by D. Brown
“Maggie,” he said. “I can’t understand how any man could regard you as anything less than the center of his universe.”
Her reply was tainted with regret, “I guess you’ll have to ask Robert that question.”
Sam smiled and after a few more steps, reluctantly let go of her hand.
She looked beautiful, the most beautiful thing in the world to him anyway. He wished more than anything that their lives had taken a different course, so they may have passed each other quietly and unnoticed in the night. He was satisfied living in the gray, but now Maggie had brought the color back into his life simply by showing up, and he didn’t want to return to the gray, ever again.
“Dammit anyway,” he mumbled under his breath.
“What?” Maggie asked.
Sam just looked at her as if debating what to say next then decided otherwise, “Nothing.”
They made their way back up the beach, both of them lost in thought, taking in the sights and sounds, neither feeling the need to speak. Sam wallowed in the glorious agony of her company, feeling deliciously miserable being with her yet knowing he’d feel even more miserable without her.
Sam stopped where their footprints angled up the slope to the house.
Maggie looked up into his eyes.
Through no words spoken, their message was exchanged between each other: I want to kiss you, and I want you to kiss me.
Maggie’s pulse raced and her breath struggled up the back of a constricting throat. She knew this was wrong; knowing this could very well destroy the foundation of everything she knew and held dear, but right now, she didn’t care.
Sam wanted to take her and love her and let her see to the very core of his soul, but fought with his own internal demons. This was agony, he thought, and this next step could very well bring about their complete ruination. Still, Sam leaned in seeing Maggie’s eyes close and her face tilt slightly upward to meet his.
He engulfed her scent and wanted to devour the rest of her: her touch, her feel, everything about her.
He heard the whisper of a nervous gasp escape Maggie’s lips.
The gentle rush of the ocean surf spilling about their feet nudged them closer and Sam reached up and placed his hand on her bare shoulder.
His fingers tingled with her touch.
Desire burned as a wildfire inside.
Then Maggie’s cell phone suddenly rang; a shrill obnoxious jingle that made her jump back in start. Her small, frightened yelp snuffed out the candle flame of her own desire, yanking her back to life’s hard reality.
She fumbled in her dress pocket for her phone. Its incessant ringing demanded a reply, an answer, and Sam saw their moment wash away like their footprints trails in the advancing tides.
Damn.
“It’s Robert,” Maggie said looking at the number on the phone, and turned away from him.
“Hello, honey,” she said. “How are you?”
She stood there silently as he replied.
“Are you home?”
Sam looked away, feeling jealousy’s thunderclap resounding through his him.
“Yes, honey, I love you too,” Maggie then said, and those words pierced a dagger through the center of his heart.
Shit.
No other word adequately described this moment.
Just... shit.
22
Sam spent the remainder of the evening sitting in his rocker, mired in a deep pout and brooding in a quagmire of his own dark thoughts. He finished off what he’d started earlier in the evening, quietly getting drunk.
The thunderstorm had pushed out to sea earlier, and as was the case with coastal thunderstorms drifting out into open water, had then been pushed back toward shore and gained strength from the strong sea winds at its back.
The moon’s Cheshire grin disappeared behind the storm’s wall. The approaching squall line flashed with the pulse of the storm’s beating heart. Even the night’s stars fled for safer shores.
He sat in his rocker, alone on his porch, trying to fathom the strange evening that had just passed.
Thinking about it.
Replaying it.
Seeing it again.
Hearing it again.
Every word.
Every touch.
The last thirty seconds replayed in Sam’s mind again and again.
“What were you thinking?” he asked the rush of the ocean wind.
Looking into her eyes and slowly almost reluctantly leaning into the kiss; Maggie had turned quickly away when her cell phone rang, and broke whatever magical spell had settled over them.
A spike of jealous anger surged through him when Maggie turned away to talk with her husband. It was an anger Sam wasn’t proud of feeling, and he hated the way he behaved whenever he felt this way.
Calling him an ass then would have been kind.
Maggie did finish the call quickly, promising her husband she’d call him when he got home, but the mood had long since passed and the moment gone.
Whatever fire that might have sparked between them, the phone call from Maggie’s husband extinguished.
Maybe that was for the best, Sam thought as he replayed again their last moments together. Still, he winced at what happened right after Maggie had hung up with her husband.
“Sorry,” she had said with a bit of an embarrassed smile, and glanced apprehensively over her shoulder at the soft glow of the window lights beyond the top of the beach slope that might as well have been her kids’ watchful eyes.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Sam said, his tone turned cold and distant. No man ever took rejection well and in that regard, he was no different.
Maggie didn’t know how to reply to Sam’s sudden shift in mood, but she was pretty sure what caused it, as it killed her mood as well. She was sorry for what happened, and regretted that they could not finish what they started just as much as he did. Still, the bottom line, this was wrong.
“I should probably be going.”
Knowing this, Sam had already turned and started up the hill, “Yeah, you do that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Maggie called after him. There was no cause to be rude.
