Chapter 14 #2
He says it lightly, even wickedly, giving Sam a look that’s hungry, anticipatory, eager—in short, it’s an expression that’s anything but shaming.
Still, as Sam follows Jake back through the deli to his own office, he’s swamped with the same regret that’s dogged his heels, kept him from making a move, every time he’s thought about approaching his feelings for Jake these last few months.
Despite his own frank desperation to lay his hands on every part of the man, the memory of the ways in which Sam’s choices damaged Jake’s life pours a bucket of cold water on his libido.
This does not, however, completely extinguish the flame, which seems to burn too hot to ever entirely go out. So Sam says nothing, ignoring the hammering of his heart and the sudden clamminess of his palms, and steps into the office after Jake, shutting the door behind him.
Jake smiles at him, all bright flirtatious confidence, and says, “Where were we?”
“Here,” Sam says, low, and pulls Jake back into his arms.
For a few minutes, Sam is again able to keep the elephant in the room out of his direct line of sight, and thus uneasily pretend that it isn’t there.
Jake is, in a word, distracting, and so Sam tries like hell to shut off his brain, let his body run the show.
This works while Jake is licking into his mouth; it works while they’re fumbling together towards, and then bumping into, Sam’s desk.
It really works when Jake tugs up Sam’s shirt high enough to reveal his full torso and then, when Sam strips it the rest of the way off and tosses it aside, works his way up said torso, kissing and sucking and gently biting.
Sam realizes dizzily that he’s going to end up with a hickey, and then is hit with a wave of surreal, confused pleasure when he realizes Jake’s the first person who ever gave him one. The reason he even likes them.
A surge of passion overrules Sam’s higher thinking at this point; he reaches out an arm without looking to sweep the contents of his desk to the floor, and thus make room on the surface for Jake.
The regret hits him a second later, as he’s lifting Jake up to sit on its surface—God, he’s going to have to clean all that up, why did he do it, nobody ever shows the mess in the movies—and then fades when Jake smirks, spreads his legs, hooks his left one around Sam’s waist, and pulls him in.
Then Jake is everywhere, touching Sam with his hands, his mouth, his thighs, moving from one thing to the next so quickly Sam can hardly breathe, let alone keep up.
Not that he’s complaining. Who could complain, about something so thrilling, so hot, so totally unprecedented even in their previous encounters?
But it’s here that Sam’s brain betrays him.
Because when he calls to mind the hazy, sun-soaked memories of their youthful trysts, the time they’d managed to spend together before it all fell apart, he can’t place the…
Well, frenetic is the only word for the energy currently thrumming through Jake, underscoring everything he’s doing.
It’s possible that this is just his vibe now, and everyone he hooks up with walks away feeling like they’ve encountered a really sexy tornado while they just stood there amazed at his power and speed, but Sam doubts it.
He thinks Jake is probably doing exactly what Sam’s doing: trying with increasing desperation to avoid seeing the damn elephant.
Sometimes life is about looking the pachyderm in the face. Sam sighs, and pulls away, and puts both hands on Jake’s shoulders to still him as he says, “God, Jake, sorry, just—hold on. Are we really not going to talk about it?”
To Sam’s surprise, the expression on Jake’s face isn’t one of resignation or even disappointment; it looks, to Sam, like full-bore terror. It sounds like it, too, when he says, his voice gone reedy, “Talk about what?”
Sam winces, wishing with all his Midwestern heart that he could swallow down this uncomfortable topic, never acknowledge or discuss it, and be perfectly fine with that, in the grand old tradition of many previous generations of Adelsons.
However, his own fundamental nature, never a good fit in that particular area of the family structure, forces him to press on.
“The… accident? The fact that we never talked again, the fact that I ruined your life—”
“What?” If Jake looked terrified before, now he looks as though Sam has just grown fourteen arms, burst into flames, and started singing the unforgivably bad Horseshoe Heights High fight song. “What? You didn’t ruin my life! I ruined your life!”
“What?” Abruptly, Sam wishes he still had his shirt on, but he doesn’t think it would be the height of dignity or tact to fish it out from where he tossed it behind the filing cabinet. He settles for crossing his arms over his chest. “You… What are you talking about?”
