Chapter 19 Sam #2
“I don’t like it.” His voice is cold, distant. “I don’t like being a whore. I don’t like having to be everyone’s…dirty cum rag. But it pays my bills.”
“I’m sorry.” It’s inadequate, I know. I wish I could go to him. I want to take him in my arms and show him it’s okay, I don’t care. He doesn’t have to do that again. Except now I can’t promise him anything because he stole twenty thousand dollars and now I don’t know what happens.
“It doesn’t matter.” He’s staring at the floor again, but I don’t think he’s really seeing it.
“You get used to it. Or, well, you learn to tolerate it. Some people I know even like doing it. After Ben died, though—I couldn’t take it anymore.
Couldn’t sit by and just…keep doing that, letting life pass me by.
Letting life fuck me. I didn’t know how to get out, though.
I never made enough to save. I don’t know, I wanted to just leave so bad.
” His voice actually breaks on that final word. “I wanted to escape.”
I sit heavily on the edge of one bed. I feel like I weigh a million pounds. “So you stole the money to do it?”
“It wasn’t planned.” Ash looks at me again. “There’s this regular—big politician in Providence. I call him Mr. Bigshot. He was pretty good to me, as far as all that goes. Generous, I mean. In terms of…pay.”
Automatically I almost say that’s good and then bite my tongue, actually bite it.
I don’t really think it’s good. And I don’t want to hear about this rich high-powered asshole bending Ash over, showering him in singles like he’s a stripper.
I don’t even want to think about it. My imaginative brain is tormenting me.
And I guess all this time I’ve been sort of thinking of him as mine, even though he really isn’t. Never was and probably never will be.
“So…” He takes a deep breath. “One time I asked him for some money, thinking he’d want to help me out.
He liked me a lot, I think. Asked after me a lot.
Instead he just lectured me on making something of myself, putting in time and effort like he did to get where he is.
That I can’t just expect handouts. Then he—” He abruptly stops, stares past me towards the balcony, and shakes his head.
“Ash?”
“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing you wanna know.”
Great. Let my imagination do the work! Some degrading thing that Ash hated every minute of, I guess. Face shoved into a pillow waiting for it to be over. God, I want to un-know this all.
“A few months later he hired me, and that night I noticed he left his safe unlocked. Same one he’d always pull cash from to pay me. So after, when he’d fallen asleep, I just…helped myself.”
“And that’s when you ran.”
“He woke up and caught me. Grabbed a gun out of his nightstand in a fucking blink and shot me. Well, clipped me. Somewhere in all that I was running, yeah.”
I push my fingers into my eyes. “Mierda,” I mumble. “You went straight from that to hitchhiking to Miami.”
“I didn’t know what else to do or where to go. I was panicking. Like I said, it wasn’t planned. Just a stupid impulse.”
“And you made me your accomplice.” I drop my hands into my lap, looking at him. “You’ve been giving me that money to spend this entire time.”
“I…” For the first time in this conversation there’s appreciable emotion on his face, his eyebrows drawing together. “Sam, I didn’t mean to. I didn’t think about it like that.”
“But that’s what you did. You rocked up and said you could pay for everything, and you did.” I press my hand to my mouth because I’ve cycled back to the nauseous stage of this peculiar grief. “Fuck,” I mumble. “We’re fucked.”
“Sam.” He’s walking closer, slowly and haltingly, until he stops some two feet away.
He could reach out and touch me if he wanted.
Or I could touch him. “It was just supposed to be those two days. And the one night. That’s all it was supposed to take, remember?
Getting to Miami? I never thought it would go on this long or be like this.
” There’s anguish in his face as he kneels at my feet and I think, maybe, it’s even genuine. “I didn’t expect to—like you.”
“Christ,” I say. “Thanks, I guess?”
“You have to believe me.” He’s not quite touching me when he puts both hands on either side of me, gripping the edge of the mattress. There’s that pleading tone in his voice, the one that pops up whenever he seems to be scared or caping. “I never meant it to go this far.”
“Sorry.” Not like I mean it.
“Sam, don’t. I really—”
“Do you know what this looks like?” I say. “For someone like me? I’m not white, Ash. I’m not blonde-haired and blue-eyed and I don’t look like an all-American boy. If the cops caught me with thousands of dollars in stolen cash, how well do you think it’d go?”
He blanches and looks away. “I didn’t…”
I point to the bundles of cash still scattered on the floor. “Is he looking for this?” I say. “Is he after you? He must be.”
“No. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but don’t think so.”
“Why the fuck wouldn’t he? You stole a whole house’s worth of cash from him, Ash.”
“Because he’s dead.”
“Dead?” My voice goes up an octave or several. “What do you mean, dead? How do you know that? Did you—” Please don’t be a murderer, too. I cannot take any more of this. No more bombshells, holy hell.
“No!” Ash releases of the mattress, sitting back on the floor. “He killed himself. After. It…was in the paper. That one you bought me, the first morning—it was in there.”
My hands sink into my hair. “He killed himself after you stole money from him? Holy fucking shit. This is so bad.”
