Chapter Five
Autumn
Sometime after two, I hear Sam on the back stairs.
I'm still on the floor with my laptop open when he comes in, jacket over one shoulder. He shuts the door and stops when he sees the coffee table.
"There are piles."
"There are."
"Should I be worried?"
"Only if you've recently become a twenty-five-year-old British pop star with a sponsor problem."
He steps over the press schedule. "Not that I know of."
"Then you're safe."
Instead of going to bed, Sam gets a beer and lowers himself onto the floor beside me. His shoulder settles against mine while he looks over the papers scattered around us.
"What's happening?"
"One sponsor wants Nix to apologize for something she isn't sorry for."
"Can they make her?"
"They can make things uncomfortable."
He picks up the sponsor list. "And you're telling them no."
"I'm telling them she can apologize for what she actually did. I'm not putting words in her mouth because they photograph better next to a corporate logo."
Sam looks over at me.
"You're protective of her."
"She's my client." I take the sponsor list from his hand and turn back to the laptop before he can point out the difference. He isn't wrong.
"Nix has been working since she was fourteen. There are a lot of people around her who are very interested in what she can do for them."
Sam takes a drink.
"So what does she want?"
The question stops my hand over the keyboard.
"Keep the tour. Stop apologizing for being nineteen. Have one person in the room care about the difference."
Sam nods once, like that settles something for him.
"Can you get her that?"
"I can try."
"Good."
That's it.
No argument. No second opinion. He stretches one leg out beside mine and stays there while I go back to work.
A little while later he gets up. I hear him moving around the kitchen while I'm rewriting the same paragraph for what has to be the eighth time.
"What are you doing?"
I look over my shoulder. "I'm almost done."
"Didn't ask."
The smell of toasted bread reaches me a few minutes later.
Sam comes back with cheese toast and makes room for the plate beside my laptop.
"You're bossy."
"Eat."
I do, because arguing takes more energy than I have left and because the cheese toast is hot and I'm starving.
Sam doesn't mention that.
He sits beside me until Anna finally agrees to send the revised language without another committee call. When her last message comes through telling me to sleep, I close the laptop and push it onto the coffee table.
Sam has moved to the couch. I climb up beside him and stretch my legs across his lap, and he catches one ankle while his thumb presses into the arch of my foot.
For a while, neither of us talks.
Then Sam asks, "Is she going to be okay?"
I know he means Nix.
"Eventually."
His hand slows. "That's not what I asked."
I open my eyes.
He's looking at me now.
"No. She's exhausted." I shift onto my side, still leaving my feet with him. "Everybody around her wants something. Nobody asks what she wants. They ask what she'll agree to."
Sam's thumb moves once beneath my ankle.
"Who asks you if you're okay?"
The question catches me hard enough that I almost laugh it away.
"Summer."
He waits.
"Jake."
"That's not what I mean."
Of course it isn't.
I look toward my closed laptop. "I have people."
"You have people who love you."
"They'd answer."
"That still isn't the same as calling them."
The quiet stretches until I finally give him the part he's asking for.
"I don't call."
Sam doesn't ask right away. His hand stays around my ankle, warm and loose, which makes it harder to pretend the answer doesn't matter.
"Why?"
I let my head fall back against the couch.
"Because somebody has to be fine."
"Why you?"
"I got good at it."
He doesn't say anything, so the rest comes out without much help from me.
"When something goes wrong, I know what to do. People figure that out. After a while they stop asking if you can carry something before they hand it to you."
Sam looks down at my foot, his thumb starting to move again.
"Very marketable skill," I say. "Got me a great apartment in New York."
"The one you're not living in."
I turn my head toward him. "You really don't let anything go."
"No."
He presses into the center of my arch, and whatever I was going to say next disappears.
My eyes close.
"That is unfair."
"I didn't do anything."
"You know exactly what you did."
His hand settles around my ankle again.
We stay like that for a while, close enough that I can feel the heat of him beneath my legs.
Then Sam says, "You could do it here."
I open my eyes.
"Do what?"
He doesn't look up.
"Not be fine."
For a second, all I can feel is his hand around my ankle.
I could ask what here means.
His apartment. Tonight. Him.
But asking would make him define it, and I know Sam well enough to know what happens then. He'd search for the safest answer he could give me and make sure he didn't promise an inch more than that.
I don't want him to make it smaller.
"Okay."
His thumb moves once against my ankle.
"Okay."
A minute later he stands and holds out his hand.
I take it.