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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