THIS KISS WAS nothing like our first time.
I worried it would be awkward like the first, but for very different reasons. Would we even have chemistry? Would it be weird? We’d been friends for so long, I feared kissing Sam would feel wrong. Like kissing Allie or Emilia . . . or Memphis.
But there was nothing remotely plutonic or incestuous about the way his lips brushed mine, savoring the taste, molding to the shape, smiling against them and cherishing a union that had taken almost two decades to create.
It felt natural to succumb to his touch so I wrapped my arms around him, spellbound by the solace of our intimacy. His tongue peeked out to slowly sweep the seam of my lips. And when he parted them, I greeted the pleasant intrusion whole-heartedly.
He had waited so long for this. He’d been so patient. Every time I thought about what it would be like to give in to him, I imagined he would be frenzied and wild. I should have known better. It was as if he knew my heart needed to catch up to his. So he took it slow, which made it that much sweeter. As we breached the boundary that separated friends from lovers, our hearts paralleled.
I hadn’t realized his hands were clutching my face until the kiss ended and he pulled away to take me in. I hesitated for a beat before gazing into his eyes. Being this close, loving him this way, did not give me pause. It overwhelmed me in the best way possible.
Sensing my rampant thoughts, Sam brought his thumb to where his lips had left their mark mere moments before. He dragged his fingertip across the tender flesh and beamed at me. “I know you want to talk things through. I get it. It’s what you need. But you know as well as I do that there’s nothing to talk about. That kiss said it all. It proved it all. Everything I’ve been trying to tell you, everything I’ve kept bottled inside—and that was just the beginning, London. I have so much more to give, so many things to show you. What I have to offer isn’t only about intimacy. My love for you encompasses so much more. You’re my every breath. Do you see that now?”
God, his words were like a poetic chorus melting my reserve. I wanted the world around us to evaporate into the ether, to let us just be. Wasn’t there a way to make that happen? To ignore everything and everyone else and fall into this without consequence?
Before I could conjure a proper response to express my innermost desires, Sam lowered his hands and tugged me into an embrace. “You don’t have to say anything, babe.” He kissed the top of my head. “I understand.”
With that, he left me breathless and walked into the kitchen.
“Tea or wine?” he called out to me.
I smiled, biting my lip. He knew me so well. How had I ever questioned this?
“Tea,” I responded and took a seat on the couch. I would have loved a glass of wine, but I didn’t want the bewitching powers of alcohol to influence whatever happened tonight.
I heard the unmistakable tick of the pilot light as he fired up the stove to boil my water. Without even having to see it, I knew he was using the white and blue CorningWare teapot that had a permanent home atop the rear left burner for as long as I could remember.
That teapot had witnessed many fun-filled nights and even more eventful mornings. I laughed at the memory of a ten-year-old Sam attempting to make us hot cocoa after playing in the snow or an older, more mature teenager concocting some oddball hangover fix the morning after a rowdy house party.
I was used to popping a mug of tap water into the microwave to brew my tea, but the familiarity of that old kettle brought this entire moment full circle. It was perfect.
I felt him enter the room before I heard him. His bare feet slowly padded across the carpet as he made his way to where I sat.
“Okay if I sit here?” he asked, eyeing the spot next to me.
“Don’t do that.” I shook my head.
“What?”
“Act like you have to walk on eggshells around me. I won’t break and I won’t run away . . . not anymore. I want you to sit next to me and let me say what I need to say. Can you do that, Goodwin, or are things going to be weird because you had your tongue in my mouth a few minutes ago?”
“Don’t you do that,” he smarted as he tossed a pillow aside to join me on the couch.
I tilted my head in question.
“Don’t downplay that kiss. Don’t downplay us.” He reached over and placed a hand on my knee. We both paused to look down at where his skin touched mine. When our eyes met again, his warm hand remained in place and that made me happier than I’d been in a long time. I knew—like I always knew—he wasn’t going anywhere. No matter what we were facing, he would never leave me or betray me. He was here to stay.
“You’re right,” I admitted. “You’ve wanted to do that for a long time, haven’t you?”
He released a deep breath and fell back into the couch cushions with a growl. “You have no fucking idea. And now all I can think about is doing it again and you want to sit here and . . . talk.” His statement was a clear sign of his frustration but the wink he gave me was a symbol of understanding.
“I know, Sam. And I’m sorry I made you wait, but I truly didn’t know. I need you to understand that—I had no idea you felt like this. Until you told me the other night, I swear I was blind to everything. Blind or just plain stupid, I guess.”
