When we had time on our hands, Sam filled it. He did this by telling me he wanted to visit the places he’d frequented when he’d lived in Indianapolis.
I’d been surprised. I knew he lived in Indy for several years but I didn’t know he held any nostalgia for it.
This was because he hadn’t told me.
So we went to Eagle Creek Park where Sam said he would go and run, he liked it and he missed it though, luckily, he didn’t run when we went there but we did walk for over an hour. We drove around the Circle. We went to an Italian restaurant called Patrizio’s where, the minute Sam walked in, the owner (the aforementioned Patrizio) greeted him like a long lost son. Interspersed with his many duties running a popular but kind of hole in the wall restaurant, Patrizio hung at our table and I learned more about Sam from Patrizio than I did from Sam. But, again, all of it was fun, reminiscing, nothing meaty, nothing profound.
In other words, in our time in Indiana we did a lot, we were together almost constantly but what we did not do was talk as Sam promised we would.
He was no less attentive, no less gentlemanly, no less Sam which meant he was no less guarded.
And that was what it was. I’d figured it out. And I’d figured it out not after the first time I gently attempted to steer our conversation to him, his intensity about me and where that was coming from, his history, his heart and had been just as gently rebuffed. Nor did I figure it out after the second time I, a little less gently, tried to approach him and was again gently rebuffed.
No, it was the last time, last night, after we’d had sex, were cuddling and murmuring about nothing important when I’d tried to move it to stuff that was important and was not gently rebuffed.
And I did this by cautiously and gently (I thought) asking about his brother Ben.
“Don’t, Kia. Yeah?” Sam had said, his until then soft murmur suddenly holding an edge.
“Don’t?” I asked carefully.
“Don’t,” Sam confirmed.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t push it.”
I pulled in breath then asked, “Push what?”
Sam didn’t answer.
No.
What he did was lift up and twist, coldly dislodging me from where I was lounging on his chest. Then he turned off the light. Then he settled in bed with his back to me.
Yes, that was what he did. He gave me nothing and then he completely shut me out.
After the shock wore off (and this took awhile), I rolled to my back, cuddled Memphis and stared at the ceiling, feeling a pain stabbing close to my heart.
Because I knew at that moment that it wasn’t about us being new, getting to know each other, feeling each other out. It wasn’t about things being intense, our feelings for each other and all the stuff swirling around me. And it wasn’t that we were jetlagged, busy and there were a million things on our minds.
It was that Sam did not intend to share and I couldn’t figure this out. He was demonstrative, affectionate and communicative. He listened, I knew, he always paid attention. He cared what I said about practically everything even if I was waxing on about how awesome pasta was at Patrizio’s.
He just wasn’t letting me in.
The one time I put up what Sam called “a wall” he got seriously ticked and tore it right down. But turnabout was obviously not fair play with Sam Cooper.
He’d broken his promise.
And that hurt.
I looked from Paula back to Sam and suddenly I felt my head start to throb dully.
I was in unchartered territory.
Of the things Sam had shared, he’d made it clear he didn’t want me gabbing to my girlfriends about him though this was mostly about how he was in bed.
I didn’t know if it was okay to do what every girl in the world did and that was pick apart her relationship with her boyfriend. I didn’t want to piss off Sam especially not now, when I felt things were at a fragile juncture.
It didn’t seem fair if the rules of dating a famous hot guy included the fact you couldn’t seek advice from your girlfriends, especially in the beginning and seriously especially at a fragile juncture.
“Babe?” Paula prompted and I looked back at her. But before I could speak, she handed me my lemonade and declared, “You know, this is good.”
My mind on Sam, I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“What’s good?”
“This,” she swept her arm out to the yard, my eyes followed it and when they did I saw Teri and Missy heading our way. “This is good,” she went on. “Letting that dickhead go. Exorcising him from your life, all of it, all of him. It’s good.”
“It is, you know,” Missy told me when she and Teri stopped close.
“I know,” I replied, looking amongst my friends.
Paula was petite, had dark, thick, curly hair, gray eyes and she was a little plump but she worked it. Teri was tall like me, way rounder than me but she also worked it. She had ash blonde, wispy hair she spent a fortune on having cut so it didn’t look so wispy. Missy was also tall, but she was blue-eyed, dark-haired and reed thin by design. She worked out daily at the gym, getting up at five o’clock in the morning on weekdays to do it. Since Rich died, it was another of her obsessions. She dropped fifteen pounds she didn’t need to lose due to grief and kept it off due to an obsession with fitness that took her mind off what she lost.
They were my friends, my posse, my best buds. But I had kept them distant from me for years as I lived in hell. They were friends who would have helped me, friends who stood beside me even though I didn’t let them in and still, even learning that lesson, I was undecided about sharing about Sam.
And I didn’t know how to feel about this either.
On the one hand, I was falling in love with Sam and if he could grow to trust me, I could grow to trust that maybe the same thing was happening for him too. And I didn’t want to do anything that might harm that.
On the other hand, with Cooter, I’d chosen the way wrong man for me, blinded by false glory and I didn’t want to do that again. Sam was not Cooter, I knew this. And for years I’d given a certain amount of headspace to what signs I might have missed from Cooter, red flags that, if I’d been older, more mature, I would have caught. There weren’t many but they were there. And what had happened last night with Sam completely shutting me out, I thought, was a red flag.
And my girls could confirm this. Or not. But at the very least talking to them would mean letting it out and getting different viewpoints because the one I had wasn’t so fun.