Chapter Twenty-Three
Autumn
Sam texts me the address at eight-thirty.
It's a coffee shop in Pilsen, small enough that when I walk in at ten there are only six tables and one of them is occupied by a woman working through a stack of papers with three different highlighters.
Sam is at the table farthest from the door.
He sees me before I finish taking off my sunglasses. His chair scrapes lightly against the floor when he stands, and for a second we both seem to forget that standing has not solved the problem of what to do with our hands.
"Hi."
"Hi."
He gestures toward the empty chair across from him. "Do you want coffee?"
"I'll get it."
Something flickers across his face before he nods and sits back down.
I order at the counter. A few months ago, Sam would've had my drink waiting, made exactly how I like it. Part of me misses that. Another part is relieved to walk back carrying something I chose for myself.
Sam has both hands around a black coffee he doesn't appear to have touched. I slide my coat over the back of the chair and sit across from him.
There are plenty of things I could say to help us start: something about Summer, the lamp, London or the woman behind me aggressively highlighting what appears to be a divorce agreement.
I leave the silence alone.
Sam rubs his thumb along the cardboard seam of his cup before looking at me. "I was trying to figure out where to start on the drive over."
"How'd that go?"
"Badly."
He answers fast enough to make me laugh.
His mouth moves at one corner, but the smile doesn't stay. He leans back slightly and breathes out.
"I'm sorry, Autumn."
There's nothing attached to it.
No explanation waiting behind the apology. No qualification. He looks at me and lets the words sit between us.
My fingers tighten around my cup.
"What I said to Bex was cruel." Sam drops his gaze briefly to his hands. "I didn't think of it that way when I said it, but that doesn't change what it was. I made what we had sound small because I needed it to sound small."
Milk steams behind the counter. Somebody opens the front door and lets in a rush of cold air. Sam waits until it closes again.
"You had trusted me with months of your life by then.
You were sleeping in my bed more nights than you weren't. Your things were upstairs.
Half the time I started dinner because I expected you before you ever told me you were coming.
" He runs his thumb once over the side of the cup.
"Then somebody asked what you were to me, and I talked about you like none of that meant anything. "
The hurt is old enough that I shouldn't be surprised by it anymore.
"You made me feel stupid."
His head comes up.
"I thought I understood what was happening between us. Then I heard you talking to Bex, and suddenly I was the woman who had invented a relationship in her head while the man involved thought it was convenient sex."
"You weren't."
"I understand that now."
"I need you to hear it from me anyway." He shifts forward, his forearms settling near the edge of the table. "You weren't wrong about us. I was."
My eyes burn, but I keep looking at him.
"I wanted you upstairs. I wanted you at Vibes.
I wanted your shoes under my furniture and your bag in the way and your shit in my bathroom.
" His fingers flex once against the cup.
"I wanted the life we were already having.
Then I went downstairs and acted like wanting all of that didn't mean anything because saying it meant something scared me. "
I take a drink mostly because I need a second before I answer.
"You didn't know I heard you when I came upstairs that night."
"No. Bex told me after you left."
"And once you found out?"
Sam looks down at the table, then presses both palms flat against it.
"That's the part I'm having the hardest time living with. You heard me reduce the whole relationship to something easy. You still came upstairs and asked me directly. You gave me a chance to say something different to your face."
His voice drops.
"And I didn't."
My throat tightens.
"I understood enough of what you were asking. You wanted me to tell you what you were to me. Whether I wanted you. You wanted something real that belonged to us instead of having to keep figuring me out from everything except my mouth."
His eyes leave mine for a moment.
"I could have answered you. I chose not to."
That's a different sentence.
Not couldn't.
Chose not to.
"I'm sorry I made you walk out believing you had asked for too much."
For months I've replayed that night from every possible angle. Too angry. Too many questions. Wrong timing. Maybe I should have started smaller. Maybe if I'd stayed calmer or given him one clean thing to answer instead of everything I'd been carrying, he would have found his way through it.
Sam just took all of those versions away from me.
It hurts.
It also feels strangely good to put them down.
I wipe beneath one eye before the tear gets any farther. His fingers curl once against his knee, but he stays on his side of the table.
"Keep going."
He exhales through his nose. "The envelope."
