Random Acts of Trust (20 page)

“What’s going on?” he murmured. “Talk to me. I wasted so much time, not talking with you. No more.”

A fluttering in my chest rose up, as if a protector inside me were sending out a warning sign to close up, put up walls, reinforce the shields. This was Sam, though. We’d just been sensual and raw and raunchy with each other and I wanted more—so much more—and yet...

Something in me hesitated.

Why?

“It’s too much, isn’t it?” he guessed, tightening his embrace.

Blink
. Images, like still photos from the past four years, paraded through my mind. Me at National Qualifiers. The kiss we shared. Sam walking out of the auditorium. All the texts unanswered, the mental screen shot of my phone’s glass screen taunting me. Prom night. Liam. Naked Liam. Naked me and Liam. Meeting Brent. Dating Brent. Naked Brent. Naked me with Brent.

All those years. All that joy and pain overshadowed by not understanding what had happened with Sam.

And now my nude body slid against his bare skin like we were old lovers so familiar with each other we could touch as if we owned the skin, and I just—

Couldn’t.

“I’m closing down,” I confessed. “It is too much, Sam. Not the sex,” I hurried to say. “It’s incredible. You’re incredible.” I reached up to trace his mouth with my finger, the gesture implying what my words couldn’t. “So many unanswered questions, and this is almost too good.”

Here came the tears.

“I keep thinking about what might have been,” I said, sighing.

A groan of deep pain came from his chest, the sound amplified because my ear was pressed into his rib cage. If this was going to be real and true and honest, then it had to start somewhere. Especially considering the fact that we were covered in (and full of) each other’s scent and sex. If you can’t be vulnerable emotionally after giving and taking so much pleasure, when can you?

Holding my breath, I waited for his answer.
Please get it. Please get it. Please get it.

“Me too,” he whispered, kissing the top of my head. My arms tightened around his chest and all the air rushed out of me.

“Sam,” I said, enjoying the feel of his name on my lips, knowing he could hear me.

He swallowed and I felt his head nod slightly. My fingers made a slow journey around his chest, down the dip of breastbone, over his nipples, which tightened from my touch. Joyous—just touching him felt like a privilege. His own hands returned the favor, sliding over my skin with a yearning I could feel.

“I meant it when I said you’re incredible.” His hand stilled at my hip, the other pinned under my neck and shoulders, the fingers resting on my shoulder. “You’re complex and nuanced and everything I’ve always wanted in a woman. But our past...”

My tears shifted to something entirely different,
a thrill of fear coursing through my heart.

“My past,” he said, as if correcting himself. “I don’t deserve you.”

“No!” I said, sitting up, my voice hoarse with protest. “No! You know that’s not true and...and....” Fury and pain and desire and lust all stirred inside me. Modesty went out the window as I charged him, my face inches from his. Someone peering in would think we were about to commence a sex act, Sam lounging on his back on the bed, me on hands and knees over him.

“And what?” he asked, shocked by my response, but also filled with something else. The corners of his mouth betrayed him, twisting ever-so-slightly in a tantalizing way.

“And you don’t get to hide from me again. You don’t get to use your own assumptions about me to conveniently rationalize why you shouldn’t give us a try.”

His head snapped back as much as it could on the pillow and his hands slipped off me. “You think that’s what I did four years ago? But I told you,” he said, eyes blazing. “I told you what happened.”

“Yes, Sam. You told me what you
did
. But you didn’t tell me
why
you did what you did. There’s a huge difference.”

“And you’re starting a fight because you’re afraid to let me make love to you.”

Thud
.

That was the sound of my jaw hitting the floor.

God damn it.

Sam knew me. Really knew me.

I closed my eyes and I felt tears run down my face. His gentle fingers sought out each drop and wiped them away, so tender, as if each tear should be revered and preserved. When I opened my eyes he was sitting up, the contours of his body right there for me to see and feel, skin impossibly hard and soft at once, each curve of muscle like a piece of art for my eyes and fingers to honor.

“Why, Amy? I want you so much. I’ll respect whatever you want. Making love to you seems like atonement right now.
I can’t get those four years back. But I can give you
now
. And tomorrow’s now. And next week’s now. And all the nows you’ll let me give you.”

“I just—”

His fingers on my lips shushed me. “You don’t have to justify anything. This isn’t a debate and you don’t need evidence or philosophical superiority. Feelings aren’t like that. The fact that you feel a certain way is enough. It doesn’t have to be validated by anyone except you.”

Soft lips pressed against mine, and then his arms were around me as I knelt on my bed. Our combined sighs let more skin press together, abs communing, heartbeats in sync.

“Do you mean it?” I asked, my lips buried in his chest.

“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t.”

My laugh was deep and low. “Plenty of people say things they don’t mean. All the time.”

“Even naked?”

“
Especially
naked.”

Shaking with giggles, we just tightened our arms around each other. The urgency faded. Now all I wanted was this—buried in his arms, discovering the terrain of this new world we were creating, layer by layer, stone by stone.

Sam pulled back and brushed the hair out of my eyes with one still hand. His knuckles seemed odd. How had I not noticed it before? A bit twisted and swollen, like my grandmother’s. The fingers still tapered, lean like a surgeon’s, but the incongruity caught my eye.

Before I could comment, he changed the subject, yawning. “I have to go. Work in a few hours.”

“Work?”

Nodding, he searched for his clothes. Regret pulled at me.
Don’t leave
, I wanted to whisper. But I didn’t.

