Quinn's Story
Copyright© 2026 by writer 406
Chapter 26
Three weeks later, they weren’t speaking to him.
The whole thing had started when Paula Reeves came up to him in the library after his tutoring session. They had dated a couple of times and had fun.
She sat down across from him, looking simultaneously terrified and determined.
He was just finishing his math homework when she sat down. This was unusual; Paula was smart; surely she didn’t need his help. Her grade point average was as good as his.
He noticed her nervousness and the determined set of her shoulders.
“What’s up there, buttercup?” He kept his tone light, trying to help her relax a bit. He liked Paula. She had gone out of her way to be nice to him on his first day at school.
“Quinn, I want to ask you something. And I want you to understand that I’ve thought about it seriously.”
“Okay,” he said. “Shoot.”
She held his gaze with the air of someone who has rehearsed a thing and is now finding the asking harder than she imagined.
“I’ve decided I want my first time to be with someone I trust,” she blurted. “Who won’t make it weird in a way that I don’t want. And who’ll be...” She stopped, then found the word. “Nice.”
He looked at her.
Quinn could see right away what it had cost her to approach him. He took a deep breath.
“Okay, I’m listening. Go on, tell me more. And hey, relax; it’s just me here. The dorky guy who almost tripped and fell on his face when we first met.”
“I’m asking you, not as a relationship thing. I’m not looking for that. Just this one thing, because I’ve thought about it, and you’re who I’d choose.” She paused. “I don’t want to head off to Cal and still be a virgin.”
She stopped and looked at him, nervously playing with her hair.
He sat with this and thought about her—the actual person he’d been sitting next to in Ferretti’s history class for two years. The kindness she had was a real thing rather than a social strategy.
He thought about what she was asking and what it required and what it would mean to get it wrong. Quinn was a sophisticated young man, but he was also a romantic when his life experience said he shouldn’t be. His childhood had been dire; by the time he gained access to the sex culture of the Internet, he was too busy to engage with it. His sexual encounters were real, with real girls, not the fantasies that most teenage boys held in their imaginations. Plus, his experiences had given him a profound hatred for predators of all kinds.
The need here was attention. Real attention to an actual person. Everything else followed from that or didn’t follow at all.
He had been thinking about this long enough that she had started shifting in her chair, her courage draining away the longer he was quiet.
“Paula,” he said. “Can I ask you something first?”
“Yes?”
“Have you thought about why you want this to be separate from a relationship? Why would you want to divide them?”
“Because the relationship thing is complicated. I’m going to be a doctor. I don’t have the time for a boyfriend,” she said. “I want this to be a simple life experience.”
He nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said. “I understand that.” He paused. “Can I tell you what I think you want and you tell me if I’m reading it right?”
“Okay,” she said.
“You want the experience to be what it is,” he said carefully. “Without all the expectation and obligation that a relationship would build around it.”
She looked at him. Something in her expression shifted—the relief of being understood.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly it.”
“And you picked me because you think I can do that,” he said.
“Because I think you can be with me and not make it about yourself.” She paused. “You do that with everyone. I’ve watched you do it for two years.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I’m going to tell you something,” he said. “And I want you to receive it as information rather than as rejection because my answer is yes. Okay?”
Her shoulders came down slightly at the yes. “Okay,” she said.
“You’re asking me to be careful,” he said. “Careful has a definition for me that’s more demanding than you might think. It means you leave in better shape than you arrived. Not just unharmed. Actually better. More yourself.” He looked at her directly. “That’s what I’m agreeing to. Not just the act. The whole thing.”
She held his gaze. “That’s a lot more than I asked for,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “But, it’s what careful means to me.”
She was quiet.
“You’re scared,” he said.
“Very,” she said. “That’s partly why I’m asking you. I think I’ll be less scared with you than with anyone else I can think of.”
“That makes sense,” he said, without inflation. “Being scared is fine. You telling me means you’re being honest.” He paused. “That’s one thing I need from you, and it’s the hardest thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Honesty,” he said. “The whole time. Not telling me you’re fine when you’re not fine.” He held her gaze. “I can deal with honesty. I can’t deal with lying to make yourself look good.”
She looked at him for a long time.
“I can do that,” she said. “I think that’s actually easier with you than it would be with someone I was trying to impress.”
“You’re not trying to impress me?” he grinned with mock dismay.
“No,” she said. “I already know what you think of me.”
“What do I think of you?”
“That I’m smart and practical and genuine,” she said. “And that those things are worth more than the other things.” A pause. “You’ve thought that since freshman year. And I could tell when we dated last month.”
He looked at her. “Yes.”
“So, Saturday?” she asked.
Quinn ran through the logistics.
“Saturday works,” he said. “I’ll handle the details.”
She nodded once, the nod of someone checking off a list.
He smiled. This whole idea was so Paula.
She looked at him and smiled. “Thank you for not making it weird.”
“It’s not weird,” he said. “It’s just two people treating each other like people.”
She almost smiled. “I don’t think most people can manage that.”
“We can. That’s why I agreed.”
She stood, picked up her bag, and looked at him for a final moment.
She left.
Quinn sat for ten minutes, thinking: This could go wrong in so many ways.
Suddenly his mind went to Jean Auel’s Ayla and Jondalar—the tenderness in those sex scenes. Maybe that was the way it could be.
He took a deep breath, thought: Okay, I can do that.
Paula got in the Jeep on Saturday afternoon. She looked worried, scared, and awkward. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
This won’t do.
He put the Jeep in gear and drove; as he drove, he put on some low classical music: Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2. The Colonel’s latest assignment. He’d been listening to it ever since he came back from Nevada. It was calming.
“There’s this woman,” he said, breaking the silence, his eyes on the road with his now practiced driving awareness. “Named Ayla. She’s Cro-Magnon, living among Neanderthals who found her on the steppe, all by herself when she was little. They raised her. She’s different from them in ways she can’t fully understand because she has no reference point of her own kind.”
Paula’s head came up.
“She’s capable of things they can’t do,” he said. “She thinks differently, learns differently, sees the world differently. It isolates her. She loves the people who raised her, but she doesn’t belong with them. That confuses her, and she keeps trying harder. But that doesn’t work either, and they end up banishing her.”
He drove. Paula listened, nervousness forgotten.
“In those times, that was almost certain death. She was a young woman alone on the steppes of prehistoric Crimea, with nothing but a sling and boundless determination. Her story is riveting. But the thing about Ayla is that she is a true innocent. She’s never lived among people like her, the Cro-Magnons, modern humans. She is not even aware they exist. She lives by herself until she rescues a young human man named Jondalar.”
“What’s he like?” she asked. She was fully engaged in the story.
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