Stranger (17 page)

I had to look away for a minute to stop the sense of spinning. When I looked back at him, he was still grinning. “Do you have a reason for being here?”

“I’m hungry.”

I sat back in my chair and ran my hands along the smooth, polished wood of its arms.

“And?”

“I figured, seeing as how it’s almost dinnertime, you might be hungry, too.”

“I don’t eat dinner at five, Sam.”

He leaned forward a little bit. “We can wait until five-thirty.”

I glanced at the clock, thinking fast, trying to decide what I wanted to say. “I don’t know.”

“What’s to know?” He settled back in his chair, one leg crossed over the other. “You, me, food. No biggie. You’re acting like I got down on one knee and proposed.”

“Pffft.” I waved a hand. “No, I’m not.”

He pointed at me with one finger. “You are. But relax. I’m only here to eat.”

“I don’t have any food here,” I protested, but feebly.

“Grace?” Shelly knocked on the door again. “There’s a delivery for you.”

Sam leaped up so fast Shelly looked startled and backed away. “I’ll get it.”

I was already out of my chair and following. “What did you do?”

“I hope you like Chinese,” he said over his shoulder as he eased past Shelly and headed for the back door by her desk. “Hey, man. Thanks.”

I watched him take the bags of take-out food and pay the deliveryman, and I ignored the looks Shelly was trying to give me. Sam turned, food in hand. Shelly nudged me with her elbow.

“You can go,” I told her. “See you tomorrow.”

“Oh, but don’t you need—”

“G’wan, get out of here,” I told her with a joker’s smile on my mouth. “It’s late.”

It wasn’t late, it was just a few minutes past five, but Shelly nodded and gathered her things from her desk. Sam had buried his nose in one of the bags and was sniffing loudly and giving a series of contented sighs.

“See you tomorrow,” Shelly said with wide eyes.

Neither Sam nor I looked at her as we both said goodbye at the same time. She left. He stayed. I fidgeted from one foot to the other, flummoxed.

“Your place?” Sam pointed at the ceiling. “Table, chairs, plates?”

“Do you always invite yourself to dinner?” I crossed my arms over my chest.

Sam gave me an unabashedly unashamed grin. “Yep. But c’mon. You’re not going to turn me away, are you? Not with a container of General Tso’s chicken in my hands.”

My favorite. My stomach rumbled, loud enough for him to hear it. I put my hands over it.

“Damn you, Sam. Damn you.”

He wafted the smell of General Tso toward me. “It’s whispering your name, Grace. Can’t you hear it? Eaaaaat me.”

“So long as it’s the food and not you saying it.”

Sam stared, then put a hand over his heart. He frowned. “You wound me, Grace, with your unjust accusations of ulterior motives. I’m tempted to take my chopsticks and go home.”

I kept my arms crossed. “Uh-huh. Let’s see you.”

Sam looked around the empty hall, then back to me. “But then my food would get cold.

Besides, I have way too much. You don’t want me to get fat, do you?”

I looked him up and down. He didn’t look like he’d ever carried an extra pound.

“Somehow I doubt that’s a problem.”

He jiggled the bags in my direction again. “Okay, so maybe you can resist me, but how can you resist a free dinner?”

I turned, crooking my finger over my shoulder as I headed for the back stairs to my apartment. “All right. When you put it that way.”

He caught up to me at the stairs and we both paused. The crinkling plastic bags filled the space between us, but I still felt as if he’d pressed up against me. Sam looked down at me until I climbed the first three steps and could look him in the eye.

“Thanks for taking such good care of my dad,” he said quietly. “Consider this a thank-you, if you don’t want to think of it as anything else.”

How could I have resisted him after that?

In my apartment I took out mismatched plates and flat-ware and cartoon-character glasses from the burger joint’s promotion of some summer blockbuster. I set my small table while Sam juggled cartons and packets of sauce.

“This is…cozy,” he said from his seat in the chair closest to the kitchen’s far wall. He had about two inches of space behind him and the same on the two other sides.

I laughed as I slid into the table’s only other chair. It didn’t have much more room. “Most of my guests aren’t as big as you are.”

Sam paused in dripping duck sauce on his plate of rice and gave me a lifted brow. “Uh-huh.”

