Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
NOW: JUNE
Not for the first time in his life, Sam reflects that being neighbors with someone you’re desperately hoping to bring home with you has real benefits.
You don’t have to ask if they want you to walk them to their place, or if they want to come back to yours; either way you’re heading to basically the same destination and will have time to work out what to do once you arrive.
He and Jake amble their way back slowly, neither of them talking very much.
It’s a warm night and slightly hazy, the humidity of summer having just started to swell in the last few days, but the breeze is cool.
Sam is grateful. He hasn’t danced like that in years, if he’s ever danced like that, and his body’s making sure he knows it.
There are trails of sweat still drying on the side of his neck; he can see a damp spot in the middle of Jake’s back.
They’re not drunk, or at least Sam isn’t drunk, and Jake doesn’t seem drunk.
It’s possible Sam’s misreading things, that the silence coming from Jake is the sound of someone semi-wasted focusing all their energy on walking in a straight line, but he doubts it.
He’s almost certain Jake’s proceeding quiet and slow up the road for the same reason Sam is: The energy vibrating between them is thick and unmistakable and entirely physical, beyond the need for words at all.
Or, at least, beyond the need for most of them.
There’s a little part of Sam that knows there are things they need to talk about, but roughly twelve seconds after he started dancing with Jake, that part of him was gathered up, gagged, and hog-tied.
So all he’s left with is the question: Why shouldn’t he?
The olive branch Jake had been kind enough to stretch between them has felt more like a twig these last few months, creaking and cracking, desperate for the comfortable peace between them to fall away to something more passionate, less controlled.
Why shouldn’t Sam lean on it that last crucial inch and snap it?
What’s the worst that could happen if he does?
Instead of the answer to that question, Sam’s mind supplies him with the response to a slightly different one: He can see suddenly what will happen if he doesn’t snap the twig, if he lets things carry on the way they’ve been going.
The simplicity and horror of it almost makes him want to laugh.
God, of course, of course, if Sam does that, it’ll just play out exactly the same way it did before.
Or, well, maybe not exactly the same way—hopefully featuring a lot less in the way of vehicular mishaps and grueling personal injury, for one thing—but the pattern, at least, would be the same.
They’d circle around and around each other, like they did in high school, and avoid talking about the growing tension between them, like they did in high school, and then when they did eventually give in to temptation, they’d still be circling and avoiding things in the ways that mattered, like they did in high school.
But Sam, as he thanks his lucky stars for every beautiful day of his adult life, is not in high school. Neither one of them will ever be in high school again.
“Did you mean it,” Sam asks, as they stop, automatically, on the street in front of Silverman’s, “when you said people shouldn’t keep doing things just because it’s the way they’ve always done them?”
“Did I mean it?” Jake looks equal parts shocked and outraged. “Did I mean it, he asks! Why would I have spent so long arguing my case if I didn’t mean it, Sam; what kind of psychopath…”
But he stops talking for once, his eyes going wide, as Sam steps into his space and lifts a hand to palm Jake’s jaw.
It’s a question more than anything else, a request for permission Jake probably shouldn’t grant, and which Sam certainly has no right to ask for; he leaves his hand there anyway, trying to memorize the feeling of Jake’s soft stubbly beard, waiting for a response.
After a beat, Jake says, voice cracking on it, “Seriously? You want to do this right now? You don’t want to, I don’t know, spend another year or two thinking it about it, but not actually doing anything, while I also think about it and don’t actually do anything, and we try to date other people and they can totally tell something is weird and—maybe you didn’t do that, when we were in high school, I never—look, never mind!
Just. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather, um.
Give yourself a little more time to consider, or to refamiliarize yourself with my less endearing qualities, or just, you know—”
“Yes,” Sam says, as certain as he’s ever been about anything. “I’m sure.”
“Ah,” Jake says, and blinks up at him, and swallows.
He looks, to Sam, to be wrestling with something internal for a moment, but then his expression clears, and he smiles, pleased and uncertain.
“Well. I mean. Okay, then. But you should know, I haven’t been on the dating scene in years, and I’m probably rusty, and—”
Feeling as though he’s returning to his own home after years away, Sam shuts Jake up by kissing him.
