by Nancy Adams
“Oh God! This is all a little early for this. Just let me enjoy my hangover in peace, please D.”
“It’s something to think about. Otherwise you could end up with nothing.”
Jenna threw her head back down in her hands and let out a loud groan.
CHAPTER TEN
It was Friday and Sam was driving Claire out to his beach house in the Hamptons. They were cruising along the Sunrise Highway in Sam’s black, open-top 1963 Aston Martin DB5, the cool wind in their hair. It was a beautiful day and they both felt better with each extra mile that was put between them and the city. That morning, when Sam had picked Claire up from a street corner close to Annabel’s, they had both felt a little odd around each other, a mechanical nature to their greeting kiss. This was an effect of seeing each other for the first time since the fateful night of the argument.
It didn’t last, however, and by the time they were moving out of the city and approaching Long Island, Claire had leaned her body over and rested her head warmly upon Sam’s shoulder as he drove. She looked so unbelievably beautiful, wearing a pair of large, black Gucci sunglasses, a black woolen cardigan over the top of a white, cotton, knee-length dress with navy-blue pinstripes running horizontally around it, and a pair of two-inch navy blue heels perched upon her bird-like feet. The only makeup she wore was bright red lipstick that sparkled in the sunbeams and accentuated the luscious lips upon her lily-white face.
Perched upon Sam’s own chiseled face was a pair of brown tortoiseshell Ray-Bans. His light brown hair was neatly parted to the side with a distinctive quaff at the front; on his legs, white chinos that finished just above the ankle. Gripping his sinewed torso was a navy blue t-shirt, over the top of which sat a navy blue pea-jacket open all the way, the collar up around his wide neck, and on his feet a pair of beige yachting shoes.
Together, the two of them looked an exceptional couple, and as the car sped along, both of them would glance at the other and instantly smile, feeling themselves the luckiest people in the world in that moment.
“You fancy driving the last half-hour?” Sam asked as he drove. “You did say that you liked the car when you first saw it.”
“Yeah, but I could never drive it. It looks too expensive.”
“It’s just like any other car. Here, I’ll pull over.”
Sam brought the car to a steady stop at the side of the road, before getting out, running around Claire's side and opening her door.
“Really!?” she exclaimed, looking up at him from the passenger seat with a bemused expression.
“Come on,” he insisted.
Sam offered Claire his hand and, smiling all over, she took it. He then lifted her delicately out of the car and she went around the driver’s side and got in. When she sat down, she adjusted the seat and then started the ignition. Once the car was running, she nervously placed one hand on the gearstick and her other on the wheel.
As she went to pull away, Sam said, “Now don’t give it too much—”
Be he got no further. He was thrown forward as she stalled the car.
“Gas,” Sam finished when he was back in his seat.
Claire turned to him with an embarrassed smile and said, “Oops! I guess it needs a little less gas than my ma’s Toyota.”
“Just a tad! The engine’s been tuned, so you need to use kid gloves.”
“Okay!”
Claire once again started the car, and this time pulled it carefully away and then onto the road. Once she was confident, she moved it up through second and then into third, feeling the car thrust her farther forward with each extra millimeter of pedal that she gave it. She’d never felt such power at her disposal before and, feeling a growing confidence, she pushed the car even farther, moving up into fourth gear, the car doing about eighty miles an hour by now.
“Okay, Claire,” Sam said with a nervous glance at her, “you’ve seen what she can do, maybe slow her down a little and get to cruising. She cruises really nicely and we have plenty of time. There’s no need to hurry.”
She turned to him and met his nervous look with a gleeful smile, replying, “There’s no one else on the road, I want to feel the engine beneath me.”
“Well, that’s fine,” he replied, gripping the dashboard and gazing anxiously ahead at the speeding road, “but at this rate we’ll end up shooting off the end of the island. Plus, there’s this nice little harbor I want to take you to and it’s not far ahead. But we might miss it if we’re doing a hundred.”
“Are you scared, Sam?” she asked playfully, the speedometer hitting the hundred-twenty mark, the road dashing past on either side, the engine roaring, vibrations ricocheting throughout the whole of the classic vehicle.
“Yes, that as well.”
“Okay, then.”
With that, she took her foot off the accelerator and the car gradually slowed down until they were cruising along.
“Well, I think I almost shit my pants!” he exclaimed when they were down to about fifty.
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“I’m not. This car was made in 1963. I’ve never taken it over eighty. I was hoping that it wouldn’t shake apart underneath us!”
“Well, it didn’t,” she retorted with a beaming smile that sparkled in the waves of sunlight that flooded down upon the Aston Martin convertible as it snaked along the freeway.
“Thank God!”
A little further up the road, Sam told her to turn off toward the coast. Soon they were pulling along a small road that weaved through fields of tall grass and entering a small harbor of fishing boats and wooden buildings, a quayside that stood out in the water. Sam directed Claire to a shingle car park at its edge and as they pulled into it, a couple of families were getting out of their cars. When they saw the classic Aston Martin drive slowly past, they all stood gazing at it with open mouths.
