by Paul Hina
doing?" Jessi yells, running toward them.
Michael turns toward Jessi. "Did you sleep with this guy?"
Jessi ignores him and moves to aid Sam. "Are you alright?" She asks, her hand on his upper arm.
"I'll be fine. I just need to sit," he says sitting in the middle of the driveway.
"Jessica, I asked you a question," Michael asks, a little too forcefully.
"No, I didn't sleep with him, Michael. And I'm not even sure what to think about you asking me that."
"Well, then, what's going on?"
"Michael, you have two choices right now," Jessi says, standing up and staring at him. "You can go back in the house, or get back in your car and go."
"I'm staying."
"Michael."
"I'm not going anywhere until he's gone. This is my house after all."
"Right. How could I forget?"
Jessi sits next to Sam in the driveway. "Are you alright?"
"I am now," he says, looking at her.
"You shouldn't have come."
"I had to. If you're going to choose, I had to make my case. I had to tell you that I want to be with you, that I need to be with you. I didn't want you to stay with him just because it's easier, or more familiar."
"Who said I was going to choose?"
"Everything is a choice, Jessi."
"…"
"I'm asking you to choose."
"Sam, that's not fair."
"But, Jessi, this is—"
"You're bleeding."
"I know," he says. "It wasn't enough that he had to hit me, but he had to hit me in the exact same spot that Chris did yesterday."
"You have a bad habit of getting hit when I'm around. Is this normal?"
"No, it must be you."
She pulls the arm of her pajama top over her hand and dabs at the corner of his mouth with her sleeve.
"Hey, what are you doing?" Michael asks.
"Back off, Michael! He's bleeding."
"Good," he says.
"You're acting like a real prick, you know that?"
"Gee, I wonder why."
Jessi turns her attention back to Sam.
"Sam, you should go."
"Choose me, Jessi."
"Sam."
"Choose me."
"What do you expect me to do with this right now?"
"Get up and leave with me. Come away with me. We'll get lost together."
"Sam, I'm in my pajamas."
"It's perfect."
"I'm sorry. I can't."
Sam looks at her and she's staring right at him, and suddenly he feels like such a fool, feels more utterly the fool than he ever felt during his drinking days. All those old mornings when he would wake up pregnant with regret, shamed by some cloudy embarrassment from the night before, pale in comparison to her looking him right in the eye and telling him she won't leave with him.
He stands up.
"Sam?"
"I'm sorry I bothered you," he says and turns toward the road.
"That's not what I—"
"Let him go," Michael says.
"Sam, wait," she says, ignoring Michael.
But Sam doesn't stop. He grabs his satchel by the gate and continues walking away from her, away from the only girl he's ever truly loved.
Halfway down the block, he looks back. She is standing at the end of the driveway in her pajamas, watching him walk away. And he can hear his own voice whispering in his head, 'She's just watching you go. She's watching you walk away.' And he gets the terrible feeling—the same sudden, uncertain, and empty feeling—that things have come to an end just as they did when he walked away from Kelly.
Sam walks for miles, bypassing train stations, not quite sure where he's going. He still has the taste of blood in his mouth from Michael's punch. And his body is so tired. The adrenaline from the morning had spiked and then slowly evaporated, and his legs are barely even moving on automatic now. It would be so easy for him to just go home and sleep the day away, forget all about Michael and Jessi in a wave of sleep, but he can't bring himself to do it. The loneliness of it is too stark an ending to surrender to.
He's walked around parts of the city that he's never even driven through before. He sees people pass by in their cars, and watches people meander along the streets. They all look to be sitting in some hypnotic haze, moving on auto-pilot, checking things off their lists one by one. Sam doesn't see a single person smile, not a single stare of sincerity passes from one person's eyes to his own. Not that he can blame them. From the look of his reflection off a camera shop's window, his lip is quite swollen and reddened by a cut. He clearly looks as if he's been hit, and so he probably looks particularly undesirable.
Undesirable. The word bounces around in his head for too long.
