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“Hey,” I said. “Can I come in?”
He stepped aside, letting me follow him through the door until we were both standing in his living room. I crossed over to the pictures above the piano, pointing to each face in turn. “Let me guess,” I said, pointing first to a woman who looked about a decade older than Sam. “That’s Tara, that’s Jack in the Cubs hat, Megan is in between, Erin’s got the pink shirt on, and that’s Dylan with his arm around you.” I squinted closer at the picture. “Are you wearing a shell necklace? What year is this from?”
It was a cheap parlor trick, but I thought maybe he’d be impressed by my memory. I’d always had a knack for those first-day-of-school games where we had to go around the room and name every student who’d come before us and the one fact they’d told about themselves. Plus, I wanted to show him that I’d been listening. That I cared.
“You switched Megan and Erin,” he said, not seeming as impressed as I’d hoped. Not seeming much of anything. He was more of a stranger than when I’d stood on his doorstep to drop off a package. “But otherwise, yeah. Did Conner leave?”
“A few minutes ago,” I said. “And the cat came back. Just like you said she would.”
“Great.”
The problem was that my first instinct was to try to kiss him, to see if I could get him to melt into me the way he had last night. But I knew that would be a mistake. The physical stuff wasn’t the issue here.
“Sam...” I swallowed, wishing I knew what to say, wishing there was some magic formula where I could give him as much of me as he wanted, but hold enough back to avoid being vulnerable. I had a sneaking suspicion that the formula didn’t exist; that it was an unsolvable equation.
He glanced toward the table, where I saw there was a half-eaten sandwich on a plate. I’d interrupted his lunch, too. God, I was the worst.
“It’s my fault,” he said finally. “I guess after last night I thought...” He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter, even though it clearly did. “If you don’t want to tell your brother yet, I get it. It’s more that I can’t figure out what youwouldtell him.”
“Not any of the details, that’s for sure,” I said. “My mother once told me about an incident with my stepdad involving a sex swing, and I’ll never be able to bleach that image from my brain. It’s made Christmases with them unbearable.”
Sam smiled a little, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. “I mean, what are we doing? Am I your boyfriend now, are we friends with benefits, was that a one-night stand...?”
The way he saidboyfriendsent a thrill up my spine. Which was ridiculous, because that was the last thing I wanted or neededright now—especially when I wasn’t even planning to be in town for that long. But suddenly he said that word and I was back in tenth grade again, doodling my crush’s name in the margins of my math homework.
“I definitely want more than one night,” I said.
His eye contact was all-consuming. “So do I.”
“After that...” I shrugged helplessly. “Can’t we just be two people? Two people who live next door to each other and hang out and hook up sometimes—preferably alotof times—but who don’t have any expectations beyond that for now?”
“So, neighbors who hook up.”
“Exactly,” I said. “It’s like friends with benefits, but less of a commute.”
I was ready to put this plan into action right there, right then, but I could tell that Sam was still thinking about it, turning something over in his head. Then there was his poor forgotten sandwich on the table, and I already felt bad for the way this day had gone after last night had been so perfect.
“Look,” I said, “no matter what, we can still be friends, right? Conner invited me to this Fourth of July fireworks thing—he’s actually going to propose to Shani that night, but you didn’t hear it from me—and you should totally come if you don’t already have plans. What do you say?”
Sam ran his hand through his hair. “I may have something,” he said, in a way that made me think he didn’t. “Can I let you know?”
“Sure,” I said, trying not to feel hurt. Fourth of July was pretty much the worst holiday, anyway. I hated fireworks andunquestioning patriotism. And I couldn’t blame him for not being super psyched to spend time with the woman who’d bailed on him this morning. “We can keep it casual.”
He gave a little laugh, more an exhalation of air than an actual sound of humor. “I think that’s where we have a disconnect,” he said. “But I’ll let you know.”
?WHEN I GOTback to my house, I plopped down on my bed, both because I was still tired and because I was running out of places to relax in this place. I had completely forgotten about Lenore under the bed until she came out, meowing at me from the floor. She eyed me warily and then leapt up onto my stomach, her small paws starting to knead at my T-shirt.
“What isthat?” I asked her. “What are you doing?”
I wished I could reach the cat book from the library, so I could look up what this behavior meant. I assumed it wasn’t an act of aggression, because she didn’t seem tense. She’d started to purr, actually, and licking the spot where she’d been kneading. I could feel the roughness of her tongue through the damp fabric.
Was she trying tonurseon me?
“This is a little weird,” I said. “Not gonna lie.”
But I let her keep doing it, because it seemed to make her happy. I reached out an experimental hand to give her a single stroke down the length of her back. She startled a little, as though not sure she liked it, and then went back to sucking on my shirt. Eventually, I was able to rest my hand on the top of her head, giving her a few firm pets that she didn’t seem to mind as much.
“You’re probably riddled with fleas,” I said. “And I bet you go through people’s garbage, don’t you, you dirty trash cat. I’m going to call you DTC instead of Lenore.”
