~ Nineteen ~
It was almost six-thirty when Colt pulled into Sam’s driveway. He sat still in his SUV for a moment, catching his breath and cursing himself for the delay in getting there, which was only made worse when he stopped in at Whole Foods to get soup for Sam and jerk wings for himself.
Not wanting to assume that it was still cool for him to use his keys, he rang the bell and waited. Within moments, the door opened.
Sam stood there, wearing a long white t-shirt that gaped at the neck—which made him suspect that the shirt was his—and black leggings. Her feet were bare, her hair pulled back in a large Afro-puff and her eyes had a bleary, medicated look about them.
“Hey,” she said.
Leaning in to kiss her, Colt hesitated a moment when he got close, not sure how she might receive it.
“It’s okay,” Sam said. “I’m not contagious. It’s a respiratory thing.”
She got on her toes and presented her cheek, which he ignored, and kissed her briefly on the lips. They were well past that chaste-kiss-on-the-cheek thing and weren’t going backwards, not if he had anything to do with it.
“What kind of respiratory thing?”
Shutting the door behind them, he followed her up to the kitchen and living areas.
“It’s going to sound so much worse than it is when I tell you, so …”
“Sam. What kind of respiratory thing?”
“It’s …”
The living area seemed to have been transformed into a makeshift bedroom. There were cups and mugs on the coffee table and a few empty water bottles strewn around; and on the sofa, a blanket, afghan and two pillows. On the floor in front of the sofa, a pair of socks turned inside out, and a discarded sweatshirt.
“It’s …?” Colt prompted. He put the food on the kitchen counter.
“Walking pneumonia,” she said, speaking quickly, as though that would lessen the impact of her words. “But …”
“What?”
“It’s not as bad as …”
“You have pneumonia? And you didn’t call me?”
“Walking pneumonia. It’s not as bad,” she said again.
“Who told you that?”
Sam looked sheepish for a moment.
“You read it on the internet.”
Shaking his head, he went closer. He hesitated then sat next to her on the sofa, shoving one of the pillows out of the way. He had been sitting there for only a moment, when Sam rested her head on his shoulder.
“The internet, huh?” Colt said dryly.
Sam sighed. “Of course, I went to the doctor as well. They gave me some stuff to take. Antibiotics. Even though they said it was just a precaution and I may not even need them.”
“They didn’t say that.”
“Yes, they did. Seriously.” Her voice raised to almost a whine. “They said that sometimes just resting and drinking lots of fluids will take care of it.”
“Sometimes …” Colt gave up and exhaled.
He leaned back into the sofa, relaxing against the headrest. The drive back from Philly had been grueling. It seemed like he had left the city limits just in time to have pre-rush hour and rush-rush hour traffic follow him everywhere: Philly to Delaware, Delaware to Baltimore, and finally from Baltimore and DC. His single purpose had been to get to Sam’s place before seven. And all because of the offhand comment she made about wanting him to come “sooner” than that.
Sam lifted her head from his shoulder and then slid down, instead resting it in his lap. Colt tensed a little, in surprise, because the last time they’d seen each other, he had been ordered to get out of her house. But Sam’s anger tended to flare unexpectedly, and then dissipate just as quickly.
He put a hand in her hair and felt her exhale at his touch, unsure where they were in this moment, and what they were.
Thinking about it and trying to answer that question seemed too strenuous, especially after the day he'd just had.
"What's that about?" Sam asked.
Her breath was warm against his thigh. Colt felt it, even through the fabric of his pants. And she was warm as well, all over. He touched the back of his hand to her forehead and confirmed that her temperature was elevated. She probably still had a low-grade fever.
"What's what about?"
"You just sighed," Sam said. "A bone-tired, world-weary sigh."
Colt laughed a little, twirling his forefinger around one of the kinky-curly coils of her hair.
"Yeah, well, if you knew you about my afternoon, you might understand."
"Tell me." Sam's voice sounded sleepy, and when Colt looked down at her again, he saw that her eyes were only half-open and she seemed ready to drift off at any moment.
Licking his lower lip, he decided not to second-guess himself, and began speaking. He described the call from Alexa, the invitation—no, the insistence—that they go somewhere "fancy" for lunch, and then the proposition. And after the proposition, the second offer in her hotel suite.
The more he talked, the stiller Sam became, and when he was done, she sat up and looked at him. Her expression was impossible to read.
"I can't believe you told me that," she said.
"But nothing happened," Colt stressed. "I mean, I swear, that shit was just embarrassing and ..."
"I believe you." She nodded. "I just can't believe you told me. "
"I wasn't trying to make it ..."
"No, you don't understand. This is the first time since we ... since we ... This is the first time I've felt like we're still ..." She shrugged. "Still, I don’t know, friends."
"Sam."
"I know what you're about to say. That of course we are, and that nothing would ever change that. But it's already changed. Don’t you feel it?
“I mean, there was that thing with Drew, and then you were mad, and I got mad, and we didn't talk for days, and it seemed like we were just any other couple. Like we might fight and break up and hide things from each other, and ..."