Sam’s laugh was a throaty chuckle. “Yeah, you could say that, but then again, I’m good at keeping secrets, especially when my best friend’s heart is at stake.” He inched closer and laced our fingers together. We’d held hands so many times before, but this time was special. It meant more. “I knew if I told you how I felt at any other moment other than when I did, it wouldn’t have been the right time. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“Instead you hurt yourself by keeping this locked up and watching me love someone else? You should’ve told me sooner, Sam. Maybe we could’ve been together all along, saved each other years of heartache.”
“London, can you honestly say your entire marriage to Hunter was miserable?”
I couldn’t look him in the eye and pretend that was true. “No, I can’t.”
“Then that’s how I know I did the right thing.”
“But it was so selfless. It must’ve been so hard.” I inhaled sharply through my nose, the weight of Sam’s sacrifice shaking me to the core.
“I don’t see it that way at all.” Admitting all of this took strength and courage, but Sam was stoic in his response, confident that things were falling into place at exactly the right moment. To say he was expressionless would be a lie. Those eyes could never be unreadable or indifferent. They swirled with a passion so profound, it was a wonder I never truly noticed it before. And now I wanted to live inside his brain, to bear witness to the exact moment he fell in love with me, to understand how he held on all these years without giving up.
“Then tell me how? Tell me everything.”
Sam shot to his feet and walked to the other side of the room. “It was hard. Of course it was, but you trusted me and confided in me as your best friend. Every time I looked at you, every time my heart ached to have you, I felt like I was betraying you.”
“Betraying me?”
“I betrayed you by falling in love with you.” He confessed this as if it made him guilty of a crime.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes perfect sense.” He spun to face me, his hands flying every which way as he spoke. “You belonged to someone else. You didn’t feel the same. I tried not to love you, but it was impossible. So I kept you close even though it killed me because I had to have you any way I could. It wasn’t damn near enough, but seeing you happy—that had to be enough.”
I had so many questions. It would take forever to get to all of them, but right now, I needed to know one thing. “Did you feel this way before I married Hunter?”
He silently nodded his head, not making eye contact.
“Sam! How?” I rushed to him and grabbed his shoulders. His omission broke my heart. Things could have been so different. We wasted so much time. “How have you kept this from me for so long?”
His upper body stiffened and he jutted his chin forward. “If I told you then, would it have changed the course of your life? Would you have stopped the wedding and married me instead?”
Hindsight was a tricky bitch because it lifted the cloak of blindness after the fact.
The day I married Hunter, I did so knowing he owned my heart. I might’ve struggled with the usual bout of cold feet beforehand only because we were so young, but Sam was right. I loved Hunter. He was my choice back then, and staring into the eyes of the man who loved me now, I recognized his reasons for staying quiet back then.
“I-I don’t know what I would have done,” I finally admitted.
“Well, I do. You would have gone through with it anyway and I would’ve lost you forever. Rather than risk that, I stayed silent and watched you marry another man because asking you not to would’ve made you run.”
“Oh, Sam.” I clutched my chest. This was too much for my heart. How did I not notice I’d been hurting him all this time? I wanted to cry. “I am so sorry.”
I lowered my head to hide the glassy curtain that clouded my eyes, but Sam dove forward to swathe my face with his hands. “Stop apologizing, London. I’ll say it a million times if I have to. I’ll say it forever. You’re here now so none of that matters anymore. I don’t want you to be sorry. I don’t want you to second-guess the life you’ve lived. We can’t regret the past we were never meant to have, but we can make sure the future is everything it was destined to be.”
My heart had never felt this full. Hunter had loved me the best way he knew how until the love I gifted him in return wasn’t enough. I had been the object of Bryce’s affection since the moment he laid eyes on me. I knew what it felt like to be loved and adored, but there was no comparison to Sam’s brand of undying devotion.
There was no going back to being just friends.
While it would take some getting used to, I had no doubt we would figure everything out. We had all the time in the world to sort through unanswered questions, to navigate this together, the way we always had. Now it would be a million times better because not only was he my best friend, but he was my best thing in this entire world.
Holding on to Sam’s arms, I lifted up on my toes. I stared into his eyes for a silent beat before stealing a tender kiss.
Okay, maybe it wouldn’t take much getting used to after all.
Sam and I drank our tea, cuddled up next to each other on the couch.
On the drive over here tonight, my thoughts wandered in so many different directions, but I never truly imagined this change in us would have happened so effortlessly.
“I have to break up with Bryce,” I mumbled into my almost empty mug.
