It was the right thing to do even if it was the most uncomfortable option available, and I groused my way through the week on that point of frustration. I shopped for Christmas gifts (angrily), graded exams (no generosity to be found), practiced (only the ranty tunes), and dreamt up (bitchy) ways to handle the barrage of questions I’d get when I arrived in Jersey.
The saving grace was my time spent with Seraphina and Lucas. She was getting good with her One Direction acoustic guitar, and she consistently said ‘hi.’ I didn’t know the trauma that caused her selective mutism, and I probably wouldn’t. My sessions only provided an outlet to manage her emotions and express herself through a medium that made sense to her. That she could find solace in songs was the win.
Lucas and I worked through complex pieces, attempted some new approaches, and sampled some holiday music. It was something of a breakthrough, considering he preferred the hard lines of Beethoven, Bach, and Tchaikovsky. He didn’t smile when we played ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ but he didn’t immediately revert to the Fifth Symphony either, and that was progress for us.
His mother, Beth, even texted me this morning to say she’d overheard him playing ‘Jingle Bells’ before she got out of bed.
I was meeting Sam for dinner tonight at a tiny organic bistro near Porter Square, and I was determined to end all complaining. It was the first time we’d managed to connect in several days. He’d been tied up with unexpected issues on some of his projects, and I missed him.
We still talked and texted, and when I’d asked one too many times whether he was actually working and not blowing me off for a swanky club, he sent me a picture of himself in a hard hat with a dozen contractors poring over blueprints behind him. He’d been sending selfies with his texts ever since. Some were funny: his annoyed expressions when things weren’t going the way he wanted at jobsites, Riley’s coffee-stained pants, vague images from the Turlan project captioned “top secret.” Others made me want to run across town and throw my arms around him: his groggy, adorable face when he first woke up, his reflection in the mirror with a question about whether he was adequately spiffy for my tastes, his frown when he had to report he’d be needed for another late night.
He knew I was going home for the holiday, and he knew I wasn’t thrilled about it. We hadn’t gotten much beyond those points.
Sam was running late again, and I sat alone in the bistro, waiting with my glass of wine. It felt oddly sophisticated to be sitting in abistroand drinkingwine,but I wasn’t about to fight Sam on restaurants. He was particular about food, and I’d eat just about anything put in front of me.
He waved from the door, quickly shaking out of his coat and scarf before heading toward our table. Bending, he placed a kiss on my lips and sighed, his forehead leaning against mine. “Hi, Tiel.”
“Hi, Sam,” I whispered, edging forward for another kiss.
His finger traced the neck of my sweater dress, and I felt him smile against my lips. “You are so fucking gorgeous. What are you wearing under this?”
“Not much,” I murmured. He growled, his fingers pressing against me in a sharp, urgent manner. My hands on his chest, I pushed him toward his seat. “So which crisis were you solving tonight?”
He sat across from me but made a small production of adjusting himself in the process. “No crises tonight, actually,” he said. “I was at Lauren’s board meeting, and it ran a couple minutes over.”
“You werewhere?”
The words flew out and I watched as they cracked over him, the unintended anger and betrayal in my voice obvious as his eyes turned from playfully aroused to confused. “I’m on the board of directors for Lauren’s school,” he said. “I think I’ve told you about that.”
“You havenot,” I said, powerless to rein in my tone. I looked away, desperate to find some of the affection I had for Sam under the irrational jealousy I was feeling right now.
“Ihavementioned that she’s very happily married to my brother.” He shook out his napkin and draped it over his lap, focused on the place setting in front of him. “To me, she is a friend. Her, Andy . . . they’re the women in my brothers’ lives.”
“I understand that,” I said. “I do. I really do. But . . . it’s hard for me to figure out this whole family thing for you.”
We ordered and Sam gazed at me after the waitress left our table. He was quiet and cool, and I could almost hear him drawing down his words and placing them in a strategic order. “This isn’t about me, and I don’t think it’s about my family either. It’s just a convenient argument because the other explanation is a tad more complex.”
He reached across the table, his fingers circling my wrist. Our freckles lined up when his thumb stroked my palm, those big brown splotches, and I smiled.
“You might be right,” I said.
“You’re pretty cute when you’re feverishly jealous,” he said. “You’re all ‘I’ll cut a bitch’ and I just want to get you naked and lick your nipples and fuck you for five or six hours.”
I snorted, choking on my wine and laughing until tears streamed down my face. Sam shifted his seat closer, his hand moving up and down my back in large, serene circles while I recovered.
“Are we pretending that isn’t what’s happening right now?” he asked as I dried my eyes with his handkerchief. “Is that who we are tonight?”
I shook my head and tapped a fast, frantic segment of Paganini’s Caprice Number Twenty-Four on the table. “I didn’t mean to snap like that,” I said.
Our entrees arrived but Sam stayed beside me with his arm over the back of my chair. “You know I won’t do that, right?”
I nodded, but I didn’t know what to think. There was always this lingering doubt, the suspicion that he’d quickly discover I wasn’t as amusing or sexy or adorable as he once thought, and this would end. He’d be the next in a terribly long line of people who cut me loose over the years, and I’d survive like I always did.
He shared his recent construction woes while we ate, offhandedly mentioning a small, methodological difference of opinion that catalyzed a debate between him and his brothers. Then he rattled off a list of restaurants he wanted us to try when we visited Arizona next month, and it was quite possible I’d never seen him so excited about food before.
“So when do you leave?” he asked, edging the assortment of French macarons the waitress delivered with his coffee toward me.
I lifted the mint green cookie and ran my tongue along the middle where chocolaty cream peeked out. “Friday morning. Christmas Eve trains will either be packed tight or totally empty, but it will give me a chance to clean up my syllabus for the spring semester.”
