Society Girl (Animos Society)
Page 17
“Mrs. Long?” Sam called for the housekeeper.
There was no answer, but there was more knocking. Sam followed the sound, stepping down the stairs with confusion. They weren’t exactly a bustling house… Could she have been wrong? Maybe this was the surprise Thomas had been planning. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to punish her after all. Maybe he had forgiven her and put it all behind them. She threw open the door.
It wasn’t Thomas. It wasn’t an orchestra. But it was a surprise.
“Daniel?”
The white-stained doorway framed him, giving him the appearance of a painted portrait, perfect and smudged in all the right places. She’d been struck by his good looks before, but damn. They knocked her sideways, robbing her of her breath. He glowed, but not from the sunshine or his golden hair. This haze of light started from the inside and spread outward, cracking the darkness of her home.
“Surprise!”
And he was holding a birthday cake. A goddamn birthday cake with shoddily spread icing, set on a plastic plate sagging under the weight of the lopsided construction. In an unsteady hand, Happy Birthday Samantha was scrawled on the top layer in grainy, pink frosting.
She shattered. The values she’d drilled into herself—conceal your weaknesses and emotions are weaknesses. Don’t humiliate yourself with something as illogical and embarrassing as showing people how they affect you—all fell away. Tears, hot and grateful, slipped down her cheeks as she wrangled a response.
“I didn’t tell you it was my birthday.”
Confusion furrowed Daniel’s brow as she wiped her face with her sleeves, desperately scrubbing away the evidence of her tears.
“Hey, what’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
“It’s nothing. It’s stupid. I’m—”
I’m falling for you and if I do then I’ll lose everything. I need to win my dad’s attention and if I can win him over, Thomas will come back around. Breaking your heart is the only way I can repair this stupid, broken family of mine. But you’re the best guy I’ve ever met—the best person I’ve ever met—which means I’ve got to be the worst person who’s ever walked this earth.
“Did I do something?”
And you made me a goddamn birthday cake.
“No.” Sam sniffled and tried to reach for her coat. A speedy getaway was best. “Can we get out of here?”
“You’re not getting out of this.” Daniel blocked her with his strong body, almost knocking her down with his intoxicating scent and too-big, too-tender eyes. “What’s wrong?”
There was no hope of hiding from him. Not now. Not when the only thing between them was the only homemade birthday cake she’d ever had. He’d thought of her and made it. That thoughtfulness killed her, and it compelled her to give him the truth. Well, more of the truth than she was normally willing to give him.
“They didn’t want to celebrate it. Well, my dad forgot and my brother just doesn’t want to celebrate it.”
“Your birthday?”
“Mm-hmm.” She nodded. Her confirmation seemed to age him ten years, new worry lines sprouted on his forehead. Dammit, he thought this was real. He thought this was all real. Worse still, his concern for her was real. “Shit, I’m sorry, I—”
“They don’t want to celebrate your birthday? Where are they? Where the fuck are they?”
“Daniel.” She placed a hand on his heaving chest, waiting until his heartbeat slowed to a manageable pace before pleading, “Please. I want to be somewhere else.”
More than anything, she wanted to be someone else, but transformation wasn’t a dream he could help her achieve. Getting away from the judgmental walls of her house, with their condescending portraits and reflective mirrors, would be the next best thing. It took him a moment before he collected himself well enough to speak. Balancing the birthday cake on one hand, he reached for his phone, shooting off a text before gesturing to the car, anger clouding his sunny face.
“I know just the place.”
The car pulled up in front of a modest house, a post-war British construction copied and pasted from every other bungalow on the block. A modest garden sprouted behind a stone fence; smoke puffed from the chimney. In the distance behind the fading orange roof, trees yawned upward, poking the sky with their green arrowhead tops. In short, it was exactly what Sam expected, which didn’t explain Daniel’s slumped shoulders.
“Well, this is me,” he muttered, ducking his head to get out of his car.
“This is your house?”
“Yeah. You know.” He shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, jangled his keys, walked too fast… Basically did everything short of saying I’m embarrassed for you to see this is where I live. “We’ll move somewhere better if I sign with Icon.”
“It’s nice,” Sam said, meaning it. What she wouldn’t have given to live in a house like this when she was younger. Memories of cold apartments and foster bunk beds fluttered like snow around her temples, melting into her brain.
“It’s not a mansion.”
“But it’s yours.”
“C’mon.” The key struggled in the lock as he fought to balance the cake in one arm while fighting to open it up. He gave it a push and led Samantha inside the humble living room.
Where his parents, Angie, and tons of the denizens of the Sunday open mic night at the bookshop were standing under a quickly assembled bouquet of balloons and streamers. Smiles on their faces. Warmth in their eyes. Their voices loud and ringing and as overwhelming as the silence of her own house had been.
“Happy Birthday to You… Happy Birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Sa-am…” They dragged her name out long enough for her to glance between the crowd and the now-singing Daniel. “Happy Birthday to you.”
“What is all this?”
“This wasn’t easy to put together in twenty minutes, so don’t judge the decorations, but happy birthday, darling.”
