38
Sam
“Sorry, Sam?”
Sam blinked and looked up from behind the Press Room counter. It was the owner of the ice cream shop down the street, who’d just come through the line.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“Well, it’s…” she ducked her head. “I really don’t want to cause a fuss, but I ordered a chai latte, and this doesn’t taste like that.”
Frowning, Sam took the cup and popped open the lid. “Well, it doesn’t taste like a chai latte because it isn’t a chai latte. Sorry about that, Cindy. I’ll get another one right out for you.”
“Thanks. I really didn’t mean to be a bother.”
“Not at all.”
The forced smile almost hurt his cheeks. He grabbed the London Fog and poured it down the drain before chucking the cup into the recycling bin and starting over. Everywhere he looked, there were traces of Ben. That wouldn’t have been a problem, if it hadn’t been a week since their fight.
Faith and Peter had been the worst about it. His first day back, they had grilled him for all the juicy details of what had happened over the weekend. Sam had tried to be as vague as possible, but when they kept pressing, he had snapped, telling them that it was none of their business and that they just needed to leave him alone. Not that that wasn’t true, but there were nicer ways to say it.
Sam put the finishing touches on the chai latte and handed it to Cindy, who smiled.
“Thanks, Sam. One of those days?”
“More like one of those weeks.” God, that fake smile really was painful. “You have a good one, Cindy.”
She nodded and left, and Sam felt Faith’s eyes on him. There was no one else in the coffee shop, so he knew what was coming.
“Look, I get that what happened in Vegas is going to stay in Vegas, but when it starts impacting your work here, then it affects all of us,” she said, crossing her arms. “I love you probably more than my own brother at times, but you’re being ridiculous. Tell me what happened so I can help.”
“You can’t help,” Sam said, a warning in his tone. This conversation wasn’t going to go well if she kept up like this.
“How do you know I can’t? You won’t even tell me the problem.”
Sam clenched his teeth and ran his fingers through his hair, then counted backwards from five. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Faith glared at him. “He’s my friend just as much as you are. He won’t talk about it either, but something happened between you two. Did you think I was just not going to notice when he suddenly started going to Claritea?”
That stung more than Sam thought it would. Claritea wasn’t exactly a competitor to the Press Room, since they were on opposite sides of town, but it meant that Ben had been going out of his way to make sure he didn’t see Sam anywhere.
“Listen, things happened. I did something I shouldn’t have and it messed up our friendship.”
“Oh?” Faith raised an eyebrow.
She wasn’t going to let this go. Faith could be extremely stubborn when she felt like it.
Checking the window to make sure no one was headed in, Sam walked around the counter and took a seat at the bar.
“So you know how I lied to my parents about having a boyfriend?” he asked.
“Seriously? That’s, like, the entire reason we had to send Ben with you in the first place.”
“Right. Yeah. Anyway, I didn’t just make someone up. I kind of…based him off Ben. I never used Ben’s name, but everything about him was Ben. Except for one thing.” It was embarrassing, just having to say it aloud. “I told my parents that Ben was rich and that he was really well-known. They weren’t supposed to find out it was a lie, and Ben wasn’t supposed to find out I’d told him that.”
Faith pursed her lips and frowned. “That doesn’t sound like the full story to me. Why would Ben be mad that you’d made up stuff about him? You made up everything, right? Like, it isn’t the only lie you told.”
At least she didn’t seem to be against him. So far.
“Things…happened while we were there.”
As realization hit her, Faith’s eyes grew wide. “Seriously? No shit, you two got together?”
“Yeah, kind of. I found his camera and saw where he’d taken all these pictures of me. I was dying to tell him anyway, but my family really don’t have good timing. At all. So yeah, we hooked up, and I didn’t want it to just be a hook up; but then he found out I had lied about that, and he got really hurt and upset.” Sam let out a slow breath after finishing.
That wasn’t all, of course, but he didn’t think it was his place to tell her about the emotional abuse Ben had suffered at the hands of his ex-boyfriend.
“Let me get this straight.” She steepled her fingers underneath her chin. “You two finally figured out that you both liked each other, you did something about it, and you let some stupid, insignificant lie destroy all of that? Jesus Christ, maybe you don’t deserve each other.”
