Daniel never saw her as a small woman. She carried herself like queen of the giants, with a regal, unattached air. Standing well over five foot ten and asserting herself with the strength of a woman twice her size, she loomed above every person, every task, and every situation.
In his arms, her face between his hands and her eyes swimming and her body shaking and her breaths unsteady and her nose sniffling and the moon hovering over her like a colorless spotlight, she was smaller than he’d ever seen her. Or thought she could be.
A shuddering breath. Shaking her head, she detached herself from his grip and sank to the door of the car. When she patted the place beside her, he took it.
“My parents met when my dad was in New York,” she began. His imagination painted the picture. Bright lights. A beautiful woman sees a handsome man across a bar. She relaxes under his winking smirk. They talk over cocktails and smooth jazz. The image was a romantic one, but it blew away like smoke the longer Sam talked. “His first wife—Thomas’s mother—died in a car wreck. My dad was driving. And a few years later, he took this trip to New York and met a topless dancer…my mom… And promised to take her away, to a green, beautiful land and his castle.”
This story didn’t have a happy ending. Daniel knew full well, but knowing didn’t stop him from wanting one.
“Instead,” Sam clucked, a sarcastic, bitter edge biting the air, “he got her pregnant and addicted to cocaine before hightailing it back to England. I didn’t see or hear from him for twenty years.”
“Fuck.” Daniel shouldn’t have spoken. It wasn’t his place or his story. He couldn’t help it.
“And when I was fourteen, I got taken away from my mom. She was unfit to parent. Crack will do that to you. When I turned twenty, this long-lost brother I didn’t know I had showed up and said he wanted me to join the family. You know what happened the first time I met my dad?”
Daniel shook his head. The night had gotten no warmer since she’d begun her story, yet he felt his temperature rising with every syllable. Sweat formed on his forehead. He’d asked for this story, and he was going to hear it out.
“He said, ‘Stop smiling. Your face is fat enough already.’” She paused, staring straight ahead as though the movie of her life played out on a screen and she was simply narrating. Perhaps the distance bothered him the most. The trauma was bad enough on its own. Samantha’s dedication to pretending it happened to someone else in another lifetime made her story infinitely worse. “No one’s ever loved me, Daniel. And I’ve never seen love work. I’m speaking from experience. It may seem dark and depressing to you, but it’s safer.”
He waited for more. Wanted there to be more. Some better moral that never came. His unspoken questions were answered with cricket buzzes and tree shakings. He now knew her secrets, her entire sordid past, the building blocks of her humanity.Be careful what you wish for. Now that he knew… He wanted nothing more than to un-know. Love couldn’t be simple any longer. It couldn’t be she didn’t love him because he projected love onto her. It couldn’t be she needed to be with the rich guy or she didn’t like him. She’d had a broken heart before he even found her, and she didn’t want anyone else fucking with the pieces.
She gave him the terrible gift of understanding, with all of its dangers and pitfalls and sharp, cutting edges. Now, he wanted to change things. With one hand, he reached out and brushed his fingertips along her skin. He had to attempt twice before he managed to speak loud enough to be heard.
“What can I do to prove you wrong?”
She shook her head. The brown hair she always kept in a tight ponytail rustled in the wind, let loose from its tight prison.
“You’ll believe me sooner or later.”
Time stretched, and the stars moved in the skies. The pair leaned back on the hood and looked to the heavens, neither speaking for the longest time, even as she cuddled into him for warmth and he held her tighter to remind himself she hadn’t faded away completely.
“I have an idea,” Daniel said, crawling to his feet.
“What?”
Swallowing the pessimism, the hatred for her father and the life that dealt her such shitty cards, he focused on his mission, letting it spring his step and guide him. “They say dancing is the body’s language of love, but you don’t like dancing.”
With heavy feet, Daniel clambered into his car and reached for the tape deck. He’d put in one of his favorite mixtapes earlier, but it was important he fast-forward and pause at the right moment. This had to be perfect, and there was only one song to cure Sam right now.
“…Right.” Sam slid off of the car’s hood, suspicion evident in every syllable.
“But music is the food of love. So…” He resurfaced, having dropped the fast-forward button on the end of the previous song, giving it time to queue up the appropriate one. The dying croon of Bobby Darin faded into the night as he took Sam’s icy hands in his. “Let’s sing.”
“I don’t like love songs.”
“You don’t like songs at all, so it might as well be a love song. Just sing.”
The opening chords of the French national anthem played, jaunty and spectacular even in their tape-deck, shabby-speakers condition. Daniel conducted the invisible orchestra before him. The bigger a fool he made of himself, the more inclined she would be to join him.
He wasn’t sure why—maybe it was because her belief in the bedrock foundation of his entire worldview hung in the balance—but he couldn’t help but sense he was on the brink of something terribly important. And the more she tried to shut him out, the more firmly he believed it.
“I don’t know this song.” Sam folded her arms across her chest.
“Okay, the chorus goes…” He considered singing it, but time was short and the intro was barreling past him. No time to explain. Paul McCartney was only a second away from preaching the gospel of the Beatles. “Never mind. You’ll pick it up.It’s easy. You’ll catch on. One, two, three.”
Joining his voice with Paul, John, Ringo, and George, Daniel moved up behind the closed-off woman as she tried to fold herself into the dark night. His arms wrapped around her from behind, relishing her curves beneath him. He leaned in close enough so her hair tickled his nose as his singing breath tickled her neck. The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” began as it always did, with the simple repetition of one word.Love.
She shrugged him away, squirming out of his grip.
