17
Sam gestures his hand at an empty plot in the ground.
I blink at him. “What?”
“This is your Dad’s…” He trails off. “You know…”
“Grave?” I offer.
He scratches his neck. I think he’s nervous. “Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you just say grave?” I ask, watching him for the answer.
And he scratches his ear.
I squint at him. “Why are you nervous?”
And then Sam Penny lets out an exasperated laugh and lets his head fall back toward the sky. “You’re so fucking hard to be around.”
I frown and he catches it, then grabs me by my arm quickly.
“Hey,” he says in a quiet voice as he shakes his head, then ducks down so we’re eye level and shifts some hair from my face. “I didn’t mean that. I was joking.”
He’s never done that before, that kind of touching me… It’s possessive and threadbare with its intent, and jarring is the wrong word because I think that has negative connotations, and trust me when I say that there was nothing negative about it, but something about him touching me startled me.
Maybe because I’ve wanted him to since I met him?
It’s not the residue of what happened with Beckett, by the way. I’ve had sex a lot of times since then with other people, which involves substantially more action than arm-grabbing and hair-brushing, and I was fine. It’s a different sort of startled. Startled in my heart, maybe? Because Sam should be a stranger to me, but he isn’t. Like I’ve dreamt of him all my life and I’ve just woken up and it’s bleeding through, and I know him…
I know I don’t know him, but I know him. And I hope he knows me too.
“So why are you nervous?” I ask again, trying to regain control of the situation or, at the very least, of myself.
“Because I don’t want to fuck this up.”
I try not to smile and lift my eyebrows up instead. “Fuck what up?”
“Shit—I mean—” I try not to look too smug over his parapraxis. He shakes his head at me, half-amused, half-serious. “I don’t want to upset you.”
I arch my eyebrow. “Why would you upset me?”
He scratches his neck again, but he doesn’t know he’s doing it. “I want you to talk to your dad.” He gestures to the square hole in the ground.
I look from the hole back to him. “There’s no one in there.”
He rolls his eyes. “There’s no one in ‘there’”—he uses air quotes—“anymore anyway. It’s about closure.”
“I don’t need closure.” I fold my hands over my chest. “I’m fine.”
“You”—he ducks his head so we’re eye to eye again—“haven’t dealt with your dad dying at all.”
“Yes, I have.” I say but it comes out a bit like a sigh. A weak lie at best.
“How?” He shrugs with his eyebrows. “And when?”
“I don’t know—in the—” I let out a frustrated noise. “I don’t care—”
“Bullshit,” he says, confident in his diagnosis.
“Don’t—” I point at him as I sigh out of my nose, annoyed. “I don’t like it when you do that to me.”
He nods. “I know you don’t.”
I give him a look. “Then stop.”
“I will—” he concedes. “After you talk to him.”
“Penny—”
And then he does it again—he reaches for me, pushes some hair behind my ears, and I stare at him with big, wide eyes.
“Do you trust me?” he asks, head tilted with perfect sincerity.
I groan a little, and he lifts his eyebrows as if to say “Do you?”
I give him a glare and put my hands on my hips. “You’re fucking this up.”
He gives me a gentle push toward the plot in the ground. “No, I’m not.”
No, he’s not. That fucking know-it-all.
I cross my hands over my chest and then shove them through my hair. “What am I—I don’t know what to say. Where am I speaking?”
He stands behind me. Like, very behind me… behind me behind me. Close enough that I can feel the warmth of him against the back of me. So close enough that I can feel his breathing on my neck, and it’s so steady and there’s something about the steadiness of Sam Penny that makes me feel sad and afraid and hopeful and lost and confused, and I find myself longing for that steadiness, which I’ve never really had in anyone before but wish I had in my dad.
Sam points to the hole in the ground to focus me.
I clear my throat.
Then I say nothing.
He nudges me again and I turn around to glare at him, but it’s a very disempowered glare because our faces are so close, and being near him like this feels like smelling petrol—you just keep inhaling forever. I can’t completely tell which way’s up and which way’s down anymore.
