Chapter Twenty-Six
Autumn
Ichose the park because I wanted somewhere I could leave without having to make a production of it.
A coffee shop has a bill. A restaurant has half-eaten food and somebody circling with a water pitcher. A hotel lobby would have been worse for reasons I chose not to examine. Here, if I decide I've heard enough, I can stand up and walk toward the gate.
That mattered when I sent Sam the address. It matters slightly less when I see him.
He's already sitting on a damp bench near the path, his forearms braced against his knees while he watches a woman attempt to negotiate a stolen stick away from a spaniel.
The grass is dark from last night's rain, and every few minutes a bicycle hisses over the wet path behind him.
There is no coffee beside him, no phone in his hand, nothing arranged to make waiting look casual.
He looks tired. He also looks like Sam, which is a profoundly unhelpful thing for him to look like right now.
I stop far enough away that he hasn't seen me yet and get the reaction over with privately. The dark curls that never quite behave. The beard. The shoulders filling out a black coat I have never seen before. His hands loose between his knees.
I have missed him. The thought comes without permission and offers no useful guidance whatsoever.
Then he looks up.
Sam stands immediately, but he doesn't walk toward me. His hands stay at his sides while I cross the remaining distance, and I notice that because I've spent months noticing every way he makes space for other people without ever seeming to think about it.
"Hi."
His mouth moves like he almost smiled. "Hi."
I sit first. Sam waits until I settle before taking the other end of the bench, leaving enough room between us that neither of us could touch without meaning to. Across the path, the spaniel finally surrenders the stick only to steal a glove from the same woman thirty seconds later.
Neither of us says anything for a while.
This should feel awkward.
Instead, it feels frighteningly familiar.
Sam rubs his palms together once and looks out across the grass. "I bought a notebook at the airport."
I turn my head. "That sounds like you are entirely prepared."
"It was supposed to be."
"What happened?"
"I wrote your name." He pauses, rubbing his thumb across one knuckle. "Then I wrote that I love you."
Every muscle in my body forgets its job and I freeze.
He doesn't look at me when he says it.
I stare at the side of his face. "You wrote what?"
"I love you."
The second one is quieter, but it is spoken this time.
My heart starts behaving like an animal trapped under furniture.
Sam breathes out through his nose. "Then I realized I was about to write the rest of it. All of it. I would've spent the whole flight getting every sentence right, and by the time I got here I'd have had something organized enough to hand you."
"That sounds rehearsed."
"Yeah." He glances over. "It also would've been performative bullshit."
My eyebrows lift.
"Not the words. The way I'd use them." He looks back toward the path. "I'd make it safe before I ever had to say any of it to you."
The cold finds the gap between my gloves and my coat sleeves, and I tug the cuffs down farther. "So what did you do?"
"Closed the notebook."
"That's eight hours of entertainment gone."
"I watched a terrible movie."
Sam looks down at his hands again. The ease that slipped in for those few seconds disappears with it.
"I don't have a speech."
"Good."
"I might fuck this up."
"That seems probable."
His mouth pulls briefly at one corner. "I'm serious."
"So am I."
He takes the hit without complaint, then shifts his hands together between his knees. "I need you to let me say it even if it comes out wonky."
My throat closes.
"I am not helping you."
"I don't want you to."
That matters more than I expected.
The last time we sat across from each other, I had watched him reach the edge of the sentence he couldn't say and wanted so badly to put words in his mouth that I had to keep reminding myself not to.
He'd spent months letting me do exactly that in smaller ways.
Filling silence. Interpreting him generously. Deciding what he probably meant.
Not today. So I wait.
Sam starts once, stops and scrubs a hand over his beard. When he tries again, he gets as far as, "What we had worked for me," before my stomach turns over.
His head comes up.
"No. Fuck. That's not what I mean."
"Promising."
"I warned you."
"You did."
He shifts on the bench, visibly irritated with himself now. "I liked what it let me get away with."
That is different. I say nothing.
Sam looks straight ahead while he works his way through it.
"I got almost everything I wanted. You upstairs.
Your shoes under my bed. Your coffee order in my head.
You wandering into the kitchen half asleep wearing one of my shirts.
I got to know when work was pissing you off and when you were pretending something didn't bother you because you didn't want to deal with it yet. "
His fingers lock together.
