by Nicole Nwosu
“Nothing.”
Caleb’s brown eyes widened like those of a squirrel with rabies. “Pupils slightly dilated. Macy’s kind of flushed. Sam, you have that stupid smirk on your ugly face and something new in your eyes. You two have that spark, spark, bang, bang thing going on.” Sam and I were unfazed by his description until he added, “Oh my God, you guys have kissed.”
Oh no. “Excuse me?” Sam asked.
“You locked lips, got to the first part before the action, you both had a spark, spark, bang, bang moment and you, Samuel Cahill, didn’t bother telling me.” Sam tried to intervene but Caleb continued, “Don’t pretend it didn’t happen. I’m not stupid.”
Neither of us said anything and Caleb groaned. “You guys aren’t going to tell me what happened? I could write a book about this.” He held up his familiar notebook. “I should call it something stereotypical and lame like The Bad Boy and the Tomboy.”
I made a face. “That’s basic. And neither of those labels are true; that title doesn’t even make sense.”
Caleb waved his notebook in front of the camera. “C’mon, this story isn’t going to write itself.”
Sam looked up above the screen. “Hazel’s grandmother’s here. We’ve gotta go.”
“I want to say hi.”
“Maybe later. Bye.” He ended the video chat and we both exhaled loudly.
“When you said this relationship would remain only between us, you definitely didn’t mean Caleb, right?”
Sam sent me a dry look and I headed back to the living room with my ice cream and phone. “Caleb’s not going to say anything,” Sam assured me. “Find a movie.”
Five minutes later, we were eating ice cream and talking together. The sound of the movie was drowned out as we talked about anything and everything. About different soccer (football) teams he thought were bad and could use a trade. About the stupid ideas that Caleb had cooked up for reality shows. The movie played in the background as we chatted the night away, eating the lasagna. Eventually, it got late and I yawned. Sam stood, and was collecting the plates when the front door opened.
“Macy?” Nonna yelled.
“Here!”
Nonna entered the living room, Justin right behind her.
My brother plopped down next to me on the couch, grabbing the remote to flick through channels. “It’s pouring out there.”
“What did you do today?”
“Emma and I hung out then her dad dropped us off at Lucy’s. You missed a mean game of Monopoly.”
“We’ll play tomorrow,” Nonna promised as Sam came out of the kitchen. “Sam! Did you two have a good time today?”
“Yeah, we did.” Sam grabbed his jacket. “I should head out. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”
“You’ll be by tomorrow?” Nonna asked. “Come early.”
“I will,” he promised, saying good-bye to her and Justin before gesturing for me to follow him to the door.
Sam put his shoes on then shrugged on his jacket. In the living room, Nonna told Justin to turn down the TV and in the hallway Sam stared at me. “What?” I asked.
He reached out, intertwining our fingers. The action itself was more intimate than it needed to be. “Are we okay?”
With this? With this week? “We’re okay. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Sam leaned forward and pressed a quick kiss to my lips. In that moment before he left, I forgot about Cedric and Jasmine. Just for a moment.
24
Until We Leave
A knock on my bedroom door woke me up. I groaned as I opened my eyes. I had forgotten to close the curtains last night, and the bright morning sun streamed into the room. Sam peeked his head in. “Don’t tell me you just woke up.”
“You woke me up.” I laced my fingers and lifted my arms up in a stretch as he entered the room, closing the door behind him.
“Your grandmother said to come early.” Sam removed his jacket, putting it on the dresser before walking toward me as I sat up. “She’s been attempting to make me and Justin wash her car for an hour.”
Still groggy, I reached for my phone on the nightstand. “It’s 11:03. Why did you wake me up?”
“How are you still asleep?”
“I value my sleep.”
“I would like for you to value your time with me,” Sam teased.
When he leaned in to kiss me, I stopped him with a hand on his mouth. “Disclaimer for the morning: I have morning breath. Gimme a second.”
Once I had finished brushing my teeth, I returned to my room to find Sam scrolling through his phone, sitting on the bed. This was happening. Granted, only for less than a week, but this was happening. Oh my God.
“This was your mum’s room, right?” asked Sam as I dug through my duffel bag for clothes to wear.
“Yeah. Nonna mentioned a few things about her when we went out. It feels good being in this house, like it was when Justin and I were kids. We’re going to look through some of Mom’s things in the attic tonight and watch her old soccer tapes tomorrow.”
“Was she as good as you?” Sam pulled me down to lie beside him on the bed.
“She was probably better.” His fingers played with my hair as I placed my head on his chest. “Taught me everything from the beginning. I used to watch old videos of her with me at the park when I was three—”
“The one next to the rec center, right?”
“And she’d try to get me to kick the ball we had, and I just kept missing the ball so at one point she said in the background of the video—she was recording—‘You’re going to look back on this and laugh.’ I was so bad.”
“You were three,” Sam said. “You had to start somewhere.”
Humming in agreement, I tilted my head up to find him looking down at me. He leaned in first and my lips met his halfway. His hands never seemed to rest in one place, constantly moving as he removed his mouth from mine, his lips moving against my neck. His tongue went over the place his lips had been and my hands slipped under his shirt.
