Read Online Crazy For You by Jennifer Crusie - Free Book Online Page A

Maybe a word to Jason.
    Beside him, Quinn rode in silence while the dog watched him over her shoulder.

    “Okay, just for the hell of it, let’s try to be calm,” Nick said from the other side of a Blazer, wondering why it was his day to deal with weirded-out women.
    Quinn glared across at him as if she knew what he was thinking. “This is not the time to be calm.”
    She clutched Katie in her arms, and the dog rested its chin on Quinn’s arm and stared at him reproachfully. They made quite a picture, and Nick decided not to let himself get sucked into pictures. “I can’t help you till I know what’s going on, and I won’t know what’s going on until you tell me.”
    Quinn took a deep breath. “I just need you to help me move my stuff out of the apartment and back to Mom’s while Bill is finishing up at school. That’s all.”
    That’s all. Nick leaned against the car and wished he were someplace else. He liked Bill. He played poker with Bill. “Maybe if you talked to Bill—”
    “He took my dog out to the pound and left her there in that cold cell all day. She could have died.” Quinn clutched Katie closer, looking ill as she spoke. “They kill the ones they think are sick, and she shakes all the time. They could have killed her.”
    Nick shook his head. “Bill’s a good guy. Maybe—”
    “Did you hear a word I just said?” Quinn demanded. “He took Katie to the pound.”
    “Yeah, I know.” Nick tried to think of the right thing to say, the thing that would make Quinn calm down and get him out of the middle of this mess. “But he’s not a mean guy, Quinn. You know that. Before you do something you’ll regret, you have to calm down.”
    “No.” Quinn began to pace up and down the garage bay, still clutching Katie in her arms. “I’m never going to calm down again. That’s been my problem all along. Zoe got to break rules, and my mother got to pretend everything was fine, and my dad got to watch TV until the mess was over, and Darla got to insult people, and you got to be uninvolved, but I was always the calm one, the one who fixed things.”
    “Well, you’re good at that,” Nick said, wishing she’d stop pacing.
    “But I’m not calm. It’s all a lie.” Quinn held Katie closer, breathing faster. “It’s just that when everybody else is screaming, somebody has to be mature and unemotional, so I have these brain-dead moments where I don’t react the way any sane human being would. I stay completely calm and ignore my feelings and compromise and make everything work again. And I’m not going to do that anymore. From now on, I’m going to be Zoe. Screw calm. Somebody else is going to have to do mature because I’m going to be selfish and get what I want.”
    Nick watched her while she talked, making no sense, scaring him a little because of the look in her eye. Quinn saying she wasn’t going to be calm anymore was like Quinn saying she was going to stop breathing. When her mother had missed the turn down by the root beer stand and hit the big oak, Quinn had been the one who’d used her gym sock to stop Meggy’s bleeding while Zoe yelled her head off. When Zoe had freaked halfway down the aisle at their wedding, Quinn had been the one who talked her into going back into the church. When Max had screwed up his history final, Quinn was the one who’d coached him through the retake she’d talked the teacher into giving him so he could graduate. Nick had known Quinn for twenty years, and in all that time, she’d been the one who fixed things, who never got upset, who made everything all right.
    Now that he thought about it, that had to be getting old.
    All she wanted was a dog.
    And Quinn deserved to have anything she wanted.
    Quinn stopped her harangue to take a breath, and Nick said, “Okay.”
    She blinked. “That’s it? Okay?”
    “What are we moving?”
    “You’re going to do it?”
    The disbelief in her voice ticked him off. “When have I ever not done what you