Chapter 5
5
S am’s thoughts whirred like the engine of one of her massive planes. Damon had a girlfriend. His arm was wrapped around her, and Marissa glowed the way only someone truly adored could. Sam should be happy for him; she should .
“It’s fantastic to see you!” Marissa said enthusiastically with no hint of unease. And when she extricated herself from Damon and went to hug Sam, her face awkwardly fell in between Sam’s breasts. Even sitting, their height difference was substantial. But Sam’s nose was just above her head, and the woman smelled like fresh soap and mint in a way that was energizing.
God dammit.
Sam’s eye had begun to twitch, and she held a finger to her lid as she replied, “Oh, my gosh, same!” But her tone was flat and fake, and she immediately worried Damon had noticed.
“Marissa is a surgeon at the hospital where my dad works.” Damon filled in the blanks. “He set us up on a date.”
Marissa beamed at the description as she saddled herself in a chair between Damon and Sam. Suddenly, Sam became the third wheel on her surprise catch-up with Damon. This really hadn’t been how she’d imagined the night going.
“At first, I didn’t know who Damon even was. I was like, Damon Rocha? Doesn’t ring a bell,” Marissa said with a laugh.
Sam squinted. Of course Marissa hadn’t known who they were—Sam and Damon had been total loners. He was the Romy to her Michele, minus the back brace.
“Yeah, I guess we were kind of hopeless.” Sam softly smiled and shifted her legs under the table. Her bare foot grazed Damon’s jeans and the friction she’d felt from his hand on her back earlier returned. But instead of letting her foot linger, she quickly pulled it away, and Damon shifted, too, probably to avoid any future touching.
Why was she getting flustered from being around them? Damon and Marissa were clearly happy, judging by the way Marissa smiled at him like the fucking sun shone out of his ass.
Be happy for them , Sam told herself. Smile, dammit. And so she did.
“What kind of surgery do you do?” Sam forced herself to ask. She avoided eye contact with Damon completely, even though his gaze was on her and she was drawn to look back as freely as she did in that weird high school dream she’d had.
“Sam?” Damon’s voice cut through her thoughts and she shook her head as she looked up.
“Oh, uh, yes?” Somewhere between Marissa describing her job as a thoracic surgeon, and Sam remembering her Damon dream, she’d zoned out.
“The seafood boil. Your homecoming dinner.” Damon pointed to a long picnic table covered in a white-and-red checkerboard cloth that stretched the line of the back fence. Servers poured massive steaming pots of seafood and potatoes onto the table, and the smell of salt and fish reached them almost instantly.
Sam’s anxiety had reached a bit of a fever pitch, with a leg that jittered so quickly her chair shook. Her inner need for control broke through and told her to just load a plate and stress eat her way back to happiness.
“You don’t have to tell me twice.” Sam forced herself up from the table and made her way to the lobster, fresh shrimp, sweet corn on the cob and melt-in-your-mouth fish. She loaded up a disposable bowl until the edges burned her fingers from the hot buttery grease. When she arrived back to their high top, a fresh beer waited—one of the perks of dining with the owner, she supposed. Sam ate without thinking, wanting to fill the void in the pit of her stomach.
As she ripped shrimp out of their shells and popped them into her mouth, she chewed and let the salty heat soothe her. When Damon returned with Marissa at his side, Sam took a wooden hammer from the center of the table and hit it hard against a lobster tail.
“Not sure what that poor lobster did to you,” Damon said as he twisted a crab leg and cracked it in half with his hands. “But remind me not to get on your bad side.”
“You made me wake up at four in the morning so we could wait in line to get Green Day tickets, and I still wasn’t mad at you. It’d take a lot to get on my bad side at this point.” Sam caught Damon’s eye and, for a moment, it was just the two of them again.
“These seafood boils are basically therapy,” Marissa interrupted. When Sam looked over, she grinned. “If you’re not sweating while eating, then what’s the point?”
Though, Sam noticed, Marissa was decidedly not sweating and also not beating the ever-loving hell out of shellfish. Instead, she picked up an ear of corn and took a ridiculously demure bite.
The cover band stepped up to the mic. “Hey there, we’re Fall Out Troy, and I’m Troy,” the lead singer said into the mic. “And yes, I’m aware it was a bit egotistical to use my own name, but I couldn’t help the pun perfection.”
Relieved to hear someone else talking, Sam quickly changed her line of thought. “Marissa, were you into emo music, too?”