Sam stopped and turned, “It means exactly what it sounds like: Go home, Maggie. Go be with your kids. Wait dutifully for your loving husband to call you back.”
He dismissed her with a waving of his arm. “Do something, but please, just please, go away.”
He turned back and continued on up the slope of the beach, “Go call your husband if you can’t wait.”
“Now, wait just a minute,” and she started up the hill after him. “What brought that on?”
“Nothing did. It’s late. I’m hungry.”
“Fine,” Maggie said. “Go eat.”
“I am.”
“Good.”
Sam stopped and turned, “Just do me this favor okay? The next time you get the urge to kiss someone,” he said. “Don’t.”
“What?”
“I didn’t stutter.”
“You think I wanted to kiss you?”
“If you didn’t then I’m one poor judge of human nature.”
“You are an ass.”
“And you’re a – ...”
Sam held up a hand, cutting himself off in mid-sentence. He sighed, relaxed the tension knotting his shoulders and slowly shook his head from side to side.
“You know? This was a bad idea.”
He looked out into the black canvas of the night seascape and struggled with the swell of emotion.
“I went in after David because no mother should ever have to bury her child. I didn’t want that to happen to you.”
He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
“Especially you.”
When Sam looked at Maggie his eyes were red and rimmed wet.
“I buried a wife. It’s not fun. The circumstances surrounding it didn’t help either. I didn’t want you to have to bury a son.”
He struggled with what
to say next. It had been so long since he’d allowed anyone inside his heart like this, and Maggie’s footprints were everywhere. Still, he wasn’t obtuse enough to see the obvious.
“You didn’t almost lose me because I was never yours to lose in the first place.”
Maggie eyes grew wide. Hurt registered in them. “I never...”
Sam cut her off, “Your marriage is a farce, Maggie, and I’ve barely known you two days. Your husband is a manipulative control freak who keeps you tied on a short leash. He’s an ass.”
“I’m not going to stand here and defend my husband to the likes of you.”
“No one asked you to. Just remember to tell that to the next guy you almost kiss.”
Sam turned to leave, stopped and turned back one last time. “And don’t make me promise you something that you have no intention of asking me to keep.”
“You are a conceited, self-serving ass, Sam McKenna,” Maggie called after him.
“You should know. You married one.”
Maggie turned on her heel with a “well I never” and stormed up the beach toward her own house. Sam heard her mutter “arrogant bastard!” under her breath.
She went home to her kids, and Sam retired to his rocker.
That was more than two hours ago, and Sam hadn’t moved since.
Fatigue pulled at Sam’s shoulders, a heaviness tugged at his eyes. He carried the weight of the world on his shoulders and looked like someone who had aged a lifetime in just a couple of hours. Someone whose single greatest desire right now involved something he always considered morally wrong – falling in love with a married woman.
It’s too late for that remorse.
The longing overwhelmed him, festering, eating away at his insides. A longing he hadn’t allowed himself to feel in years.
How can I get through the night or tomorrow when I can’t get through the next ten minutes?
God almighty, I hate feeling this way.
Yet at the same time he loved it too.
Love’s sweet agony.
Life sure was a hell of a lot easier when he was lonely.
23
Sam kept looking at Maggie’s house next door.
He couldn’t help it.
The side windows glowed behind drawn curtains, and Sam tried to picture what Maggie and her kids were doing behind them: taking showers, getting ready for bed, maybe even gathered around the television set watching a movie, David curled up and asleep at his mother’s side.
He willed Maggie to look outside.
He wanted to see her, if only just a dark silhouette through a lighted window.
Hour two crept into hour three, time marked by the hourglass of the emptying wine bottle standing sentinel on the table next to him.
Friday heaved its final breath and gave way to Saturday morning.
As if waiting its cue of the clock, the thunderstorm that had marched out to sea, turned around and started back for shore.
A sudden flash bathed the late night in a silvery light and for an instant turned midnight into noon. A gunshot of thunder threatened to split the night apart at the seams and Sam heard the hiss of the approaching squall line rake through the fronds of nearby palm trees.
But Sam noticed first, the lights in Maggie’s house blink off one by one.
A deeper heaviness settled in his heart that the probability of seeing her again tonight extinguished with the last darkened window.
Sadness squeezed his throat as time slowed to a crawl, and the rest of the night’s passage would span an agonizing eternity one
“TIC!”
And
“TOCK!”
At a time.
A single tear traced a line down Sam’s cheek, the first drop of rain from the raging storm in his heart.
“Happy Fourth of July,” Sam said to the calm before the storm.
Sam laughed at the irony, but didn’t find it the least bit funny.
Maggie had another fight with Robert over the phone.
To top that off, the night hadn’t gone well with the kids at all, especially Anna Beth.
David and Robbie were okay, but sensed the tension between their mom and older sister.
Anna Beth saw her mother visibly upset to the point of tears when she came back from her walk. Her daughter was bright enough to suspect that her mother hadn’t taken a walk alone.