Sam rubbed at his eyelid with his thumb. “There’s more to it, but I can’t tell you. It’s not mine to tell. What we see as a little harmless lie was a lot more to Ben. I fucked up. I tried to tell him that I fucked up and apologize, but he was too upset. Not that I blame him.”
Faith leveled him with a stare. “You’re idiots. The both of you. Yes, you did something incredibly hurtful. If Andre had lied to his family about me, then I would have been pissed. But we were actually dating when I met his family. You two weren’t.”
When she put it that way, it made Sam feel a little less shitty about what he had done.
“That’s not to say you didn’t fuck up royally.” And the good feeling was gone. “You should never have done that. Actually, why did you lie about that? You never gave two shits about what your family thought.”
There was no good explanation for it, and Sam knew that. Anything he said was just going to sound awful. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try and explain anyway.
“It wasn’t enough that I had a boyfriend,” he said. “They wanted to know more about him. They wanted to know what he did and where he was from and how much money he made. Especially the money thing, because that’s really all my dad’s interested in, and Mom wanted to know I wasn’t going to be starving on the street.”
No matter how many times he tried to explain that he was financially comfortable, she never seemed to listen.
“I just wanted them off my back.” The words came out on a sigh. “I wanted to cover all my bases so that when I went up to see them, I wouldn’t have to deal with the questions that I knew they were going to ask.”
“Clearly that backfired. Did they at least not find out that Ben isn’t your boyfriend?”
“Oh no, they found out.”
That had been a horrible conversation. When Ben had stormed from the room, his family had naturally been confused. After he had gotten back home, Sam had broken the news to them that he had lied the entire time, leaving out the part where he and Ben had gotten together during the trip. They didn’t need to know that.
“Well shit. Sounds like everything kind of blew up in your face.”
Sam sighed at the words. He had predicted the exact same thing before they’d left, but at the time, he didn’t know just how bad it was going to be.
“I just wish I could go back in time and fix things.”
“Fix them how?” Faith asked, propping her chin on her hands.
“Not lie to my parents, for one. Or not lie about the money. I don’t know. Just…fix them to where Ben didn’t hate me.”
“For starters, I don’t think Ben hates you. He’s hurt, yeah, but hate is a secondary emotion, like anger. It takes an underlying cause to make you hate.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Okay psychology major.”
“And another thing, if you hadn’t lied to your parents, then you never would have gotten the chance to be with Ben. Would you really want to trade that?”
“For him hating me? Of course.” That was a no-brainer. He would do just about anything to get Ben to stop hating him.
“Think about it harder. Think about what would have happened if you hadn’t lied,” Faith said. “You would have had to watch him come in here day in and day out, and then one day he would have brought in a guy. And maybe things would have gotten serious. All because you hadn’t taken the chance. At least this is salvageable.”
“How the hell do you suggest salvaging it?” Sam was desperate enough that he would try pretty much anything.
Faith tapped her finger on her chin. “You said you lied about the governor thing, right?”
He didn’t see where this was going. “Yeah, I told my parents that the governor had been to one of his shows and bought a photo.”
“Okay, hear me out. Does your family happen to know the governor of Connecticut?”
That was her grand plan? To get the governor to come to one of Ben’s shows? More than likely, he would only be pissed off even further.
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” he started.
“You don’t really have any better options. You need to do something big to get back in his good graces.”
“And you don’t think that pushing the governor to his show is me saying, ‘Yeah, I actually did care about the money. Here, I brought you someone who can make you rich’?”
“Ah,” Faith said, after a beat.
“Yeah.”
“In that case, do something simple. Buy him flowers. Go to one of his openings. Go to an opening with flowers. You want to show him you don’t care about how much he makes? Focus on the things he does make.”
That actually wasn’t a bad idea. He had been so hesitant to go to the gallery because he didn’t want Ben to catch on. Now that that didn’t matter anymore, it might not be such a bad way to win his affection back. The alternative was that Ben would hold firm with his demand for Sam never to speak with him again, and Sam didn’t think he could handle that.
“When’s his next one?” he asked.
The sooner they made up, the better Sam would feel. He realized, of course, that his own feelings weren’t the ones that mattered, but at the same time, he was desperate to make the knot of tension in his stomach go away.
“This Friday. Get your flowers ready.”
Two days from now. Plenty of time to try and think of what he was going to say to make Ben see that he really was sorry. Sam only hoped that it would be enough to convince him to give him another chance.