Stranger (42 page)

My gaze followed his pointing finger toward a little boy wearing a stuffed steering wheel attached around his waist and running around a racetrack laid out on the floor. “Oh, yeah?

What’s his name?”

“I don’t know.” Simon shrugged, unconcerned, and headed back to the playground.

I watched him leap right into the game with a friend whose name didn’t matter, and I tried to remember what it was like to instantly trust every stranger who came along. I scanned the crowd of gamboling children, found Melanie and, satisfied, turned back to my book.

The story engrossed me, but my need for coffee raised my head. Only a glance, but my attention tore from the book and I let it close without the benefit of my finger to keep my place this time. Across the room, sitting at a tiny table meant for two, a man stared back at me.

Sam.

He saw me. I knew he did, because he’d been staring at me, but as soon as our eyes met he looked away. A moment later, a young woman with blond hair joined him. With her back toward me, I couldn’t see her face, but the low-riding jeans and tight T-shirt told me enough. She handed him a large cup and set one down in front of her. She spoke to him, and he answered, his eyes moving once more over her shoulder to meet mine.

That time, I looked away, back to the book on which I could no longer concentrate. I was more upset by the fact I couldn’t focus on the story than by the fact Sam was obviously not going to greet me. That, I understood.

It didn’t hurt my feelings.

It didn’t make me feel.

Oh, but it did, the fact we’d stared each other in the face, both knowing the other, and had said nothing. Not even a casual lift of our fingers, the sort of gesture you’d give to an acquaintance whose face you recalled while their name escaped you. He didn’t acknowledge me.

I didn’t acknowledge him. We pretended we’d never known each other at all, even as we stared and looked away like just looking at each other would burn.

We had danced together, eaten together, gone to the movies. We’d been naked and sweating with each other. I knew the taste of his skin and the way his face looked when he came inside me, and how his hand felt smoothing through my fuck-tangled hair.

We knew all that and still we looked and looked away.

I tried hard to focus on the book, but the words had been spoiled for me. I couldn’t read about lovers finding their way into each other’s arms. I blinked hard, and the tiny black letters swam viciously on the sea of their white pages, refusing to settle into words I could read.

Melanie came to the table next to drink from her bottled water. She chattered and I answered with a nod and a tight smile. She wriggled on her seat, telling me about the puppet show she was putting on with another girl.

“I have to go to the bathroom. You and Simon stay in the playground. Don’t go anywhere.” I kept my voice from sounding strangled, though I wasn’t sure how.

“Okay,” came her cheerful answer, and she headed back into the playground.

In the garish, jungle-painted bathroom, I splashed water on my cheeks again and again, not caring that I washed away my lipstick. I blotted my face with paper towels and stared at my face in the mirror. My cheeks still blushed pink. My eyes were too bright, the gaze bordering on frenzied, and I blinked again and again until I forced my expression into blandness. I wasn’t ready to leave the bathroom, but I couldn’t forget my responsibility to my niece and nephew, so I pushed through the swinging door into the corridor outside.

He was there.

At the end of the hall I could see the play area, teeming with kids, two of them belonging to me. I saw my table, my book propped unceremoniously against the napkin holder. And, through the plate-glass windows at the front of Mocha Madness, a thin and lovely blond woman holding a little boy by one hand while she stepped off the curb into the parking lot.

For one heavy second we looked at each other before something in me kicked to life and I forced a shiny-bright smile that made my face ache. “Hi.”

“Grace. Hi.” Sam looked hesitant, but this time he kept his eyes on my face. “How’ve you been?”

“Fine. Good. You?” The hallway in front of the bathrooms was not the best place for a reunion, but it was the only place we had.

“Good. Great.” He nodded.

I had thought pretending we were strangers had been bad, but making each other into nothing was worse. Because even if I was nothing to him, he wasn’t nothing to me. My smile melted into a frown, and Sam frowned, too.

“Hey—”

I waved a hand. “Shh.”

We stood and stared in the narrow hall stinking of chemicals with the sounds of hyper children echoing all around us. He only had to take one step to put his arm around me in a half hug that brought my face to his shoulder. My body stiff, my eyes closed.