Robert called back a half-hour later in a rotten mood. The walkout negotiations never got off the ground much less getting resolved quickly and it was clear the contract negotiations wouldn’t be resolved before the weekend.
And with it being a holiday weekend, Robert was left to deal with the problem alone, and he wasn’t pleased about it at all, even if he was billing this at $400 an hour.
So, he took it out on Maggie.
He chided her for deciding not to cut their vacation short and follow him home. He whined about the lack of food in the house, and how Maggie wasn’t there to fix one of her special hot tuna melt sandwiches.
“I’ve got plenty of sugar though,” he added and the sarcasm in his voice didn’t go unnoticed.
After twenty minutes of ‘yes dears’ and ‘I’m sorry Roberts’, Maggie had about as much of her husband’s attitude as she cared to take for one night.
“Robert? Go to bed. Deal with it in the morning. Get some sleep.”
“Where were you earlier?” he asked, “When I called you the first time.”
“I was... busy,” Maggie hesitated, and she never was very good at lying. Her lie was as transparent as sheer lace.
“Busy doing what?”
This was Robert’s style, badger Maggie until she grew weary of his constant questions and then give in, either telling him what he wanted to know, or letting him have what he wanted in the first place.
“I was walking on the beach, Robert,” she said, “Enjoying the sunset.”
“With whom?”
Maggie chose not to hear him because she was telling her husband to get some sleep and that she’d talk to him in the morning, and hung up before he could protest.
She sighed and looked at Anna Beth.
“Don’t start,” she said. “I’m not in the mood.”
Anna Beth cut her mother a scowl revealing her displeasure and disapproval. Maggie decided she’d had enough of her daughter’s implications and innuendos.
“I’ve done nothing wrong!” Maggie exclaimed to the ceiling.
“Then why did you lie to Daddy?”
Maggie’s sigh was her answer, as any continued discussion proved pointless.
Flashes of white flickered off and on outside. The kettledrum of answering thunder reverberated through the walls and vibrated the coffee cups hanging from the hooks in the kitchen.
David wanted to be a little scared of the storm at first, but he quickly drifted off to sleep in Maggie’s lap as she watched a movie with Anna Beth and Robbie, her thoughts more on Sam than what she saw on television.
Anna Beth and Robbie stayed up until close to midnight, and then retired to the bedrooms, leaving Maggie alone with a sleeping David.
She sat there for a long time, enjoying the tranquil quiet inside and listening to the muted sounds of the approaching storm outside. The steady tick-tock of the kitchen clock kept the rhythm of the dying evening.
Maggie couldn’t keep her mind off Sam and her mood fluctuated between compassion and frustrated anger. Throw into the mix her conversations with her husband tonight and it left her sitting there irritated, angry and confused. After twenty minutes, Maggie gave up, turned out the lights, and carried David into his bed.
She kissed him goodnight on the forehead, pausing a moment to look at her young son, and the close call he experienced today, hoping the experience didn’t leave any lasting trauma in his young mind; and how this possible tragedy, the loss of her son, a thought she didn’t even want to conceptualize, had been averted by the strange man next door, who almost gave his own life because he felt so strongly that no mother should outl
ive her child.
Despite the nobleness of Sam’s act, his attitude though, irritated her to no end.
Sam had been embarrassed by the day’s play of events, felt very foolish in fact.
There was nothing foolish about what he did for her this afternoon and it made her angry when he dismissed her gratitude as casually as he did.
My son could have died out there today, she said to the ceiling in a quiet whisper, and Sam, so could you.
As she started off for bed herself, a brighter more intense flash of lightning turned the nighttime into day.
Through the side windows, she caught a glimpse of Sam’s porch and what she thought was Sam sitting in his rocker watching the storm. The feelings from earlier, feelings she fought so hard to repress and forget bubbled back to the surface fresh and renewed when she saw him sitting out there.
“Damn you Sam McKenna,” she said to the windowpane. “Damn you for making me feel this way.”
24
The Third Day – Saturday, July 4
After midnight.
Maggie wanted to go outside.
Self-righteous anger told her that man demanded a piece of her mind.
No, she decided.
“Enough for one night,” and continued on to bed.
Maggie busied herself in her bedroom, brushing her teeth, combing out her hair and washing up before she slipped on her night shirt, an extra-long Steelers t-shirt and pulled back the comforter to climb into bed.
She turned out the lights and lay there on her back, no more ready to go to sleep than she had been in the middle of the afternoon. The more she thought about things, the angrier she became, and Maggie Scott was never one to suffer silently.
She remembered Sam’s parting comments this evening, when Robert’s phone call interrupted what could have been a very poignant and in the same breath, a potentially disastrous moment between them.
A mixture of guilt and regret swelled over her as the persona of wife and mother took over. “I can’t believe I almost did that,” and clenched her eyes shut in a grimace, “Stupid, just a stupid thing to do.”
Still, there was a part of her that wanted that kiss, a part of her that glowed in this foreign warmth she hadn’t felt in years, a warmth emanating from the very core of her soul.