. Brittany. I was feeling a little shaky and overwhelmed, and Quest looked like he was in pain or about to be sick. When he stopped walking and touched my arm, his face was serious as it usually was.
Unless he was smiling at me.
"Tillie, I don't know about you, but I want to get out of my head for a bit. You want to grab some food, go sit by the river?"
I didn't even have to think about that. I wanted to get out of my head, too. Possibly even my body, but that might be harder to accomplish.
"That sounds good."
"Why don't you go home and get Spring, and I'll go grab some food and we can meet by the river?"
"Cape's?" I asked, maybe a little pleadingly.
"Whatever you want," he promised.
Half an hour later, Quest pulled into a parking spot just as I let Spring off her leash. She ran around sniffing, so overwhelmed with new scents that she was zipping from place to place like a little fawn blur, pushed-in nose to the ground, tiny little stub of a tail wiggling happily. Quest grinned at me and held up a big bag of burgers from my favorite burger place, Cape's, while he balanced a cardboard drink holder with four drinks.
I'd already thrown down the quilt, and I took the drinks from him and set them down without spilling anything before I sat down. Quest sat on the other side of the blanket and put the bag of burgers between us.
"Got plain fries and seasoned ones. There's a cheeseburger for you in there, no pickles. Should be the top one. The other three are for me."
Then we got down to the serious business of burgers and fries and iced tea...and chocolate malts with fresh whipped cream on top for dessert. We hadn't said a word while we ate, just enjoyed our food, the sight and sounds of the river and Spring alternating between sniffing around the trees and coming to us, begging for food.
"How often do you teach your MMA classes?" I asked him once we were halfway through our malts.
"One class a night, Monday through Friday, and one class Saturday morning," he said. "Then I'll usually fight on Friday and Saturday nights and work on your house in between times."
"And the boy you're a Big Brother to?"
"Rhys I see once a week, before and after my Saturday MMA class."
"Do you sleep?" I asked him, laughing. "Between all this and working full time plus?"
"Yeah. I sleep, but being busy is a good thing. How about you? You've got to be pretty damn busy with school, studying, your job, Spring and your hiking club."
"Being busy is a good thing," I gave his words right back to him and he grinned at me.
Quest stretched out on his back, hands under his head. "Being busy fills the time void, but it doesn't do anything to help me stop missing you. More than fourteen months later, and it's no easier than it was at the beginning."
I completely agreed, but I wasn't going to tell him that yet. After his betrayal, Quest had opened up to me more, and I kept more back. Which wasn't all that surprising, according to Monica.
"What if I never come back to you, Quest? What are you going to do then?"
He sat up at that and looked at me. "Keep doing what I've been doing. Work. Teach classes. Be a Big Brother. Most of all, I'd miss you every day."
"And what if I remarry? Have children with another man?"
His eyes were pained. "I'd be happy for you, Til. I'd be happy because you were happy again. But I'd have to move away because it'd kill me to see you with children that weren't mine."
"But just seeing me with my husband would be OK?"
"I don't think it'd be too healthy to want to beat the shit out of your husband all the time, so that would be another reason to move, too."
"And what if you get remarried?"
Quest just shook his head at me. "No interest because no woman would be you."
"You've always said you wanted to be married and have children. Why would you suddenly not want them?"
"You got that wrong, Tillie. I always said I wanted to be married to you. I wanted to have children with you. Nobody else. Just you."
I pulled my knees up and wrapped my arms around them as Spring snuffled her way over to the quilt and flopped down next to Quest, exhausted from all the sniffing she'd done. Watching the river roll by helped to focus my thoughts. About the information I'd just learned about some things.
"I thought I wanted to come here to clear my head, but there're some things I want to say, Quest. Monica said some things to me in the last session I had with her that've really been on my mind. I'd been talking about school and my classes for most of the session, and then near the end, I told her about a visit I had with a couple of my cousins who came into town and they asked me about you."
Quest was watching me, waiting, knowing there was a lot more. And by the look of distaste on his face, he suspected which cousins had visited.
"And they were saying that instead of just dating other men, I should be fucking all of them because how else would I get even with you? And then they said you were probably lying about everything and secretly wanted Mary Lou Dawn."
"God, no." He looked ill at the thought. "By any chance is this your holier-than-thou, annoying cousins with the 27 cats we're talking about who always have opinions regardless of the facts?"
