Page 144 of Smoke and Glitter

"Let's not get carried away."

His mouth pulls sideways. I stand before sitting beside him starts feeling too easy.

Sam rises with me, and suddenly the careful distance we've maintained for the entire conversation disappears. He's close enough that I can smell clean soap and the faint trace of whatever cologne he put on this morning.

His eyes drop to my mouth. My body notices. Traitor.

Neither of us moves.

"You can walk me to the gate," I say.

Sam nods and falls into step beside me.

He doesn't reach for my hand. The fact that I notice the absence is annoying enough that I shove both hands into my coat pockets. At the entrance, we stop.

Sam looks at me for a long moment. "I'm glad I came."

He doesn't ask whether I am.

I look at this man who crossed an ocean without knowing whether I would even agree to sit beside him, who finally said what I begged him to say months ago and managed not to ask me to reward him for it.

"I am too."

Something loosens in his face.

"I'll call you."

The certainty catches my attention. No qualification. No decision handed back to me disguised as consideration.

"I'll answer if I can."

"Fair."

I turn toward the gate. Sam stays where he is. I make it far enough that looking back becomes a decision. I do it anyway. He's still standing beside the bench, hands buried in his coat pockets.

He lets me leave.

I change into soft pants when I get back to my flat. I take a blanket to the sofa and turn on the lamp beside it because whoever furnished this place believes overhead lighting is appropriate for human habitation and therefore cannot be trusted.

I try television for a while, then reading. Neither lasts. Eventually I stop trying and go through the conversation again. What surprises me is that I'm not searching for holes.

I spend my professional life listening for them. I can hear when somebody has rehearsed around an inconvenient fact or sanded a sentence down until technically true becomes functionally useless. I know what a controlled message sounds like.

Sam wasn't controlled.

He lost his place. Corrected himself. Said things in ways that made him look selfish and afraid and occasionally like an absolute idiot.

He told me he loved me.

I pull the blanket tighter around my legs.

I love you, Autumn.

For months, I thought those words were what I was waiting for.

I believe him. I believe he loves me now. I believe he loved me when we were sleeping in the same bed. I believe he loved me while I was leaving shoes in his apartment and taking calls from his kitchen. I even believe he loved me when he sat with Bex and made what we had small enough that he could pretend losing it wouldn't destroy him. Love wasn't what was missing. Trust was. And love, inconveniently, can arrive all at once. Trust can't. Trust has to get up tomorrow and do it again.

Chapter twenty-seven