"And I didn't have to tell you what any of that did to me."
I turn a little more toward him. He keeps going without waiting for the question.
"You were there. You wanted me. You kept coming back. As long as I never said how much I wanted the same thing, I could tell myself I hadn't really put anything in your hands."
"What would I have had in my hands?"
His jaw shifts.
"Me."
The word is so simple I think I've misunderstood it.
Sam finally looks at me. "If I told you how much I wanted you, how much I wanted what we were becoming, then you could leave knowing exactly what it would do to me."
My throat tightens.
"I wasn't planning to leave."
"I understand that."
"Do you?"
"Yes." His answer comes without hesitation. "That's part of why what I did was so fucked up."
The wind pushes a strand of hair across my mouth. I pull it away and wait.
Sam looks down again. "I told you in Chicago that what happened with Elise didn't create all of this. That's still true. I was doing versions of it long before her. Taking care of things myself. Being useful. Making sure nobody had to do much for me."
His thumb works against the side of his hand.
"Then my wife and my business partner handed me a pretty convincing argument for never questioning any of it again."
There is no accusation in his voice. No suggestion that two people from his past are sitting on this bench with us.
He just looks tired.
"I let that become an excuse for things it didn't excuse," he says. "You weren't Elise. You weren't him. You didn't betray me, and you weren't waiting for the right opening to screw me over. You showed up for me over and over again, and I still made you pay for something you didn't do."
I look toward the path because looking at him suddenly feels dangerous.
A little girl in a red coat is throwing bread to birds while her father tries unsuccessfully to convince her that ducks do not need an entire croissant each.
Normal people doing normal things on a normal afternoon. Meanwhile, the man beside me has decided to excavate my rib cage with his bare hands.
"So when you told Bex we were casual," I say, keeping my eyes on the ducks, "when you said it wasn't serious and it wasn't that deep, what did you mean?"
Sam goes very still.
When he answers, his voice is lower. "I meant I needed it not to be."
I turn toward him.
"That isn't the same as it not being serious."
"No."
"You knew that."
"Yes."
It hurts even though I already knew.
Maybe because this is the first time he has given it to me without somewhere to hide inside it.
"I told myself if I kept it unnamed, I couldn't lose anything I had admitted mattered." His mouth twists without humor. "Turns out refusing to name something doesn't make it disappear when you wreck it."
I look down at my gloves.
Sam's hand shifts on the bench between us, not toward mine, just enough that I notice it.
"I wake up reaching for you more often than not."
I stop breathing properly.
He doesn't seem to realize what that sentence has done because he's looking at the ground again.
"I see things you'd like and pull my phone out before I remember I don't get to send them to you. I still make too much coffee. I can tell you what time it is here without checking because I've been doing the math in my head for weeks."
My eyes start burning. Absolutely fucking not. I blink hard and stare toward the path until the feeling backs down enough for me to trust myself.
Sam lets me.
He doesn't reach for me. He doesn't apologize for making me emotional or try to turn it into proof that I'm still his.
He gives me enough time to get myself under control, then rubs both palms over his thighs.
"When we talked in Chicago, you asked me what you were to me."
My stomach tightens.
Sam looks at me now. "I got all the way to the answer and stopped."
"You did."
"I don't want to stop this time."
The park keeps moving around us. Someone jogs past with headphones in. A bicycle bell sounds somewhere behind me. The woman with the spaniel has surrendered the stick to him now.
Sam's hands stay clasped between his knees.
"I love you, Autumn."
The words don't hit like I imagined. There is no rush of victory. No enormous relief that makes the last few months rearrange themselves into something easier. They settle into me slowly and hurt everywhere they touch.
Sam swallows. "I'm in love with you. I was in love with you when you were sleeping upstairs and leaving shoes under my bed.
I was in love with you when I sat downstairs and told Bex we weren't serious.
I was already there. I just kept pretending there was a difference between feeling it and having to let you know. "
My eyes burn again.
He keeps going, and I can't decide whether I hate him for it.
"You weren't casual. You weren't easy. You weren't someone I could take or leave. I needed to call it that because the truth was the exact opposite, and the truth scared the shit out of me."
I look down at my hands.