"Yep. You know exactly which ones I'm talking about." He'd met them on our wedding day and hadn't been impressed with their negative, nit-picky attitudes. "But I did find out through them that you forced Jack to fire her or you and your dad would never allow his fleet of cars in your shops ever again."
"Because she went after you, Tillie. She went after you in public."
"And then you figured out that she was blackmailing a bunch of men in town and you bullied all nine of them into pressing charges against her so she'd go to jail. You didn't just talk them into it like I heard. Rumor has it you practically beat them into submission."
Those wide shoulders shrugged. "She deserved it after she went after you at Cha-Cha's. She should have left you alone."
"Well, I talked with Monica about all the shit my cousins were shoveling -- and they said a lot more besides telling me about Mary Lou. So Monica said, and I'm paraphrasing here because she said it a little nicer, fuck those stupid assholes who are running their mouths and their equally stupid, fucking opinions. And you know what? She was right! My opinion is the only one that matters in my life. I'm not weak because I don't feel the need to go fuck some other man to get even with you. You know what would make me weak? If I did something just because other people thought I should. If someone wants to go out and have sex with some guy because that's the way she wants to get back at a man, that's fine -- for her. But to imply that I have to have sex with another man or I'm weak? What a bunch of bullshit my cousins were spewing. I'll do what I want when I want, and that feels like a year's worth of growth right there because that's the true strength I've been working toward. Standing on my own and not letting anyone dictate what I do. I don't have to please one damn person but myself. Not you, not my parents, not my cousins -- just me."
"Good for you, Tillie," Quest said when I wound down from my tirade, and his voice was both proud and sweet, his eyes shining at me. "You know, I thought you went there with Brad Cramer," he said quietly. "You told me later it had just been a kiss, but while you were in the car with him...I figured you were getting even."
"You sat in your truck and watched his car while you thought I was having sex with him?" Then I thought back to the expression on his face when Brad rolled down the steamy windows. I'd thought Quest had looked gutted and resigned at the time.
"Tillie, I was sitting in the truck watching his car in case he tried to pull the shit he was rumored to pull with women. I wouldn't stop you from having sex with him, but I would have stopped him if you decided you didn't want to have sex with him and he pushed it."
"And then later that night you found him and beat him up and broke his fingers."
"Because he shouldn't have told another man what he did with you."
"No, you're right, he shouldn't have," I agreed. "Monica told me one last thing, and I'm going to be thinking about this for a while, and maybe we might talk to Ellis about it because I'm ready to dive deeper on this. She said again that I needed to look at cheating in the context of the person."
"What does that mean?"
"Well, if I decide cheating is something I can forgive, what might help me make the decision is looking at who you are. Are you a serial cheater? A one-time cheater? Or a somewhere-in-between cheater?"
"One time." Swift and sure.
"One time is still one time too many, Quest."
He met my eyes. "I know. And I'll never forget how one time has hurt you and how one time has hurt us."
"So I need to think about that. I'm going to be watching you and deciding."
"I'm going to prove it to you, Tillie. You can watch me as much as you want and you'll see I'll never betray you again."
"Time will tell, Quest."
He hesitated a minute. "I don't know if you're ready for this yet, but do you want to watch me fight this Friday? We can go out for dinner after."
Before I could even think about that or form a response, Quest went on.
"The reason I'm asking is because we've been living pretty separate lives for more than fourteen months, Til, pursuing some new interests, going back to some old ones. I want to see if we can mesh our lives together again. See if we can start dating slowly. I know we never had trouble talking before, but I think now we can talk differently. Deeper. I've been working this last year with Mark on my failings as a husband. I didn't see you as a partner so much as I saw you as someone to protect and take care of. I didn't share enough of my thoughts with you, and I want to change that going forward. I'd also like us to do things together -- I'd like to go hiking with you in your group if you'll let me. Help quiz you for your tests for your PTA classes and help you study any way you need. I want you to meet Rhys one Saturday and maybe have lunch with us sometimes, come to some of my fights and we can go out after. Start seeing if who we are now works together."
Who we are now.
I knew that I wasn't the girl who expected to be taken care of by her husband any longer. I knew I wanted to be a wife in the most real sense of the word, as someone who stood beside my husband, not slightly behind him as he protected me from the world. And here was Quest telling me about things he wanted instead of just giving me whatever I wanted and letting that be enough.
"I'd like to see you fight Friday," I said.
"Then it's a date," Quest said.