by Alys Murray
How had they gotten from Sam crying at the sight of a birthday cake to eating the cake with their bare hands and splitting their sides with laughter to this fight? An hour ago, this was the best day of her life. How had a confession of love so thoroughly wrecked it all?
“I’ve seen your heart, Sam.” He leaned in and pressed his hand to her chest. When she tried to slip away, he clenched the fabric of his coat in his fist, holding her in place. “I know it’s in there. You can’t pretend it’s not anymore.”
“I like you—”
He’d listened to her pussyfoot around the truth and drop meaningless hints and tease him with a shielded version of herself. No more. Leaving himself bare and vulnerable to her would not end in her brushing him aside.
“What happened to make you this way?” he asked.
“What happened to make you the way you are? You’re the one who’s making no sense, like—”
Sam moved again, faster this time, surprisingly fast. He moved his hands from her chest and placed them on her cheeks.
“I know you’re in there, Sam. I’ve seen you.” He tipped his forehead against hers; a shaking breath fluttered against his lips, a shaking breath he recognized from trying to fight back tears. “Now I need to understand you.”
“Some people are the way they are.”
Another deflection. He turned to begging. She didn’t have to love him back. She didn’t need to put any faith in love or love songs, even. But he needed to know why.
“Please.”
Daniel never saw her as a small woman. She carried herself like queen of the giants, with a regal, unattached air. Standing well over five foot ten and asserting herself with the strength of a woman twice her size, she loomed above every person, every task, and every situation.
In his arms, her face between his hands and her eyes swimming and her body shaking and her breaths unsteady and her nose sniffling and the moon hovering over her like a colorless spotlight, she was smaller than he’d ever seen her. Or thought she could be.
A shuddering breath. Shaking her head, she detached herself from his grip and sank to the door of the car. When she patted the place beside her, he took it.
“My parents met when my dad was in New York,” she began. His imagination painted the picture. Bright lights. A beautiful woman sees a handsome man across a bar. She relaxes under his winking smirk. They talk over cocktails and smooth jazz. The image was a romantic one, but it blew away like smoke the longer Sam talked. “His first wife—Thomas’s mother—died in a car wreck. My dad was driving. And a few years later, he took this trip to New York and met a topless dancer…my mom… And promised to take her away, to a green, beautiful land and his castle.”
This story didn’t have a happy ending. Daniel knew full well, but knowing didn’t stop him from wanting one.
“Instead,” Sam clucked, a sarcastic, bitter edge biting the air, “he got her pregnant and addicted to cocaine before hightailing it back to England. I didn’t see or hear from him for twenty years.”
“Fuck.” Daniel shouldn’t have spoken. It wasn’t his place or his story. He couldn’t help it.
“And when I was fourteen, I got taken away from my mom. She was unfit to parent. Crack will do that to you. When I turned twenty, this long-lost brother I didn’t know I had showed up and said he wanted me to join the family. You know what happened the first time I met my dad?”
Daniel shook his head. The night had gotten no warmer since she’d begun her story, yet he felt his temperature rising with every syllable. Sweat formed on his forehead. He’d asked for this story, and he was going to hear it out.
“He said, ‘Stop smiling. Your face is fat enough already.’” She paused, staring straight ahead as though the movie of her life played out on a screen and she was simply narrating. Perhaps the distance bothered him the most. The trauma was bad enough on its own. Samantha’s dedication to pretending it happened to someone else in another lifetime made her story infinitely worse. “No one’s ever loved me, Daniel. And I’ve never seen love work. I’m speaking from experience. It may seem dark and depressing to you, but it’s safer.”
He waited for more. Wanted there to be more. Some better moral that never came. His unspoken questions were answered with cricket buzzes and tree shakings. He now knew her secrets, her entire sordid past, the building blocks of her humanity. Be careful what you wish for. Now that he knew… He wanted nothing more than to un-know. Love couldn’t be simple any longer. It couldn’t be she didn’t love him because he projected love onto her. It couldn’t be she needed to be with the rich guy or she didn’t like him. She’d had a broken heart before he even found her, and she didn’t want anyone else fucking with the pieces.
She gave him the terrible gift of understanding, with all of its dangers and pitfalls and sharp, cutting edges. Now, he wanted to change things. With one hand, he reached out and brushed his fingertips along her skin. He had to attempt twice before he managed to speak loud enough to be heard.
“What can I do to prove you wrong?”
She shook her head. The brown hair she always kept in a tight ponytail rustled in the wind, let loose from its tight prison.
“You’ll believe me sooner or later.”
Time stretched, and the stars moved in the skies. The pair leaned back on the hood and looked to the heavens, neither speaking for the longest time, even as she cuddled into him for warmth and he held her tighter to remind himself she hadn’t faded away completely.
“I have an idea,” Daniel said, crawling to his feet.
“What?”
Swallowing the pessimism, the hatred for her father and the life that dealt her such shitty cards, he focused on his mission, letting it spring his step and guide him. “They say dancing is the body’s language of love, but you don’t like dancing.”
With heavy feet, Daniel clambered into his car and reached for the tape deck. He’d put in one of his favorite mixtapes earlier, but it was important he fast-forward and pause at the right moment. This had to be perfect, and there was only one song to cure Sam right now.
