Chapter Twenty-Six #2
Sam's voice gets rougher. "You asked me to choose you. The fucked-up part is I already had. In every way except the one that required me to admit it."
I turn toward him on instinct. He doesn't look away.
"I don't want easy," he says. "I want you.
I want the work that takes you places I don't like and the calls at terrible hours and the weeks when you're buried and I barely get you.
I want to figure that out with you instead of acting like the only relationship I can handle is one that never asks me to change anything. "
Months ago, I told him nobody was asking anybody to rearrange their lives. I remember exactly how quickly he'd agreed.
Sam does too.
"I was wrong about that," he says. "I don't want you doing all the rearranging. I don't want you deciding what parts of your life will fit around mine and quietly cutting off everything that doesn't."
My throat tightens.
"I want to rearrange too."
I stare at him.
He shifts on the bench, but his eyes stay on mine. "I want to build around you too."
The name of the bar comes back to me then, one word handed over with coffee in his kitchen.
"You did give me one thing."
Sam's brow pulls together. "What?"
"Smoke. You told me the name before anybody else knew it. Before the plate. Before Pilsen was anything but an idea." My throat tightens. "You gave me one thing that was mine before I ever asked, and you never knew it counted."
His expression changes slowly. "Did it?"
"It did. It still does."
Sam looks down at his hands. When he looks back, he doesn't reach for the moment like it cancels everything else. He just nods.
There are sentences you wait so long to hear that eventually you stop imagining what they will sound like. I had stopped imagining that one.
Sam breathes out slowly. "You're the woman I love. You're the person I want to come home to. That's what you were asking me to tell you."
For months, I thought hearing him say it would fix something. Instead, I believe him completely, and I am still sitting here with a broken heart.
Sam doesn't ask what that means. He doesn't reach across the space between us or try to make the fact that I believe him useful.
He waits.
I don't mean to tell him about London.
The words come anyway.
"I turned it down."
His brow pulls together. "Turned what down?"
"London, initially."
His body goes still.
I pull my gloves off because my hands have suddenly become too warm. "Anna called me while I was at your apartment. You were asleep, so I took the call in the hallway."
Sam stares at me.
"Before everything happened with us. Anna offered me the O'Keefe tour here in London. The office possibility too."
His mouth parts slightly.
"I told her no."
Nothing moves in his face for several seconds.
"It was in your apartment one morning. I think the call lasted maybe five minutes. I got back to bed with you afterward, and you put your arm over me without waking up."
Sam looks down at his hands.
I keep going because stopping would be worse.
"I lay there thinking about London and Chicago. The job I'd been working toward for years and the life I thought I was building here."
My voice threatens to go. I make it behave.
"I chose Chicago."
Sam closes his eyes.
"The reason was you."
His hands come up over his face.
My first instinct is immediate and humiliating: move closer, touch him, make this easier. Sam lowers his hands before I act on it. His eyes are red around the edges, and he doesn't ask me to fix that either.
"Fuck."
"Pretty much."
He looks away toward the path. "You turned it down for me, and then I sat downstairs telling Bex you weren't building anything around me."
The memory still has teeth.
"Yes."
His jaw flexes.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
The question comes quickly, but Sam catches whatever follows it before it leaves his mouth. He sits with it for a moment, then looks back at me.
"I want to know," he says. "But I'm not asking because you were supposed to tell me the right thing and prevent what I did."
The distinction loosens something inside me.
"You can ask."
He asks it again. The same five words. Not the same question.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
I rub my thumb over the seam of one glove. "Partly because I didn't want it to become a debt. I made the decision. I didn't want to tell you I'd given something up and have that sitting between us like you owed me."
Sam listens without interrupting.
"And partly because I thought you should understand without me saying it."
His eyebrows draw together slightly.
"I thought if you mattered enough for me to make that choice, then you should be able to see that I was making it."
Saying it aloud makes the flaw impossible to ignore.
"I expected you to understand something I never actually told you."
Sam nods slowly. "You should've told me."
"I should have."
"And I should've asked."
I look at him.
He leans forward, forearms against his knees. "I liked that you didn't ask much from me. I told myself it meant you didn't need anything instead of finding out whether that was true."
My chest tightens.
"I should have told you about London. I should have told you sooner that I wanted more from us."
"Yes."
The certainty in his answer almost makes me flinch.
Then he adds, "And none of that changes what I did when you finally asked me."
I hold his gaze.
"No."
"You asked me directly. I had the answer. I refused to give it to you." His fingers tighten together.
I breathe out slowly. This is what I needed.
Not for Sam to tell me I had done everything perfectly. I hadn't. I expected him to infer things I should have said. I made enormous decisions privately and called it independence because admitting I needed him felt far more dangerous.
The silence between us stretches, but neither of us rushes to fill it. Sam looks toward the path while I put my gloves back on, taking more care with the fingers than necessary.
Eventually I ask, "So what happens now?"
His mouth tightens slightly. "I don't think another apology is going to help."
"I believed the one you gave me."
"And you still left."
"Yes."
He nods. "Then I have to do something besides apologize."
I wait.
"I can tell you I'm going to speak before you have to drag things out of me. I can tell you I'll ask what you want instead of deciding you're fine with whatever I'm willing to give." He rubs one palm over his thigh. "But telling you any of that once doesn't make it true."
My eyes stay on him.
"You asked me for one thing at Vibes that was yours," he says.
I remember.
"Something that made you know you weren't standing in the same place as everybody else."
My throat tightens.
"When you walk into Vibes, I come to you."
I study his face. "I don't need you dropping everything every time I walk into a room."
"That's not what I'm saying."
"Then say what you are saying."
Sam glances down briefly before answering. "I stop making you live on what happens when nobody else can see us. I stop being one person with you upstairs and another person when we're downstairs."
That one finds the exact bruise.
His voice quiets. "I can tell you what I intend to do differently. Then I have to do it enough times that you don't have to wonder whether it was just something I said because I was scared of losing you."
He pauses.