26
“Go with her,” I hear Tennyson say to someone as I thunder down the street.
I’m on kind of a weird and shitty road. A lot of trees, a lot of overhang. Which way did Beckett go? I try to remember. He went right, I think, so I go left. I should still be careful…though I suppose he did look quite incapacitated.
I’m a fast walker at the best of times, and this is the worst of times. I’m about ten yards away when I hear someone jogging after me, and I know it’s him because who else could it be?
Sam grabs me by the arm and pulls me to a standstill.
He stands there for a couple of seconds, brows low and creased, and his eyes flicker over me like he’s scanning me, looking for broken parts and things to fix, and then he slips his hands around the back of my head and pulls me into his chest.
He holds me like that for I don’t know how long, but it’s me who pulls away because a car drives past and I think about how Oliver seeing me being held by his sponsor is the last thing I need right now, so I cover my face for a second and then shove my hands through my hair and start walking down the street again. Sam keeps pace with me in silence.
It’s strange, actually. I’ve spent years and years contemplating how it would feel for me to have someone defend my honor about all this, but now that it’s happened—it was bizarrely nonrestorative. I think I began to believe that if someone had known, if someone knew and they came to my defense, that it would have felt the same as being defended at the time, but it didn’t. It doesn’t—it couldn’t. And I really wanted it to. Like, I’m such a fucking idiot for thinking being saved by someone would undo being raped by someone.
It’s not how it works.
This realization makes me feel alarmingly stupid for a few seconds, because I knew better—or, I thought I would have. I don’t, evidently—but I should.
But then this floats through my head: You survive whatever you need to, however you can.
For many years, the idea of someone riding in on a white horse, defending and reclaiming my honor, was how I envisioned my redemption story playing out. The music would swell in the soundtrack of my mind and years of pain would fall off me like scales and I would be different because my savior made me feel clean again; but life, it seems, and hearts as well, are not that simple.
We walk a few blocks in silence and even still, all things about this night and day considered, I like the silence with Sam Penny. I like silence with most people, actually, but I like it with Sam for a different reason.
With everyone else, I like their silence because it talks to me. I trust people’s silences more than their words. I can read the world in silence. But Sam is different. Silence with him is silence. Silence with him is five fifteen in the morning before the sun’s up and it’s still dark but the birds are singing. He’s the heavy quilt you pull over your head when it’s too cold and too early to wake up. He’s the song no parent ever loved me enough to sing. He’s the way water runs and bubbles over stones in a stream. He’s a quiet mind.
I glance over at him and he stops walking.
He tilts his head, and his face looks pained. But I wonder if it’s pained for me. “Are you okay?”
I touch his face without even thinking—his lip’s all cut. His face is a bit bloody still. “Are you?”
Sam sighs and gives me a look, holding my hand to his face with his own. He shifts his head and kisses my palm. “Yeah.”
“I’m really sorr—” I start, but he shakes his head, pushing my hand away.
“No.” He shakes his head again. “Don’t ever be sorry.”
“But—”
“But nothing.” He frowns. “I would have curb-stomped his head if Oliver let me.”
I look up at him affectionately. “This is a new side of you.”
He rubs his mouth absentmindedly as he stares at me. “Yeah, it is.” He pushes some hair behind my ears. “Are you, though? Okay?”
I take a deep breath, then exhale it back out I as look up at him. “I thought that would feel better than it did.”
He gives me a sad smile, then sniffs a laugh. “I’m glad I got to hit him. I know it’s not about me…” He gives a tiny shrug. “But I’m really glad I got to fuck him up a bit.”
I squash away a smile.
“What can I do?” He tilts his head so we’re eye to eye. “Tell me, I’ll do anything—whatever I can do to make it better, I’ll do it.”
And I don’t know why the sincerity of his offer makes me tear up, but it does. I frown, but I’m not sad—I just don’t really understand. “You don’t even know me—”
“Yeah.” He pushes his hand through my hair, and in case you’re wondering, our interpersonal proximity is next to none. Ten inches between us? Maybe a little less? “But I’m trying to.”
His eyes flicker from my eyes to my mouth, back and forth. They can’t land, like bouncy balls in a tight corridor. My heart is pounding because he’s kept his hand in my hair, and he swallows heavily.
“Fuck.” He sighs as his head falls back. “Would it be so fucked up if I kissed you right now?”
I drop my chin a little and gnaw on my bottom lip. “No,”
Then he rushes me. Not that we were far apart to start with, but his mouth knocks me back with such force that I could be falling, and probably, definitely I am, but not in the literal way—but also maybe in the literal way? I can’t tell.
His hand that’s still tangled in my hair slips around to the back of my head, and his other goes around my waist. He pulls me tighter against him, and I don’t think I’m on the ground anymore.
He spins us somehow; it feels too smooth to be real. And I’m not being dramatic when I say for a few seconds it feels like I’m floating—and then, you know when you’re on a boat and it’s docking and it bangs into the pier, and it’s not bad at all, but it is a jolt that throws all your nerves?
I’m jolted.
Metaphorically, and also into a tree.
I die a little as his face bangs into mine, and I can feel him smile, his mouth on my mouth, before he goes back to kissing me, which I think for him, is quite a serious business.
I make a note to remember forever the way his face is a nice kind of scratchy, and how his mouth is moving like a curtain blows gently in the summer at magic hour, and how he tastes like Skittles and smells like Tom Ford, how it feels when his breath washes over me and makes me warm everywhere. His hands are firmly in their places, one locked on my waist and then one in my hair, which sometimes travels south to my face, but then it always journeys back.
I think because I’ve wanted to be kissed by him since the day I met him, I’m not initially thinking much about anything else—but eventually I realize that there are about a million places I want my hands to be right now and pinned between me and the tree isn’t one of them.
I pull them out and throw them around his neck, slipping them into his hair, and stop just being kissed and start to kiss him back.
This sets off a fire-and-powder chain of events. He kisses me more, so I kiss him more, so he kisses me more, and I’m worried for when he stops kissing me. How can I go back to a life where Sam Penny isn’t kissing me?
The great, deep stirring begins in the center of me, which some might call a longing, but I think of it more as an emptying. And it aches in my shoulders and my ribs because I know it won’t be filled tonight, and when he stops kissing me, which he eventually will because he has to because that’s how kisses work, it will tear me in two, because I think I’ve been waiting to know Sam Penny all my life.
And I should maybe be worried about spiders and bugs and that someone could see us, but I don’t think I’ll be worried about anything else ever again.