Taylor was depressed. Or at least that’s what his shrink, his latest shrink, had told him. That was the explanation for the feelings of restlessness, bouts of insomnia, and most crucially, his complete and utter loss of sexual interest. Since he had woken up without Quin’s body beside him, he had done pretty much nothing but sit in his apartment watching pointless daytime TV and writing songs that he wouldn’t have deemed worthy of presenting to his brothers in even their most dire circumstances.
So when the garbage can next to his piano was full of Chinese take out boxes and crumpled sheet music, he had finally been coerced by Isaac to find a new psychologist and he had gone to the first meeting, set up by Isaac, begrudgingly. To his complete amazement, the psychologist was actually insightful, but Taylor had the feeling that it had something to do with the fact that he was a fifty-something man chosen by his brother and not a thirty-something woman chosen by himself based on her attractiveness and the fact that she probably wanted to sleep with him.
Dr. Feldman told him that his infatuation with Quin was due to the fact that she was the only woman to make him work so hard and the reason he was feeling so strangely now was that after all that work, she had also become the only one to leave before he had woken up in the morning. She had become an obsession and had changed his usual habits and expectations, leaving him with the mild depression he was now experiencing. Dr. Feldman also told him that the best thing to do was to instead focus his energy on getting back into his usual routine if he was unwilling to explore other reasons as to why he might have been experiencing the depression. As he was unwilling, Taylor had left the office feeling that Dr. Feldman was not only right, but also the smartest damned person he’d met in a long time. He decided to take a walk around the city to clear his head, not going anywhere in particular. Taylor was feeling much better, already more like his old self. He stopped in Starbucks and got himself a grande cappuccino. But then, his feet walked him past Noche and the heavy feeling in the pit of his stomach returned.
He lingered outside, looking in the front window and watching as Quin helped a customer. Her smile was bright and genuine and he could practically hear her voice coercing the woman into buying the jacket she was running her fingertips over like it was something so precious it might break at any moment. It hadn’t been his intention to make his presence known, but she happened to look at the window. He didn’t know what he would have expected her expression to be when she saw him lurking there outside her shop, but the look of complete indifference in her eyes was enough to make his blood run cold. Without another thought, he turned and kept walking though his destination remained unclear. Eventually, he found himself deep in the middle of Central Park where he collapsed into the grass and lay there, staring up at the clouds as they passed overhead and trying to think of anything but her face.
Almost an entire hour had passed by the time his cell phone started to ring in his pocket. For a few moments, he contemplated letting it go to voicemail, but eventually gave in to its annoying series of beeps and answered. It was Isaac.
“How was your meeting with Dr. Feldman? Wasn’t he great?” his older brother asked cheerfully.
“Why don’t you ask him yourself if you have such a boner for him?” Taylor asked, his focus more fixated on the star shaped cloud overhead than the conversation at his ear.
“I’ll take that as a ‘not very well.’ Did you even give him a chance?”
“He was fine. But he thinks I’m depressed and I’m not. He was really good at filling my head with a bunch of bullshit that I believed for about fifteen minutes.”
“What happened then?”
“I saw Quin.”
“Oh…” Isaac said, the already short word trailing off into a whisper, “Where did you see her?”
“I was just walking and all of a sudden, I was right in front of her shop. I just looked inside and she looked out and saw me,” Taylor explained, struggling himself into a sitting position and taking out his internal struggle on the patch of grass in front of his feet.
“I take it the following discussion didn’t go well?”
“More like didn’t happen at all. I bailed.” Isaac sighed and Taylor continued to tug pieces of grass from the ground.
“Why did you leave without talking to her?”
“Because, she looked at me… and it was just like I was any other guy passing on the street.”
“Oh my god, Taylor! How many girls have you blatantly ignored after sleeping with them?” Isaac asked, not waiting for Taylor to respond before continuing, “You like her! Just admit it!”
“Fuck off,” Taylor mumbled into the mouthpiece before hanging up. He knew what he needed to do. He needed to go talk to Quin to prove to himself that he didn’t have feelings for her, because he knew that if he would just go spend a few more minutes in her presence, he would find that those feelings of longing were gone. So, he stood and started back towards Noche. As his feet traversed those streets for the second time that day, he tried to imagine what he would say, what his reason would be for showing back up. Should he take her coffee? The second the thought came to fruition he dismissed it as both stupid and pathetic in every possible sense of the word. So he decided to just show up and talk to her and hope that she took the lead and told him why she had left without word.
When it came time for him to pass by the shop window, he took a deep breath before walking towards the door. His fingers closed around the door handle and he pulled it towards himself and stepped over the threshold to the tinkling of the bell overhead. Quin didn’t look at all surprised to see him standing there dumbly.
“I knew you’d come back,” she told him simply, not stopping her non-stop flurry of action around the shop, straightening things and moving others back to their rightful locations. Taylor wished that she would stop for just a minute to talk to him, but that was apparently not a viable option. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, but her friend walked in from the back and from the hard look Quin shot her, it was clear that Quin was as annoyed by the disruption as he was. Not knowing what to say or do, he just clamped his mouth shut and watched as Quin started making inane, silence-filling conversation with the friend. She was ignoring him. He was standing right there in her store and she wouldn’t even look at him.
“Quin-” he started, but was interrupted by another flurry of conversation that had nothing to do with him. So he tried again. “Quin.” Again, no acknowledgment. And with that, Taylor was forced to gain her attention by force. While she and her friend discussed where to move their newest designer’s latest dresses, he crossed the distance between them, grabbed her arm and pulled her to him in a kiss that made her finally pay attention.