Sam’s eyes were hazy as he took off his shirt, tugging it from the back and throwing it to the ground before kissing me again. I loved the feeling of him, close and against me. I didn’t even stop him as his hands slowly found their way up my shirt, skimming my stomach.
“Holy shit!”
I pushed Sam off me and he fell on the floor with a thud, getting tangled in the sheets that he took down with him. “Fuck,” he muttered as Justin slammed the door closed and ran back down the hall.
Regaining my senses, I rolled over to see Sam kicking the sheets off himself. He got up and put his shirt on. “This is going to be interesting.”
Putting my hair up in a ponytail, I went down the stairs to find Justin sitting in the living room. I took a seat next to my brother, and he didn’t waste a second. “Why did you and Sam decide to do it in the morning?”
“We weren’t doing it,” I said.
“It was leading to it, was it not? Why were you kissing him anyway? Aren’t you still dating his cousin?”
The charm bracelet on my wrist jangled. I didn’t even know how Cedric was. There wasn’t any cell phone service where he was.
“He left a mark,” Justin muttered, and I ran to the mirror in the bathroom. There it was. On my neck. Something I’d seen many times on my sexually or romantically active friends, but never on me.
Sam was frowning as I marched back into the living room. “What’s got you all worked up?”
I grabbed one of the throw pillows. “You.” Hit. “Gave.” Hit. “Me.” Hit. “A stupid.” Hit. “Hickey!”
“It’s not that dark. Makeup?” The dry look I sent him answered his question. Sam looked at my brother. “You’re spending time with Emma?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Did you try anything on her?”
“No!” Justin glared
at the two of us. “Are you two together?” Sam and I didn’t answer but Justin didn’t care. “I’m going to Emma’s. We’re going out to a movie.” He looked at me, begging with his brown eyes.
I walked over to my wallet in my camera bag near the door, and gave him fifty dollars.
“I’ll drop you off,” Sam said to Justin, before turning to me. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours. I want to show you something.”
He kissed me before he left and when I turned around, Nonna stood in front of me with her hands on her hips. Even with her small stature, she somehow towered over me. “When did this start between you two?”
“It’s only a thing until we leave.”
Nonna frowned. “I hope you both know what you’re doing.”
No. I don’t think we do.
“You’re being annoying.”
Sam handed me a napkin for the spilled lemonade, indulging in his need to annoy me. It wasn’t my fault—all he had done since picking me up was look at me in a way that made me nervous. We were back at the café that afternoon and, thankfully, Alexis wasn’t here. “You didn’t hand it to me properly, you jerk.”
“We’ve only been here for nine minutes.” There’s that time thing again. “I’ll get you another one.”
He was at the counter ordering another drink when my phone rang in my pocket, and a video-chat call came in from Austin. When I answered, he was combing his hair, looking at himself in the camera. “What’s going on with you?”
The guy I’ve been pushing away my feelings for kissed me yesterday and decided that we should basically date for a few days behind his cousin’s back and explore our level of attraction toward one another to get it out of our systems. “Not much, what about you?”
“Hanging out with the guys and Stevie. Why is Caleb asking everyone if tomato sauce is a jam or not?”
“We never know what’s going on in his mind,” I admitted as Sam gave our order at the counter. The girl taking his order was obviously interested in him but he didn’t look like he cared.
“Austin, I’ll call you tonight.”
“It’s a plan,” he agreed, before hanging up the call as Sam came back.
Sam handed me my lemonade in an exaggeratedly slow way, causing me to snatch it from him. I glanced over at the girl. “She seemed friendly.”
Sam’s eyes scanned my face. “You’re not jealous, are you?”
“No. I’m a little surprised, that’s all. I’m used to you reciprocating attention, not ignoring it.”
“It’s not the attention. It’s who it comes from.”
Warmth crept up to my cheeks and I broke eye contact. “That was cringe.” His phone rang: Alexis.
He answered, putting the phone against his ear. “Yeah? . . . I can’t . . . I’m at the café . . . with Hazel . . .” Irritation flashed in his eyes before he looked at me as she spoke to him. “I have to go.”
He hung up. My face was probably red as I got up. “I’m going to get another cinnamon roll.”
“I’ll buy it,” Sam offered.
“Dude.”
Sam gently pushed me back in my seat. “Dude,” he mocked me and I stuck my tongue out at him. “I’ll pay.”
He returned with my food and I gladly dug in. “Do you get a big allowance or something?” I asked, looking at the bills in the black wallet he put back in his pocket.
“No. I don’t like asking for money. It’s usually saved up from presents and this job I did as a kid.”
“What was it?”
“I was a model, okay?”
Modeling was a great job, nothing to be embarrassed about. But Sam as a model? I slapped my hands over my mouth. He tilted his head in annoyance and I dropped my hands back down. “Sorry, that’s . . . cool. It’s not that big a deal.”
Sam shrugged. “It wasn’t. One summer, Aunt Liz had a new clothing line and my mum offered me up. That led to another, and another, then a photo shoot when I was fourteen, and I’m going to stop talking because you seem to be picturing me as a model.”