Jake had known how to kiss, in the broadest sense of the word, when they were teenagers.
So had Sam; at its most basic level, the process is fairly straightforward.
But neither of them had been particularly experienced, naturally talented, or, not to put too fine a point on it, good at kissing at the time.
It hadn’t mattered because each had been desperately interested in the other and at a similar level of skill.
Back then, Sam would have rated them both as excellent in all aspects of hooking up, and been almost entirely wrong.
He’d learned a lot in the ensuing years that colors the memories in retrospect, and he cringes a little these days to think of some of his own less advisable moves and techniques.
But he’s always been grateful that at least they’d both had fun and cared about one another, no matter how awkward it sometimes was, or how badly it all wound up ending.
Jake… does not kiss like a teenager anymore.
Jake kisses like he’s the most erudite, sophisticated man at the world’s most erudite, sophisticated gathering, and Sam is a glass of punishingly expensive wine he’s making a show of enjoying.
He is slow and pointed and thorough, kissing Sam with such focused ferocity that he forgets entirely that he was in the lead here just moments ago.
His hand falls from Jake’s cheek to his hip as Jake reaches up to press just his fingertips against the sensitive skin of Sam’s throat, stroking featherlight and then moving an inch or two to repeat the process, over and over.
Sam hisses into Jake’s mouth and feels him smile—puts a hand on the small of Jake’s back to pull him closer—
A shriek interrupts them, making them both jump, though not enough to let go of each other.
They turn, Jake’s hand tight around Sam’s jacket, to a mortified-looking Amber Baumbach holding the hand of Claudia, her oldest daughter.
Claudia, roughly six years old and according to her mother allergic to only the exterior pastrami spices, seems to be in rapturous agonies as she looks back and forth between them and cries, “Mom! It’s the deli man and my dance teacher! And they were kissing!”
“Hi, Claudia,” Jake says, only slightly wearily. “Good eyes you’ve got there; you must eat a lot of carrots.”
“I do,” Claudia says somberly, nodding at him.
“I’m so sorry.” Amber looks mortified; in spite of himself, Sam can’t help but be amused.
“She’s not quite old enough to understand, uh, when not to…
interrupt. We wouldn’t usually be out here this late, though; my ex took her to a movie, and I’m just taking her home.
So you don’t have to worry about this in, um.
In the future.” Hastily, she adds, “Not that there has to be a future or anything! None of my business at all, obviously. We’re just…
going to go home now. So sorry. Have a good night! ”
“Bye, Deli Man! Bye, Jake! I’ll tell everyone in our dance group I saw you kissing!
” Claudia’s tone suggests this is a favor, sparing them the trouble of doing it themselves.
The last thing they hear before Amber manages to drag her around the corner is Claudia cackle to herself and add, “Kissing is disgusting.”
“Ah, and here again we see the defining note of my life: dignity,” Jake says, in a voice equally amused and despairing. “Always dignity.”
“I think you came out of that with more dignity than I did; at least she knows your name.” Sam rests his forehead briefly against Jake’s. “Might feel more dignified inside? Fewer onlookers, for one thing. If, you know, you wanna come in.”
“I think I’ve made my interest in doing that painfully clear,” Jake says, and Sam grins, steps away to unlock the deli’s front door.
The minute he’s locked it behind them, they’re pressed together again, Sam unsure which of them moved first and not actually caring.
He’s pushing Jake up against the glass—Jake’s sliding a hand into his hair—Sam’s halfway to undoing Jake’s fly when he remembers that they don’t want to make a total display of themselves here in the Silverman’s front window.
Joanie would probably film it, for one thing.
“My office?” he suggests, low and heady, in Jake’s ear. “It’s closer, and we’ll have to deal with Pastrami if we go upstairs and wake her.”
“All for that plan,” Jake agrees breathlessly, and as Sam, regretfully, moves away enough for them both to start walking back there, he slaps his cane lightly. “This thing will get me up those stairs, but not quickly, and I feel time is of the essence here, don’t you?”