Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Sundays were Lacey’s only guaranteed day off. If she’d wanted to, she probably could have picked up a few private lessons, but she wanted a day to rest and recharge. She wanted that time more than she wanted to be out of debt faster.
She’d just finished applying a mud mask when the doorbell rang. Leo was at the restaurant and Gavin was on a walk, enjoying the sun before the rain was supposed to move back in that afternoon. Lacey decided to ignore the bell.
Then came the knocking.
“Move to a small town, they said. It’s quiet, they said,” she muttered while she stomped to the door. Whoever it was had better have a good reason for being so damn persistent. If this was about Christmas lights or a Turkey Trot, she was going to scream.
Lacey yanked the front door open. Sam took a step back, his eyes wide.
“Daisy and I were looking for Lacey. Have you seen her, Ms. Swamp Monster?”
Lacey narrowed her eyes and felt the drying mud crack. “Ha, ha.”
Daisy barked once, torn between hiding behind Sam and investigating the strange-looking woman.
“We were out for a walk and saw your car,” Sam explained, “and we thought we’d stop by and see if you wanted to hang out.”
Lacey raised her eyebrows, further cracking her mud mask. “You drove twenty minutes into town to walk around my neighborhood?”
Sam blushed. “That does sound about correct.”
Lacey resisted the urge to preen, though warmth spread through her body. “Let me go wash this off.”
“We will be waiting with bated breath.”
Lacey hurried more than she would admit to get ready. On her way out the door, she grabbed her raincoat, just in case.
“So, how’s Daisy doing?” she asked when they reached the sidewalk.
“She’s great…I think,” Sam said, and frowned. “I don’t know a lot about dogs.”
Daisy walked ahead of them on her leash, her stride half graceful prance and half short-legged waddle. It made Lacey smile.
“I don’t either, honestly. I always wanted one as a kid, but I couldn’t have one.”
They walked in silence to the stop sign at the end of the street. Even with the sun out, there was a distinct chill in the air. Lacey pulled her hands inside her jacket.
Sam looked left and right for cars before walking across the street. “Can I ask you a question?”
“I don’t think that’s a bad idea, since we’re supposed to be dating,” Lacey answered.
“Why was it so important to you to save Daisy?”
Lacey stopped in the middle of the crosswalk. All the feelings she’d had when she thought Daisy might be going to the animal shelter bubbled up again. “Because she reminded me of me.”
Sam looked over his shoulder, realized she’d stopped, and stopped too, just short of the curb. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Lacey caught up to him. “I guess since we’re supposed to be dating, this is something you’d know about me. My mom passed when I was seventeen. She was sick. It wasn’t unexpected, but still, you know, hard at that age. Or any age, I guess.” She stuffed her jacket-covered hands under her armpits. “My parents got divorced when I was six. They shared custody kind of sixty-forty until I turned eleven. Then my dad met my stepmom. She didn’t like it when I was around. She didn’t say that to me, but I could tell. I think she was jealous of the attention my dad gave me, which wasn’t a lot to start with. He tried, but being a parent didn’t come naturally to him.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said. It was what people always said when they found out about her mom, but he said it softly, like he meant it, instead of it being the thing he was supposed to say.
“I stopped going to my dad’s house when he married my stepmom. It made it easier for everyone. When my mom passed, I went to live with them. My stepmom made a big fuss about not kicking her daughters out of their rooms because I was only going to be there until the end of the school year. I slept on a pullout couch for most of my senior year.”
“Fuck,” Sam cursed under his breath.
“It motivated me to get the hell out of there,” Lacey said. “When I graduated from high school, I got half of the money my mom left for me and I went to New York City to try and make it as a professional dancer.”
“Did you?” Sam asked, pausing to let Daisy sniff a flower bush.
“Did I what?”
“Make it as a professional dancer?”
Lacey looked around the neighborhood. “Well, I’m here, so I’ll let you figure that one out.”
“So you needed to rescue Daisy because she reminded you of you.”
Lacey nodded. “She lost her mom and the people who were supposed to take care of her abandoned her.”
It sounded like Sam cursed again, but a passing car drowned out the sound. Daisy grew bored with the bush, peed on it, and their walk resumed.
“What about you? What are your parents like?”
“They’re nice people, but we don’t talk anymore.”
Lacey frowned. “Why not?”
“It’s easier for them,” he said, stopping again because Daisy needed to investigate a tree that probably got peed on by every dog in the neighborhood. “My early career almost wrecked their marriage, so when I turned eighteen, I decided to stay away so they could preserve some sense of normalcy and privacy.”
“That must be hard.”
“It’s better this way.”
“Where are you from?” Lacey asked, searching for things they should know about each other.
“The Detroit area. What about you?”
“Around Pittsburgh.”
“How did you end up here?”