I was. He scowled and threw his drink in the garbage.
Later that day, we got out of the car after a short drive. It was a bright day in Redmond but traces of winter stayed. “This is the second time you’ve taken me to a place surrounded by trees.”
Sam went over to the trunk of the car and pulled out a full plastic bag. He held the bag in one hand, then slung an arm around my shoulders. “I take you to places where I like thinking.”
His warm hand pulled me deeper into the forest. “You’d better not be planning to take me to a cabin and kill me. Or blindfold me so I can’t find my way out once you leave me. Or—”
“Your imagination is so vivid. I don’t know whether that is a good thing or a bad thing sometimes.”
We continued walking, listening to the branches and pinecones crunching under our feet. His white Converse shoes were getting dirty but Sam didn’t seem to mind as he stopped at our destination. “Here we are.”
Past a tiny clearing, I could see the blue water of a lake stretched out before us, and Sam led us to the shore. Bending down in a crab position, I ran my hands through the bright water. “It’s not warm enough for anyone to go into that water.”
“It’s practically spring.”
“It’s pneumonia,” I argued, and he shook his head, probably at the memory of my words, bending forward to look at the water.
Why was this guy into me? I worried that, when we went back home, I wouldn’t get over him. That I wouldn’t have gotten him out of my system enough to fully focus on his cousin, the one I was in a relationship with, especially since Sam was looking at me the same way as before, with that smile reserved solely for me on his face.
I pushed him and he stumbled enough to almost fall into the cold water. The look I received was playful. “I don’t think that’s what girlfriends should do to their boyfriends.” He walked toward me and I backed away.
“How would you know?”
His hand grabbed my arm, and he started to drag me toward the water. I screamed as it seeped into my shoes and he flung some water, splashing it in my face.
Later, we sat on grass, watching the water move ahead of us as we ate the food Sam had in the plastic bag. Two containers were filled with pasta he claimed to have made with his grandmother earlier today, along with another tub of assorted fruit. I shoved another forkful of pasta into my mouth from the container he’d brought, marveling at the taste. “You should cook for me every day,” I said.
He took a napkin and wiped the corner of my mouth with it. The area was quiet, the water moving ahead of us as I set the container beside me. This reminded me of swimming with Andrew and Jasmine as kids at the public pool back home. We were so happy, it wasn’t hard to remember the joy we felt back then.
I whipped my head toward Sam when the sound of my camera cut through the air. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Jasmine and I aren’t speaking.” I told him about most of the argument and that Jasmine has been facing family issues but was careful not to say anything more than that. “I messed up. I shouldn’t have tried to force her to talk about something she didn’t want to.”
“We all mess up. You’re going to fix this. You and Jasmine have been friends for a long time and there’s a reason. You have to look at it from Jasmine’s perspective: she, along with Austin, Caleb, and Jon Ming, is one of the few minorities at our school in Port Meadow. There are a lot of people out there who are going to say horrible and bigoted shit to Jasmine, and you can’t tell her to suck it up.”
“She doesn’t deserve to be treated like that.”
“No one does,” he agreed. “Be there for her for that, for her family situation, for whatever it is. Anything involving family can be rough: she’s going to need you and Andrew.” He took my hand. “I don’t think she meant to change you either. It wasn�
��t her intention.”
“It wasn’t,” I agreed.
“I mean, you could be a little less annoying and stop eating all those Pop-Tarts.” I scowled. “Kidding. I wouldn’t change you for the world.”
“Can’t relate,” I jested, squirming out of his hold before he ran after me.
That night in the attic of Nonna’s house, Justin and I sat on the wooden floor and went through scrapbooks that had been in packed up boxes. Nonna was sorting through other boxes when my finger landed on a picture of Mom when she was a baby. “She looked like you when you were a baby,” I said to Justin.
Justin looked surprised when he looked at the photo. “She did. That’s so weird.”
He flipped through a few pages in the scrapbook he was holding before showing me a picture of our parents. “They were in university. That’s where Mom and Dad met, right?”
“Yup,” Nonna answered from where she stood. “They met in their second year of university, then a few years later had the tall one over there.”
I groaned. “Nonna.” We all shared a laugh.
Justin was still staring at the photo. He pointed at the familiar necklace around her neck in the photograph. His eyes flicked to my own. “Hey, Nonna,” Justin said. “Do you know where Mom’s necklace is?”
“Which necklace?”
“This one.” Justin pointed to it in the picture.
“One second.” She made her way downstairs and when she came back up, she handed Justin a box. “The last time Lauren visited here with you all, the pendant was broken and I offered to fix it. When Lauren passed, I had never gotten the opportunity to give it back to her after it was repaired, and I took it with me when I left years ago.”
Justin opened the box. “Who gave it to her?”
“Your grandfather,” Nonna answered as he took the necklace out of the box. “After her first year on her university team.” The soccer-ball pendant was smooth, the chain of the necklace silver. After years of seeing it only in pictures, tears burned my eyes. While my family thought it was lost, it was truly with the right person.