“I’m more of a pop girl myself,” Marissa said, wiping her fingers on a paper napkin. “Taylor Swift. Britney. The Spice Girls. I never really got into grunge.”
Sam’s nose scrunched. “Would we call ourselves grunge?”
“Emo for sure,” Damon said.
“Your red-dyed tips were absolutely not grunge, and took forever to dye,” Sam practically had to shout over Fall Out Troy’s rendition of “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark.”
“And to wash out, unfortunately.” Damon ran a hand through his non-dyed hair.
“Damon!” A surfer bro wearing board shorts and a puka shell necklace slapped Damon on the back.
“Myles.” Damon turned and they did a very choreographed hand bump that Sam would never entertain being able to pull off. “Do you remember Sam, from high school?”
Lord, did everyone from their high school hang out here? Myles took in the full length of her in a way she wasn’t entirely comfortable with.
“She wore all black back then and a lot of shimmery eyeshadow.” Damon’s fingers danced around his eyes, as if that would somehow emphasize his point.
Sam stared at Damon in horror. Was that really how Damon remembered her?
“Um, you’re one to talk. You smudged your eyeliner on purpose and cut your own bangs,” Sam said.
“She’s got you there, bro!” Myles covered a laugh with the back of his hand. She remembered Myles, who’d been the opposite of emo, with trucker hats, popped collars and multiple Livestrong bracelets.
“She was also the tallest girl in our class,” Damon offered.
There was uncertainty, and then some recognition sparked in Myles’s eyes. “Oh, shit, I remember you now. You were Damon’s spooky girlfriend.”
“We were just friends,” Sam and Damon said at the same time, maybe too fast and too furious.
“You look so different, like a fancy statue.” Myles thoughtfully gazed at her.
“Thank you?” She had no idea if “fancy statue” was a good or bad thing.
“Weren’t you like a vampire or something?” Myles asked, quite seriously. “Like, you drank people’s blood?”
“What?” Marissa asked, but she looked a bit too amused by the accusation.
Sam tried not to roll her eyes. “I was really into the Twilight books, and then someone started a rumor that I liked to visit the graveyard and dig up bodies. Because I’m a redhead, and we’re—”
“Soulless vampires,” Marissa finished the sentence for her. And something about that irked Sam.
But she did her best to hide her emotions. “It happens to the best of us.” Sam lifted the beer to her lips, suddenly self-conscious about the reminder that she was, well, a loser in high school.
“I heard you left Tybee and joined a cult.” Myles frowned. “Are you still in the cult?”
“No, I’m not still in the cult.” Sam bristled. “I was never in a cult, to be clear.”
“Shouldn’t you be wearing one of those flowing robes if you’re in a cult?” Myles, apparently, was hard of hearing.
“I’m not in a cult!” Sam shouted at the exact moment Fall Out Troy ended a song. Her declaration sailed over the crowd and they all turned to look directly at her. “Jesus,” she mumbled to herself, feeling her cheeks flame. “I’m a pilot.”
“Sam’s back home for a bit, but she flies all over the world,” Damon said. “She’s traveled more than all of us combined.” He sat back and sipped his beer, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, all while never breaking eye contact with her.
Was Damon...impressed by that? Just stating a fact? She wished she could read him the way she’d used to.
“Rock on,” Myles said. Then he leaned toward Sam and whispered, “I won’t tell anyone that you’re a vampire. That can be our little secret. And let me know if you need a tour guide while you’re home.”
When he pulled back, he smiled, but Sam flashed her teeth just to up the ante. He seemed to flinch, which was really more satisfying than it should’ve been. She couldn’t believe this guy had accused her of drinking blood and then thought hitting on her was a fair next move.
“Great to see you.” She gave him a gentle shove away from her, which didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest.
“Damon, give Twilight girl my number!” Myles called out over his shoulder.
As he walked away, Sam turned to Damon. “Myles? Wasn’t he on the soccer team? He was...popular and mean.”
“Yeah,” Damon said, then took a sip from his drink.
“He was always nice to me.” Marissa shrugged and sipped her beer.
Sam ignored her, wanting clarity from Damon. “So, what, you’re friends?”
There was the Damon whom Sam remembered from high school, and then there was this strange reality, where Damon was dating a cheerleader and best friends with the popular kids.
“Myles is cool now.”
“Myles is cool ?” Sam mimicked. “Didn’t he almost get expelled for tagging the gym? And didn’t he misspell the word freshman in said graffiti?”
