by A. K. Evans
A few minutes later, I opened the door to my apartment and led Sam inside.
“Go have a seat,” I urged, jerking my head in the direction of the couch. “I’ll be right there.”
Sam did as I had suggested and moved into the living room to sit down. I walked out into the kitchen and got each of us a glass of water. I could have given her alcohol, but I figured I’d wait and see just how bad things were for her before taking it to that level.
When I walked back into the living room, I nearly fell to my knees. Sam was sitting on the edge of the couch’s middle cushion. Her feet were flat on the floor, and her body was bent in such a way that her ribs were connected to her thighs, her cheek was pressed against her knees, and her arms were wrapped around her shins.
I wanted nothing more than to drop the glasses, pick her up, and make it all better. Washing away whatever made her curl up like that was my only goal. But I realized in order to do that, I was going to need to know what I was dealing with first.
Taking in a deep breath, I tamped down my frustration and moved to Sam. I sat down beside her and placed the glasses on the coffee table in front of her legs.
Sam sniffled.
I brought my hand to the middle of her back and gently stroked up and down, back and forth, hoping I was providing her with some comfort. For a long time, Sam didn’t say anything. But I knew she was feeling tormented because the tears didn’t stop leaking from her eyes and landing on the floor by her feet.
Eventually, I decided it was probably best for me to take the lead, so as gently as I could, I asked, “What happened?”
Almost immediately, Sam declared, “It’s over.”
Two words.
That’s all it took.
Even though I had already assumed that was the case based on how she looked from the moment she walked through the doors at Granite and the way she’d been acting ever since I got her in my car, it was something else to hear her admit it. The truth was that I’d been dying to hear those words ever since the day I confronted her at her place about the fact that she hadn’t shared the news that she was in a relationship.
And feeling happiness or relief right now made me realize I was a complete dick. Because that happiness came at the expense of Sam’s heart. I should have been upset. On some level, I was. I hated seeing her hurt. It was just that I knew, in the long run, she was going to be much better off.
“It’s over?” I repeated.
For the first time since I walked into the room, Sam lifted her torso and began wiping at her tears. I reached to the end table behind me and grabbed the box of tissues. She took a couple before I tossed the box onto the coffee table.
After a few beats of silence, Sam confirmed, “Yes, Mitch and I are over.”
Nodding, I replied, “Okay. Did something happen?”
Shaking her head, she murmured, “I don’t know why I’m upset. I’m the one who ended it.”
That news caught me by surprise. “You did?” I asked.
“I should have done it a long time ago,” she said, still staring off into space.
“So, why now?” I wondered.
Sam hadn’t given me her eyes since she walked into Granite and stopped in front of me at the bar. But at my question, she finally directed them at me again. Then she answered, “He’s moving.”
“Moving?”
“Back to Hartford.”
My brows shot up. “He didn’t want you to go with him?” I asked.
“He did,” she confirmed. “He wanted me to go with him. In fact, he just expected I was going to go, which is why he put in for the transfer back with his job without ever telling me.”
What an idiot. If I had any doubt about whether I’d been unfairly judging him, there was no longer any question about it. The man clearly didn’t have a brain if he could do something so ridiculous.
“I’m sorry,” I lamented.
“I can’t believe I was so stupid,” she muttered.
“You’re not stupid, Sam,” I clipped.
Her eyes grew worried, and I realized I needed to get ahold of my emotions. I was angry, but it wasn’t at her. I didn’t like that this guy made her feel this way.
“But I should have seen the signs,” she argued. “When we went to Hartford back in February, I should have known. At the time, I was oblivious to it, but looking back now, it all makes sense. Mitch didn’t take me there just so I could meet his parents. I mean, I did meet them, but that wasn’t the only reason he planned that trip. He did it because he wanted me to see what it was like there. He planned the whole thing for one selfish reason.”
The last thing I wanted to do was give the guy the benefit of the doubt, but because he’d been important to Sam, I didn’t want her saying things out of anger that maybe she didn’t mean. So, I suggested, “Maybe that’s not it. Perhaps the trip back made him nostalgic.”
“I could believe that and maybe feel a smidgen of understanding for it if that were the case,” Sam returned. “But the problem with your logic is that it doesn’t take into consideration the fact that Mitch put in for the transfer at the end of January.”
Well, there was that.
I tried.
Apparently, there was no helping the guy.
Wearing an expression of sympathy, I said, “I’m really sorry, Sam. I don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine why he’d do something like that without talking to you about it first.”
And that was the truth. If I had been as lucky as he had been and managed to have Sam as my girlfriend, there wasn’t a chance in hell that I’d do something to risk what I had with her. Then again, I’d seen the guy in action. He’d done plenty in front of me that I found questionable. If he was willing to go to those lengths to treat Sam the way he did in front of me, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that he wouldn’t have much of a care for her behind closed doors.