That pulls the beginning of a smile from me. "That fucking envelope."
"Yeah. That fucking envelope."
Sam reaches for his coffee, takes a drink and immediately grimaces.
"Cold?"
"Disgusting."
"You've been sitting here too long."
"I got here early."
"How early?"
His eyes narrow slightly. "That's classified."
I shake my head, and the pressure between us loosens for a few seconds.
Then he puts the cup down.
"I opened it."
My hands close around my coffee.
"And?"
"I used your plan."
I watch his face.
"It worked."
There's no triumph in the admission. If anything, he looks faintly embarrassed.
"I called him. The whole thing took about four minutes."
I stare at Sam. "Three years."
"Pretty much."
"For four minutes."
His mouth twists. "Wasn't my finest moment."
Despite myself, a breath of laughter slips out of me.
Sam looks down at his coffee. "He signed. Then a few days later he showed up at Vibes with the originals."
I lower my cup. "He came to Vibes?"
"Yeah. First time I'd seen him in three years."
That takes a second to absorb. "Why did he come?"
"I think he wanted to apologize to my face." Sam drags his thumb along the edge of the lid. "He tried."
"And?"
"I wasn't interested."
There's something very Sam about how flatly he says it. I can picture him standing behind that locked door with three years of anger between them and absolutely no intention of making the other man feel better about any of it.
"What happened?"
"Not much. He handed me the papers. I was ready for him to leave." Sam shifts in his chair. "Then he looked past me into Vibes."
I wait while he turns the cup slowly between his palms.
"He asked if I built it. Asked if I had a partner. When I told him no, he said he should've guessed."
"Why?"
"I asked him the same thing." Sam looks down at the table for a moment. "He said I'd always taken everything on myself. Before our place. Before any of what happened with him and Elise. If something needed doing, I usually did it before anybody got the chance to help."
There's no affection in Sam's face when he talks about him, but the anger is different now. Older. Less sharp around the edges.
"He wasn't trying to make some point about me," Sam says. "He knew me a long time. He remembered something I didn't."
I turn my cup between my hands. "Which was?"
"That I was doing this shit before I had anybody to blame for it."
His eyes meet mine.
"I spent three years treating what they did like it explained everything about who I am now. It explains some of it. A lot of it, probably." Sam rubs his palm once over his beard. "But I was already the guy who would rather handle something himself than ask somebody else to carry it."
He pauses, his fingers settling against the cup again.
"What happened didn't create that. It just gave me a damn good reason to stop questioning it."
I sit quietly across from him.
This is different from hearing what Elise did. Different from another story about the business falling apart. Sam isn't telling me what happened to him.
He's telling me something he learned about himself afterward.
He watches my face for a moment before looking down at the table.
"That's what I kept thinking about after I opened your envelope. You did for me exactly what I spend my life doing for everybody else. You saw I was stuck before I asked and found a way to help."
"And you hated it."
"I hated how exposed it made me feel."
His answer comes without hesitation.
I wrap both hands around my coffee.
"I like taking care of people. I don't want to turn every decent thing I've ever done into evidence that I'm secretly fucked up."
"I never thought you should."
"But giving is easy for me." His shoulders shift under his shirt. "If I'm the one helping, I already know what I'm willing to give. I don't have to ask somebody for something and wait to see what they do with it."
He looks down at his hands.
"When you handed me that envelope, I was suddenly on the other side."
"And you punished me for it."
His eyes come back to mine.
"Yeah. I did."
The agreement hurts, but not in the same way denial would have.
Sam leaves it there for a few seconds before continuing. "After he signed, the financing cleared. I signed the Pilsen papers this week."
It takes me a second.
"You bought it?"
"I bought it."
Warmth breaks through before I can stop it.
"Sam."
His expression changes when he sees mine.
"You did it."
"I did."
For a few seconds, I am simply happy for him.
That feels strange after everything else sitting on the table between us, but I take it anyway.
"Congratulations."
His smile is small and real. "Thank you."
I take another drink. "Does it look the way you imagined?"
"Not yet. Right now it mostly looks expensive."
I laugh, and this time he does too.
Then his expression settles again.
"I've been thinking about what you asked me that night. About giving you one thing you didn't have to hear from somebody else."
My heartbeat picks up.
He notices.