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“I stopped the car because you need to hear this when we’re still. I’ve been thinking about you nonstop all week.”
A delicate silence stretched out between us greedily, and it felt like not only the car had stopped, but the world around us had stopped turning, too.
For once, my head wasn’t spinning. Everything felt too vulnerable and real and clear.
He wasn’t even touching me, but I felt like he was. When he looked at me like that, Sam was inside me, looking through my eyes and into my soul, at all of the parts I hated about myself.
Yet, he was still here.
People made eye contact with me hundreds of times every day. But for the first time in my life, here in this car with Sam, I feltseen.
“You’ve burrowed into my mind and made a home there. And I’m telling you this right now because I don’t believe in games, so I’m making my intentions clear. I want you.”
“But, we’ve already—”
“I know.”
He pointed to my chest, to my heart, which was all I could hear pounding in my ears.
“But I want that.”
15
Sam
Too much? Too much.
Grace looked down, then pointed her eyes straight ahead. “I… I don’t know what to say…”
“You don’t have to say anything,” I said, returning my eyes to the road. “I don’t even care if we’re on the same page. I’m just letting you know what page I’m on. And you can turn to it, if you want.”
“What if I’m not ready?”
I shrugged and pressed the gas pedal gently, and the car and the world started moving again. “I don’t expect you to be ready. What, do you think I’m some tool that would take advantage of you when you’re distressed and vulnerable like this? Why do you think I didn’t kiss you in your classroom when your eyes were all like,‘kiss me, Sam’?”
She didn’t say anything, then turned to stare out the window. Then she said, “Things are complicated.”
“Then let’s un-complicate them,” I said. “Tell me everything you’ve got locked in that noggin. But put on some music first.”
“Oh, right,” she said, glancing down at my phone for seemingly the thirtieth fucking time.
If I didn’t get some sound in here soon, there would be nothing to stop my mental chatter from pouring out and annoying her to death. Rhymes and jokes and puns and disses…
The ‘negging.’
“Trying to figure out who you are via Taylor Swift is a little heavy for right now,” I said. “How about you play The Dear Hunter? Act Five: Hymns with the Devil in Confessional.”
She relaxed, freed from the weight of the decision. “Why, you feel like you’re the devil and I’m in confessional?”
I smiled.
I liked the sound of that.
“Not quite the devil, but maybe the little one on your shoulder telling you to indulge.”
She giggled, and the gentle wind chime sound of her laugh dispelled all the tension in the air.
It soothed me, and then it got even better when the gentle harp chords of the first song on the album, Regress, came through the speakers.
