or anything. There wasn’t any hate involved, actually. It
wasn’t angry or desperate. It was just- right. That probably
sounds stupid.”
“No it doesn’t.”
“Well, this is the stupid part. We started talking, or maybe
it was just me who started talking, talking like maybe we
could go forward with this somehow. From a distance, if that’s
all we could have at first. Like we could figure things out.
Like we’d be moving in a straight line. Really, we were just
moving in a circle, and that’s so- so- it was stupid. She didn’t
manipulate me. I was that dumb all on my own. Tonight we
were kind of talking about it, or maybe I was trying to talk
about something that she didn’t feel and I thought she felt, and
she told me that her parents don’t even know that she’s here.”
“What?” Danica tried to sound unsurprised, but it was
clear she was just as shocked as Quinn had been.
“Yeah. She said she didn’t tell them because she didn’t
want to explain everything to them before she left to come
here. I don’t buy it. I think she didn’t want them to know that
she was coming back to Topeka because they would have tried
to stop her. I don’t think they’ve accepted anything. I think she
might have been lying about that. Or maybe they just don’t
like me. At any rate, she didn’t tell them. I can’t- I can’t think
about us moving in any direction if her family hates me or
doesn’t want us to be together. That would never work. She’d
have to choose and that isn’t fair.”
“No, what’s not fair is that she’d pull that shit.”
Quinn thought back to what Dallas was trying to explain.
She hadn’t really given Dallas a chance to say what she was
trying to say because she’d been so angry. “It was all pretty