After walking for miles, lugging his satchel over street after street, block after block, he feels as though he can't walk another step. So, he descends the steps of a train station, traverses the concrete passageways to the platform, having no idea where he'll go next.
When a train arrives, he gets on, finds an empty seat, hugs his satchel against his chest and watches the fluorescent lights streak across the windows. He listens to the squeal of the brakes, hears the quick puff of air as the train stops. And when the pffft of the door announces that they're opening or closing, he watches people get off and watches new people get on.He just lets the world wash over him, experiences everything only as it is, not as he wants it to be.
He reaches into his pants pocket, grabs his phone, turns it off. Then he places himself firmly back into the world of the present, lets it's dullness soften his body into a thick skin of sleep.
A little boy pokes Sam in the face. Sam, bleary-eyed and startled, turns quickly toward the boy.
"Sorry," the boy's mother says, pulling the toddler away from Sam and close to her chest.
"S'alright," Sam says, looking around to gain some sensory equilibrium.
The train is full now. He guesses that he's slept through the remainder of the morning and is now firmly against the lunch hour.
Though it seems like he's slept for a long time, he guesses it's been no more than an hour. As the next stop approaches, he realizes that he is a dozen stops or so from home, and he's going the wrong way.
He gets off the train, maneuvers the station to get to the east bound platform, and waits. He's doing his best impression of a guy who's not love sick, but he can't help but think that this is going to be a tough one to hide. He wonders what the group will think if he shows up to tonight's meeting looking as glum as he feels now. And what if Jessi doesn't show? He certainly doesn't expect her to be there. It will be transparent to everyone that something has happened, and the blame of her absence will fall firmly on him. Everyone will wonder how he chased her away. Did he chase her to another meeting? Or did he chase her back to drink?
After hours of lying in bed, pretending that he doesn't want to obsess over Jessi, trying to think his way away from her—though trying to think her away still means thinking of her—he can't help but wonder if she's thinking of him, can't help but wonder how her and Michael's conversation might have went after he was gone.
Sam was, no doubt, second guessing his decision to go to Jessi's this morning. Still, he knows that if he hadn't gone, he would've regretted it. Instead of lying in bed wondering why he went, he would've been lying in bed agonizing over the fact that he didn't go. Still, if he's put Jessi and Michael's engagement in danger for his own selfish reasons, then that would be a shame. But it's not as if she hadn't expressed emotional interest in Sam. She had. He genuinely believed she needed him to show her that he was serious about her. He had to let her know that he hadn't come into her life as some passing fad, at least not as far as he was concerned. He needed to tell her that he believed they could share something special over the long haul.
All of these thoughts—chasing them away and watching them come back to him—eventually did put him to sleep.
By the time he gets up,
it's already after five o'clock. And though normally he would've given himself a hell of a time for sleeping the day away, he tunes all the personal noise out for the moment. He sits on the edge of the bed, puts his face in his hands, and sighs.
"Oh, God," he says, and he feels a little like he has just gotten up from a long bender. He has a headache, his legs feel sore—probably from the long walk—and his face, particular his jaw, is throbbing from Michael's punch. All the things he did this morning, all the things he has done over the last couple of days—trying to chase a new hope—has been nothing if not desperate, and, ultimately, a desperation exercised for naught. He'd been somewhat aware of this before now, but it didn't seem so stark until this moment of utter clarity, this moment of coldest sobriety.
Still, even this desperate chase has been better than absently chasing one day into the next, which is what he had been doing. He had just come to accept that things were hopeless. He created this obsessive interest in AA. He had read the literature, went through the motions, and ran through his daily routine to get through those first, tough months of sobriety. But for the past several weeks, he's just been running out the clock.
There is a moment there, on the edge of his bed, looking out into his apartment with a look of desperate confusion on his face, that he has the revelation that he has always felt that aloneness, even with Kelly. It wasn't until Jessi that he'd found someone else who had known her own sense of perpetual aloneness. And together they had, for the first time, felt unalone, a little bit more whole, and that, together, they didn't need to fill up those vast internal spaces with drink, with routine, anymore. They didn't need to run out the clock. They could