Chapter 12 #2
On the other hand, maybe Sam shouldn’t judge.
It’s not as though Luce isn’t being forced to watch what’s going on with him and Jake, which is arguably just as obvious as what she’s been up to with Joey.
In fact, on the whole, Sam thinks it might be worse.
At least Luce and Joey, having never met before encountering one another at Silverman’s, are free to move forward at whatever strange, slightly awkward pace suits them.
Sam and Jake are almost dancing now, whirling around and around the conversation neither one of them wants to have.
But without having that conversation—without acknowledging the accident, and everything that happened after—neither one of them can make a move towards the other.
So instead they circle closer and closer to the thing without ever touching it, the way two opposing magnets can be made to spin around their own resistance to making contact.
Jake won’t accept payment for his social media work; that’s part of the problem. It’s not right, letting him do all that for nothing, but he stands firm and won’t be moved, so Sam has to find other methods of compensation. This, for Sam, means feeding him.
It would be less embarrassing, probably, if Sam hadn’t already done this with Jake when they were teenagers—or, indeed, if demonstrating his value by method of producing a meal wasn’t already basically his go-to move.
If you gathered his handful of exes together and asked them to compare notes, they’d all agree that Sam’s love language was cooking, and also that maybe, at least in this aspect of himself, he talked a bit too much.
But Jake seems to enjoy Sam’s tendency to drop a plate in front of him, or bring him a fresh piece of rugelach snatched directly off a hot sheet tray while Eileen’s back is turned.
It might simply be a function of the fact that Jake’s living, as best Sam can tell, as close to the bone as possible, but he doesn’t really think so.
Jake had been like this when they were younger, too: exclaiming appreciatively over every dish, eating heartily, asking for seconds.
He seems to genuinely enjoy not just food, but Sam’s food, and has an unerring tendency to notice and praise the ways Sam’s making a recipe his own.
If he’s honest, that was part of what had driven Sam to improve his cooking skills in the first place: the thought of how impressed and enthusiastic Jake would be about homemade pizza or scratch brownies.
Only… the thing is, Jake never asks for food, so Sam tends to throw together meals or snacks for him when he’s doing it for himself.
And then Jake will notice that Sam has two plates, and invite him to sit down, join him.
And then, without his meaning them to, whole hours will pass as they lose themselves in the simple pleasure of conversation—laughing about strange customers and the unlikely adult lives of the people they went to high school with, or sharing interesting tidbits of knowledge they’ve scraped up off the floor of some life experience or another.
They don’t talk about: their families, the accident, the aftermath, Jake’s messy relationship with Walt, Sam’s messy relationship with himself, how increasingly obvious it is that they’re every bit as desperately attracted to one another as they were twelve years ago.
It’s all too loaded, a whole chain of land mines just waiting to go off, and both of them are a little too aware of it for comfort, always tensed for the explosion.
But that doesn’t stop the other variety of tension they’re feeling for one another from… manifesting. Aggressively. Embarrassingly, some might say, especially since it’s happening all over the deli.
It’s all really stupid stuff, too; that’s the worst part.
Sam wouldn’t mind it so much if he and Jake were debonairly swooning around like actors in a period piece, delivering devastatingly sharp one-liners and double entendres before raising speaking eyebrows.
That would be… okay, not exactly fine, it would still be mortifying, but it would be better than what is happening.
That’s because what’s happening is that Sam, at the ripe old age of thirty, has forgotten how to behave like a human being.
Jake does something particularly funny or kind or hot, and all the desperate confused longing Sam’s been tamping down since high school seems to shove his higher thinking skills away and take the wheel.
Worse, the same thing seems to be happening to Jake, meaning that between the two of them they possess not even one person’s worth of normal behavior.
This dire circumstance keeps resulting in situations like the one just the other day, where Jake was behind the counter filming, Sam needed to put a stick of cheese away in the cooler behind him, and as he leaned the perfectly reasonable amount that was required into Jake’s personal space, meant to say, Don’t mind me, just putting the cheese away.
But instead he’d experienced an internal electrical fire the second he got within a few inches of Jake, abruptly unable to think about anything beyond how much closer he’d like to get. So what he actually said, staring down at Jake’s mouth, was, “Don’t, uh. Cheese.”
And Jake, staring back up at him with wide, unblinking eyes, replied, “Oh. It—won’t,” as though either statement made any sense at all.
There was a charged moment, one where Sam seriously considered demanding everyone get out of the deli so he and Jake could defile some tables, leaving undiscussed past traumas and the associated horrors to be solved for another day.
Of course, then Joey said, “Question: Is there like a joke here I’m not getting, or do you both need to go to the hospital? Those weren’t, like. Sentences?”
Sam, grimacing, had to suffer the indignity of rescue by little sister, as Luce took their arm, laughing, and said, “It’s your break now, right?
Come out back with me and I’ll explain it to you.
” They’d left, and he and Jake had exchanged a horrified look, which became a lingering, speculative look before, when they noticed this, becoming horrified again.
Even Pastrami had seemed a bit embarrassed for them at that point, slinking away from them to hide underneath one of the prep tables with a whine.
It’s all starting to feel a bit… unsustainable, Sam thinks, is the word for it.
He’s dreaming about the man most nights now, these sweat-soaked, sheet-twisting fantasies of Jake showing up in his bedroom half-dressed and wearing less by the minute, smirking at Sam’s surprise, climbing into bed to straddle him.
The details vary delightfully from there, but it always ends with Sam pinning Jake to the mattress, which he knows because more than once he’s woken up to find himself grinding against his own.
He’s not sure how long a person can sustain this kind of desire before something breaks dramatically, and they end up entwined, naked and touching frantically, in the middle of a public sidewalk.
On the other hand, to snap himself out of it, all Sam has to do is try, for the thousandth time, to figure out how to clear the dreaded conversational hurdles that stand between him and satisfaction.
Even the thought of the accident is like taking a series of punishingly cold showers, and the idea of talking about it is genuinely chilling, no matter what approach Sam considers.
So they carry on in limbo, leaning towards each other and away again, inching closer and closer to the critical moment of no return—
—until it arrives, with little warning and even less fanfare, the night of Joey’s twenty-first birthday party.