Randomly Ever After

by Julia Kent

  Randomly Ever After: Sam and Amy

  A Random series novella

  by Julia Kent

  Copyright © 2014 by Julia Kent

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.

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  Author’s Note

  This story is not meant to be read as a standalone. It follows the characters in the Random series -- in particular, Sam and Amy from the book Random Acts of Trust. In terms of the timeline, the events in Randomly Ever After take place about eighteen months after Sam and Amy got together. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy!

  Amy

  Keying in to the building where I now lived was still a novel experience. Moving in to share a bedroom with Sam, and an entire apartment with him and Trevor, still felt surreal. Sam and I had been together for about eighteen months now, and it made sense to take this step, but even a month after living together it felt...unreal.

  Sam was doing laundry and I’d just finished classes for the day, ready to come home, shower, and head out to his big gig tonight. Now that Liam and Charlotte were back together, the band felt complete. Settled. Stronger than ever, and a big-city tour was on the horizon.

  “Which key opens the mailbox again?” I mumbled to myself in the building’s foyer, finally getting it right on the second try. A bunch of junk mail, some letters with Harvard logos all over them (for Trevor, I assumed), some bills with Sam’s name on them, and—

  I froze.

  A letter from my university. For me.

  I raced to the apartment and flung everything but the letter onto the ground, kicking the door closed. Did they accept me? Reject me? Oh, God, what if I opened it and I didn’t get in? Should I open this alone, or wait until Sam got home?

  Sam.

  Oh, boy.

  My hands shook as I opened the thin envelope, the yellow post office forwarding sticker like a gut punch. I’d wondered why some of my classmates in grad school in my library science program already heard back, and I hadn’t. I’d figured I was on a waiting list.

  Instead, my move from my tiny apartment into Sam and Trevor’s place had delayed learning about my future.

  Sam’s words from last year rang through my head a hundred times a day:

  “You’ll make a damn fine librarian, but you’d make an even better law librarian.”

  I’d started my grad school program hoping that someday I might find my way to law school, back to the passion I’d held before I thought I’d ruined everything by beating Sam in the big debate our senior year of high school. This past year I’d taken some law courses that counted toward my library science degree, and...

  Someday was right here in front of me in the form of fine linen paper that felt like a knife as I slid my fingernail in the envelope’s corner, opening up my future.

  If they accepted me into the dual program, I’d need two more years to finish both my master’s in library science and law school. I’d be a JD, just like Trevor and Joe, though the school I’d applied to wasn’t Ivy League. That was fine—it was more affordable, less competitive, and I could take classes while finishing my library credentials.

  Win-win-win.

  The win that had haunted me from my senior year of high school was just one event in my past now, no longer the millstone around my neck, a weight of regret gone since Sam and I were back together.

  One niggling thought thrummed through me as I slid the tri-folded sheet out of its casing and slowly, achingly opened it.

  Why hadn’t I told Sam?

  Hot tears filled my eyes as I sped through the words on the page, the only words I needed to read coming through loud and clear right from the start:

  Dear Ms. Smithson,

  We are pleased to inform you—

  My breath caught in my throat. The words looped through my mind a thousand times in one agonizingly slow second.

  We are pleased.

  The door creaked open and a flash of auburn hair poked through the crack, followed by the distinct body of my love, my life, the reason I could breathe.

  He carried a plastic laundry tub with freshly-folded, clean clothes, head bent down as he dropped the basket next to the door and fumbled with a backpack. Gnarled hands flexed, broken bones mended but sore as they always would be.

  “Hey! You’re home!” he said with a breathless quality I imagined I could easily match, if I could talk.

  I looked up from the paper and just stared at him, transfixed.

  We are pleased.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, alarmed and at my side in a rush of kinetic motion, towering over me and his warm, tender embrace so fast it crushed the piece of paper—the Golden Ticket—that righted so many wrongs.

  That I was in Sam’s arms at this very moment was karmic. Pure. A perfect ending to a subject that, it turned out, needed more closure than I realized.

  But I had a problem.

  “Why are you crying?” he murmured in my ear, his voice an amalgam of four and a half years of pain, a year and a half of joy, and my answer, I knew, would be infused with redemption. It had to be. Six years ago I thought my winning the debate against him had been my downfall, and I’d internalized my loss of Sam into some kind of fear of exerting my own power.

  The past year and a half with him had proven how wrong that was, but I couldn’t shake it. Trauma plants seeds deep in the soul, and when those seeds grow and the leaves find sunlight, digging out the roots to kill off the plants forever seems like a never-ending job.

  I hadn’t told him I was applying to law school. It had been my little secret, one I nurtured and enjoyed in a strange sort of way, something that was mine. All mine. No one else, not even Sam, knew what I’d done.

  And now it was time to share.

  Pulling out of his embrace, I did what seemed most forthright. “Here,” I said simply, handing him the letter.