His eyes briefly slip closed and for a moment he looks so…
young. Vulnerable. Tired. There are dark hollows beneath his eyes, the same ones that I haven’t seen since that first night I met him.
But some food and a good night’s sleep had fixed that.
A few days with me and he’d been happy, I think. At least something close to it.
Hooking since he was seventeen. I can’t fathom it.
He was just a baby. He still is. God, I think my heart’s breaking for real.
So badly I wanna reach out and hold him.
I even begin to, but he’s getting up, moving away from me.
Something’s broken between us and maybe I wish I hadn’t gone through his bag at all.
We could be in the shower. We could be at breakfast. We could be on the road, heading home.
“I tried to tell you,” he says, and for some reason his voice sounds like it’s coming from the end of a long, dark tunnel. “I’m not who you think I am. I’m a disgusting piece of shit.”
“No.” Not that. Of all the things he was and might be, never that. “Ash. No.”
Silence. Looking at each other at a distance of, maybe, four feet, but it feels like miles. I am standing on the edge of a trench. If I try to move towards him, I will fall. I don’t know what to do or say.
“You can leave me here,” he says. “I’ll find my way to Miami alone. No one has to know you were ever involved, if they come looking. Your hands will be clean.”
“I don’t know if it works that way.”
“Could try, at least.”
The problem is that I don’t want to leave him. Even after he lied. Even after he took me for the most insane ride of my life. Even after everything he just told me I’m still—
Well. I’m still in love with him.
That’s the shittiest part of this all, maybe. Realizing this: I’m in love with Ash, sense be damned. He did me fucking dirty as hell and I’m in love with him, anyway. And I can’t even turn it off to preserve my own fucking hide.
“Ash,” I say. “Were you going to hide this from me forever? Not tell me even a part of it? Just…keep lying?” It’s a Hail Mary.
It’s me looking for a reason to justify everything I’m feeling.
I need something to quell this awful mix of anger and sadness—and yes, love—desperate and helpless, still urging me across the room to him.
The sense of injustice—that he did put me in danger, recklessly, to save himself.
Can I live with that? Believe it’s a mistake? That he wasn’t thinking, in the moment? That he just…did something impulsive and it wasn’t about me at all.
But then, he probably doesn’t like me the way I like him. Isn’t in love with me. The way I am with him.
“I wasn’t going to tell you I was a hustler,” he says, half-incredulous and half-angry. “Of course I wasn’t. Are you serious? I’m not proud of that, I’m…I fucking hate it. I hate myself for it. Okay? Does that make you feel better?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“You want the truth? When I ran away from home and I was on the streets, men just started soliciting me. Honking at me from their cars. Asking me how much. And I realized I could just lie there and let them fuck me for cash. Enough to get by. I was a kid, I had no skills. I didn’t know what else to do. And then I just…kept doing it.”
Seventeen. I wince again.
“And if you’re worried, I get tested all the time. Negative everything as of last month. You’re safe.”
Small consolation I guess. I drop my head in my hands again. “I mean the other stuff. The stealing. The guy who fucking killed himself.”
His eyes flare. “The answer’s no, Sam. I was never going to tell you any of that.
If I got away with it. Why would I? How could I, without everything else?
Jesus. Why would I ever want you to look at me differently?
You—you’re all I fucking have right now.
I wanted you to keep believing I was this amazing person, and I thought I could maybe be that person. Fake it til you make it, right?”
“And let our relationship stay built on a fucking lie?”
His mouth snaps shut. He’s shaking, I think. I don’t know what from. Anger? Sadness? All of the above? Some other emotion entirely? “That’s not…” Faltering. “Fuck, I don’t know.”
“Was any of this real?” I ask him. I know how pathetic it sounds, how lacerated, but I have to know this much. “Me and you? Was it real? When we fucked? Or…was that a lie, too?”
“Oh, Sam.” His face crumples. “Of course it was real. I never, ever faked any of that. I swear to you. I…I…”
Do I believe that? I want to, so bad. “How do I know that?”
He recoils like he’s been slapped. “Are you fucking serious? You think all of that was fake? You think I was performing for you? Sam, I’m the one who sought you out! How can I prove it to you?”
I don’t say anything.
“Sam?” There’s a tinge of desperation to his voice now. “Sam, I need you to believe this. I’m not bullshitting you.”
I stand. Robotically, I reach for my open duffel and pull out a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I pull them both on. “I need some space,” I say. “I’m gonna go for a drive.”
“What?”
I grab my keys off the nightstand. “I’ll be back, okay?”
“Sam, no. Forget it. I’ll leave. I’ll get another ride.”
“Please don’t. I’ll worry about you out there with strangers. Just…give me an hour or something. To clear my head. I promise I’ll be back.”
As I brush past him heading towards the door, he says, in a small voice, “Sam? I’m sorry that I put your neck on the line. But…I’m not sorry that we met. I can’t be sorry for that.”
To that I don’t say anything at all.
Mostly because I think I’ll start crying if I do.