Once they were out of the car, Sam offered her his arm and she took it with a gleaming smile. Ignoring the people who stood and stared, they made their way out of the car park and began walking along the harbor walkways toward a restaurant situated in a small inlet at the edge of the harbor that overlooked the ocean and the boats. Claire smiled the moment she saw the old wooden building that housed the restaurant, faded by a hundred summer suns with its fishing nets hung over the windows and its mast, complete with crow’s nest, sitting on top of its roof. It reminded her of so many little ocean-side restaurants that she’d been to with her family as a child, and what further filled her with nostalgia was the sound of the gulls squawking and the lines of the boats twanging in the wind as she walked along the little wooden walkway arm in arm with Sam.
“I love the sounds they make,” Claire remarked as they came toward the entrance of the restaurant.
“The sounds that what makes?”
“The boats. That twanging sound they make as their lines are strung by the wind. It always reminds me of holidays by the coast. I have an uncle and aunt in Maine. We used to go up to theirs in the summer. It was a really nice time.”
“I grew up in Oregon, so we used to visit the coast a lot too. It’s why I love this little restaurant we’re going to now. It’s a mom-and-pop kinda place. The guy that runs it these days is the great-grandson of the original owners.”
Claire beamed at him as they reached the door and he held it open for her. When they stepped inside, a young waitress came up to them and was immediately lost for words when she saw that her customer was none other than Sam Burgess.
Finally finding her words, the girl stuttered, “How…eh…may I help you?”
“We’d like a table, please,” Sam replied.
“Okay,” she nervously said, taking up some menus, before guiding them to a table by a window at the back, overlooking the water.
While they walked through the restaurant, people stopped eating, some with their forks held hovering in front of their mouths as their eyes followed Sam and Claire. When they were seated they ordered soft drinks and were then left with their menus.
“All the fish is caught just off the coast here by local fishermen,” Sam remarked as they sat opposite one another gazing at the menus. “The shrimp here is amazing.”
“What about the crab?”
“The crab is really good too.”
Claire glanced up from her menu and took a look around at all the spying eyes that were cast upon their table.
“This is surreal,” she commented.
“What is?”
“All these people looking over. Doesn’t it bother you?”
“It used to. I used to hate it and avoid it at all costs. That’s why I ended up out in the middle of the Colorado wilderness living like a recluse. But in the last five years, I’ve had to face it and now I just get on with things. They can look all they want, so long as they don’t come over and annoy me.”
“Do they ever?”
“Of course! I just have a respectful but very short conversation with them, before politely telling them to leave me at peace. But people don’t usually bother me.”
“I find it slightly eerie.”
Sam reached his hand across and took hers. When he did, she anxiously looked around and wondered what the eyes would think of this.
“Don’t worry about them,” he said to her, gazing across into her beautiful brown eyes as they darted from table to table.
She gradually Sam’s look and gave him a sheepish smile.
“Just enjoy the food, the restaurant and the company,” he advised her. “Ignore the eyes.”
Feeling her hand underneath his own made her feel a little easier, but she still found the experience of being subject to everyone's prying natures quite unnerving. With an affectionate smile, Sam retracted his hand and took up his menu once again. Claire took up her own menu and began glancing over it again, trying her best not to be overawed by the occasion.
While Claire attempted to take her mind off of things with the menu, the waitress came over with their drinks and asked if they were ready to order. Sam shone his warm smile at Claire and inquired if she was ready, to which she replied that she was. Claire ordered the fried shrimp sandwich and Sam the broiled scallops.
They were once again left to themselves, and both found their gazes being drawn out the window and toward the sea. As they watched the choppy waters, they saw countless fishing boats going out.
“I used to want to be a fisherman when I was very young,” Sam remarked as they watched them.
“It’s a terribly hard and dangerous job, you know. I’m not sure you’d be suitable.”
Sam flashed her with an irked frown.
“What do mean by that?” he asked, acting indignantly.
She turned from the view with a smile and replied, “Could you see yourself out there in your Armani and Ralph Lauren? Getting those beautifully manicured hands ground down to calluses by rough ropes and fishing nets?”
“Well, obviously I’d be no good now. And I’m not sure I would have been then. Although I’ve always been athletic, I’ve never been good with labor. I used to do my brother Kade’s homework if he did my chores in the yard.”
“Huh! Even then you were using your brain to escape real work.”
“Hey, what do you mean!? I do real work. Any chimpanzee can mow the lawn, but not everyone can create code. Anyway, I was never serious about becoming a fisherman. I was just a kid and found the profession exciting after I’d read Moby Dick. It thrilled me to think of going out in boats and battling sea creatures. I love the idea of being brave and going out into the middle of the old blue and fighting with nature.”
Claire gave him a slightly incredulous look.
“Yeah, but it’s not all high adventure,” she remarked. “It’s going out into the cold and the wet and working up to sixteen hours a day, sometimes more, in some of the most dangerous conditions. And the largest sea creature you’re likely to see will be a king crab!”
