~ Ten ~
For a few moments after waking, Samantha kept her eyes shut, and wondered whether she had dreamed the whole thing. But she hadn’t. Though she was alone in the bed, the ache and weightiness between her legs told her that what she remembered of the night before had been all too real.
Turning her face into the pillow to muffle the sound, she screamed, then just as suddenly, sat up and looked around. The bedroom was empty. Gathering the sheet around her, she immediately dropped it again. What was the point, after last night, in being all shy now?
Getting out of bed, naked, she glanced at her reflection and recoiled at her mass of matted, tangled hair. If she had woken up in her own bed, and at home, she would have immediately taken care of that situation, but there was nothing to be done here, without the array of products she depended on to keep her natural mane under control. She left the bedroom—his really bright bedroom with the shades wide open—and headed downstairs.
“Colt?”
There was no response. No sound at all, in fact. The digits above the range, in neon green, read 1:09.
How had it gotten this late?
Because of the cookout, she’d been planning to work out today. But who was she kidding? It would be at least two days before she could comfortably move the way she needed to, to get a thorough sweat. And sitting on the uncomfortable seat for spinning? Forget it.
Her thighs ached, though she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why. The lovemaking had been slow, and sweet and sensuous. Just the one time, but it had been so good. So, so good. She had often imagined what it would be like, and now she knew.
She had a sudden urge to call her sister, Leah. After Colt, Leah was the person she confided in most, and Sam tended to share all things man-related with her. Except not this time. This development with her and Colt had to be handled delicately. If she dared tell her sister anything like this over the phone, Leah wouldn’t even hang up completely before calling their mother to deliver the news.
A spontaneous giggle shook Sam’s shoulders and she clapped a hand over her mouth to stop it from becoming a full-throated laugh. But there was no reason to suppress her laughter because there was no one there but her.
Where the hell was Colt?
Sam tried not to let her mind wander in the direction most women’s minds inevitably did when they woke up alone after a night that began with company and was followed by a morning of stony silence and solitude. This wasn’t at all like that, she told herself. This was her, and Colton. And also, she was in his house. So, no … no need to think crazy thoughts.
Hesitating, she looked around for his coffee, and began making herself a cup. She would take it upstairs, take a shower and then try calling him. And if she could convince him to come back soon enough, maybe they would …
“Damn. That’s a sight a man could get used to every morning.”
Shrieking, Sam almost dropped one of his mugs as she turned to find Colt standing at the kitchen door. He was sweaty, wearing shorts and a skin-tight sleeveless crew-neck workout top. His chest and abs were defined and visible beneath the lightweight top, and he was breathing audibly.
“Just went for a quick run,” he explained.
Now that she’d turned to face him, he sounded like an automaton. Colt stood there at the door, looking at her, but neither advancing nor retreating. Perspiration dripped from his brow and ran in rivulets down the side of his face. And he didn’t take his eyes off her for a second. In fact, he was outright staring, his eyes traveling her full length.
Sam felt her face grow warm, and then hot. The only other time she recalled Colt looking at her with anything approaching this kind of hunger was that first night, when everything had changed between them. She used to wish for a look like this from him, and now that she had it, it was a dozen times better than she could ever have imagined.
If there had ever been moments when she thought of Colt as the boy she had known since they were kids, those moments would be no more. He was now completely and irrevocably a man. She would never, could never, think of him as a boy again.
His stare, strangely, didn’t make her want to cover up, and shrink from it at all. It made her feel bold. Her back straightened, her chin lifted, and her nipples hardened.
Colt took one step toward her, and another.
Sam stood her ground.
When he was close, she felt his body-heat, and smelled his perspiration which was earthy, and pungent, but familiar. She already knew all his smells. His just-showered, just-played-some-ball, and even his just-heading-to-the-club scent. This was different, because beneath the perfectly ordinary scent of a man who had just gotten a workout, was the brackish odor of sex.
With her. Sex, with her.
Sam took a step toward him. They were only inches apart now.
Colt reached for the mug in her hand, and without looking, placed it on the countertop. With both hands, he ran the tips of his fingers over her forearms and up to her shoulders. Sam trembled at the contact. His fingers were damp, but cool.
“C’mon,” he said, inclining his head toward to stairs to the third level.
“I’m supposed to be at Mom’s house for dinner in a couple hours.”
“Call her and cancel,” Colt said.
Sam looked at him, her expression reproachful. “I can’t call her and cancel.”
“Then text her and cancel,” Colt said.
“Text her. Right. This is a woman who still hasn’t figured out how to record an outgoing voicemail message on her ‘portable phone’.” Sam made air-quotes to indicate what her mother called it.
Colt laughed. “Ma Maxine is my girl. I bet if you just let her in on everything about us she would …”
“No,” Sam said.
From the look on Colt’s face, she knew right away that she had said it too quickly, too emphatically.
He sat up.