“…Right.” Sam slid off of the car’s hood, suspicion evident in every syllable.
“But music is the food of love. So…” He resurfaced, having dropped the fast-forward button on the end of the previous song, giving it time to queue up the appropriate one. The dying croon of Bobby Darin faded into the night as he took Sam’s icy hands in his. “Let’s sing.”
“I don’t like love songs.”
“You don’t like songs at all, so it might as well be a love song. Just sing.”
The opening chords of the French national anthem played, jaunty and spectacular even in their tape-deck, shabby-speakers condition. Daniel conducted the invisible orchestra before him. The bigger a fool he made of himself, the more inclined she would be to join him.
He wasn’t sure why—maybe it was because her belief in the bedrock foundation of his entire worldview hung in the balance—but he couldn’t help but sense he was on the brink of something terribly important. And the more she tried to shut him out, the more firmly he believed it.
“I don’t know this song.” Sam folded her arms across her chest.
“Okay, the chorus goes…” He considered singing it, but time was short and the intro was barreling past him. No time to explain. Paul McCartney was only a second away from preaching the gospel of the Beatles. “Never mind. You’ll pick it up. It’s easy. You’ll catch on. One, two, three.”
Joining his voice with Paul, John, Ringo, and George, Daniel moved up behind the closed-off woman as she tried to fold herself into the dark night. His arms wrapped around her from behind, relishing her curves beneath him. He leaned in close enough so her hair tickled his nose as his singing breath tickled her neck. The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” began as it always did, with the simple repetition of one word. Love.
She shrugged him away, squirming out of his grip.
“You’re ridiculous.”
He sang
the first line, holding his arms out in a devil-may-care challenge. He was going to sing. He was going to sing the truth of the world straight to the stars, and maybe she’d start to believe it.
“I’m not doing this.”
And the second.
“I don’t like it! You can’t make me like it.”
“There’s no one here but us, Sam. It’s you and me and the stars. Sing. No one has to know.”
“But I don’t believe it. I don’t believe the song. It’s bullshit.”
“You don’t believe it yet,” he said with a self-assured wink.
He no longer entertained the idea this wasn’t going to work, the idea he and Samantha weren’t meant for each other or her heresy was going to keep them apart. This was true love. Something as small as her not believing in forever couldn’t keep them apart.
“This isn’t a good idea.”
“Just sing!” he shouted.
This moment they shared was a freight train barreling through the night, cutting through the darkness. The brakes were broken.
“I don’t know how!”
“Like you didn’t know how to dance?”
Daniel clambered up to the top of his old car, as he’d done a million times before. But this time was different. This time, his singing wasn’t some unanswered prayer to invisible gods and twinkling stars for human contact and affection. This time, he was Aladdin on a magic carpet, asking Jasmine to trust him. This was either the beginning of a whole new world, or the end of everything. And he had his eyes set on the horizon of fresh adventure. Sam sprinted to the hood of the car from her place on the hilltop’s edge, jaw practically dragging along the grass.
“What are you doing up there? You’ll get yourself killed!”
“C’mon, get up here,” he offered. “Get as close to the stars as you can.”
“No way! You come down here!”
He stood his ground. Or roof. He was in his own personal heaven, surrounded by stars and music. The only thing missing was her.
“You’ll have to come up and get me.”
A final challenge. Daniel sang to himself, waiting for the chorus to properly kick in and for its wonder to vibrate the trees at the same rate as his heartbeat.
“You’re impossible,” she huffed.
Nonetheless, a minute later, they were on the roof of the car, halfway between heaven and earth.
“Not so bad, is it?”
“No.”
He took her hand, partly to calm his own speeding pulse and partly to make sure she stayed put and didn’t run off on him. She was such a mystery, such a complex puzzle to solve. He always feared one day she would slip away like a pleasant, hazy dream. Daniel let the Beatles’ words and melodies fall out of him, line after line, until he realized there were only male voices slicing the night. She wasn’t even trying.
“Sing, Sam.” He gave her a squeeze, and from the corner of his eye, he saw her head dip.
“I can’t.”
The chorus barreled into them, the famous chorus sung on the rooftops of London, but still, Sam did not sing. He leaned in and whispered in her ear. “What are you afraid of?”
Those were the magic words. She squeezed him back. And began singing. It was slightly off-key. Rusty as the Tin Man. The voice of a baby bird trying their warbling tweet for the first time. Uncertain at first, then progressively stronger and stronger, until they were dancing on the rooftop, singing in perfect unison.
When it was over, when the tape flipped over and sank into some Elton John ballad with slammed piano and stricken emotion, they held each other close. Her coat opened up and he pressed his chest to hers. Their heartbeats danced as they did.
“I’m falling in love with you, Samantha Dubarry,” he said.
“Don’t push your luck.”
“Fine.” He held her all the closer. “I’m not falling in love with you.”
A pause. She cleared her throat.
“Good.”
Closer now. They were one body of music and soul. Of love even she couldn’t deny.
“Because I’m already there.”