“I’m working for a moving company tomorrow. Just labor.” He shrugged his way into his wrinkled t-shirt. My eyes ate him up, sad to see him go from naked and open to closed and clothed. Joining him, I threw my own clothes on, stirred up and still uncertain I’d done the right thing telling him what was going on inside me.

Dispelling some of that fear, Sam took me in his arms and kissed me so softly my heart ached a bit. “When the time is right, we’ll know. In the meantime,” he said, nipping at my earlobe as he whispered in my ear, “what we shared tonight was a taste of what’s to come.”

“Literally,” I joked, the room open again. Light-hearted. The way I’d imagined intimacy could be, all flesh and heat and wonder.

“I hate to leave, but...” I sensed he wasn’t just looking for an excuse. Time was short and I got the reality of work. My own luxury of a few weeks off would end soon enough, when school started.

The wall of Sam hit me again with a fevered kiss that made my knees weak, and then he was gone. “I’ll text!” he whispered, disappearing down the hall, leaving me to wonder if what we’d just shared had really happened.

Random Acts indeed.

Except ours wasn’t one of crazy.

It was a random act of trust.

Sam

The walk home was excruciating and exhilarating, all at once. It turned out that Amy didn’t live that far from Trevor and Joe. At three in the morning, Boston is silent—I got the city mostly to myself. It was an eerie quiet, and it helped with the echo in my head. The ringing from the amps and the equipment on stage was mostly gone. The smell of Amy was on my fingers, the taste of her on my lips, the feel of her skin on my chest, waist, and my reawakened hard on was a testimony to so many things that I wanted to do.

By the time I got to Trevor’s and pulled out the key, my phone buzzed its text tone. I scrambled it out of my pocket, hoping it was Amy.

Not Amy.

The text read,
Come for an interview tomorrow. 10 PM.
And then an address. An interview? Oh, shit. That must be the job that Liam told me about, the one I’d called and left a message for. An interview!

So, I got a possible place to live permanently, Amy, and a job interview all in one evening. Life was good. Life was
finally
good.

Amy

There I was, staring at a spot on the ceiling, a streak of dirt the color of dark burgundy. I’d never noticed it before. The glow of the security light outside made it eerie. Sam had just left and I’d done my nighttime routine; brushed my teeth and flossed like a good little girl, climbed into a nightshirt and my undies, and snuggled under the covers, alone. My typical bedmate was my tablet and a sex toy or two. Right now, though, I just wanted to lie there and let my body feel everything it had just experienced in the last few hours.

Sam. Sam. Sam
. His name had become a bass drum beat in my head. Four and a half years of wondering had turned to four and a half hours of bliss. It was as if fate had snapped its fingers and decided that my entire life would take a different trajectory. I had been sad, and a little desperate, and yearning for something that I could never have just a few hours ago, going a bit shamefaced and sheepish to watch Random Acts of Crazy in yet another dark bar.

And then, he marched off that stage, his eyes on me and only me, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. I’d tried to say something and he’d shut me up with those lips. That’s what Sam
was
. That’s who he was making me become.
Real.
All the words that had flown between us over the past few hours, the touches, the sighs, the needs, the wants, and the restraint, formed a giant web inside me that I was trying to untangle right now, even as my hands slipped over my thighs, imagining they were his.

The brush of my cotton sheets against bare skin was a kind of torture, because it wasn’t the warmth of his fingertips. My cheek against my pillow left me bereft, because it wasn’t Sam’s shoulder that I rested against. Even the glow of the security lights of middle-of-the-night Boston left me empty, because they weren’t reflecting on his skin. What did all of this mean? Where did we go from here?

We’d both held back, his hands going to find the core of my desire for him, and my own hands touching parts of him that I had dreamed about for so many years, finding the truth so much better than anything my imagination could conjure. Hard muscle and soft skin met my palms, my forearms, driving into his flesh, my fingers, my lips, my mouth seeking every part of him that I could connect with.

Why had I held back? Why had I breathlessly poured out my heart like that, all while keeping my body at bay? It’s not as if we were virgins; that train had left the station long ago. Liam. Liam had been the conductor on that one. Sam would be my third. And I hoped Sam would be my last.

The touch of his tongue on my clit had been divine. The feel of him throbbing in my grasp, of his flesh wrapped by my lips, how he lost control and I gained it in one move—all of that was just a brief glimpse of what we both knew could be more intense, more revealing, more raw.

More.

Exhaustion hit me in increasingly-massive waves until sleep took me away. I didn’t dream that night.

My favorite, most frequent dream had just happened in real life.

Chapter Six

Sam

Two beers, a sandwich, and an episode of
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
later, I was just getting settled on the couch under a thin blanket, loose and a little buzzed. The heat of what had happened between me and Amy made even the lightweight cotton feel like a torture blanket of lava, and the crazy shit Charlie, Glen, Dee and Mac did on the show reminded me a little too much of Darla, Trevor, Joe and Liam. And, I guess, me.

As that thought rumbled around in my mind, my phone buzzed again. Maybe Amy this time? I checked, but it wasn’t her.

Can you come in now?
it said.

And then the name,
Louise.

That’s weird. I checked—it was the same number as the person who had texted me for the interview.

I typed back,
Now? It’s 4 AM.

Yeah, now,
the reply came back quickly.
Are you available?

What the hell kind of job was this?
I wondered. It couldn’t be that bad if Liam had referred me to them, but a 4 AM job interview?