“Uh, yeah, you do.” He stroked my hair as if mesmerized by its length. Sam’s hands had not left my body for over an hour. I understood their need to feel me. He’d kept them to himself for so many years.
“He won’t take it lightly, Sam. You know that, right?”
“He’s a big boy. He can deal with it.”
“I don’t know. He’s been really . . . different lately.”
Sam tensed. “Different how?”
I didn’t want to get into details. The situation was bizarre enough as it was. Regardless of how brutal Bryce was, he’d been inside of me only a few hours ago. That made me feel all kinds of wrong for being here with Sam. “Let’s not talk about it. I’ll do what I have to do. It’s our first night together as more than friends and I don’t want to ruin it.”
Not falling for it, Sam pivoted his body to appraise me. “London, that’s ridiculous. When we were just friends you told me everything. That won’t change now that we’re more. I don’t want to talk about Bryce either. The way I see it, the quicker you get rid of him the better, but I’m not an insensitive jerk. I know he meant something to you, but I wasn’t kidding before. He’s a liar.”
I inhaled a heavy breath and waited for him to continue.
“You said he told you I left the hospital because I got a call from Patricia. That was total bullshit. I left because he and I had words and he turned into a combative asshole.”
I recalled how I felt about Sam leaving the hospital to be with her. It stung. I didn’t like it. This alternative was so much better than the lie Bryce fed me. It had crossed my mind that Bryce hadn’t been telling the truth.
“I had a feeling something like that went down,” I said.
“Maybe you should pay closer attention to that intuition of yours. He might be a prick, but he’s a smart prick. He knew all along how I felt about you and everything he said back there was a manipulative ploy to mess with your head. He lied about why I left because he knew damn well it would hurt you and make you mad at me.
“I even called him out for creating this whole rejection rate dilemma. I’m pretty sure he’s hell bent on making sure Ella doesn’t ever get my kidney. He knows it’ll only bring us closer and he’s scared shitless he’ll lose you. He looks good on paper, babe, but he’s not the all-American good boy you think he is.”
Hearing all of this confirmed what I already knew. Sam would never lie to me. Based on what I’d gathered from Bryce’s recent actions, however, who knew what lengths he would go to in order to keep Sam away and make himself look like the good guy.
“I know,” I admitted.
I thought the confirmation would set Sam at ease, but instead it agitated him further. “What do you mean, you know?”
I didn’t want to lie to him, but if I told him about the night of the carnival and what happened back at Bryce’s office earlier . . . he would lose his mind. “If I tell you, will you promise not to flip out?”
“That’s basically a guarantee to do exactly that.”
I eyed him sternly, softening my lips into a slight smile to calm him down. “I’m serious, Sam.”
“Okay, fine!” he acquiesced. “Tell me what Doctor Douche did to finally send you running into my arms.”
“No.” I forced a humorless laugh and shook my head. “Don’t fucking go there. It’s not like that. Don’t make me out to be some indecisive chick who jumps from guy to guy, depending on her mood.”
Quick to express his regret, Sam inched closer. “Oh my God, I swear to you, I didn’t mean for it to come out like that.”
“Then what did you mean? Because you made it clear that I had to make a choice. I came here tonight to do that and after one kiss, the choice was made for me. Don’t you dare assume this was some easy breezy last minute decision. I didn’t fly out of one man’s arms to fall into yours just because I didn’t like something Bryce said. It’s more complicated than that, and that’s why I wanted to talk things through. If we’re going to do this, there will be a learning curve. It won’t magically be perfect, and it can’t simply happen overnight.”
I didn’t want to put limitations on us, but Sam needed to know this wasn’t something I decided on a whim. Yes, the way in which my mind was made up so definitively seemed impulsive. And I hadn’t expected it to be so easy to want to let go of Bryce. But that was before I whole-heartedly understood the depth of Sam’s love and how all-encompassing it would be. It was before everything added up and became as clear as the glimmer of loyalty that shone brightly in Sam’s eyes.
“Come here,” he whispered, pulling my body into his.
There was no way I could resist, even if I tried.
I nuzzled close to him, our bodies molding together differently, but somehow still the same.
When a few seconds of comforting silence had passed, Sam placed a soft kiss at my temple and then rested his mouth against my ear. He kissed me there too, and then reassured me with the sweetest of empathy.
“I’m sorry for what I said and I’m sorry for being greedy. I understand this will take time, that things have to settle for everyone to move on, but I need you to know that you’ve got me by your side to help you through it all. Just like before. Same old Sam. That will never change.”