Chapter 22: Four Minutes Slow

Quinn's bedroom was the one room in the building I had never seen.

It was small and plain, with a quilt on the bed and a window onto the back garden.

He had finished the clock from his kitchen counter.

It hung over the dresser and ticked.

"It's slow," he said, following my eyes. "I haven't set it yet."

"It's perfect."

"It's four minutes slow."

"That's what I said."

He shut the door behind us and turned the lock.

For the first time in two weeks nobody was waiting on the other side of anything.

I stood in the middle of his floor in the maid of honor's dress, the color of weak tea, and began to laugh.

It started small.

It turned into the kind of laugh that bends you over.

He crossed the room and caught me.

"Hey."

"I stood on a lawn," I said into his shirt, "in front of a hundred and forty people, and I made a man's customers leave."

"You did."

"A tent fell down."

"The tent fell down on its own. You only provided the paperwork."

I laughed until I cried, and then I just cried, and he held on.

When I was finished, he wiped my face with his thumbs.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi."

"You want to get out of that dress?"

"God, yes."

He found the zipper at my back.

He drew it down slowly, one inch at a time, and the weak tea silk loosened and fell around my feet.

I stepped out of it and kicked it across the room.

"Don't ever put me in that color again."

"Never."

I stood in front of him in my underwear with the clock ticking.

He looked at me for a long moment, with no hurry at all.

"What?" I said.

"I'm just trying to remember it."

"You've seen me."

"Not like this. Not when it's over."

He lifted me and laid me on the quilt.