In Between Frames (9 page)

There was only one answer to that, an answer that Sam was tired of giving:
 
“I don’t know, darling. I don’t know.”

Part V

Miles headed back to Athens that evening, ignoring the blips and beeps of his smartphone telling him that he’d received fifteen emails and thirteen voicemails from Gary.
 
He’d fallen behind on his updates to his agent and he knew it—and, knowing Gary, fourteen of those emails and twelve of those voicemails consisted of various ways to say “What’s going on?”

He had a few more shoots to do the next day, and he promised Sam that he’d come back tomorrow evening after he was finished. He couldn’t sleep at night in his hotel, so he put on a fresh shirt and stepped out.
 
The air was still clinging to the last traces of the day’s heat, but the sky had deepened to purple and the streetlights began to cast their liquid orange light everywhere.
 
He had no idea where he was going, or what to do.
 
He just knew that he was intolerably bored without Sam and Mabel.
 

And yet, it wasn’t as if he was doing anything especially fun with them.
 
He might, had he stayed there, have combed the beach for driftwood and pretty shells with Mabel, and would now be lighting a driftwood fire on the beach, wrapping clams in seaweed and letting them steam, opening a bottle of a chilled white with Sam while Mabel dozed.
 
Come to think on it, that does sound spectacularly fun, he thought.
 
But men his age were supposed to be hitting the clubs, chatting up women.
 
He wasn’t supposed to be so old on the inside.
 

People milled around him, heading for the neon banners of discotheques or whatever clubs were called, here.
 
The smell of cheap beer occasionally assaulted his nostrils as he walked, and some of the cooler nightspots smelled of tangy things grilling.
 
He went into a bar/nightclub place where there were still open seats at the bar and ordered a gin and tonic and “whatever’s good”, and was given a shot of
tsipuro
while the bartender got his evening meal together.
 
He drank down the shot while watching the slithery, lithe bodies of the young women, idly wondering how many of them had boyfriends, and how many of them had friends that thought they were boyfriends but weren’t, and at how strange it was that with so much information shared online these days, there could be so much confusion and so much could remain unknown.

The food arrived, a sort of tapas-like assortment of olives, bread and sharp cheese, fried eggplant, and unseemly fresh figs.
 
The gin and tonic came with it, looking suspiciously like Sprite, but when he tasted it the alcohol hit him like a freight train, and as the evening wore on his thoughts began to grow maudlin.
 
How could it be, he mused as he walked, that we should know so much about each other, but so little of the people?
 
That was what he liked about Sam—that he knew her.
 
He didn’t know that much about her, but he knew her.
 
He fell asleep at 3:00 a.m. with her name on his mind and a smile on his lips, certain, now, that this was love and not merely a crush.
 

The next day, after a full day’s of shooting, answering all seventeen of Gary’s emails, and retouching his photographs, he suddenly remembered the film he’d dropped off at the drugstore.
 
He made it to the drugstore just before it closed, paid for the photos despite the clerk clearly not-wanting to let him do so, and got into his rental car for the drive to
Loutraki
.
 
He stopped just outside Athens to top off the gas, and there had his first glance at the new pictures he shot on the Leica.

The photos of Athens were nice enough—protesters, but also of city life, grinding to a halt:
 
people with studiously angry expressions finding out that their bus had been cancelled again, a mountain of trash and the stray dogs feasting on it.
 
He was glad to see that the pictures came out much as he thought they would, crisp and clear and with no surprises—until he saw a photo of Stephan on a boat, sitting in the dark, his hands on his knees, holding a rope between them.
 
There was something ominous about his carefully neutral face in that photo, and although Miles knew that there was nothing definitive about the rope, its presence in Stephan’s hands felt vaguely sinister.

He considered calling Sam, but then he realized that, despite having spoken with her for hours yesterday and the night before, he never remembered to ask her for her phone number.
 
What would he have told her, anyway?
 
That he had a bad feeling about Stephan?

Nevertheless, he pushed the little Renault to its limit for the next forty minutes, and finally zipped down the hill and pulled up next to her cottage.
 
The door was open again, which was probably a good sign, and
 
when he went up to it, he could hear Sam telling Mabel, “…and your molars, now spit.”

He knocked on the frame.
 
Sam peeked her head out.
 
“Oh, and here’s Miles!” she said to Mabel.
 
“Just in time to say good night.”

Despite his uneasiness about the picture, he found Mabel’s enthusiasm impossible to ward off, and then after he tucked her in, she wanted a story, so Miles read the shortest one he could find, and then tiptoed back down the stairs, only to see Sam sitting at the table, a dreamy expression on her face as she swirled a half-finished glass of wine.
 
“You’re so good with children,” she said.
 

“Thanks,” Miles said. “I think something might be wrong with Stephan.”