They started walking after Daisy added her scent to the tree trunk.
“Well, the boyfriend I had been supporting financially while he tried to make his music career happen made his music career happen, and he dumped me. Then I twisted my knee, and the medical bills pushed me further into debt. And right when I thought I was going to have to live out of my car, Gavin reached out and asked if I was interested in a job. So I moved here because it’s cheap rent and there’s nothing to do.”
Sam chuckled. “How did you meet Gavin?”
“I took a few workshops from him. We casually kept in touch. Then I ran into him and Leo when they were on a cruise—I worked on a cruise ship as a dancer.”
“That explains the sweatshirt.”
Lacey cocked her head at him. “You noticed what was on my sweatshirt?”
Sam’s cheeks reddened. “I notice things.”
“Except that we knew each other because we’d fucked before.”
His face grew redder. “Okay, I notice some things.” They reached the end of the block and Sam looked both ways again before crossing, even though there were rarely cars. “If you got the chance, would you go back to professional dancing or would you keep teaching?”
“If I got the chance to be a professional dancer again, I’d leave in the middle of a class,” Lacey said. “But I think that ship has sailed. Or rather, it won’t come back into port until after I get my finances figured out. You need money to survive not getting jobs.”
“This is a good point. What else should I know about you?”
Lacey looked up at the sky and got a raindrop in her eye. “Fuck…um…Despite what everyone assumes about me because I’m a teacher, I don’t want kids.”
“That’s good, because neither do I,” Sam said. “If we were actually dating, I definitely would have made that clear already.”
“Look at us. A match made in heaven.”
They walked in semi-comfortable silence for half a block before Lacey asked, “Would you have told me why your engagement broke up?”
Sam sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe?” He stopped so Daisy could pee on another tree. “Do you want to know?”
Of course she wanted to know. She’d wanted to know why for years. The tabloid versions of the story were salacious, and she’d wondered if any of the “close sources” were telling the truth.
“If you want to tell me.”
“We were young. It was incredibly intense, both emotionally and publicly. Maybe it was incredibly intense emotionally because it was intense publicly. People were invested in us like we were characters on their favorite TV show.”
Daisy concluded her business and they started to walk.
“I’d been a working professional for years by the time I proposed, so I thought I was ready. And, fuck, I just wanted to be loved and wanted by someone who knew me.”
The rain began to pepper their heads but Lacey didn’t dare mention it. Sam might stop if she interrupted to point out something as trivial as the weather.
“I found out we weren’t together anymore at the same time the world did. Adrienne was photographed without her ring on a sexy vacation with someone else who could further her career. It was her declaration of independence from me.”
“Did you ever find out why?” Lacey asked.
“I got some intel from mutual friends before we did our postmortem,” Sam said. “What I heard from our friends was that she’d wanted to break up for a while but the advantages outweighed the disadvantages. When we got together to talk, she said she felt a lot of pressure to be in a relationship with me, that she didn’t want to get married but didn’t feel like she could say no. Then the paparazzi swarmed the place, and when the articles came out about us possibly reconciling, I realized it was all a bunch of bullshit and a fucking set up. It really fucked me up.”
“Has she ever apologized for all of that? I mean, you were young. We all did stupid shit before our prefrontal cortexes were developed. Some of us,” Lacey pointed to herself, “have continued to do stupid shit. But is she sorry at all?”
“Well, I think the album I wrote to process our breakup and all of the stuff after kind of put the last nail in the communication coffin,” Sam said with a grim smile.
“Do you regret it?”
“Which part?”
“All of it.”
“Nah.” He turned his face skyward, letting a few drops land before wiping them away. “I got to learn my lesson young. Relationships, marriage, that stuff isn’t for me.”
“God, I wish that was me,” Lacey said. “I can’t learn my lesson to save my life. One loser after an another.”
“Present company excepted?”
“The jury is still out,” she teased. “I mean, I gave you a rim job and?—”
“What part of not bringing up my butthole in public wasn’t clear?” Sam tried to sound stern, but there was a hint of laughter in his voice.
Daisy sat down unexpectedly, and Sam stumbled before he realized the weight at the end of the leash was no longer in motion.
“Come on, Daisy,” he encouraged, and the dog lay down on the sidewalk instead. He tugged on the leash, but she would not budge.
“I think she’s done,” Lacey said. “Maybe she doesn’t like the rain?”
Sam sighed heavily and walked the few feet back to the dog and scooped her up in his arms, cradling her like a baby. “What kind of Pacific Northwest dog are you?”
“Maybe she needs a raincoat,” Lacey suggested as they started to walk back to the house.
“She lived outside for weeks.”
“Doesn’t mean she isn’t a delicate flower.”
“Delicate Daisy.” Sam shook his head. “What am I going to do with you?”