“Hi, Dad,” I say uncomfortably. I clear my throat again. “Sorry about your heart attack—”
“Fuck, Georgia.” Sam sighs and laughs at the same time. Then he clears his throat. “Hey, Mr. Carter,” he says from over my shoulder. “We didn’t get a chance to meet—I’m Sam. Penny. I’m um—” He pauses. “I’m Oliver’s AA sponsor.” I feel him nodding behind me. “You’d be really proud of him. He’s done a lot of good, hard work. I’m here with your daughter—she’s like, really fucking cool too. Kind of weird and sometimes annoying,” he concedes, “but…pretty great.”
I try not to smile too much.
“You’d be proud of her—I don’t know how much you talked. She’s pretty quiet about you. But she’s super smart…I mean, Cambridge-smart. And she’s a total knock-out,” he adds, and I’m so glad he can’t see my face, because I’m not just the cat who got the cream; I’m the cat who got the whole fucking cow. “Doesn’t really know how to talk to people if she can’t see their faces, though, so I think this is kind of hard for her, or something…because you’re—” He lowers his voice. “Dead.”
I laugh once and turn around to face him.
Our faces couldn’t be more than seven inches apart.
“I don’t know what to say,” I tell him, frowning, feeling like I’m somehow failing both him and my dad.
“The truth, Gige.” He gives me a gentle look.
And I’m aware he’s never called me that before, and I’ve never really cared what people call me, but my nickname in his mouth makes my stomach do a backflip.
Sam nudges me. “Tell him how you feel.”
I shake my head.
“Georgia, when are you coming back to South Carolina?”
I frown. “Um—never.”
“Then you might never get to tell him how you feel again.”
“It’s a hole in the ground!” I point at it and he turns me back to face it, but leaves his hands on both my arms, and it makes me feel safe. Psychologically safe. Him holding me how he’s holding me gives my brain permission to look at feelings I’ve otherwise thrown blankets over in the back of my mind.
I take a big breath. “I am…” I pause, and Sam squeezes my arms again. “Angry at you.”
I nod once. “I’m angry at you. And I didn’t like you very much. Not often, anyway.” I pause. “I don’t know whether you’ve gotten worse in my mind with the distance and over time or if you were just kind of always shitty? I really—I don’t know. I hated you for how you dealt with Oliver’s sexuality. I hated you for how you let others treat him because of it.” I hold my breath for a second. Sam moves in closer behind me. “I wonder sometimes, if you had treated him differently, would everyone else have? You set the tone for the whole family. Tennyson loves what you loved. Mom would believe that the earth was flat and made of cardboard if you told her, so if you had just…” I trail off, shake my head, and take a breath.
Sam shifts behind me, closer again, and now he rests his chin on top of my head, and then his arms slip from my arms to around my body. I could close my eyes and cry about how supremely and surprisingly unlonely I feel as I talk to my dead dad via a hole in the ground.
“Keep going,” Sam says, but it’s muffled by my hair.
“You were good at providing”—I nod to myself—“for us. Fiscally, I mean. You were good at providing for us like that, but what does that count for? I don’t know.” I shrug. “Maybe I’m just ungrateful…” I trail off again and then find that my voice gets a little caught in my throat as I say, “I kind of just wanted a dad.”
Sam shifts behind me, and I wouldn’t say he kissed the back of my head, but I certainly wouldn’t not say that either. I guess I’d say that technically he pressed his mouth against the back of my head. I think I’d maybe allow myself to call it a Freudian Kiss. Which isn’t a thing; it’s a thing I just invented now, but if it was a thing, that’d be the thing it would be.
I don’t think Sam would say he kissed my head either. I would say he wanted to, though, and this makes me braver.
Not that the boy I think I like not-kissing me makes me brave, because I’m all for self-empowerment and being brave on my own. But there’s much to be said about being believed in.
“You didn’t really know me,” I tell my dad. “You didn’t even try. And now you’re dead, so I can’t know you either.”
And then I feel sad and angry and I spin around so I’m face-to-face with Sam.
“Can I stop now?”
His face looks raw and his eyes look ragged as they snag on my mouth. He nods quickly, then pushes some hair behind my ears again. “Let’s go.”