It’s the same,
I thought as I drew in a deep, deep breath, smelling him.
It’s the same as it
always was.

He smelled the same. I felt the same, this close to him, the trickle of his breath caressing my ear and his hand a weight on my back. His knee bumped mine. It was all the same.

Everything and nothing. So much to say. So much that couldn’t be said, all packaged into the casual bump of a knee against knee and the smell of cologne.

I was the one who pulled away. The embrace had lasted no more than a few seconds, not even long enough for his touch to leave any lasting warmth. I stepped back and sidled past him, toward the main room. He stared after me.

“It was good seeing you,” I said. “I’ve got to get back. Simon and Melanie…”

“Yes. Right, sure. Right.” Sam nodded and followed me.

At my table he hesitated again, but I was already settling into my seat and picking up my novel. I looked up at him with a brief, tight smile and then back to the book in my hands, and though he paused for a few moments longer than was necessary, Sam didn’t try to get me to look up.

“Good seeing you, Grace.”

“Goodbye, Sam.”

I didn’t look up to watch him go, but I knew when he’d gone all the same.

At my sister’s house, Melanie and Simon ran off to the basement to battle each other with the crude plastic swords they’d used their prize tickets for. My sister offered me coffee. I don’t know who was more surprised when I burst into tears.

She poured us both cups while I sobbed out the entire story. Sam with the bimbo. How he’d smelled. How it had felt the same as it always had, that brief moment, and how much more I wanted to hate him now, and still couldn’t.

She listened without saying anything. The lack of advice was what finally dried my tears. I wiped my face and drank half a mug of now-cold coffee.

“Nothing?” I said.

Hannah shook her head. “Love stinks?”

“Not helpful.” I rested my chin in my hand. “I thought I was over it.”

She laughed. “You’ve been moping around for months. If you thought you were over it, you were fooling yourself.”

“But…I’m not sad all the time,” I protested. “I don’t even cry about it anymore! At least, I didn’t until today.”

“You don’t have to be sad to miss someone and wish they were still in your life.”

When the kids pounded up the stairs, each bearing a handful of stuffing from a pillow they’d dismembered, I braced myself for a Hannah explosion. Instead, my sister sighed and rolled her eyes, took the stuffing and gave them both pudding cups to take back downstairs.

Chocolate pudding cups.

I stared at her until she raised an eyebrow. “What?”

I took a plunge. “He’s been good for you.”

“Who?” I’d caught her, but she wasn’t going to admit it.

“Him. Whoever he is.” I poured more coffee from the pot and warmed my hands on the cup, but didn’t drink. “I don’t judge you, by the way.”

My sister laughed. “For what?”

“For what you’re doing. I understand. Just be careful, that’s all.”

Hannah blew out a long breath that ended in another laugh. “You think I’m having an affair.”

We both drank coffee while she laughed and I felt stupid. “You’re not?”

“No, Grace. God, no.” She laughed again and made a face. “I’ve been going to therapy.”

Many replies to this tried to burst out of my mouth, but I held them all back while my sister watched and looked amused.

“Go ahead, say it,” she told me. “It’s about time?”

“I wasn’t going to say that.” I’d been thinking it, though.

“It’s okay,” my sister said. “It’s true.”

“Does Jerry know?” I studied her again, this time without the assumption that lust had changed her. She still looked different. My perception of her reasons for changing were different, but that was all.

Hannah shrugged. “He does now. He didn’t at first. It’s made a big difference, though.”

“I can tell.” I watched her tidy the sugar packets in their small basket on the table. She hadn’t been replaced by a pod person, after all.

“Maybe you should call him, Grace.”

I blinked in surprise. “Your therapist?”

“No, dork. Sam.”

“Right. Sam.”

“Just call him,” my sister said.

But I couldn’t. Turns out, I didn’t have to. Sam called me at his usual time of half-past ass-crack o’thirty. I swam up from sleep with a thick tongue that stumbled on the syllables of

“hello.”

“Grace?”

“Timezit?” The bright blue screen of my phone pierced my eyelids but faded after ten seconds and put me back into darkness.

“You don’t want me to tell you.”

“No, I don’t. Hi, Sam.”

“Are you going to hang up on me?”

I thought for a second. “I don’t think so.”