  Frowning, he took it from me, those green eyes filled with worry and confusion. His hands grasped the thick paper, eyes scanning fast, the knot of his brow shifting as his eyes widened with surprise, then the skin underneath lifting as he smiled.

  The moment he looked at me I knew.

  I knew, deep to my core, that Sam loved me. Me. The real me, power and all.

  “You—wow, Amy—congratulations! You’re doing it! You’re really doing it!” Sam didn’t just hug me—he grabbed me full force, as if pressing his love into my skin, cell by cell. He smelled so delicious, the mingling of his warm, loving grasp with his breath and his excitement making me smile.

  I laughed through tears. “I didn’t want to say anything because what if they didn’t accept me? I took the LSAT tests and then—”

  My words were cut off by the most tender kiss, Sam’s arms winding around me like a cocoon, his cheek against mine, the world blocked out by each sigh, the sweep of his tongue so achingly sweet. I had to look up to reach him, and he bent down to connect with me. The taste of victory in me wasn’t from the paper he still held in his hand, but from the loving lips that explored me. Congratulated me.

  Honored me.

  “You don’t have to explain,” he said in a low voice, need rising up between us in more ways than one. “All that mat
ters is that you made a decision, you worked your ass off, and all that hard work paid off.” He handed me the letter, his face split into a wide grin, eyes caring and admiring.

  I let out a puff of air. Once again, I’d been holding my breath without realizing it. “Yes, I did. I mean, it’s not Penn or Harvard, but—”

  He made a face. “Don’t do that. Who cares if it isn’t those schools? It’s your school. And you’ll graduate with two degrees to their one!” He laughed without restraint, the sound vibrating through me, giving me heat and light and love.

  “It’s more than that, I know,” he added, his hands holding my elbows now, one thumb tracing a lazy path along the soft skin inside the crook of my arm.

  “Yes.”

  “You needed to right the wrong.”

  My mouth went dry just as every pore on my body began to tingle. Yes. Yes—how did he understand me so well?

  We’d been through four and a half years of misunderstandings. Through Sam’s horrific beating at the hands of his father. Through his mother’s ambivalence and complicity. Through my brother’s arrest, my mother’s denial, and through my smartphone getting lodged in my—

  Well, we hadn’t been through that, but you get the point.

  We’d been to the island of Eden, where I watched human beings play water sports (not that kind) naked on a beach wearing animal masks. Then I watched people wearing animal costumes having sex—in public, and in character. I’d finished a year of grueling grad school. We’d watched Trevor rescue a live chicken from being eaten by a snake on stage, and saw Liam’s sex doll get ravaged by a horny snake. If we could get through all that, surely we were meant to be together, right?

  But in many ways, this moment—this very second, as I saw Sam’s pupils dilate, watched the skin around his eyes move with mirth and appreciation, felt his fingers possess me without hurry, without rush, with a steady certainty that said we were together—was a watershed. Forever. This was it.

  As I experienced that deep sense of calm, of a world tilted on its axis and made right again, centered and balanced, I reached for him through that sense of ageless knowing and said the only words that ever mattered.

  “I love you so much.”

  He stepped into me again, eyes combing over me, studying me. A flush began right over my heart, warming my chest, my breasts, spreading down like wildfire.

  “Now I have something in common with Darla,” he whispered, his fingers tracing lines along my lips.

  “Darla?” I laughed, the sound like a happy sigh.

  His arms snaked around my waist and he pulled me in, hard. Our hearts slammed against each other, separated by bone and skin, but only divided by the laws of biology, for otherwise they, too would have embraced.

  “We’re both sleeping with future lawyers,” he said against my earlobe, his warm mouth sucking on my soft skin, making me forget what we were talking about.

  “And I have something in common with her, too,” I gasped as his mouth continued working wonders.

  “Mmmm?”

  “We’re both fucking rock stars.”

  “No, you’re not,” he whispered.

  “We’re not?”

  He took my hand and walked toward our bedroom. “Not yet.” And with an evil grin, he pulled me onto the bed.

  “You have a concert in an hour!” I squealed as he pulled at my belt.

  “An hour is more than enough time.” He stopped, face serious suddenly. Bending down to kiss me, he touched his front pants pocket, furrowed his brow, then gave a slight shake of his head.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” He gave me a nervous smile.

  “What?”

  “It’s just...I was wrong. An hour isn’t enough time.”

  I laughed, pulling on his belt now. “How much time do you need?”

  “A lifetime.”

  “Well,” I said, gasping as his mouth found my neck, sucking a path to my ear, “we have twenty minutes.”

  “That will have to do.” His hands reached under the thin fabric of my shirt and under the thick silk-wrapped wire of my bra, palms filling with my abundance, thumbs on nipples that—

  “Take it off,” I begged, already wet and eager, so excited by my triumph that making love with Sam felt like a victory lap.

  With whip-fast reflexes, he unhooked my bra and slipped it, and my shirt, off over my head, the quick chill of the room making me flush with need. I was cold, I was hot, I was rippled with desire, I was everything I wanted to be in this singular moment with him.

