“And if the woman you love doesn’t love you back?”
Leave it to Sam to ask the hard questions.
“If I wanted to be asked questions like this, I’d go and tell your brother the truth.”
“He would be honest,” he mumbles, scratching the back of his neck. “Ain’t no doubt about that.”
I think Sam is a bit embarrassed by how often he visits his brother. He keeps his distance from the farm, mostly sticking to this very coffee shop, or popping off for meetings somewhere else. I think that the distance he’s put between himself and his family has woven itself into his core and it’s now a habit that’s almost impossible for him to break. Now, just the mere mention of his brother has his tan skin turning bright pink.
“I just…” Sam waits for me to continue patiently. “Everything happened so quickly. I let something slip that I shouldn’t have, and my mom just went with a story that I never even told. I was going to explain the truth, honestly, I was, but then I spent the entire night after lying awake and thinking, and there was just constantly this part of my brain that kept telling me that I had an opportunity. That this was a chance for me to at the very least experience what it might have felt like if Oakleigh loved me back in some alternate universe. I saw it as an opportunity to let her see that we’d be so much better together if we replaced the fighting with something deeper.”
“Maybe she already knows that?”
I scoff bitterly. “Yeah, right. That night eight months ago, she literally tried to best-friend’s-brother zone me.”
“What the fuck is that?”
“Something worse than friend-zone.” I wince at the memory, at the ghost of a feeling in my chest that I felt deeply back then. The feeling of hopelessness that coated my skin like acid at the mere mention of being nothing more than I was then. I remember that feeling turning into the fuel that pushed me to tease and kiss her.
“Wow.”
“Yeah.” I chug the remainder of my coffee and hunch in my seat. Sam looks deep in thought and I’m grateful for the reprieve; grateful for the chance to wallow in my self-pity for a minute and wish for something more than what I have.
“You know the one thing I really don’t understand in all of this?” Sam asks.
“What?”
“Why the hell do the two of you hate—or should I say ‘hate’—each other in the first place?”
I let out a groan and tilt my head back until it falls onto the back of my chair, because fuck this story.
“It was all one big misunderstanding that I just never clarified.”
“Do tell,” he says, sinking further into his seat to get comfortable, a grin dimpling his cheek.
I shake my head in retaliation, but the words come out of my mouth regardless. “The first day I met her, me and this idiot I used to know, Benjamin, were coming home late from practice. He used to stop by my house on the way to his because Mom would always feed him. When we got home, Wren was sat in the kitchen with Oakleigh and I had never seen her before, but Sam, I could have sworn to you that I felt this sort of new lease on life the moment I laid eyes on her. She had her face absolutely full of this cherry pie that they had made in home ec., and it was all over her mouth and she hadn’t even bothered to get a fork, she was just there eating it with her hands.”
Sam grimaces at the thought, but I smile softly at the memory.
“I just remember thinking how free she looked, so uninhibited and not ruled by her mind like I am. Her eyes were the lightest things I’d ever seen, and I just felt this urge to spew out some shit about how she was the most beautiful thing.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Yeah, why didn’t you?” Jamie asks.
Jesus, I was so wrapped up in the memory, I didn’t even notice him come and join us. He’s sat on the arm of Sam’s chair, elbow resting on his knee and head in his hand as they both watch me intently.
“Back then, I hadn’t started seeing my current therapist yet. I was a mess, even more controlled by my thoughts than I am now, and the compulsions were just…out of control most of the time, and even though I knew that I would have done everything in my power to make Oakleigh the happiest I could make her, there was just this part of me that kept reminding me that I was broken and beyond repair. I didn’t want her to have to deal with that; to make my burden her own, especially when she was only fifteen.”
Sam and Jamie both move their gazes down toward the floor. Sam’s face is the softest I’ve ever seen it.
“The thought of it kind of soured my mood in record time. Mix that with my awe of seeing her and…I don’t know, I just kind of spoke and it just came out so…blunt.”
“What did you say?” Jamie asks.
“All I said was, ‘You really should wipe your mouth, even Mowgli eats neater than you.’”
“Oof.”
