(For a moment, Sammy considered it. I reminded her that she didn’t have any set plans for Halloween, that her roommate had kind of been annoying her of late, and it would be more fun to go with Gael, anyway. I even let the streetlights catch Gael’s eyes so they’d glisten in a way I knew she’d find downright adorable. But, alas, it was no use. Sammy was a Cynic, as I have mentioned previously. And she had too much freaking pride.)
“I have plans,” she said, shaking her head. “And I also don’t want to crash your date.”
Gael was about to tell her that it wasn’t a date—not officially, at least—but that’s when it started to rain. Hard.
(Okay, the rain was my handiwork. This is a love story, after all. You might call it clichéd, but I call it classic.)
“Shit,” Sammy said, as the two of them ran for cover under the nearest tree.
It began to rain harder.
Gael looked at Sammy, at her dew-kissed hair and the raindrops on her nose and her glasses, which were already fogging up. And all he wanted was to pause this moment, freeze it in place, just like this.
Their eyes met, and he could swear she was thinking the same thing.
Her lips parted ever so slightly, and he felt so nervous, like something might happen, something that could change everything.
But then she pressed her lips together and crossed her arms.
“I should go,” Sammy said.
“You don’t want to wait it out?” he asked. “It’s pouring.”
She shook her head quickly, making it clearer than ever that even if he wanted more than friendship, she didn’t.
And without another word, she took off into a run down the brick sidewalk.
To Gael’s surprise, the rain stopped almost as soon as she was gone. And so he crossed Franklin and headed toward Henderson Street, trying not to be too disappointed by her sudden departure.
He took another sip of his hot chocolate, but it had already gone cold.
gael’s netflix queue, pre- and post-sammy
Pre:
2001: A Space Odyssey
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Reservoir Dogs
Moonrise Kingdom
Breaking Bad: Seasons 1–6
Post:
When Harry Met Sally
Friday the 13th
Silver Linings Playbook
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Lovestruck: The Evolutionary Reasons Behind Why We Fall
scenes from a baltimore dorm room
My work is a bit like juggling. At any given time there are tons of people who need me. And I do my best to balance it all. But sometimes, I don’t. Sometimes, I focus so very much on diverting someone away from the wrong person and over to the right person that I lose sight of, well, the bigger picture.
This was one of those times.
While Sammy was running away from both the rainstorm and her own confusing feelings, her ex, John, was kneeling on a dusty linoleum floor, rummaging around in the chaos that lived beneath his lofted bed in Wolman Hall at Johns Hopkins.
John had once thought that his parents paying a boatload for him to go to school here would equal at least a semi-nice dorm room, but that certainly wasn’t the case—not that he and his roommate, Juan (yes, John and Juan and at Johns Hopkins, no less), had worked to make it any better.
His hand hit the edge of a Tupperware tub, and he pulled it out from under the bed. A range of gadgets that his mom and dad had thought would be useful lay inside in a spaghetti-like tangle of cords.
Juan shuffled into the room. “What are you looking for?” he asked.
“The panini maker,” John said, tossing his two Kraft singles onto a plate on his bed so he could better dig through the cords.
“Oh shit, man,” Juan said. “I just took it to Cayden’s this afternoon and forgot to bring it back . . .”
But John stopped listening. Suddenly he didn’t care about the panini maker.
There in the bin, peeking out from beneath the George Foreman grill, which still had its tags, was The Elements of Style.
John stared at the vacant-looking watercolor basset hound on the cover. How in the hell had this gotten in here? he wondered. He could’ve sworn he’d intentionally left it at home to make his decision to break up with Sammy a little easier.
He glanced up at Juan, who was still going on about the panini maker while opening a fresh bag of Cheetos.
“It’s okay, dude,” John said. “Forget it.”
He fingered the book in his hands.
“You okay, man?” Juan asked. “You look freaked out all of a sudden.”
John didn’t answer. He just stared at the book.
In the chaos of packing up his room, his mom or brother must have tossed it in last-minute.
All that summer, John had had the unshakable feeling of wanting to break up with Sammy, as he watched fellow high school couples dissolve in preparation for fall orientation. But she had been steadfast. She had asked him just once, right after graduation, if he thought they would stay together. It was in the middle of fooling around, and he’d said yes without thinking about much more than the fact that he wanted to get her top off. She’d never asked him again, instead frequently enlightening him on the average cost of flights from Baltimore to Raleigh and how long it would take to drive, with and without traffic.