Chapter Nineteen
Since meeting Daniel almost three weeks ago, Sam had done everything in her power to avoid the Animos Society. Being around them only reminded her of the inevitable consequences waiting for her foolish heart at the end of this ride. A glimpse of one of them in the streets and alleys between Oxford’s many colleges shoved her into a spiral of heavy breathing and panic. The color blue—even if put somewhere other than their uniforms—punched the back of her throat until she was certain she’d throw up.
They all ran in the same circles; seeing at least one of them every so often was inevitable, whether in the halls of the university or somewhere else the children of England’s elite went to drink and be rich together. The real problem wasn’t PJ or Graham or any of the other flunkies who wore the blues of the Animos Society. Her problem was very specific.
Captain was her problem. He wouldn’t leave her alone. Whether he was swanning into her house to ask her to a ball or demanding they meet up for some sort of “friendly chat” about Animos or sending her streams of text messages or leaving drunk voicemails on her phone, he crept into her life like a wall-colored spider… Slowly at first, then everywhere at once. Welcoming his advances meant spending time with him, while ignoring Captain always ended in some simmering confrontation.
She could avoid them no longer. A week ago, she received a gilded invitation for an Animos supper, and there would be no begging out of an invitation as she had been begging out of their more casual affairs. An Animos Supper was a blue-tie affair, the highest distinction one could put on a society event. Not showing up would mean immediate expulsion from the group. Two years ago, one guy missed a Blue-Tie Supper for his own sister’s funeral, only to be asked to turn in his uniform and pin the next day. An expulsion wasn’t something Sam could handle, especially not after her talk with Thomas.
The stakes were too high. The walls were closing in. She had to face the facts.
With this threat hanging over her head, she made the thirty-mile drive to the nearest estate allowed to host them. Oxford banned all official meetings of their society within university limits in the early 1900s after a group of particularly rowdy blue-coats burned a church to the ground, so they were forced to thrust these sorts of meals on unsuspecting country pubs. She arrived with time to spare, wearing her black initiate uniform. She stuck out like a painful, throbbing bruise at the long table of Animos blues.
She put all thoughts of yesterday out of her head. If she was going to survive, she couldn’t think about Daniel. Or his love for her.
Or her love for him.
Tonight, she sewed her invisible mask of upper crust civility to her face. Without its protection, she knew she would give something away, her displeasure or hatred for these men around her.
For so long, she wanted to be one of them. The shimmer of their pins blinded her. She knew they were the most common kind of evil, but she pushed it aside, hoping one day she’d have a permanent seat beside them. Now, all she wanted was to take the ride back to Crowdwell’s Bookshop and sit at a table with the eclectic musicians who’d taken her under their wings these last few weeks. What she wouldn’t give to hear the mournful weep of a bassoon or the shrill rage of a guitar right now.
What she wouldn’t give to feel Daniel’s comforting grip on her hand. To be dancing on his car, shouting about impossible love with him to the stars.
The pub’s long, private dining room was filled with the current members of the Society, with Captain at the head of the table. He stared her down, the furrow of his brow casting a shade over his already darkly bagged eyes. By the time she arrived, earlier than most but later than some of the more eager hangers-on, Captain was already drunk. By the end of the third course, he was polluted. When desserts turned into port and cheese, he spoke for the first time.
“So.” He slammed down a wineglass. The delicate glass only narrowly esc
aped falling haphazardly to the floor by Graham’s guiding hand.
The room was more silent than a grave. All eyes were on their leader. All eyes except for Sam’s.
“The Piggy finally graces us with her presence.”
Captain lobbed the first insult in her direction, and thus began the back-and-forth the men at the table around them followed, their heads snapping back and forth like this was a particularly fierce match at Wimbledon.
“I’ve been busy with my Mud Duck.” Her voice was a dividing line, a quiet refutation because she couldn’t make a loud one. The attention of the room scalded her.
“That’s what we’re calling it these days?”
“Cap—” PJ’s voice shook, an unsteady entry into the fray.
“Don’t say it. You know they’re fucking.”
“We aren’t,” Sam almost whispered.
She wanted to. She thought about it every day. Every part of her burned for him whenever he got close to her. But she wasn’t going to take his virginity like this. She wasn’t going to steal that away from him.
“Bullshit!” Captain barked. “Everyone does! PJ, are you fucking yours?”
“Yeah.”
“Graham?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m fucking mine,” Captain declared, slamming his hand on the table. Sam flinched at the ensuing crash, but she did not look up. The thing about Captain was his extraordinary ordinariness. She thought him unspeakably cruel and vile, sharp elbowed and hedonistic, but he wasn’t alone. Every man in this room was born to the same privileges as him, and she saw Captain reflected in every one of their silent, unmoved faces. “If we’re all fucking ours, why wouldn’t you be wasting yourself on your mechanic?”
“I’m not attracted to him.”
Lie. Everyone knew it. Especially Captain. He’d seen them wrapped in each other’s arms. Beads of sweat rose on Sam’s exposed neck; a chill rattled her even as her temperature spiked, and her cheeks flushed. Breathing grew increasingly difficult, like she was pulling the air through hardening concrete.
“Tell me the truth.” Captain’s voice was rising now.