  I was me.

  Sam’s pants made an audible thunk as they hit the floor.

  “I see you’ve been commando,” I noted, emitting a low whistle he cut off with a fevered kiss that made me arch against him. As his lips slanted against mine, tongue exploring with a connective urgency, my mind grasped at its final moments of clarity to take a moment to pause, to admire, to cherish what we’d created together. From awkward, tentative desire eighteen months ago and miscommunication and misunderstanding we’d deepened our souls, together.

  The sex was an afterthought.

  An intimate, toe-curling, pulse-pounding, smile-inducing, sweaty afterthought, to be sure, my mind slippery and wet (along with the rest of my body), his hands sliding my pants off and magically conjuring our mutual nakedness, his eyes dark and smoky, so verdant.

  This—the joining of bodies—was just a continuation of our heart merger, the mixing of flesh and blood and soul and love that now came out with the wrap of a hand on hot flesh, the stroke of a thumb just so, the push of a palm against pliant curves, the rush of a tongue in the perfect place.

  The perfect heart.

  The ideal soul.

  He had mine and I had his and as I opened my legs to welcome him in an embrace, the soft skin of my inner thighs clinging to his hips, vulnerable yet wanting, the tight clasp of my knees against his ripped back, the press of abs against abs, his mouth sucking and teasing my nipple into clenched spasms in concert with my walls below, I whispered his name through closed teeth.

  “Sam.”

  It echoed thousands of times in caverns within dimensions where I knew parts of us lived, the sound reaching out through frequency and time immemorial, reaching all the Sams and Amys ever known. All the parts of us. Every fragment, each atom, every breath.

  He pulled back, face over me, eyes full of all those times and places, radiating joy. Inside me, he pulsed, our heat unimaginably stoked, like an ember made from gentle cells, a radioactive core where we could connect without words.

  He said only one word in response as he shifted his weight and cupped my jaw, the shining light of tears pooling in those intense eyes making my own fill up as well.

  “You.” The word slid up from my sacrum in a long, loving line up my spine, entering at the base of my neck, traveling through my blood to flood my heart.

  I stretched up, curling our hips into each other, making him touch me so deep inside we slipped briefly through a portal where only our connected mouths mattered, where we were the center of the universe, the beginning of everything, the epicenter, the core, the divine.

  As he moved within, slow and unhurried, taking his time because why not? We had it all. We were a multiverse of love, the climax building with aching anticipation, until suddenly it was there, both of us alone and conjoined, separate and interconnected, skin and bone working to express the pleasure of emotion so well understood.

  On the brink of letting myself fall off the cliff of orgasm and flow, Sam whispered, “You. Only you, Amy. I love you so much, and only you could bring me so much. I wake up to you in my arms every morning. I go to sleep with you each night. We found something no one else has. No one else ever will.” His eyes sparkled in the light, so beautiful and changing, sincere and centered.

  His palm grasped the lush flesh at my hip, moving up to my breast, the other arm puling me up until I was in his lap, half-riding him. His strokes shortened but hammered home his words, the change in posi
tion and intensity lighting me, making me airborne, sending me into the ethers.

  We had a pact. An understanding. An emotional contract, if you will—and the explosive burst of mutual orgasm left me without memory. Pure flesh. Pure heart. Pure soul, so splintered and whole, so breathless and calm, so paradoxical and so, so treasured.

  I came back to my logical mind minutes later, cradled in Sam’s arms, bodies spooning, breath uneven and halting, like we’d just run a marathon.

  “God, you’re so....” The fade of his voice made me laugh.

  “That good?”

  “It’s always that good.”

  He was right.

  “And I want it to always be that good,” he added.

  My heart began to thump in double time though I hadn’t moved a muscle. Not even a twitch.

  Always.

  Now there’s a word to ponder.

  Always.

  Sam

  I couldn’t stop touching the ring in my front pocket.

  That’s right—ring. The word sounded so heavy, so weighted with importance. Ring. Like the words wife and husband and wedding and marriage.

  And I couldn’t stop touching the box that held my future.

  Amy had caught it, the rift between my presence in that moment just before words didn’t matter. Words, though, were exactly what I needed today, because tonight I was going to sing a new song I’d written just for her—and propose.

  Propose. That word feels like a fifty-pound lead ball that sits in your stomach.

  And like the lightest, most beautiful bird gliding over the endless sea.

  Both of us naked and a bit sticky, we pulled apart, the shower a strong need. “You go first,” I said, pointing. “You take longer.”

  “Want to take one together?” she offered, eyes gleaming and cheeks pulled up with dimples.

  I groaned, body half ready and part of me hardening at the thought. God, I was tempted. So tempted. But—

  “No,” I groaned, clearly torn. She laughed.

  “You’re getting old,” she teased.

  I pulled back the covered and showed her exactly how not-old I was.