"No." Colt put a hand over hers. "We aren't. We won't. C’mere.” He pulled her back against him. She rested her head against his chest and he lifted his arm so she could get more comfortable.
“I want to tell you about Drew,” she said.
Colt didn’t move. For a moment, he even held his breath.
He wanted to know, but at the same time didn’t. He wasn’t sure whether he could harness his anger and jealousy enough to preserve their closeness in this moment once she was done speaking.
“Okay,” he said, his voice a croak.
The thing about Drew was, Colt had always known something. Even when he didn’t consciously know something, he knew something. In their senior year of college, Drew started coming home much more often. And Colt thought it might have to do with him being injured, and then not playing as well when he returned to the team. The Clemson Tigers were on fire that year, and Drew was just an ember. But by then, he and Drew didn’t talk about basketball as much.
When he came to town, Colt and he found ways to distract themselves from their diminishing friendship, and from the growing chasm between them. They went to pubs, and to parties at Howard University, where the types of girls they were both attracted to hung out in larger numbers than they did at Georgetown. Occasionally, Drew dropped the suggestion that Sam might want to come along, go for drinks, play some pool, get a bite to eat.
Colt always shut it down. It was instinctive and reflexive.
‘She ain’t into that,’ he would say. ‘Sam’s all about the books during the semester.’
That was true, but she would have taken a day, or a night or both, just to catch up with Drew. Colt just never made room for that to happen. And he never even asked himself why.
“How’d it start?” he asked now.
“At the draft. The night of.”
She described a night of conversation and dinner, with her and Drew walking the streets of Manhattan, becoming reacquainted, and then winding up at Drew’s hotel. She faded to black when she described what happened there, blushing a little. The blush was visible, though Colt tried to make himself believe it was the flush that came from her fever.
“He was so sweet to me,” she said. “Just really …” She shrugged.
“And all that time, neither one of you thought to tell me.”
Colt shifted, so that Sam had to sit up, and move away from him. He didn’t want to listen to her talk about how “sweet” Drew had been to her.
Sam was watching him as he went into the kitchen, pulled the soup he had gotten out of the bag, and started busying himself with it, so he wouldn’t have to look at her.
“No,” Sam said. “We didn’t.”
Colt exhaled sharply and shook his head. “Okay.”
His heart was pounding harder, and faster, the way it always did when he was angry, couldn’t think of a way to handle it, and didn’t have a ball in his hand to work things out that way.
“It wasn’t a deliberate thing. Like, we never said we wouldn’t tell you. It just didn’t occur to us to tell you.”
“Okay,” he said again.
This time the word was spoken with emphasis, with disbelief, and exactly the way you would speak when you wanted to tell someone to shut up. He did want to tell her to shut up. Because the idea of Drew and Sam, sharing something intimate, special and secret while he was … what? Screwing groupies and cheerleaders, going to strip clubs twice a week? How could he have missed all this, and not even had a whiff that it was going on?
Even his parents knew. Maybe everyone had. Except him.
“Did you ever go see him? In Spain?” he asked.
He looked up when it took her a while to respond.
Sam nodded.
“A few times, yeah.”
“A few times?” Colt shook his head. He set the bowl he had taken out to reheat the soup in slowly and deliberately on the countertop, to prevent himself from slamming it down, and shattering it into a thousand brittle pieces.
“Yes.”
Sam was watching him, waiting. Her posture was stiff with trepidation. She knew he wouldn’t explode, wouldn’t hurt her. So he could only imagine that her trepidation was at the possibility of her, hurting him.
“Sam, you’ve never even told me you’d set foot in Europe. How many times was it? How many times did you go?”
“Does it …?”
“How many?”
“A few. A lot. Almost once a month … every six weeks or so for almost a year. And then …”
Colt took a step back from the kitchen counter and folded his arms. “You’re fucking kidding me, right?”
“Colt, don’t …”
“Don’t what?” he demanded. “Be mad? How can I not be mad, Samantha? I mean, where was I when …?”
“Exactly.” She interrupted him. “Where were you? Do you even remember?”
Colt exhaled, placing both hands, fingers interlaced atop his head, and looking at the ceiling.
“No,” Sam said quietly. “That wasn’t a rhetorical question. Honestly, where were you?”
Living his dream, that was where. How many people got to say that? That they had been given a chance to fulfill something that they had literally dreamed about for as long as they could remember?
The squeal and squeak of rubber soles on a basketball court, the screech of a ref’s whistle—those were the sounds that punctuated Colt’s childhood dreams. Those sounds, and that of the crowd, and the feeling of hundreds of pairs of eyes on him when he scored an improbable basket. To have that high, but in the highest pinnacle, the NBA, was indescribable.
He had lived and breathed for that dream for so long that when he finally got it all, he didn’t want to miss a second. Everything, on and off the court that came with his new status, he wanted to experience to the fullest.
