Chapter 24 Sam
Sam
Iknew something was awry when Jose and Barney were waiting for me on the porch of the Victorian Monday morning, both of them looking somber.
“What happened? Did someone die?”
“Did you, uh, happen to see the local news this morning, boss?” Jose asked.
When I shook my head, Barney handed me his phone with a wince. What the hell?
I looked at the screen and felt my heart stutter. It was the website for the Seattle newspaper with a story about last night’s charity gala for the symphony. I looked up in confusion, and Barney said, “Scroll down.”
Partway through the article was a picture of Livi.
She was wearing a stunning pink dress that hugged her curves, her long blonde hair falling over one shoulder in loose curls.
She looked beautiful. Sophisticated. Wealthy.
And she was not alone. She was holding the arm of a very handsome older man in a tuxedo.
He was leaning close to say something to her, both of them smiling. They looked happy.
I felt a stab of jealousy. She’d taken a date to the event? Was she seeing that guy too? Is that why we mostly only hung out on the weekends, because she was with him during the week? They looked awfully cozy to be just friends.
“We thought we should tell you before you saw them,” Jose offered. “But I’m sure it’s not what it looks like.”
My chest felt tight and for a second I thought I might pass out. But I took a deep breath, schooled my expression, and handed Barney his phone back.
“Okay guys, let’s get to work.”
Livi texted me as soon as I walked into my office. I ignored her message, and the one that came during lunch. When I got back to my apartment after work there was a bouquet of flowers on my doorstep, a gift from Livi.
Thinking of you, the note said.
Were these a guilt gift? I wondered. She’d never sent flowers before. Weren’t flowers the gift of choice for cheaters? And if Livi was bringing a date to the event, if it was innocent, why hadn’t she mentioned it?
Ignoring Leo’s cries for food, I went right for my laptop, doing a search for pictures from last night’s gala. There were several shots of Livi, always with the mystery guy very close to her. There was also a shot of the two of them with her parents, everyone smiling happily.
Livi hadn’t introduced me to her parents. She’d said it was because her mother would be rude to me and she wanted to spare me from dealing with that, but now I had to wonder. Did her parents even know she had a girlfriend?
I thought back to the story she’d told about how her mother had fixed her up with that guy Matt and she’d just gone along with it to keep her mother happy. Was her mother matchmaking again? Or maybe Livi was tired of me and wanted to date someone in her own social class again?
Something wasn’t right here, and the last thing I wanted in a relationship was drama.
I should have known it was only a matter of time before things went sour between us.
Livi was an heiress, someone who was inheriting an empire.
I’d inherited my mother’s tools. That said everything.
She was diamonds, and I was sawdust. This relationship always had an expiration date.
Before I could change my mind, I shot off a text to Livi.
Sam: This relationship isn’t working out for me. I’m sorry to do this over text, but I need to end things. Wishing you all the best.
Then I shut off my phone, put on my pajamas, and had myself a good cry.
The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that Livi wouldn’t cheat on me.
She’d been way too angry about her ex for her to do the same thing to me.
I believed she loved me, and I certainly loved her.
I’d been surprised by those cozy looking photos, but I was pretty sure they didn’t mean anything.
But seeing her at the formal event with all those wealthy people just reminded me of all the reasons that we weren’t going to work.
I would have stuck out like a sore thumb at that event, and I knew enough about Livi to know that she needed to go to a lot of those things.
I would hate it and eventually she would hate me.
There was no sense prolonging the inevitable.
We needed to call things off while we could part as friends.
By the morning I was questioning my decision. When I turned on my phone I had half a dozen messages from Livi, asking what happened, why we couldn’t talk about it, asking what she’d done.
I sent a brief text asking her to give me space, then headed to work.
For the next few days I threw myself into my job, coming early, staying late, having lunch in my office, and working harder than everyone else in my efforts to keep from thinking. At night I sat in my apartment with Leo, staring into space like a sad sack and missing Livi.
I wasn’t sleeping well and wasn’t eating a lot, so I knew I looked like crap.
Judging by the sympathetic looks I was getting, the guys were all feeling sorry for me, but they knew better than to say anything.
But Barney was too good of a friend to let me wallow in my sadness for too long.
On Thursday he came into my office right before lunchtime, settled in a chair across from me, and gave me a long look.
“Out with it. What happened with Livi?”
I had the impression that it pained him to have to ask, which made me appreciate him all the more. Barney was not a guy who wanted to talk about feelings.
“It’s not going to work out between us,” I told him.
“What did she say about the guy in the picture?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I haven’t talked to her. We broke up.”
“She broke up with you?” he asked in surprise.
“No, I broke up with her. Seeing those pictures reminded me that we are way too different for us to pursue anything long-term. She’s used to a certain lifestyle, a certain level of…
well, everything. People will assume that I’m with her for the wrong reasons, and sooner or later she’ll realize that I’m holding her back.
The two of us can never be happy together. ”
“Bullshit.”
I looked up at Barney’s forceful expletive.
“That girl loves you, and you love her. Everything else is noise. You’re not the first couple to come from divergent backgrounds, and you won’t be the last. One thing I can tell you from my own marriage is that you’ll get a lot farther looking at the things you have in common instead of the things that make you different. ”
My mind flashed over the past few months, all the good times we had, the way Livi had treated me so well, and I felt sick to my stomach. What had I done? I hadn’t even given her a chance to talk about my concerns. I’d shut her out, hurting her before she could hurt me. I was such a jerk.
“Has Livi ever made you feel like she was better than you or you were somehow a problem because you don’t come from a wealthy family?”
“No.”
I’d given her a hard time about being wealthy, but she’d never said a word about me being middle class or having a blue collar job. I was the one with the problem, not her.
“I’ve made a mistake, haven’t I?”
“A big one from the sounds of it,” Barney agreed. “The question is, what are you going to do to fix it?”
“I need ideas.”
Barney stood up and grabbed his lunch. “Let’s join the guys for lunch. You need to eat anyway, and maybe one of them will have a suggestion. It’s been way too long since I was in the dating pool.”
Normally I kept my personal life private but given that the crew had a front row seat for mine and Livi’s budding romance, I swallowed my pride and took Barney’s suggestion to talk to them.
I shared how I’d gotten freaked out by the photos of Livi, not because I thought she was cheating on me but because it reinforced that we came from such different backgrounds.
“So I called things off with Livi,” I ended.
“Wait, you broke up with her over text?” Jose said. “Man, that’s harsh. Any relationship over a month you have to dump them in-person, it’s like a rule.”
The rest of the crew nodded in agreement, making me feel even worse about how I’d left things with Livi.
“Yeah, it wasn’t my finest moment,” I said. “But the question is, how do I fix it?”
“You need a grand gesture.”
The guys started brainstorming increasingly elaborate grand gestures.
“You could have a mariachi band play outside her house,” Jose suggested. “Ooh, what if you make a video collage of all the fun times you had together and play it somewhere that she’ll see it.”
The suggestions got more and more outlandish until Barney finally spoke up.
“You know what? This is stupid. You’ve been broken up for what, four days? How about if you just go talk to her like a grown up?”
For some reason that sounded harder than a grand gesture.