She was not trying to make fun of Myles per se, but she also wanted to remind Damon that he wasn’t the only one who remembered things.
“People can change,” Damon said.Sam disagreed.
“Unless you’re still in a vampire cult?” he finished.
Marissa giggled at Damon’s joke and, despite herself, Sam had a hard time hiding the grin that crossed her face. She supposed she deserved that friendly dig. “On that note, I think this vampire is going to head home. I need to get in my coffin before the sun comes out and reveals my glittery skin to the world.”
“Really? It’s early. The band’s just getting warmed up.”
“Yeah, you should stay,” Marissa said. Judging by the way her nails dug into Damon’s arm, though, she didn’t really mean it.
Sam pushed herself up from the table, and all of the buttery food and sour beer finally made themselves known. Damon had called this a homecoming dinner and, in a way, Sam wanted to go home more than anything. “Marissa, maybe I’ll see you soon?” Sam tried to give what she hoped was a friendly expression.
Marissa took the bait, because she left Damon’s side, threw her arms around Sam and hugged her with the kind of intensity usually reserved for children greeting puppies. “It was so wonderful to see you!”
And Sam hugged her back, because there was nothing else to do in that moment. But her gaze locked on to Damon, who watched them both, and she wondered if he was just as thrown by all of this as she was.
Be happy for Damon , Sam kept repeating to herself. Be happy . But she wasn’t. She felt a numb kind of sadness that almost shut her thoughts down entirely.
When she got out of the car, the street was quiet, save for the loud hum of crickets that filled the air and surrounded her. Grandma Pearl had left the porch light on, and Sam found that acknowledgment of her presence a small comfort.
Once she was back in her room, Sam peeled her dress off, the scent of butter embedded in the fabric. In her dresser drawer, she found an old pair of flannel sweatpants and a worn Urban Outfitters T-shirt that read, “Getting Lucky in Kentucky.” She was 100 percent sure she hadn’t known what that phrase meant when she’d bought it, but she did now as she tugged it over her head. She sat on the edge of her bed and massaged her temples. With her grandma’s accident, the house and relearning who Damon was, her first full day in Tybee might as well have been a full month. If every day was going to be like this, she wasn’t entirely sure she could keep up with the pace.
The responsibility of landing a plane safely was absolutely less intense than the interpersonal muddiness she was having to wade through. Not only had she been roasted by Damon and his new bestie, Myles, but she’d also hammered a lobster claw so aggressively she was fairly certain she’d nearly splintered the table.
Coming back to Tybee was supposed to be easy, in that she had moved on from this place and the people she’d grown up with, Damon included. She’d arrived and expected to really confirm that leaving had been the right choice. After all, she’d built a great, big, exciting life for herself. She lived abroad. She traveled the world. So why was the only thing occupying her thoughts the heat of Damon’s palm on the small of her back? This was a guy she’d turned down so many years ago, yet he somehow still had a line directly to her. But he’d found someone else in Marissa. It wasn’t like Sam was expecting him to pick up where they’d left off in high school—in fact, she’d hoped for the opposite: that Damon had forgotten the way Sam ended them when they were fifteen. So how come she was so jealous?
She was determined to just sleep the night off, but couldn’t help clock the CD player on the floor. Looking at the thing was a blatant reminder wrapped in a bow of how she’d once been the center of Damon’s world—the person he made mix CDs for—but now she wasn’t. Marissa was.
She regretted not throwing the Walkman and Damon’s CD out along with the collection of black nail polish, because like a moth to some funhouse flame, she reached for it. Her first thought was that she just wanted to hear one more song that Damon had picked for her. Damon was no longer hers—and really, never had been. But seeing him with Marissa rubbed salt in a wound Sam wasn’t even aware she’d had.
Maybe it was ridiculous, but wouldn’t listening to another track be a safe way for her to relive their friendship? Her day had been so chaotic that she almost felt hungover from the lack of control, but if she could sit and listen to a song, that might help her relax, just as music used to when she was a teenager.
She was also wildly aware that by indulging this urge, she might sink herself deeper into the Damon quicksand. But she let that thought come and go quickly as she sat on the bed and put the headphones on. Wallowing was apparently her next item on the night’s to-do list, and after an evening of watching Damon and Marissa, she needed a break. She didn’t know what was queued next as the screen lit up; she just wanted to hear a song Damon had chosen specifically for her.
“Okay, Damon, let’s hear it,” she whispered as she pressed Play.