“Thank you, Mrs.…?” Sam hesitated, not sure what she was meant to call Daniel’s mother, who stepped out from the crowd to embrace her.
She stiffened at the contact, the warm, thick arms enveloping her body. It was like taking the bite of a foreign food for the first time or being given a gadget you have no idea how to work. What do I do now? At first, Sam did nothing but absorb the hug. Eventually, though, she returned it, sinking into the sensation. If she was going to let Daniel do something as recklessly emotional as throw her a birthday party, she might as well enjoy it. In a few days, it would all be over. This hug would be a memory.
“Oh! Goodness, me! I’m Daniel’s mum! Mrs. Best.” The hug ended; Sam shivered from the sudden loss of the woman’s warm embrace. Around them, the various invited parties chattered and joked, munching on crisps as the surprise party began in earnest. “And you’re the girl who’s been driving him mad these last few weeks.”
“Mum—”
The tips of Daniel’s ears turned pink. Samantha didn’t point it out, but she couldn’t help a small giggle at the sight. Dropping off his slice of cake on a nearby table, he slid his arm around her waist. Did he think she needed the support? Did he know how strange this scene was for her, like falling into the pages of a fantasy novel where birthdays actually mattered and people around you cared to celebrate them? Thomas might have celebrated it with her last year, but one party didn’t make up for a lifetime of lonely birthdays she celebrated alone with a single Twix bar.
“I’m Andrew, Daniel’s father.” The tall man with hair graying at his temples handed her a box wrapped in shining red paper. Green letters declared, “Happy Christmas ” in the wrapping, though Mr. Best wished her, “Happy Birthday.”
Please don’t be what I think it is. Please don’t be a present.
“What’s this?” she asked, her throat tightening.
“A little something. And I do mean a little something.” Mrs. Best tucked herself under her husband’s arm, and he hugged her into his chest. It would have made Sam vomit if she didn’t believe their love. “Again, short notice.”
One long red scarf. Tassels on the end. Holes and missed purls everywhere. Handmade. Shoddily made. Imperfectly made.
“Where did you get this?” Sam asked, hoping it wasn’t what she thought.
“I made it, actually.” Daniel’s father raised a tentative I’m guilty hand. “She’s been teaching me to knit.”
“Don’t pin this on me,” Mrs. Best teased. “All of the holes are his fault.”
The scarf was ugly as sin, a terrible shade of red knit into a crooked strand of fabric with inappropriately large tassels on each end. For the last two years, since moving in with her father and trying to assimilate in the brave new world in which he lived, Samantha never wore anything less than perfect. Her father expected clean fabrics and pressed lines, brand names and expensive shopping bills. On her third night in England, she took her suitcase to the garbage cans in the back and dumped the entirety of its contents in them. Years of hand-me-down jeans and Goodwill T-shirts joined rotten banana peels and half-empty water bottles in the trash. From Dumpster Day forward, she dressed for the family she had and the family she wanted—like a goddamn princess.
A month ago, she wouldn’t have been caught dead even holding this scarf. What if her father saw? Now, she threw it around her neck, looping it until its arms hung down over her shoulders and its thick fibers tickled her jawline.
“It’s wonderful. Really.” Don’t you cry again. Don’t you fucking cry. “Thank you.”
…
The party raged on through the day and well into the night. People came and went, poured drinks and emptied them, sang songs and laughed harder than anyone could remember. Daniel watched Samantha with keen interest, sticking close to her side through it all. Eventually, the sun disappeared and the crowds dispersed, leaving Sam tucked into the sofa, surrounded by the remnants of the party. She stared lazily at the television.
Ten hours after she’d first been given it, she still wore the scarf his father knit her. When he furiously texted Angie asking her to rally the troops for a surprise birthday party, he had expected her to deliver. He hadn’t expected Sam to appreciate it quite so damn much. Even when she started sweating in the mid-afternoon heat, she didn’t take the thing off.
“How do you feel?”
“Like I’m going to explode from birthday cake,” she said, groaning. “Or turn into one.”
He couldn’t hold back a chuckle. She had eaten more than her fair share of birthday cake. He thought back to what she’d told him about her childhood, about growing up so differently than she was living now. When was the last time she’d had a real birthday, a celebration like this?
“No, I mean how’s your birthday?”
“This is the best day I think I’ve ever had,” she said, as calm and still as if she were reading instructions from a recipe book. Her lips scribbled a sort of half smile, but a haze of melancholy hung around her.
“Then why do you look so sad?”
“Because it’s going to end. I have to go home sometime. Things have to change.”
“Says who?”
“It’s the rules. It’s the way things are. Nothing good lasts forever. Not even birthdays.”
A greater heaviness weighed down the quiet murmur. What should have been a whisper hit him with the force of a thousand steaming freight trains. He reached for his coat.
“Well, it’s still your birthday for another hour.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means the good stuff isn’t over yet.” He tossed her the coat she’d stolen from him all those weeks ago, the coat she’d never returned and wore constantly. “C’mon. I want to show you something.”