Sleep was fading. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to cling to it, or just face the fact this was going to be another one of those nights. I pulled the covers up higher on my neck.

“Good.”

“Are you drunk?” I asked.

“No. Not at all. Do I have to be drunk to call you at—”

I coughed. “Ah, ah. Don’t tell me.”

“I’m not drunk. I promise. I haven’t been in more than a month.”

I believed him. “I miss you, Sam.”

“If I knocked, would you open the door?”

My eyes had started fluttering open, but when he said that, I sat straight up in bed. My heart pounded. I almost dropped the cell phone but juggled it back against my ear as I swung my legs over the side of the bed.

“Why don’t you try and find out?”

Five steps took me out of the bedroom. Another six to the kitchen. I waited, sleep gone, my insides bouncing.

He knocked.

I tossed the cell phone to the kitchen table and yanked aside the shelving. Boxes of pasta and some pots clattered to the floor, but I ignored them. I fumbled with the locks and cursed, but in another minute had the door open.

Sam.

“I didn’t want to scare you,” he said into the phone still held at his ear, though he was looking right at me.

“Come here,” I ordered, but didn’t wait for him to obey before I went to him.

His mouth tasted the same. So did his skin. He felt the same, too, under my palms as I slid them up his chest to take his face in my hands. When he put his arms around me, I was ready to jump, and he caught me.

Long legs, smoothly bunching muscles, a hint of stubble. His stubborn belt buckle and the layers of his shirts. Sleek, dark, feathery spiked hair. These were not new to me, either. Time hadn’t made him once again a stranger.

He carried me to the bedroom, where we fell onto my bed. I waited, breathless, for it to break, but the old wood creaked in greeting as Sam covered me with his body and his kisses.

Naked, we couldn’t get enough of each other. He kissed me from the arches of my feet to my earlobes, and when it was my turn, I paid extra attention to the places I’d missed most. The backs of his knees and insides of his elbows. The dip next to each hipbone. The bulge of his shoulder blades.

When Sam finally slid inside me, we both sighed. No fancy tricks this time. No kinky positions, no toys. Nothing but him and me.

We made love slowly, each thrust building the pressure until I came saying his name. A moment later, Sam murmured mine into my ear and shuddered. His hair tickled my cheeks when he buried his face into my shoulder. I stroked my hands down his back until he rolled off me, and then I pulled the blankets up over us both.

“Do I get a discount for repeat business?” I asked him sleepily.

“Fuck you, Grace,” Sam said fondly.

“So soon?” I tweaked one of his nipples, and he wiggled satisfactorily.

“Don’t we have to talk about stuff?” he asked.

“Talking’s your thing, dude,” I murmured, already dozing. “Save it for the morning,

’kay?”

Sam turned to spoon against me from behind. “I still love you.”

“I know you do.” I smiled. “You’ll love me in the morning, too. Go to sleep.”

But Sam wouldn’t sleep. “I’m sorry.”

I turned to face him. I loved the way he looked with moonlight painting the stubble on his cheeks. “Have you come back to me, or are you just here for an old-time’s-sake fuck?”

He kissed me so hard my lips bruised. “I’m back. Don’t ask about the music now. I’ll tell you later.”

“Okay.” I stroked his hair, then his face, and breathed in the warm, male scent of him. My knee nudged up between his and even though we’d only finished making love a short time before, he stirred against me.

“Do you still not want a boyfriend?”

“Depends on who he is, Sam.” I kissed the little divot in his throat.

“Me, Grace. I’m asking if you want me.”

“You’re really determined to talk about this now.”

Even my yawn didn’t deter him. “Yes.”

“Oh, Sam,” I said. “Yes. I do. Can we go to sleep now?”

He gave me another five minutes, just long enough for me to doze again, before he spoke.

“Do you forgive me?”

“I never blamed you,” I said. “Things happen. You taught me something.”

“It wasn’t that trick you do with your tongue,” Sam said. “You already knew that when I met you.”

I laughed. “Not that. I learned that I didn’t want to live without you, but that I could.”

“I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.” Sam kissed me again.

“It’s a good thing. A very good thing. Because before you, I was so afraid of being unable to live without someone, I could never live with someone.”