WORK IN PROGRESS: Dinner Disasters: Drake and Quinn

Chapter 4 (Quinn): Hard To Fathom

Drake got this look of sheer determination in his eyes that I'd never seen before when I told him I didn't see myself getting past what he and his friends had done. The bet about the ugly girl -- and not just the ugly girl, the ugliest girl in the bar.

"I'll get you past it, Quinn. It was awful, it was something that should have never happened, but it's not something I'm going to let you use to keep us from our future."

Sputtering at that, I finally found my words. "You think I want to use this to keep us from being together?"

"In a way, yeah," he said. "I think the way you were treated in your past and the way you see yourself makes you think we don't belong together. You think I don't notice you tensing up when we're in public and people walk by and look at us? You told me when we started dating that we don't look like we belong together, and I brushed it off by saying I thought we looked perfect together. I shouldn't have brushed it off. But I'm going to fix that mistake, too."

"There's no need to, Drake. The bet mistake is something that can't be fixed. I mean, seriously! What kind of people would do something like that?"

"Horrible ones," he said right off. "People that weren't being kind or thinking of anything but stupid, mean, nasty shit. People who lost sight of their humanity and thought being cruel was funny."

"Right," I said. "And you were a part of that. And maybe it's more understandable, but not really, if you were teenagers, but you're all adults with high-pressure jobs. If you thought it was so wrong, if you regretted it so much, then why did you remain friends with people like that?"

"I shouldn't have, but I did because I work with them and I excused what we all did that night as not really being us. But I should have protected you from them, Quinn."

Drake had been protective of me around them, but not by refusing to let them hang around me; instead he always closely monitored the conversations that went on around me. Looking back, with the bet as context, I could see why Drake had always been careful of what was being said by them while we were all out together. He'd been afraid someone would say something to me, clue me in as to the only reason he was with me.

"You shouldn't be friends with people like that. You shouldn't be someone like that."

"Quinn, I'm owning that. You're right. And I hope in the months we've been together that you can see that wasn't really me. It was a terrible, spur-of-the-moment thing that got out of control with everyone egging everyone else on and it took on a life of its own."

"Drake, I want you to go now."

"I'll be back tomorrow with something else."

"No. Just box it all up and leave it outside my door."

I felt like throwing a toddler-energy tantrum. Give it back! Give it back to meeeeee!

"We've been creating something good --"

"Creating a lie, so how is that good?" I interrupted scathingly.

"We've been creating something good," he repeated, anger edging his words to the point that I wanted to smack him, "and I'm not letting what's between us go without a fight. You need time to think about it, I'll give you some time. You need space to be pissed, I'll back off and give you space. But what I won't do is give up, Quinn. I love you too much to let this be the end."

"How can you just pretend it's not a big deal?"

Were there tears forming in my eyes? Yes, most definitely, but let him see the hurt he caused. A couple slipped out of my eyes, and of course Drake came toward me in an instant, unable to handle me crying, but I practically fell over myself to avoid his outstretched hands. On the two occasions he'd seen me cry before, he couldn't handle my tears then, either -- and those were simply PMS-induced tears that involved puppies or babies in commercials.

"Quinn. Quinn. I'm not pretending anything; I know it's a big deal, baby. Anything that hurts you is; any pain I've caused you is a huge deal. It's unacceptable, and I'm going to take every step necessary to heal what I've broken between us. What I've broken. And what I break, I fix."

"You can't." I shook my head wildly, trying to shut out the noise from his mouth. "Go."

"I'll go for now. But, Quinn, I hope you think about this: if you were nothing but a bet, I'd have taken the money, brought everything back to you all at once and walked away, happy as hell it was all out in the open and done. Over. But I'm not doing that. I'm not running in the opposite direction. I'm running right toward you because I love you and I'm going to spend the rest of my life loving you."

I crossed my arms over my chest and looked at the floor. He finally got the message and left. And then, like the contrary beings that we are, I wanted him to come back and keep trying to talk me into forgiving him.

When you don't really have any family you can depend on to call when things get rough, you try to build your own family with a few carefully selected friends. If you're reading this anywhere but Wattpad, you're reading a book stolen from groveltohea. Read this story for free on wattpad. I have two, and I call them angel and devil in my head because they're so opposite in their approaches that it really is like having an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other.

My friend Celine is the angel -- she's the friend who listens to your problems and then gives you solid, balanced, thoughtful advice. She's loving, but she listens and thinks about what you've been telling her so she can give you what you need to hear, not what you might necessarily want to hear. She's the reasonable, practical one and won't hesitate to point out when she thinks you're wrong and things you might not have considered.

Then there's Keres, the devil on my other shoulder. She's the friend who listens to your problems and before you've even finished, she's heading for the car to go find the person she needs to beat the shit out of. You want revenge? You want petty? You want spur-of the moment wrath? You want someone to rain down fire? She's the girl. Celine would jump in the car, but she'd be saying, Let's think about this for a minute before we're posing for mug shots.

I'm honestly not sure how the three of us became friends, but we're tight. Surprisingly, the three of us rarely have disagreements. We rarely fight because we respect what the others have to say and we all give each other room to be who we are, no judgment, no nasty barbs about the others' inherent traits. On paper, we shouldn't work, but we do and we have ever since we banded together in high school. Even though we all went to different universities, we maintained our friendship, and we all came back to our hometown after graduation.

I tend more toward the angel sitting on my shoulder because being kind is my go-to. But maybe I need to listen to the devil because I now have a long list of people I don't feel very kindly toward. Normally, I try to understand people, but this...this was hard to fathom.

And it hurt.