I mirrored his look. “Tall, Sam. I meant tall.”

“Sure.” He shot me a grin and stretched out his legs to the side. They reached all the way to the kitchen cabinets, and he tapped the wooden doors with the toe of his battered boots. “Big works, too.”

There wasn’t any way to deny that we’d had sex, and it seemed silly pretending. I stirred my portion of noodles with my chopsticks, thinking of what to say about it that wouldn’t sound like a come-on or an insult.

“Look,” I said at the same time Sam said, “Grace.”

We both stopped. Sam gave a nod, letting me go first. I wanted to look away, but I forced myself to look at him.

“About that night.”

He waited.
Still Life with Chopsticks.
The dark arches of his brows were so perfect I wanted to run my fingertips over them. I wanted to kiss him.

“I don’t want you to think that I just…do that.” Although I had. Although I did.

Sam’s mouth curved the tiniest bit at the corners. “I don’t want you to think I do, either.”

We looked at each other another moment before he shrugged and bent to his food like we’d had an entire discussion and come to a conclusion. I wasn’t convinced, but I wasn’t sure what else to say about it. I ate, too, and the food was so good I had to sigh.

“I haven’t had Chinese in forever,” I told him.

“That’s like a sacrilege. How can you not, like, eat Chinese at least once a week?” Sam offered me an egg roll.

“Uh, a little thing called money?” I took it and cracked it open to let the steam out and drizzled duck sauce into the shredded cabbagey goodness inside.

“Oh, that,” Sam said, scoffing. “Money.”

“It’s easy to laugh about if you have a lot of it.” I crunched into the egg roll’s crispy outer layer.

“If I had a lot of money, would that make you like me better, or worse?”

I looked up, thinking he must be joking, but he looked serious. “Neither.”

Sam lifted a chunk of chicken with his chopsticks and used it to point at me. “You’re sure?”

“Why, Sam? Are you a secret millionaire?” I looked to the side, at his boots. “Because I have to say, if you are, you’re really good at keeping it a secret.”

He laughed and drew in his legs, bumping the table. “No. I’m pretty poor, actually.

Starving artist and all that.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “I’m wallpaper.”

I took a minute to chew before I let on that I had no clue what he meant by that. “Huh?”

“Wallpaper.” He waved around the room. “People go to dinner, they eat and talk. They don’t pay attention to the wallpaper. Or to the dude playing ‘Killing Me Softly’ on the guitar.”

“I think if I heard a dude playing ‘Killing Me Softly’ on the guitar, I’d pay attention.” Not to mention if said dude was Sam, who couldn’t possibly ever blend into the background.

Sam shook his head and looked mournful. “Not so, I’m afraid. Nobody ever says anything about the fact I change all the words, so I’m positive nobody’s ever listening.”

I laughed at the mental image of Sam bent over his guitar, crooning different lyrics to songs while all around him people drank wine and flirted with everyone but him. Sam grinned and sat back to tip his beer to his lips. I watched his throat work as he swallowed.

“You play guitar for a living?”

“A living? Arguable. Do I earn money doing it? Yes.”

“Wow.” I made an impressed face.

Sam laughed. “Yeah. My family’s so proud.”

The way he said it made me think that wasn’t quite true.

“Do you think you’ll get a record deal or anything?” Not being particularly creative myself, it was pretty cool to meet someone who was.

Sam laughed again, this time louder. “Oh…right. Hey, you never know. I’d be satisfied getting paid to play for people who actually listen to me sing, at this point.”

“Someday,” I said, because it’s what you said to people when they shared they had a dream.

“Yeah,” Sam answered. “Someday.”

We both drank in silence for a moment.

“So, about that night,” Sam said, catching me looking. “If you don’t really do that, and I don’t really do that, how come we both did it?”

I couldn’t tell him that I’d thought he was my rentboy. “I don’t know.”

“Fate?” He drank more beer, this time with an eye on me.

“I don’t believe in fate.”

“Luck?” He grinned and licked his lips and set the bottle on the table.

“Maybe luck. But, Sam…”

He held up a hand to stop me, and I did. He unfolded himself inch by inch from his chair and gathered up the garbage while he talked. “You don’t have to say it. You don’t want a boyfriend. You’re not into dating. You just want to be friends.”