“You just figured that out?” Sam asked.
 
“I can tell you exactly what’s wrong with him and why—“

“No, I don’t mean that.
 
I mean that he might…I don’t know, try something.”

Sam shook her head.
 
“His father would kill him,” she said. “You don’t need to worry about me ending up dead—
Loutraki
is too small for that.
 
Anyway, what’s with you and Stephan all of a sudden?
 
He stopped giving us Greek lessons and tried to get Mabel onto a sailboat with no outboard as a backup—“

“I know that,” Miles said.
 
“I’m just afraid that he might be in trouble.”

Sam reached over and patted his hand.
 
“You’re a good man, Miles,” she said.
 
“But I’ve washed my hands of him.
 
Let him be.
 
I want to enjoy us.”

Miles was surprised at how much he enjoyed her feathery touch on his hand, and at the sudden swell of desire racing in his blood, flooding out all of the other thoughts.
 
Part of him knew he had to press the matter of Stephan, but Sam’s fingers, light and airy as a cloud against his palm, sealed his lips with the tantalizing promise of more, elsewhere.

“Are you sure?” Miles asked, his voice hoarse.
 

In response, she leaned over and kissed him.
 
She tasted of wine, and for a moment Miles was afraid that she was drunk and he would be accused of something untoward.
 
And then he decided what the hell, because if he was spending all of his working hours thinking about her, unable to stop imagining himself with her, driving forty miles each way to see her, he was the one besotted with her, so he might as well surrender to it.
 
Then she shifted, and slid into his lap, and that was the last thing he remembered of the night.

~~~

Sam hadn’t had that many lovers—David was the only man she’d ever properly slept with, and in high school she’d let a few boys touch her breasts—so she couldn’t say whether Miles was a “good lover”.
 
He was attentive and gentle, which reminded her of David, but for some reason it didn’t feel creepy to think of him and David at the same time.
 
She supposed Mabel must have known, though Mabel said nothing about it over yoghurt and muesli the next morning.

Miles said nothing about it, either.
 
He listened attentively to Mabel babbling about the dream she had last night, and asked her polite questions about the plants and birds. He would be a good father, Sam thought, as she watched him help her get her shoes on.

“Did you want children?” Sam asked, as Mabel skipped outside to find her friends.
 

For a moment, Miles’s eyes went bleak with sadness as he remembered Nellie.
 
“We always spoke of it,” he said.
 
“But I was just starting out, and she was a paralegal, and it was just never the right time, and then she got cancer.”

“You’re so good with Mabel,” Sam said.
 
“That’s why I asked.”

Miles smiled.
 
“I was the oldest brother to three sisters,” he said.
 
“Little girls are easy.
 
Little boys, on the other hand, are mysteries to me.”

Sam felt her smile widen even further.
 
“Do you have to go back to Athens today?” she asked.

“I’m supposed to be on a plane in six hours,” he said.
 

“Oh.”

“But I want to stay here,” he added.
 
“With you.
 
If you don’t mind.”

A warm feeling began to spread in her gut.
 
Sam didn’t realize how nervous she’d been about his impending departure until she felt how relieved she was.
 
“That’s great,” she said.
 
Then her modesty came back and she amended, “If Mabel approves, of course.”

“Of course.”

“She didn’t like you as much as she liked Stephan at first, you know,” Sam said.
 

Miles laughed.
 
“I’m not surprised.
 
I’m not exactly an exciting character.”

“But you understand her so well.”

He made a small bow on his way to the sink with their bowls. “Like I said, three little sisters.
 
What about you?” he asked.
 
“Wait, let me guess—you were an only child.”

Sam laughed.
 
“Yes—“

There was a knock and the door swung open before Sam had time to get up from the table.
 
At first, she thought he was a delivery man, but then she remembered that nothing was ever delivered in the mornings, and these days, with the new rounds of austerity protests, it was a miracle that anything was ever delivered, at all.
 
He was as large an imposing as a bear, standing in the door with his arms folded across his chest, his face florid under his
mustache
.
 
She hadn’t seen Stephan’s father since the second time she went to his store, and his name was slow to come to her.
 
“Jon,” she gasped, at last.
 
“What are you doing down here?”

“Where is Stephan?” he asked.
 

“I don’t know,” she said.
 

“Don’t lie—“
 

He stopped when he noticed Miles at the sink, washing their breakfast dishes.
 
Miles waved and smiled, which annoyed him, but then she remembered that he didn’t know very much about Stephan, only that Stephan believed that they had a connection.
 
“So, is true,” Jon
Ionides
said, after a long and ominous silence.
 
“You are whore.”

Sam sighed.
 
“I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head,” she said.
 
“And I never, ever, promised anything to your son other than money and dinner.”