AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I rolled my eyes at that one, sitting down and pointedly putting my earbuds in. I only half expected Sam to actually follow my direction about the guitar. I had no idea what he’d been doing before I showed up, after all, and I wasn’t the boss of him. But I was aware of him disappearing into the garage, the door shut behind him while he did... well, whatever building a guitar entailed. Something with wood and strings, I imagined.
When I’d finished and emailed the chapter to Dr.Nilsson—rough as hell butdone, at least—I ventured out there, not sure if I should knock first. Even though I now knew that the garage wasn’t some secret serial killer lair, I still had this squirmy feeling in my stomach about bothering Sam there. But he glanced up from where he was working, giving me a smile as I came in.
“Done?”
“With that part, at least,” I said. “And I emailed this local professor my advisor wanted me to meet with, to set that up. Then I had to text Alison to see if she could help me look for a blazer.” I waved a hand, figuring it was all pretty boring. “Whatever. I hate shopping. What are you marking that up for?”
Sam had been measuring out distances on the raw wood body, penciling in a few dots along a straight center line. “I still haven’t decided on the scale length of the neck,” he said. “But if I go withtwenty-five point five, I think this is where the bridge’ll go, and then the pickups will be here.”
He was pointing at various spots on the guitar, but I had no idea what half those words meant, so I focused more on how good his hand looked as he swiped some eraser dust off the wood, how much I liked hearing the energy in his voice when he talked about something that excited him.
“I have an old electric from high school,” I said. “The strings have a really bad buzz to them now, though.”
“Could need to have the frets leveled,” Sam said. “Bring it over and I’ll intonate it for you, put new strings on.”
“Cool, thanks,” I said. “Don’t be scared if the only song I can play is ‘Doll Parts.’ It’s just super easy so it might be the only one I remember. Personally, I don’t think Courtney had anything to do with what happened to Kurt.”
“Courtney Love doesn’t scare me,” Sam said. He put the pencil down, looked at me. “You’re used to intimidating people, aren’t you?”
I shrugged. “You have to admit. When you first met me, you were scared.”
“Because you threatened me with Mace,” Sam pointed out. “And called memy dudein a way that suggested imminent violence. I still thought you were cute. Meanwhile you thought I was a six on your serial killer scale.”
That seemed so long ago already, a time when I didn’t know Sam the way I did now. The way his eyes lit up when he found something truly hilarious. The way he sometimes pressed the tip of his tongue to the corner of his mouth when he wasconcentrating. The way his hands clenched my hips when he was about to come, as though he wanted us as close as possible.
On my serial killer scale, Sam was now comfortably at a one.
But on a scale of how much he scared me? It was starting to climb the charts. Because this was supposed to be a brief, fun summer thing... so why did it already feel like more?
“I’ll probably leave for North Carolina in about a month,” I said. I realized it was a non sequitur in our conversation, but in my head the through line was perfectly clear. “I should be able to find another apartment in the same complex where I was renting before, but I still need to get everything settled.”
“Okay,” Sam said. “Teachers go back the first week of August, so if it’s before that I can help you move.”
An altogether confusing response. On the one hand, my brain couldn’t help but interpret that as an eagerness to see me gone, although I was the one who’d brought it up and my leaving had never been in question. On the other hand, he wanted to help me move? Like, drive ten hours, go through my storage unit with me, unpack a bunch of boxes of books I probably didn’tneedbut was never going to get rid of?
That sounded like more commitment than a summer fling.
“We’ll see,” I said. Then, because I couldn’t stop myself, I blurted, “What about the next few weeks, then? What are we doing, if we know this is going to end?”
Sam cradled my jaw in his hands, his eyes searching my face, as if he were looking for some answer there. From his expression, I couldn’t tell if he’d found it. “We know it’s going to change,” he said, resting his forehead against mine. “That doesn’t necessarilymeanend, unless you want it to. You have my full attention, Phoebe. I’m not going anywhere.”
The joke was on the tip of my tongue, something about howIwas the one going somewhere in this scenario. But I swallowed it back, not wanting to shift out of this moment just yet. I pushed up on my tiptoes to press a kiss behind Sam’s ear. “My dude,” I said.
?SAM AND Iended up spending the rest of the night watching movies—somehow, I convinced him to let me put onSilence of the Lambs—and eating some pasta dish he’d whipped up that I was very impressed by.
“It has, like, five ingredients,” he’d said. “Checkers, not chess.”
I would’ve happily stayed in that bubble, taking turns going down on each other on the couch before going for another nighttime swim, but I still didn’t like the idea of spending all night away from Lenore, no matter how much she ignored me.
Plus, the next day I was supposed to meet up with Alison to try to find a blazer at the mall. I already knew it was going to be a futile search. There were too many brands that acted like you should be grateful if they went up to an L, too many stores that stocked a million size 4s and then one size 16 somewhere on the clearance rack. And a blazer was one of the worst items to fit of all, considering that I had to contend with shoulders and sleeve length and whether it pulled weirdly because it had failed to account for the fact that some women have breasts.
“The shoulder fit is the most important,” Alison said as we were going through the racks in one department store. “You can always get any clothing item tailored, but it’s harder to adjust that part. You have such nice, straight shoulders.”
“I’m not going to send some fifty-dollar polyester thing to atailor,” I said. “That’s just throwing away money.”
Alison shrugged. “Obviously it’s better if you start with a high-quality item to begin with,” she said. “But I know you’re on a time crunch so we’ll work with what we have.”
I wanted to point out that all this was easy for her to say. She had the kind of figure that they made clothes for—thin and straight—and everything looked amazing on her. But then I also knew I was being churlish, because that was exactly the reason I’d asked for her help. If left to my own devices, I’d half-heartedly try on a single blazer in Target and then walk out of there with it, only to find out later that it didn’t really fit.
