31
I went to dinner with Violet and Clay after that, and it was so good to spend time with just them because they remind me that not all grown-ups are fucked, but I didn’t get home until way later than I’d hoped.
Today was the least amount of time that I’ve seen Sam since I met him, and I know that sounds clingy, but then I suppose I won’t see him again come next week, and that’s the sort of revelation that could drive a person to eat a two-pound lobster in twenty-five minutes. But it was all for nought, because then they took me for dessert and I kissed my chances of kissing Sam tonight goodbye.
The lights are off in the house when I get home; no one’s awake.
I’d hoped maybe Sam would be in the chair in the living room “reading”—or even actually reading would have been fine—but he’s not.
I head upstairs to my room, and that’s when I see it: his bedroom is light on, and it’s flooding our narrow corridor with light from his open door.
He’s sitting on the bed, black jeans and a white T-shirt, knees up, book in hand, and the mundane-ness of the moment makes my heart ache for all the other mundane things I don’t think I’ll get to see him do: clean his teeth, pick up the morning paper, buy some milk, ask for directions—
Sam Penny doing any of those things would be poetry, but him like that on the bed with a book is Shakespeare.
“Hi.” I lean against his doorframe.
He looks up, and the way his whole face lifts when he sees me makes me want to cry on the spot, because how many people just light up because you walk into the room? One in a lifetime, two maybe?
“Hey.” He tosses the book to the side, then stands up and walks over to me. “How was your day?”
I smile at him, tireder than I mean to, but Sam Penny undoes all my guises and I sigh.
“Um—heavy?” That tired smile morphs now into a grimace I’ve not permitted to be on my face. “What about yours?”
“Yeah.” He shrugs. “It was pretty good. Tenny and me went fishing.”
I let out a single laugh. “Why?”
Sam’s face falters for a tiny second. “He’s your brother.”
I swallow. “You mean Oliver’s brother…”
“No.” He shakes his head coolly. Shoulders square, pupils dilated. “I mean yours.”
“Oh.” I purse my lips and my cheeks go pink, those traitors, and he squashes a smile as he watches me, and I could catch fire under his unflinching gaze.
“At breakfast this morning, Oliver asked me if anything was going on between us,” I tell him.
Sam’s head pulls back, a sliver of an AU1 and an AU12. It’s pretty locked up on his face, but I can still spot it: surprise and happiness.
“What’d you say?”
“No?” I say it, but there’s an upward inflection, and his eyebrows flick up quickly.
Okay so, no— now he’s surprised.
He squints at me a little and tilts his head. “It’s okay if it is, but is that the truth?”
Our interpersonal distance is clocking in at about one foot, two inches at this second, and his feet are directly toward me, and I don’t mean to, but I’m staring at his mouth while biting down on mine. I sniff a laugh, because—“No.”
He presses his lips together and nods, smiling. “Can I take you on a date?”
“What, now?” My cheeks go pink again.
“Yeah.”
I frown. “I’ve had dinner.”
He makes a half laugh, half pfft sound.
“We’ll have it again.” He shrugs. “Or—don’t? I don’t care—I just wanna—what’s your favorite place in South Carolina?”
“The airport,” I say, deadpan.
Sam Penny rolls his eyes. “Come on.”
I purse my lips and pretend like I have to think about it.
“Are you up for a bit of a drive?”
“With you?” He blinks a couple of times, then smiles. “Yeah, I’ll take the long road.”
***
“Did you and Ol have a good lunch?” Sam asks, glancing over at me from the driver’s seat.
I don’t know why he’s driving when I’m the one from here, but there’s something about boys in cars and the way they hold the clutch…
“Yeah,” I nod. “It was good. We kind of just…caught up.”
He looks back at the road, but his mouth does something weird. It pursed or it twitched? I don’t know. Something.
“What?” I ask, staring at him.
He glances at me quickly. “Nothing.”
Then he looks back at the road. He swallows.
“What’s that?” I ask, tilting my head to get a better look at him.
“What’s what?” His face goes tight, eyes squinting a little, cheeks pulling up.
I plant my finger on his cheekbone. “That.”
He flicks his eyes over at me, a little annoyed, but it dissipates quickly. He blows air out of his mouth like it’s nothing. “Oliver mentioned in passing today that you seemed pretty hung up on your ex.”
I snap my head in his direction. “What?”
“Don’t be angry at him.” Sam shakes his head. “He was just—”
“Lying!” I blink.
Sam’s face goes still. “So you’re not still in love with him?”
“I love him, I’m not in love with him.”
Sam glances over at me, and maybe for the first time since we met, he looks cautious. “That’s not like—a fucking stellar answer, Georgia…”
I sigh. “We didn’t have this fiery, death-storm breakup—”
“Yeah?” He interrupts, eyebrows up. “So what did you have?”
