It would be the same way with Daniel. She couldn’t expect him to forgive her at all, much less quickly. The possibility that he would take her back was even more ridiculous. But the tiny, wavering hope wasn’t even possible if she sat on her ass and didn’t take this chance. The chance began with Angie. She’d never get anywhere near Daniel if she didn’t get through his best friend first. This was the necessary first step, no matter how much of her pride she had to swallow to be there.
“You look like shit.”
Not an auspicious beginning, but Samantha expected as much. After days of begging over the phone, Angie finally agreed to meet her in a park near her home so long as she brought two apple crumbles from the “posh bakery near your uni” as tribute. Upon her arrival, Samantha handed over the two boxes. Angie opened the bakery box and began digging in with a fork pulled from her pocket. Without the conventions of plate or napkin, she helped herself to the caramel-sweet filling beneath the sugar crust.
“Yeah, I haven’t been sleeping well,” Samantha admitted, running a hand through her greasy hair.
“Guilty conscience?”
“Yes.”
There was no point in hiding it. She was here to beg for Angie’s help. She would grovel and admit her every sin if it meant getting it.
“Cut to the chase.” Angie wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve, showing her distaste for Samantha in a single gesture. “Why are you here?”
“Because I’m in love with Daniel and I need to tell him.” Angie flinched as if the word vomit were actual vomit and had landed squarely on her nose. With no time to reflect on how liberating it was to finally confess it out loud, she pressed on when all she really wanted to do was go skipping around town screaming it at the top of her lungs.I’m in love with Daniel Best. I’m in love with Daniel Best. I’m in love with Daniel Best… And being with him is impossible. “And I need him to know how sorry I am. I don’t need him to forgive me or love me back. I wasted my chance, but…” She swallowed hard. “I have to tell him.”
“Okay.” Angie carelessly tossed her plastic fork at Samantha, sending pie viscera flying. She collected her things. “I don’t give a shit. You broke his heart. You fucked him up.”
“I know.”
“You’re a fucking bitch.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you have one soft bone in your body.”
Samantha was willing to listen to a lot of abuse against herself, all abuse she’d earned. She may have done a heartless thing, but she wasn’t heartless. Even if Angie didn’t help her, she didn’t want her walking away thinking she was.
“That’s not true,” she shouted to Angie’s retreating form. “I was hiding it.”
Angie paused. The British wind clung to them, tripping the hairs on the back of Samantha’s neck up and sending her wave after wave of the other woman’s anger and hurt. Anger and hurt Samantha understood.
“Why’d you do it?” she asked.
Sam gave her rehearsed answer. “Because I wanted love so badly I was blind when it was right in front of me.”
Angie shook her head.
“Bullshit.”
“Because I thought I wanted something else more.”
“Again.” Another wry laugh. “Bullshit.”
“Because I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
Music played in the edges of Samantha’s thoughts, the notes dancing and weaving and filling her with bitter, forgotten warmth that she would give anything to feel again.
“Of loving him.” But that wasn’t all, and they both knew it. “And getting my heart broken.”
“Of having done to you what you did to him?”
The appraisal of the situation was blunt, but she wasn’t wrong. Daniel was the best of men, the rare breed who hoped for love with everything he had in him. He was everything Samantha desperately longed to be and feared she would become, if only because she knew how easy it was to lose the things one cares about. Out of fear, she’d turned him into a shadow version of himself, or a reflection of her. Dark, lost,cynical—just like her.
“Yes.”
