Chapter Thirteen
Ian
Sam was quiet. She had never been a chatterbox and usually preferred to listen more than she spoke, but the silence in my car felt tangible. Suffocating, even. Something was wrong and I had no idea what had changed.
“So, what did you think?” I asked lightly. “Did my family scare you off?”
She shook her head. “No.”
I glanced at her, but she was looking out the window. I wondered if maybe my mother or Frankie had said something to inadvertently hurt her feelings while I was out in the backyard. When I came back inside to get her, she seemed tense. Worried in a way that went beyond the simple anxiety I’d seen from her before.
One hand on the wheel, I reached out to tangle my fingers with hers, to provide some kind of reassuring contact. But she simply moved her hand away, eyes still fixed out the passenger’s side window.
It rattled me, that simple rejection. She had never pulled away from me before, and once we got to her house, returned to her comfort zone where she could retreat into her things and her space, I fully intended to get to figure out what had her so upset. Whatever it was, her poker face was terrible, and I was worried that if I poked just a little bit at whatever was bothering her, she would crack and shatter right there in the car.
Finally, still locked in that terrible silence, we turned down her leafy street and I parked my car in front of her house. I turned to her, mouth open to speak, but didn’t get a single word out before she hurtled out of the car and stormed away, up her front steps to slam the front door behind her.
Oh, no. Fuck, no.
My fingers practically shook as I fumbled with my seat belt, and my head swam as I climbed the steps to the front door. The door wasn’t locked, so I let myself in, and as I stepped inside the house, it felt almost odd that the creaking floorboards welcomed me the same as always, even though I had a horrible feeling about what waited for me inside.
I knew it would happen eventually—my first fight with my new girlfriend—but I didn’t expect to feel so scared of conflict without alcohol to blur all the edges.
“Sam?” I called.
“In here.” Her voice was tight and quiet, the words punctuated with a soft sniffle.
I followed the voice into the living room, and my stomach nearly bottomed out when I saw her curled into a ball on the couch, Marge at her feet while big tears rolled down her face.
The room was a mess, with artwork spread everywhere while she prepared for her upcoming show. And in the middle of all of those things, that riot of color and texture, Sam seemed—so small. Sad. I picked my way through all the stuff and sat down next to her on the couch.
“Sam, what’s wrong?” I wanted to reach out and take her hand, but thought better of it. “What happened?”
She swiped a hand across her face to wipe away the tears. “I know about New York.” Reddened eyes met mine. “I went out to the backyard and overheard you talking to your dad and brothers about it. Did you plan to tell me at all? Or were you just going to call me when you got there?”
I straightened. “The New York thing is kind of preliminary,” I said stiffly. “I hadn’t really talked to anybody about it.”
She laughed, low and angry. “Your dad asked you about it, Ian. He already knew. Do you know how embarrassed I feel? To be the only person in the house who didn’t know that my boyfriend might be moving across the country?”
George, you fucking gossip, I thought.
I was so used to how my family operated—no privacy, no just-between-us information—that I didn’t even stop to think about how my dad already knew.
What a fucking mess. I pinched the bridge of my nose and tried to gather my thoughts.
“Okay,” I finally said, realizing the damage I might have done by keeping this to myself, even if I hadn’t made a firm decision yet. “This looks very bad, but I want to explain.”
Sam pulled in a deep, shaky breath. “Do you want to go, Ian? Just tell me, so I don’t look like an idiot when you leave.”
When I met Sam, it was a relief to share the broken and jagged parts of myself with her, and to believe her when she told me that she liked me because of who I was and what I had done—not in spite of those things. And looking at her, curled in on herself on her couch, body stiff with anger and shame and grief—all I could think about was an evening weeks before, laying in bed after a sweaty round of sex, when I asked her about her childhood. As I’d listened to her explain it all that night—the tense silences, the parents who hated each other, the tightly-wound sense of impending disaster that she lived with every day—I knew that she had experienced terrible pain as well.
I had stirred up something awful for her, I realized. A sense of rejection and abandonment. And I wasn’t sure what I could do or say in that moment to fix it. But I owed her the truth, at the very least.
“I’m considering everything.” An honest answer—I was thinking about every call, every offer that came in through my inbox after that Tattooist spread. “New York is a really good offer. It would be big for my career.”
Sam’s face crumpled again, and my heart sank as I watched her sob into her hands. I scooted closer, and even though I ached to reach for her, to pull her into my arms and tell her it was all okay, I didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” I said. The apology sounded lame, even to me. “I—I didn’t mean to keep anything from you. It just seemed too early to make any firm decisions, and like something I could figure out when the time came.”