Chapter Twenty
Autumn
I'm waiting for the kettle when Sam's name appears on my phone.
I leave his name on the screen while the kettle begins to hiss behind me. There hasn't been anything from him since I left Chicago, and seeing it in the middle of my kitchen makes the room feel smaller.
I pick up the phone.
Sam: Autumn. I don't get to ask you for anything. I'd like to talk to you when you're ready. Whenever that is.
The kettle clicks off behind me. I read the message again.
There's no apology attached to it. No explanation of what he's figured out while I've been gone. No request that I give him five minutes, hear him out or tell him how I feel. He's asking for a conversation and leaving the timing with me.
Which is so close to what I wanted from him that I have no idea what to do with it.
I make the tea and carry it to the sofa, but his message comes with me. By lunch I can repeat it without looking. By dinner I've opened the thread enough times that I finally admit I'm not going to stop until I answer.
It still takes me ten minutes to type the lines.
Me: I'm glad you texted. I'm not ready yet. I'm not trying to punish you, and I'm not saying no. I just can't do this right now. I'll tell you when I can. Please let me get there.
My thumb hovers over send while I start looking for ways to make it softer. Something that tells him I miss him too. Something that makes sure he doesn't read not yet as never. Something that takes the uncertainty I'm handing him and makes it easier to carry.
I stop myself and send what I wrote.
His answer comes a few minutes later.
Sam: Okay. Take whatever time you need.
That's it. I wait anyway. Nothing else appears.
I set the phone beside me and finish my tea.
When I wake the next morning, sunlight is coming through the gap in the curtains and the phone is exactly where I left it.
For the next couple of weeks, Sam does exactly what I asked him to do.
He doesn't check in. He doesn't call. Summer never casually mentions that he asked about me, and nobody from Vibes suddenly develops an urgent need to know when I'll be back in Chicago.
I asked him to leave the next move with me. He does. I wish that made him easier to stop thinking about.
It doesn't.
The flowers arrive while I'm on a call.
I'm halfway through sorting out a problem with a Manchester interview when Gemma appears outside the glass with both hands pointing toward something behind her. A man from reception comes around the corner carrying enough flowers to make me lose the next sentence completely.
I hold up one finger and finish the call while he sets them on the corner of my desk.
By the time I hang up, Gemma is standing in the doorway.
"Do you want the room?"
"It's a glass box."
"I can still make people scared to come near it."
"I'm fine," I say, laughing despite myself.
She looks at the flowers, then at me. "Okay."
And because she's learned something since coming to work with me, she actually leaves.
I sit there for a minute before reaching for the small envelope tucked between the stems.
The card isn't in Sam's handwriting. Somebody at the shop took the words down for him, but I know they're his before I reach the name at the bottom.
I hope the tour is everything you wanted.
I miss you.
We weren't nothing.
Sam
I read the first sentence again. It's kind. That shouldn't matter as much as it does.
He isn't asking whether I'm happy without him or telling me he wishes I'd come home. He hopes the tour is everything I wanted it to be.
The second sentence is harder.
I miss you.
My eyes stay there for a while.
I miss him too. That's never been the problem.
Then I reach the third sentence again.
We weren't nothing.
I lean back in my chair with the card between my fingers.
I read language for a living. Most of my job is figuring out what somebody is trying very hard not to say, and Sam has given me a sentence built entirely around what something wasn't.
He can tell me we weren't nothing.
He still can't tell me what we were.
That bothers me because I've heard him do this before.
It's not that deep.
Now:
We weren't nothing.
Different direction. Same empty space in the middle.
I put the card on my desk and look at the flowers.
They really are beautiful. Hydrangeas, peonies, things I don't know the names of arranged by somebody who knows exactly what they're doing. They probably cost an obscene amount of money.
The first night I met Sam, he put a mezcal in front of me that I hadn't ordered because he'd watched me long enough to know I wanted one. Then he walked away.
That was Sam.
He noticed. He remembered. He gave people things that belonged specifically to them.
These flowers could have been sent by almost any man trying to fix almost any relationship.
That's what gets me. It isn't that I think they mean nothing to him. I know better than that now. Sending them probably took more from him than he would ever admit.
But money was never what I needed Sam to spend on me.
I wanted the part that cost him something else. I pick the card up again.
We weren't nothing.
He is closer. I can feel that. He still hasn't said it.
There's another part I can't quite ignore either. I asked him to let me get there, and for almost two weeks he did. The flowers don't demand an answer. There isn't a question on the card or a request that I call him.
But he still decided today was the day he would step back into the room.
Maybe he thought this didn't count.
Maybe it doesn't, exactly.
I still don't reply.
I put the card back in its envelope and slide it into my desk drawer. The flowers go into the kitchen because I'm not going to throw away perfectly good flowers to prove something to a man an ocean away. They aren't responsible for any of this.
Everyone enjoys them for the next several days.
By the end of the week, people have started taking pieces home until there isn't much left besides a few stems in one of the office jugs.
The card stays in my drawer.