Chapter Text
Carrie is engrossed in the sudoku when Quinn yells her name from the other room, muttering numbers under her breath and scanning the lines.
“I’ve got a 5 there and a 5 there, and that row won’t match the 9 unless...”
“Carrie!”
He comes into the kitchen, leaning against the doorframe.
“Carrie, I need a safety pin, do we have any?”
“Four, four, four, yes! That’s my line.”
He sighs
“Carrie?”
She looks up, jumping at the sight of him.
“Where did you come from?”
“I’ve been calling you for the last five minutes”
She looks from him to the sudoku and back again and he grins, moving to the table and wrapping his arms around her shoulders and peppering her neck with kisses.
“Go back to your puzzle” he says, knowing full well he’s broken her concentration now, “I’ll find the safety pins.”
Carrie hides a fond smile as she goes back to the sudoku. She loves the repetitive nature, seeing patterns in the numbers. It keeps her grounded on bad days and gives her routine. She knows it drives Quinn crazy when she’s distracted and ignores him, but it’s only for a quarter of an hour (twenty minutes when it’s the super-fiendish day)
She finishes and pushes her chair back, tips the dregs of her tea down the sink and starts to run the water for washing up the breakfast things. Over the sound of the running water she doesn’t hear Quinn’s steps on the stairs until he clears his throat from the doorway. She turns with a smile that dies on her lips when she sees what he has in his palm.
“Say, Carrie” he says, voice deceptively calm, “why exactly do you keep a fucking engagement ring in your desk drawer?”
****
They sit opposite sides of the kitchen table, the fake ring sat between them accusingly.
“There’s a really good explanation for this” Carrie tries; avoiding Quinn’s glare.
“Well, please, go on” he says sarcastically, sweeping his hand towards her, “Enlighten me.”
She opens her mouth, closes it again, swallows.
“I don’t think you’ll like it.”
“You think?!”
Her shoulders tense and she meets his gaze angrily.
“I don’t like your tone”
“I don’t like you having an engagement ring hidden in a drawer!”
She sighs and scrubs her hands through her hair.
“I used to use it to go out and pick up men, okay?”
His anger subsides into relief and then confusion.
“What?”
Carrie blinks, not expecting that reaction.
“Men are drawn towards what they can’t have. So, when I’ve been....not feeling great, in the past, I’ve gone out to bars on my own, with the ring on, and...yeah.”
He blinks
“What?”
“Quinn, you’re not going like me explaining it any more graphically, I promise you.”
He huffs a laugh and leans back, tension draining out of his shoulders.
“I thought it was something else.”
Now it’s Carrie’s turn to be confused; her brow furrows and she leans forward.
“What?”
His eyes slide to the side and he smiles ruefully.
“I don’t want to say.”
She scowls at him.
“Tough.”
“I assumed it meant that you’d been engaged before” he says quietly, picking at a spot on the table with the corner of his nail. “I didn’t like the idea that you would have agreed to spend the rest of your life with someone.”
She pauses, considers that. There hasn’t really been anyone, that she can think of. Relationships have been fleeting and insignificant, usually ending in trauma; even Brody, who she really did love in some way, had never been a forever thing. She wonders if that’s even what she wants from life; wonders if it’s what Quinn wants.
“I’ve never been close to it” she says with a crooked smile, suddenly wanting to divert the question, “You know what I’ve been like.”
It’s an innocuous comment but gives him pause for thought. What she’s been like. What she has been like in the past, but maybe not now.
She didn’t say ‘you know what I’m like’.
“I know” he says, his tone belying the myriad of thoughts rushing through his head. “I shouldn’t have blown up about it.”
Carrie gets up to start the abandoned washing up, squeezing his shoulder.
“I like it when you get jealous” she teases, and is elsewhere within minutes, humming along with the radio and clattering dishes.
Peter stares at the ring, still sat on the table. Platinum band, ostentatious (fake) diamond, just sized for her tiny fingers. It glints in the sunlight at him, reflecting a rainbow onto the water glasses.
He reaches out, runs his finger around the smooth band, well worn now from being slid on and off her finger. Thinks about the time when that used to be her life; a different man every night, and god knows she wouldn’t have had trouble even without the ring. But she’d been specifically going out to find men who cheated, men who were less stable, men she wouldn’t have to learn to rely on.
He would have been one of those men once, he thinks. It’s not like a ring had ever stopped him from going after something he wanted, and he has wanted her from the moment he laid eyes on her. He wonders if they had met in a different universe, if they would have shared the same connection all those years ago, or whether it would have been a quick fuck and never seen each other again. He wonders what she would be like, on a one night stand; whether she would be selfish and take what she wanted, assertive or submissive.
They’re such different people now, he thinks. They’ve become stable, they’ve got normal jobs, they’re raising her daughter as a family. All these things that would have terrified him before make him so happy now he doesn’t know how he survived the bad times. He loves her; loves her in a way and with an intensity that he’s never experienced before, and even through his insecurities he knows that she feels the same, although they’re not the type to talk about it.
He turns the ring over in his fingers, rubbing a thumb over the stone, and feels something crystalise inside him, a calm determination.
He puts the ring into his pocked and smiles.
Oh yes, he has plans.