“Like I said—if you weren’t paying attention—I was a kid with his head in books all the time. I’d watch the boats go out from the Oregon coast and imagine they were led by Ahab on their way to tame some giant beast. But of course they were going out to work harder than they ever had and if they didn’t catch enough then they didn’t get paid.”
“Reality bites!”
This last remark of hers echoed in her mind though, and her face went dark at a certain thought that it conjured up. She turned her eyes to Sam and asked, “This is real though, isn’t it? Us—we’re real.”
He reached out and took her hand once again, gazing solemnly into her eyes.
“Yes, we are,” he said firmly, squeezing her waif fingers. “In the past five years I’ve loved you with all my heart and that has never diminished. In everything I’ve done, your presence has been there with me, always your name upon the tip of my tongue, your image upon the crest of a wave in my mind’s eye. Nothing is more real than the light that burns between us.”
A tear appeared in the corner of one of her eyes, caught a sparkle of light and then shimmered as it dropped from her eye. He leaned over the table and took her face in his hand, adding in a soft voice, “My God, I could gaze into your eyes for a whole eternity. Dive into the raging brown sea of your irises and fall through the velvet darkness of your pupils. There is nothing more real than my feelings for you.”
They held each other through their eyes for a moment, until they were interrupted by the arrival of their food. Glancing at the waitress, Sam removed his hand from her face and leaned back into his seat. At the same time, Claire wiped her cheek and turned to the food with a smile.
“Looks good,” Sam remarked as the food was placed before them.
When the waitress had given them their food, the plump, fresh-faced teen turned to Sam with a beaming smile, showing off her braces and said gushingly, “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, Mr. Burgess, but I’m like your hugest fan. I’ve watched like all of your T7s and own practically every new device that Techsoft has come up with—which you’ve come up with—in the last five years. Anyway, I’m babbling and I guess all I wanted to say was like that I think you’re amazing.”
The girl remained in front of Sam for a moment, blushing all over and gazing adoringly down at him. He in turn merely sat with an uncomfortable look on his face, wondering what she was going to say or do next. On the opposite side of the table, Claire watched the scene with a mischievous smile, finding the whole thing hilarious, Sam squirming in his seat as the young girl fixed him with her wide smile and doting eyes.
Feeling a need to break her stare, Sam said, “Well, thank you…?”
“Karen.”
“Thank you, Karen. I’m glad that you appreciate the work we do.”
He sat there gazing up at her, unsure what else he could say, contemplating telling her to leave, but not wanting to be rude, the girl continuing to gaze wide-eyed down at him with that crazed Cheshire-cat grin.
“Okay,” Karen said, snapping out of her trance. “I’ll leave you folks to eat.”
With that she went, and Sam felt himself breathe again.
He sat with a slight frown, watching her go, and then turned sharply to Claire, remarking in a hushed voice, “Okay, that was weird. Wasn’t that weird? It felt weird to me. Did that feel weird to you?”
Claire was giggling now, holding her hand over her mouth in an attempt to control her mirth.
“That was weird,” she sniggered, nodding. “I thought she was going to stand there forever staring at you with that massive smile!”
“I admit I got scared for a minute there!”
“And you wanna be a fisherman!?”
Having laughed together for some time, they tucked into their food with relish, feeling much lighter than they had earlier. The girl had been a welcome break in their thoughts, and they found themselves swimming off with the day and leaving everything else behind them as they enjoyed the food and the scenery.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Paul, I don’t understand,” his father said down the p
hone to him.
“What’s there to understand, Dad?” the son replied in a drawled voice, the lingering effects of the previous day’s alcohol. “We broke up. It’s not that hard, is it?”
“But why does that mean you’ve got to throw everything else away with it?”
Paul sighed loudly and glared out across the shattered remains of his lounge. Everything in his life appeared to resemble that room. Broken, twisted and shattered. That morning he had visited St. Pancras to tell them that he would be standing down from his residency forthwith. He had done it as though in a dream, and as he sat in the supervising doctor’s office, he had felt everything like a ghost does, the words coming from his own mouth in a blank and automatic fashion, the doctor’s answers and questions sounding faint to his ears.
“I need to get away from this apartment. Away from this city. It’s killing me, dad.”
“I’ve never heard you talk like this, Paul. You’re scaring me.”
“I’m scaring myself. I need to come home for a while and breathe. I feel suffocated here.”
“But you went out there with such high hopes, you shouldn’t let a breakup wreck everything. You should go back to the hospital and withdraw your resignation. You can still live your life without Claire.”
The compassionate warmth in his father’s voice brought tears to Paul’s eyes and he began to sob.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” he wept. “You’ve always had Ma. Imagine if you lost her. Wouldn’t you feel low?”
“Yeah, I guess I would, son.” There was a brief pause as the father listened to his sad son cry on the other end. “Well, then I’ll see you in…?”
Paul wiped his eyes and took a few deep breaths to settle himself.