They’d been lounging in his bed, enjoying a lazy afternoon, watching television, and napping on and off. Sam was still sex-drowsy but planned to rouse herself just enough to go home, shower, change, and then stumble over to her mother’s place in Crystal City.
Since Sam’s father’s passing, Maxine had been talking about selling the family home and moving into a bright new complex, where there were what she called “other seniors.” At just fifty-eight Maxine hardly qualified for that label. No one could tell her mother otherwise though, because since her husband’s death, she seemed to have resigned herself to following him to the grave, likely sooner rather than later.
Sam and her sister viewed it as their duty to disabuse her of that notion. She was still vibrant and young. She could have another life, and Lord knew, they both hoped that she would realize she could also have love and companionship again. The weekly dinners, every Sunday, like clockwork, were a way to keep closely in touch, and make sure she was living a life, and not just planning for her death.
“You don’t think she’d be happy about it?” Colt asked. “Me and you being, you know …”
It was the ‘you know’ that was the problem. Maxine would leap to conclusions if she knew what was going on. And after the conclusions would make inquiries, and shortly after that, probably graduate to demands: for an engagement, for a wedding, for grandbabies.
“It isn’t about you.” Sam shook her head.
“It is about me. Because I’m the dude you’re scared to tell her about.”
“But not because it’s you. At least not …”
Colt narrowed his eyes and leaned closer. “At least not what? Finish your sentence.”
“At least not entirely because it’s you,” Sam said.
“So gimme a percentage. How much of it is because it’s me?”
His voice was tense now, as was his jaw. And he was squinting. A dead giveaway that he was growing agitated, if not outright angry. It made Sam want to smile. Despite the real risk that this could turn into a full-blown argument, she wanted to smile because of how easily she could read him. Whether or not that meant good news as they built their ‘you know’ remained to be seen.
“What’s funny?”
Oh, so maybe she was smiling. Quickly feigning a sober expression, with both palms, Sam pressed against Colt’s chest, trying to push him back against the sheets again.
“Nah,” he said, looking like he was struggling not to smile as well. “You ain’t about to fuck me calm. I want to know why Ma Maxine can’t know that …”
Sam kissed him. “Okay, I’ll tell her,” she said when she raised her head.
Colt grinned.
“Not today,” she added. “But soon.”
“You got two weeks.”
“Two weeks,” Sam agreed.
“Bet.”
They hooked pinkies to seal the deal and then Colt let Sam push him backward after all.
Sam’s mother was beautiful. Not just pretty, attractive or that dreaded label women acquired in middle-age: well-preserved. She was beautiful.
Watching her as she busied herself with taking a casserole out of the oven, Sam took in her mother’s poise, and grace. She was slender, with a small waist and wide hips, a long neck and the movements of woman who had grown up in a more genteel era. But the truth was, Maxine was a girl from the housing projects of DC who, at eighteen, met a charming country boy from rural Virginia, who almost immediately saw in Maxine, the mother of his children.
Sam’s father had worked hard his entire life, so that his wife would never have to. His role as her provider had brought him enormous pride, because he had been the one to take Maxine out of a hard life and build for her one of ease. He was content to have her cook his meals, join her clubs and raise the two girls she bore him. He never hinted at the things Sam now knew had to have been true, at least sometimes—financial strain, workplace stress, and the pressures of a house filled with females who liked pretty and frivolous things.
If her father had failed at anything, it was to prepare his wife for a life without him in it. He had bought mortgage insurance, so the house was hers outright. And he had life insurance, so she would not now, in her fifties have to find work. But he hadn’t imagined—nor had any of them, really—that the beautiful wife he kept like a princess would not know how to cope with his mere absence.
When Sam was thirteen, she accidentally stumbled across a cardboard box in her mother’s closet. Thinking that perhaps she had discovered her parents’ secret stash of porn (because didn’t most parents have one?) she’d opened it, keeping an ear out for someone who might discover her snooping.
But inside, she had only discovered paintings. Miniatures in bright colors, depicting scenes of men and women dancing exuberantly, heads thrown back and arms spread wide, in ramshackle juke joints, vibrant nightclubs, and parlors.
At first, Sam couldn’t understand why her mother would buy the dozens of small oil paintings and not display them. Then she noticed the artist’s marking at the bottom—her mother’s initials. Or at least what her initials had been before she was married. The discovery for a moment delighted Sam, and then saddened her. She had never seen her mother with paints, canvases, or anything of an artist. She had never heard her mother so much as express an interest in art. And yet … here it was, the evidence of what had to have been a passion of hers, once upon a time.
Sam never told anyone what she found. Not even her sister. But she took one of the small paintings and hid it in her room. It was of a woman, or a girl, really, in a yellow dress, dancing alone in the middle of a room. She is surrounded by people, watching her with wonder, and with envy. Sam still had the painting and sometimes took it out to look at it but had never displayed it for obvious reasons. She imagined the girl in the yellow dress was Maxine, before she allowed marriage and motherhood to suffocate every other part of herself.