I didn’t get up to help him, but he didn’t really look as if he needed any. He even found my trash can in its hidden place beneath the sink. “Why would you assume I’d say that?”

Sam washed his hands at the sink and turned. “Were you going to say something different?”

“No.” I shook my head and stood, too. “I just didn’t like that you assumed you knew what I was going to say.”

We smiled at each other. Sam looked at the clock, then back at me. “We can be friends.”

“We can?” His answer surprised me. Disappointed me, too, a little, I’ll admit.

“Sure.” Sam grinned. “Until we can both no longer deny our unquenchable passion for one another.”

I laughed. “Is it time for you to leave?”

“Yes.” He straightened. “I think it is.”

I walked him to the front door, and down the stairs to the back door of the funeral home, where he hesitated on the covered porch and I pretended my heart wasn’t jumping into my throat.

“This is kind of a pain,” Sam said.

I thought he meant the kiss thing—should he or shouldn’t he? I was half voting for should, even though I knew it should be shouldn’t. “What?”

“The door. You don’t have your own entrance?”

“Oh. I do, but I don’t use it. When I started renovating the apartment I blocked off the door with the shelves in the kitchen. It’s safer that way.”

Sam nodded, solemn. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Well, good night, Grace. Thanks for letting me invite myself to dinner.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, and meant it. “We should do it again.”

“Sure. Friends eat dinner together, right?”

I nodded and before I could stop myself, I reached to run a finger along the line of buttons on the front of his shirt. “Sam?”

“Yeah?” He shifted, just barely, when my finger stopped somewhere in the middle of his chest and I pulled it away.

“About that unquenchable-passion thing…”

He smiled and jumped down the two steps to the sidewalk. “Just think about it.”

I sighed and watched him walk away. “I’m thinking about it.”

“
Keep
thinking about it!” he called over his shoulder, and I went inside and closed the door.

I thought about it, all right. Too much. It was pretty much all I thought about for the next week, but Sam never called. Not that he’d promised to call. Just that after he’d showed up with dinner, I’d expected him to. Shit. I’d
wanted
him to, and that pissed me off more than the fact he didn’t.

I could have tracked him down, but I refused. I didn’t need Sam’s long legs, his shaggy hair, his big, big hands. I didn’t need his smile.

I didn’t need Sam, period.

Sunday dinner was neither worse nor better than I’d expected it to be. My niece and nephew romped with my parents’ dog, Reba, a purebred hunting spaniel they’d rescued a few years ago. My sister helped my mom in the kitchen while my dad and Jerry lounged in front of the television in the den. I wasn’t needed in the kitchen where the two whirling dervishes of domesticity tackled the cleaning of dishes with the precision of an army heading to battle. This left me with nothing to do but climb the stairs to the room I’d shared with Hannah.

I meant to look for some old photo albums. My best friend Mo was getting married next year and I wanted to give her something different than just a set of wineglasses or a gravy boat. I looked around the room, which had once been papered with posters of rock stars and unicorns but now featured plain green walls hung with prints of flowers. The twin beds were the same, covered now in matching comforters with a battered nightstand between them. This was where the kids slept when they spent the night.

I still had junk here, in the crawlspace. I tugged open the small half door set into the wall.

Craig and Hannah had both teased me that “Big Jim” lived in there, and that if I didn’t do what they wanted, Big Jim would come out and get me. I’d gotten them back by hiding there one night and making scratching and moaning noises that had scared them both so badly they’d called the police. I was pretty sure Hannah still hadn’t forgiven me for that little stunt.

The cubbyhole was frigid in the winter and sweltering in the summer, which made it not the best place to store precious things, especially not in cardboard boxes. I dragged the three with my name on them out into the center of the room. I remembered packing them up before I left for college, labeling the contents of each. I remembered thinking how important it was to save these memories of childhood and high school. Test papers, notes passed in class, a journal in which I’d written the name of my first crush.

They didn’t seem so important now, not even the collection of plastic Smurfs that tumbled out of their disintegrating shoe box. I lined them up. Smurfette, Brainy, Handy. My favorite was the little Smurf lifting a beer to his happy grin. Him I tucked into my jeans pocket, but the others I divided into two piles to give to Simon and Melanie.