Suddenly they’re both talking over each other:
“You dropped out of school—”
“School?! Jake! The bottom of your leg was crushed—”
“—and I couldn’t talk my parents out of pressing charges—”
“—and your whole life was about your dance career—”
“—so you ended up with a criminal record and—”
“—and if I’d just stalled an extra few minutes before leaving—”
“—it wasn’t even your idea to take the car—”
“—or done the smart thing right when you showed up and took your keys—”
“—and you took the blame and I was too much of a coward to—”
“—or called someone! Your dad, even! And anyway he told me, that day he came by, he told me about all the surgeries and how you couldn’t go to Juilliard and how I’d, as I said, ruined your life—”
“What?” This time the fury on the word, and blazing in Jake’s blue eyes, dams up the flow of words from Sam’s mouth. “My father did what? When?”
“The day after,” Sam says, hollow and sick all over again at the memory, the crawling shame down the back of his spine as fresh as it was that morning.
God, he wishes he had his shirt. “He came over to the house screaming about it; I thought he was going to hit me. After he left my mother put me in the car and brought me… here.” He gives Jake, who looks like maybe he’s about to explode into a million enraged pieces, an uncomfortable half smile.
“It’s okay, really. I think he was just, you know.
Upset because his son was in the hospital, and God knows I deserved it. ”
“No you didn’t.” Jake says this so loudly that Sam jumps a little.
“No you didn’t! It wasn’t your fault that idiot didn’t know how to drive, or to tell time, or what a stop sign was!
It wasn’t your fault my freaked-out teen brain decided the solution to parental rejection was copious drinking and grand theft auto!
You were trying to help me, and in exchange I cost you everything.
Everything! I couldn’t even stand up to my stupid parents for you!
And you think you deserved it, I—” He cuts himself off, his throat catching, and runs a hand over his face.
“You deserved better, is what you deserved. A lot better. I’m sorry. ”
For a long beat Sam just stares at him. Then, entirely against his will, a choked-off half laugh escapes him as he says, “Come on. You’re not serious!”
“I am as serious,” Jake says, meeting his eyes with level, unyielding certainty, “as a heart attack. I’m so serious it might give me a heart attack, which would be a problem.
If I die, how will I murder my father?” He pauses, thoughtful, and adds, “Although I suppose I could haunt him. He’d hate that. ”
“You don’t have to haunt anyone,” Sam says, “and I’d prefer you remain alive if at all possible, but… I don’t understand. You never talked to me again—”
“You never talked to me again,” Jake cries, looking genuinely aghast now.
“Which I never questioned, because cutting ties is what you should do! When you try to help someone out and in exchange their parents try to get you jail time! That’s categorically a relationship ender!
” He runs a hand over his face, peering at Sam through spread fingers.
“But you’re telling me that all this time—God, Sam, for all these years—you’ve thought that I stopped talking to you? That I blamed you?”
“I mean,” Sam says, with a wincing little shrug. “…Yeah?”
“Oh, I’m going to go submerge myself in the deep fryer,” Jake mutters, clearly as much for himself as for Sam.
“I’m going to lock myself in the walk-in ’til I’m a Jakesicle.
Listen, I know you don’t serve alcohol down here, but do you have booze upstairs?
Because, I mean, not trying to suggest I learned nothing from my teenage mistakes, but: I could really use a drink.
I know we agreed the office was our move, but… ”
“Yeah, that was then,” Sam, who could use both a drink and a shirt, agrees. They proceed up the stairs without talking, only the thud of Jake’s cane hitting the wood—and, eventually, the gleeful bark of Pastrami—breaking the silence.
Once Sam’s shown Jake his (admittedly paltry) liquor selection and acquired a fresh T-shirt, he takes Pastrami out for a quick potty run.
Feeling like an idiot, he briefly outlines the situation to her as they go and asks her to be chill when they get inside.
Logically, he knows that likelier than not the only part of this hasty, one-sided discussion she understood was her own name, but when they get inside she does, unusually for her, go straight to her pillow and lie down.
She is—small mercies—asleep again in moments.
And in additional mercies, Jake has produced two drinks, one of which he is sipping, and the other of which is sitting and sweating invitingly on Sam’s counter.
“It’s a Paloma. Well, a half-assed Paloma,” Jake says, gesturing at the glass to indicate Sam should take it. “I hope you weren’t saving that can of grapefruit juice in the back of the cupboard for anything.”