Chapter Eighteen
Hangman’s Hill rose out of the outer edges of Oxfordshire. The unfortunate name didn’t actually come from hangings; those were always performed in the town square. The name actually came from an old English song about a man who hanged himself on a hill to be closer to his love, who’d died and gone to heaven.
Daniel’s poetic nature seeped into all things, including where he liked to do his stargazing.
Cars technically weren’t meant to drive up through the brush climbing up the grassy hillside, but he’d broken the rule so many times he’d cleared a path large enough for his small car to squeeze through. As always, he parked between two great fir trees and left the headlights on, giving enough light for them to see each other by as he rummaged through his back seat. His box of tapes had to be in here somewhere. This night called for just the right sound.
Finally, he found it and popped it in, retiring the colorful cassette case back into its place between Stevie Nicks and Bennie Goodman.
He eventually resurfaced to find Sam leaning against the car’s body. The pose baffled him. She could be surrounded by so many stars—stars so dense and so close they could have swum through them or used them as stepping stones straight to the moon—and still stare so intently down at the ground. They’d spent the entire day together laughing and enjoying her birthday. Couldn’t she go an entire day without hiding herself again?
“This is my favorite place in the world,” he said, trying to yank her into the splendor around them.
“It’s beautiful.” She nodded but made no effort to appreciate the beauty. “Why are we here?”
“Well…” He ducked into the car and turned up the volume, letting the first song of his mixtape ring out. A moment of silence followed, as it always did, where he held his breath and wondered if the car would suddenly give out, then David Bowie’s “Heroes” shook the speakers. “I thought we could dance.”
“Oh, Daniel.” She groaned, practically jumping away from him.
“What?”
“I have to tell you something,” she said, wincing with something like guilt.
“Okay.”
Daniel held his breath. This is where she tells me she’s got webbed feet or is one of those card-carrying American gun nuts, isn’t it? Well, the webbed feet I could live with; the gun thing is a massive deal-breaker. She wrung her hands, the shoulders of his coat shifting on her shoulder as she did so.
“I don’t really like music.”
If this were a movie, a record scratch would have sounded, and the camera would have panned in on his stricken expression. I don’t really like music. He understood quantum physics better than he understood those words.
“Huh?”
“I don’t really like music.”
“Yeah, I heard you, but I don’t understand those words in the order you put them in.” This was like hearing someone didn’t like pizza or sunshine or air or anything else necessary to sustain human life on earth. “Who doesn’t like music?”
“Music is sort of symptomatic of a bigger problem, don’t you think?” She stepped back from him until she wandered into a nearby tree trunk. He didn’t pursue her. “Like… They tell us love is this incredible, forever thing and it’s a heap of crap.”
For weeks now, he’d been wondering when their first roadblock to happiness would present itself. He’d assumed it was going to stem from her close-hearted ways or the Animos asshole who hung around and constantly intimidated them both. Those were small potatoes compared to this. How could he love a woman who didn’t love music?
Okay, he realized the melodrama as soon as he’d thought it. But it was shocking. Love songs were written in his veins, they were how he communicated with the world outside of his own skin, how he built his future. He’d devoted his life to writing songs to inspire love in others… How could she be so dismissive?
“You can’t believe it’s all crap,” he said, more hope and prayer than statement of fact.
“Don’t get me wrong. You’re a good singer, but it doesn’t change the facts. Music is music and love songs are love songs.”
Music is music and love songs are love songs. How could two people in
terpret the same set of words in such vastly different ways? To Daniel, music was freeing and love songs were cures for broken and ailing souls. To her, they were nothing but pretty lies, tied up in neat marketing bows.
“What a shame, because I have a confession, too.” Daniel strode over to her and placed one hand on either side of her head, pinning her to the thick body of the tree behind her. Her heat radiated straight into him, urging him to say the one thing on his lips from the first time their eyes met through her father’s window.
“Yes…” She trailed off. In the yellowing light of his car headlights, her blush was clearer and rosier than ever before. Daniel tucked away the memory for safekeeping before diving headfirst into the truth.
“I’m falling in love with you.”
Saying it would have been the ultimate liberation, finally saying out loud what for weeks he’d only had the courage to scribble into songs. Would have been, if she didn’t flinch as though she’d been slapped.
“No.” She shook her head, like a femme fatale who’d been told her husband was a murderer. Even the moon slanted across her face just right and David Bowie swelled at the right moment, giving everything a cinematic tint. “You’re not. Don’t be stupid.”
Before he could stop her, press her to the tree, and commandeer her lips and deliver his sincerity straight into her skin, she ducked under his arms and strode away.
Maybe he was naive. Maybe he was stupid. Maybe he wanted too much and felt too deeply and believed the best of people who didn’t deserve it or who hadn’t proved themselves. But he knew love. And Sam felt it, too. She had to.
“We’re not falling in love,” she asserted. “We’re having fun.”
“So, you’re scared of commitment.”
“I’m not scared of anything.”
“Then what is it?”
“We’re having fun.”
“I’m not just having fun, Sam. I’m falling—”
She held up a single hand. She traffic-guarded his confession.
“Don’t say it,” she warned.
“I promise—”
“Don’t promise. I don’t want you to lie.”