I did my best to stop myself from wincing. The thought suddenly popped in my head that he could have done something worse to her when nobody could see, and that was enough to send me into a dangerous mindset. I’d never seen any proof of physical abuse, but I had seen how Sam changed over the last several months. Even if he hadn’t put his hands on her in anger, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that he’d dished out some pretty heavy emotional abuse.
At that thought, hating myself for not stepping in to do something about it sooner, I had to try to focus myself back on Sam and the present moment. I couldn’t lose sight of the fact that she was here now, and she was safe.
Heartbroken but safe.
“He’s known all this time, and he just told me about it two days ago,” she shared.
“When is he planning to move?” I asked.
“Three weeks.” Sam closed her eyes and sighed. When she opened them again, she continued, “He thought I was just going to pack up and leave everything that’s home to me behind. In three weeks. If he’d talked to me about it from the beginning, if he’d asked for my input before he went ahead and made his request with work, I might not be sitting here feeling like this now. I’m not saying I would have agreed to go, but I’d like to think we could have worked it out.”
I hated to think there was even a remote possibility that he could have taken her away from me permanently. A painful burn had started in my gut, thinking I could have lost her.
Thankfully, I could take a moment to pull myself together because Sam went on, “No matter what we would have decided, it’s the whole point that it would have been the both of us deciding it together. I would have felt better knowing I factored into his decision.”
“I’m sure he thinks that taking you with him is how he factored you into the equation,” I noted.
“Perhaps, but that doesn’t work for me,” she replied. Following a few moments of silence, she asked, “Why wasn’t I important?”
“What?”
“To him,” she clarified. “Why wasn’t I important enough to him, after all these months, to be part of such a deci
sion?”
The anguish was written all over her face, and I hated that for her.
“I wish I could give you an answer to that,” I said.
Closing her eyes again, she huffed, “What a waste.”
“Pardon?”
“Eight months of my life just wasted,” she explained.
“Don’t beat yourself up about this, babe,” I pleaded.
Shaking her head in disappointment and frustration, she countered, “How can I not? I wasted all that time. I never should have gotten involved with him from the start.”
“You couldn’t possibly know that it was going to be a waste,” I assured her, even though I knew that I had no doubt she’d wasted her time with him. The thing was, she’d been in the relationship, so it was harder for her to see what I could, what Demi could.
“Yeah, well, it never would have worked between us,” she mumbled. “If he was the kind of man who wasn’t going to include me in any discussion about life-changing decisions, I guess I should consider myself lucky that it didn’t go any farther than this.”
“You’re not wrong about that,” I told her. “It’s better that you know that now instead of years down the road.”
She nodded several times and rasped, “Yeah. But it still hurts.”
At those words, the tears began to fall again. So, I reached out and pulled her into my arms. Sam curled up against me and buried her face in my chest.
As I held Sam while her emotions poured out of her and soaked my T-shirt, I made a silent vow to myself and to her. No matter how difficult it was or how long it took, I was going to be there for Sam. I was going to see her through this.
She’d endured a lot, I had no doubt. Recalling the things I’d seen, I already knew it was terrible. I had a feeling there was more that I didn’t know. But no matter what it took, I’d make this better for her.
Every piece of her that Mitch broke was going to be mine. I was going to take all of them, all her broken pieces, and I’d love her until she was whole again. Whole and healed.
Then, and only then, I was going to do what I should have done two years ago. I was going to tell her how I felt about her, and I was going to make her fall in love with me.
As much as I wanted to do it now, I couldn’t. She wasn’t ready for that.
But I knew that time would come. And this time, nothing was going to stop me from finally getting the woman who had existed only in dreams in my arms permanently.
Ten
Samantha
“Can I get you another?”
I shook my head. “I can’t. I’m not staying,” I answered.
Cal’s body tensed as he stood up straight and cautiously repeated, “Not staying?”
God, what had I done?
My friends didn’t trust me any longer. A handful of words made the man in front of me think that I wasn’t just leaving his bar for the night but that I was leaving town altogether.
“I’m waiting for Demi to call,” I clarified. “We’re meeting up for dinner tonight.”
The tension instantly left Cal’s body as his features softened. “That’s good,” he said. “I think the two of you need it.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I just hope things can get back to what they used to be.”
“They will,” he promised.
It had been a week since I walked into Granite, feeling nothing but devastation. It had been a week since Cal took one look at me and didn’t hesitate to give me the emotional support I needed. It had been one week since Cal held me in his arms.
It was interesting to me how much had changed in such a short time. I didn’t think I could feel both an odd sense of relief, like a weight had been lifted off my chest, and also like I still had so much work to do.
For the last week and a half, things hadn’t exactly been easy. Between recognizing the official end of my relationship with Mitch and trying to cope with it on my own for two days before going to Cal to then finding a way to accept what that relationship brought into my life and figuring out how I was going to rectify it, I felt a little disoriented.
But each day was getting easier.