“I didn’t want it to be about you, Colt. I didn’t want to …”
“Ruin it?”
Sam nodded.
He let his hands drop from his head and stared at her. Even with the distance between them — him in the kitchen, her in the living area — he could see the wetness of her eyes and that she was fighting to keep the tears from falling.
She shook her head. “Not in the way you think,” she said. “I guess I … I had something that wasn’t about you. For once. But you had that too, didn’t you? Your rookie year? You had something for once that wasn’t about me.”
“Everything’s about you,” he said.
The words surprised even him. But Sam looked more than surprised, she looked stunned for a few beats and then recovered.
“How can you say that when you weren’t even … the way you treated me, Colt …”
“I was stupid, I was immature, I was … sometimes I was a real … ass. I know that. But you got it all twisted, Sam. I swear I wasn’t being that way because I saw you as part of my past. I was like that because I saw you as my future.”
At that, the tears that had been pooling in Sam’s eyes finally fell. Colt walked around the counter and toward her once again. She was shaking her head in emphatic denial, just as he was nodding his.
“No,” she said. Her tone was like a warning. “No. Don’t … that’s not …”
“Yes,” Colt said, aware that he was speaking aloud to her something that he had never even thought to himself. “Yes. I just wasn’t ready to go there yet. If I’d tried to make it work then, I would’ve fucked it up. I would’ve lied … I would’ve done you wrong …”
“Oh, trust me, you did anyway,” Sam said, wiping her eyes with the back of a hand.
Sinking to his knees in front of her, he took Sam’s hands in his. “As a best friend, maybe. But I didn’t want to be … I don’t want to be an ass in this, in what we’re in right now.”
“What are we in right now?” Her eyes were still wet.
He shrugged. “Whatever we want it to be. I want to figure that out. Figure us out.”
“Me too.”
“So, live with me,” he said.
He had been thinking about it the entire drive back from Philly. He and Sam weren’t new. They didn’t need to do what other couples did. They knew each other backwards and forward, inside and out. Dating was too little for them right now, and deciding to take that final, permanent step was too much. So, this was the perfect solution. For now.
“Live with … but I have my house,” she said. “This house. I couldn’t …”
“The season’ll start and I’ll be away soon. Sometimes for a long while. Why should we waste time acting like …why should we waste time? Live with me. Rent out the house. And then …”
“And then?” Sam prompted, her voice almost inaudible.
“I know what I want,” Colt said, looking her in the eye. “Do you?”
Colt was awakened past midnight when he felt Sam next to him, turning back and forth, in obvious discomfort. Sitting up, he switched on the bedside light to see what she needed, but she was still asleep. Touching her, he almost pulled back in shock at how hot her skin was. Her temperature had risen once again, and she was boiling hot. The thrashing around was because, in her sleep, she was trying to rid herself of the sheets that were damp and entangled with her arms and legs.
Trying to help with that, without waking her, Colt tugged and yanked but Sam had practically cocooned herself in the covers with all the twisting about. He shook her shoulder gently, and she opened her eyes, but they were red, and unfocused.
"Sam?"
"Colt," she said, blinking with heavy eyelids. "There are way too many of them, aren't there? Too many."
"Too many ... what're you talking about?"
"Things," she said, impatiently. "Too many things. And we have to leave some. Or we'll fail. We'll fail, Colton. We will."
She was delirious, he realized. And whatever she was saying now was nonsensical, and the product of a feverish mind.
"Baby," he said. "Let's get you up. We need to break this fever."
Lowering his feet to the floor, he went around to her side of the bed, and painstakingly, unraveled Sam from the sheets. She submitted, her body almost limp as he lifted her to a sitting position, undressed her, and then carried her to the bathroom. Once there, he turned on the shower, keeping the water tepid, bordering on cool and stepped inside, carrying Sam with him.
Gasping at the temperature, which to her probably felt freezing, she struggled a little at first, and her eyes opened wide. But she didn't ask what he was doing, nor did she complain, except to wrap her arms tighter around his neck. The water streamed over her shoulders and down her neck and back, drenching her hair. It was only then that Colt realized he probably should have put on a shower cap.
Sam was going to kill him when she awoke to a headful of matted hair.
Because he hadn't had the forethought to remove his boxers when he undressed her, they were soaked through and clinging to him, but Colt stood under the torrent of the shower until Sam started to whimper a little.
Stepping out carefully, he clumsily grabbed a towel and went back into the bedroom where he wrapped her in it like a child and set her on the bed. He went back to the bathroom to shed his wet underwear, turn off the shower and grab a towel of his own.
In the bedroom, Sam had turned onto her side and pulled the towel over herself. She was, incredibly, asleep once again. Colt dried her in the position where she lay and did as much as he could to dry her hair as well. Then he removed the tangled and now damp sheet, and found a new one, rolling Sam right, and then left to get it on the bed.
After a few minutes of maneuvering he had everything in order and was able to turn the lights off again, and climb in naked next to her, covering them both with the comforter.