That could be the sharpest he’s ever been with me, and I’m fuming. Not with Sam—I’m practically soaring over Sam’s microexpressions. Contempt, maybe a twinge of fear, a bit of anger. That’s a lot of strong emotions swirling around something that—technically, aside from me—has nothing to do with him. But Oliver? Oliver, I could murder.
Because he knows I’m not hung up on Storm… I was explicit about it. So he’s just lying to Sam for his own benefit.
Sam’s looking at me, waiting, those suspended eyebrows trimmed with annoyance and impatience, and I feel my ego inflating over his reaction. I sigh and I tell Sam the story—who Anatole was, what he did, the disappearing, the danger, the breakup—and the further into the story I go, the sadder he looks.
“I’m not angry at him,” I tell Sam. “I’m not bitter at him—I’m grateful for him, actually. And I love him, and I want him to be safe and happy, but I’m fully aware now that if I was with him, I’d never be safe, and if I was never safe, he’d never be happy.”
Sam glances at me. “Do you think he’s going to kill me in my sleep?”
“Oh, no.” I wave my hand dismissively. “He’s much more a ‘shoot you in the face while you’re awake’ kind of guy.”
Sam rolls his eyes, and it’s only then I realize we’ve stopped driving. It isn’t a huge drive, I suppose—about a half hour from my parents’ house.
“I can’t believe you dated a mercenary…”
I grimace. “I really think he was more like, a private contractor with an army at his disposal.”
Sam tosses me a sarcastic glance. “Oh, is that all?”
“It didn’t mean anything.” I shrug. “He was just my boyfriend with a weird job.”
Sam climbs out of the car and opens my door.
I stand up and he stands there, toe-to-toe with me, brows furrowed. “What’d you tell Oliver?” he asks.
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “The same story?”
Sam purses his mouth and makes a hm sound.
“What?” I blink.
And his face pulls a million microexpressions, but then he shakes his head. “I—did you? Never mind.”
I watch Sam’s face, looking for clues. He’s annoyed. There’s contempt on his face; he doesn’t want there to be, but there is. He’s jamming his mouth shut, which I think I’m interpreting as a self-hushing emblem.
I take a shot in the dark. “I was explicit with Oliver about my position with Storm.”
“Explicit?” he repeats, thinking and frowning.
I nod. “Is there a chance you misinterpreted what he meant?”
Sam gives me a long look, then shakes his head again. “No, he was pretty explicit himself.”
“Oh.” And suddenly I feel less bad for saying nothing was going on before.
And then Sam Penny grabs my face and kisses me. This big, deep, wave-against-a-cliff kiss that knocks me back a little, but his hand is behind me, and it catches me briefly before he presses me into the door of the car. The hand on my face slides into my hair, and I think I’ve never felt safer in my life, pinned between him and a car, his chest grazing mine as he breathes a bit raggedly. The more I kiss Sam (which, admittedly, is substantially less frequently than I’d like to), the more I realize something about it hurts me, but not in the bad way—in the good way?
You know how there’s a good kind of hurting? Like rubbing out a cramp? Or great sex, sometimes? Being near him hurts me all over my body. I think it’s because he’s what all the songs are singing about. Every single fucking one of them, they’re singing about him.
So maybe it’s the cosmicness of it, or maybe it’s the way his mouth feels against mine—like it’s some sort of soul resuscitation, like Sam Penny is a heart-stretch put on the planet to reinstill faith back into mankind so we have something worthwhile to write the poems about.
He pulls back a little and smiles at me before he sighs, content.
He offers me his hand, and I stare at it for a few seconds before I take it, not because I don’t want to, but because aimless closeness is still a new concept to me.
He leads me a few steps into the darkness and then he pauses, glancing back at me.
“I don’t know where I’m going.”
I smile at him and lead the way.
It used to be called Prince William’s Parish Church, but now they call it the Old Sheldon Church Ruins. It burned down first in 1779 in the Revolutionary War, and then they rebuilt it about fifty years later, but someone burned it down again during the Civil War. I think it’s so interesting that the names of things can change after something bad happens to them.
These old church ruins sit amongst giant oak trees and gravestones dating back the last three hundred years, and I’ve always loved it here.
Always. Violet showed me it when I was nine. It’s where Clay proposed to her.
“Holy shit,” he says, staring up at the stripped-back pillars in awe.
The sky is inky and starry and clear, which makes it feel ethereal and otherworldly, but the hauntedness of the droopy oaks grounds me and reminds me that it’s all real.
Because it so easily could not be.
Sam Penny in that white T-shirt, in his black jeans and those old Cons he wears, looking like that, kissing like that—it’s where you hope you’ll go when your head touches the pillow.
“Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” I stare up at the big arch, which is my favorite part, I think. “Even though it’s broken?”
“Yep,” he says quietly, and he’s looking just at me.