Most of the emotion I was now feeling had little to do with my actual relationship. The fact that I’d loved Mitch was one thing, but for some reason, I didn’t feel as devastated about it as I thought I would.
The overwhelming need I had to cope now had everything to do with recognizing what I did to myself and what I foolishly accepted in my life. Over the last several days, I started to realize how much I changed for Mitch. And in that realization, I knew I had so much work to do to get back to myself and fix things with my friends.
My friends.
Cal and Demi.
Cal had been amazing. Never, not once throughout this entire thing, did he ever make me feel bad. No matter what was happening, no matter if I was doing something wrong, he made it very clear he’d be there for me.
And he was.
The moment he knew I needed him, he dropped everything for me. Ever since the day he allowed my heartbreak to leak out onto his shirt, he hadn’t once faltered in continuing to provide me with the support and love I needed.
He checked in regularly, but he did it in a way that didn’t feel like a parent looking after a child. It was simply one friend looking after another. Cal just cared about me, and I hated to think that I’d ruined the trust he had in me.
I knew I had to fix it. I wanted to get back what we had. I wanted our silly conversations back. I missed the playfulness between us.
But I had to respect the fact that I’d selfishly taken that away from Cal, and I hadn’t gotten any indication from him that he missed it or wanted it back.
For the time being, I was going to keep it simple between us. It was working. It wasn’t everything it used to be, but it was better than it had been.
And considering I had a much bigger problem on the friend front, I decided to make that a priority.
Demi.
To put it mildly, things had been strained between us over the last month. Ever since the night of the second-anniversary celebration that Cal had for Granite, things hadn’t been right between Demi and me.
While we’d seen each other frequently at work during the course of the last month, we didn’t have the conversations we usually had. Everything we discussed was only ever about work. I’d hated it.
And now that I was seeing things clearly—or, at least, better than I had been for months—I realized that I was the one who had to fix it. So, two days ago, I checked our schedules, confirmed what time she got off tonight, and asked her if we could get together for dinner so we could talk. There was no missing the relief she felt as she accepted my invitation.
But since I had left work earlier than her today, I decided to come to Granite to meet up with Cal. Not only did I want to see him and check in with him, but I also wanted to get his advice.
So, now that I’d calmed the fear he had about me leaving town, I felt compelled to give him the truth.
“I’m scared,” I admitted. “Things aren’t good.”
“I know, but I think you’re worried about nothing,” he replied.
Shaking my head, I shared, “You haven’t seen it, though. Cal, we are barely speaking to one another. And when we do, it’s only about work. It is so awful. I think she hates me.”
Cal reached across the counter and curled his fingers around mine. “She doesn’t hate you, Sam,” he assured me. “She’s hurting just as much as you are.”
Surprise flitted through me.
I don’t know why it never dawned on me that as much as I might have been depending on Cal for advice and support, Demi could have been doing the same.
“You talked to her,” I surmised.
He nodded. “Yeah,” he confirmed. “Just relax. Everything is going to be fine between the two of you. You love each other. That’s going to make it impossible to walk away from one another.”
“She doesn’t know,” I told him.
&nbs
p; Cal’s brows pulled together as his head tipped to the side. “What?”
“I didn’t tell her about Mitch. She doesn’t know that I ended things with him.”
“So, tell her tonight if you’re ready to do that,” he suggested.
“She’s probably going to be upset with me, though,” I worried.
“Why would you think that?” he asked.
“You were,” I blurted. I hadn’t meant for it to come out like that. In fact, I hadn’t meant to say that at all.
Cal looked at me curiously and asked, “What are you talking about? I was never upset with you for telling me what happened.”
I bit my lip. I hadn’t wanted to bring this up, and yet, I didn’t really have a choice now.
“You were upset with me for not telling you that I’d gotten involved with Mitch in the beginning,” I reminded him.
He took that in, swallowed hard, and croaked, “You and I were in a different place at that time. I thought we were on good terms. You and Demi are not on good terms right now. You need to fix that first. Everything else will fall into place afterward.”
I couldn’t help but notice how much bringing up that whole situation affected Cal. More than that, I couldn’t ignore how quickly he seemed to redirect the conversation back to the topic of my friendship with Demi.
“Cal, I—” I started before he cut me off.
“Don’t, Sam,” he ordered. “Not here. Not now. We’re good. Just let it go.”
I wasn’t exactly convinced Cal and I were good. The simple fact that he didn’t even want to hear what I was going to say because he knew where the conversation was going to lead was evidence of that.
But if he didn’t want to do this here and now, I’d honor that request. It was the least I could do for him after everything he’d done for me.
So, I nodded and rasped, “Okay.”
Just then, my phone, which had been resting on the counter, lit up.
A text was there from Demi.
Demi: I just got to my car. I’m leaving now.
“That’s her,” I shared with Cal as I picked my phone up and started tapping out a reply. “She’s heading out.”