“Why is Leah always late?” Sam complained to her mother now, as Maxine walked the casserole out to the dining table.
“She has to make sure Kieran is settled with the baby. You know how men are. They panic when they’re about to be left alone with an infant.”
Sam rolled her eyes at how easily the excuse for Leah’s flakiness rolled off her mother’s tongue.
“Well, I’m hungry now. I’m going to start eating without her,” she threatened.
“The chicken needs another few minutes,” her mother said. “She should be here by the time it’s done.”
Together they sat at the kitchen table, and Sam eyed the cake sitting in the center of it.
“I found that recipe in the grocery store,” her mother said, following her gaze. “Some Spanish thing. Tres Leches. You ever heard of that?”
Sam nodded. “Delicious.”
“It’s the kind of thing your father would have liked. Because it’s so rich. It’s probably the kind of thing that killed him,” her mother said putting a hand to her jaw. “I always liked baking for him.”
“You didn’t kill Dad with your cooking,” Sam said wearily.
“I indulged him,” her mother returned.
“And he indulged you.”
“Yes, but not with things that could kill me.”
“Mom. Diabetes runs in his family.”
“Diabetes doesn’t run in families. Poor eating habits do.”
“Okay,” Sam said.
She stood and went to get something to drink from the refrigerator.
What she really wanted was to eat. She had been ravenous since she left Colt’s place, having worked off their light meal with all the fooling around they did just before she got ready to come here.
She took a bottled water from the fridge and cracked the seal, taking a long swallow. The silence lengthened, and Sam watched the back of her mother’s head. She had grown less conscientious about her greys. Now, they laced through her dark brown permed hair, making it appear dry.
Once a young woman who painted colorful miniatures, her mother was now a much older woman, unable to envision a life without her man. How long did a transformation like that take? Ten years, twenty? Or, perhaps even more scary, what if it took only one, or two years to lose yourself?
“I’m here!”
The sound of Leah’s voice, coming from the front hall seemed to energize the room. Sam watched her mother’s shoulders straighten, and she stood, turning to Sam with a smile.
“I knew she wouldn’t be too late,” she said.
The words were spoken as though to herself, rather than to Sam, and she turned to head out to the front room, leaving Sam standing in the kitchen by herself.
They wouldn’t have missed her, Sam thought as she eased her Altima back down her mother’s driveway, keeping an eye on her passenger-side mirror as she did.
Leah had parked her ridiculously huge Cadillac Escalade a little close for comfort to Sam’s vehicle. Between the two of them, it was Leah who had the most to lose if there was a scratch, so one would have thought she would be more careful. But ‘careful’ and Leah didn’t really go together in a sentence.
Her mother and Leah were still in the living room when she took her leave, sitting on the sofa with legs folded beneath them, gossiping like girlfriends. Sam had lost track of the conversation about an hour earlier, but tried to hang in there, not wanting to be transparent about the fact that she had been plotting her escape since shortly after the Tres Leches and coffee were served. If Sam had been the one who was late, or hadn’t shown up at all, there would have been some reflexive grumbling and complaints, but they ultimately wouldn’t have missed her.
The entire time she was there, her mind wandered to work, and Jason’s comments on the juvenile asylee paper; and to Colt, and that morning, and the night before.
Mostly, her mind stayed on Colt.
She should have been clamoring to tell her mother and sister about the new development in their relationship. But something was holding her back, and she wasn’t even sure she knew what it was. Her mother at least, would be thrilled. Leah, maybe not as much.
Instinctively—because it was what she always did after dinner at her mother’s—she called Colt. He was breathless when he answered the phone.
“Working out,” he explained.
“Again?”
“I didn’t work out earlier,” he said. “I went for a run.”
“That’s the same thing to me,” Sam mumbled.
“What’s wrong, lady bug?” Colt asked. “You sound funny. Leah get on your nerves?”
“You know she always does.”
That was untrue. Leah didn’t always get on Sam’s nerves. Leah and her mother together got on her nerves.
“I’m almost done here. Come through.”
“I literally just left you, like, three hours ago.”
“So what?” Colt said. “I didn’t get enough of you. I need some more.”
Jesus.
Sam felt her face, and other parts of her body warming.
No wonder women acted like fools for him. If this was the way he talked, she would be a fool for him soon enough.
Sam listened to him on the other end of the line, grunting. He was probably lifting weights, just as casual as can be—lifting weights, and increasing her heartrate, like it was nothing. Across a telephone line, no less.
“No,” she said. “I have to go home. Get some … stuff done.”
This couldn’t be healthy. No one was supposed to be this important to another person.
“Okay …” More grunting. “So, I’ll come to you just as soon as I’m done.”
Sam hesitated, and opened her mouth to refuse, but nothing came out.
“A’ight, bug? I’ll come to you.”
“Yes,” she said.
Come to me.