Love and Chaos (26 page)

“The penthouse?” I repeat. “Seriously?”

Sam just shrugs and smiles.

The elevator opens straight into the apartment, and my jaw drops. A huge loft-like space with wall-to-wall windows looking out over Brooklyn and Manhattan and the raging storm.

And it’s decorated with the kind of understated, comfortably masculine touches that you only get from a professional interior designer. This is one hell of a place to sleep on the floor while you’re trying to find a job. Why did Sam want to spend so much time with me at crummy old Rookhaven when he could have been hanging out here?

“Holy shit. What is your friend? A captain of goddamn industry?”

I look up at Sam to see if he’s laughing, but he’s suddenly frowning at me so intensely that my stomach drops and my heart races and oh, God, every cliché I’ve ever read in any romance novel, ever, and he’s just so sexy and this is really happening, he really loves me, too, he wants me, too.… I want to kiss him again, but I feel paralyzed with, I don’t know, shyness, or fear, or something.

Then Sam pulls me in to him and kisses me again.

And so we kiss. We kiss, standing up, against the closed elevator door. Then take a step toward the sofa, then stop, kissing more, then one more step again. My clothes are drenched and I’m freezing, but all I can feel is Sam’s warm lips on mine and his arms around me, all I can hear is our breathing and the storm outside. This is perfect.

When we finally get to the sofa, there’s a clap of thunder so loud that we both startle, and pause to look at the awesomely violent storm currently at play over the city. The thunder is making the entire building shake every few minutes, and the rain is coming down in hard, angry sheets hitting the windows with an audible
crackcrackcrack
. The strangest thing of all is that the clouds over New York City are purple and gray, furious-looking and illuminated every few seconds by lightning. It looks almost like CGI.

“Crazy…” I murmur. “This must be the best view in the city.”

“It is,” says Sam, and I look up and see he’s looking only at me.

“Cheesy,” I say.

“Yeah. That was a little cheesy.” Sam kisses me again.

“It’s like that hurricane,” I say. “Sandy. The one that lasted all night and gave half of New York a blackout for days.”

“Actually, this is a derecho, rather than a hurricane,” Sam says. “A derecho is a series of storms. All of them pounding across New York City.”

“Tell me more about the weather,” I say. “You’re so interesting.”

“And you’re such a smartass.” Sam grabs me and I give a little involuntary shriek, and we get lost in kissing again, till another clap of thunder draws our attention back to the storm. There are over a dozen lightning storms right now over different patches of the city, like tiny rain gods are fighting wars in the clouds.

“Why did you ask Julia out?” I say, out of nowhere. “I mean … seriously. I was so shocked.”

“I didn’t ask her out.” Sam looks surprised. “I thought you knew. She asked me out. We were talking about this Mexican place and I said ‘We should go sometime.’ I meant all of your roommates, especially you.…” He leans forward and kisses me again. “Next thing I knew, she was texting me about what time she could meet me and that I should pick her up and that she was having first-date nerves and all this stuff, and I just … didn’t know what to do.”

“Oh…” I say.

“I tried to call you about it, but you weren’t answering your phone. So I just went to the dinner. It wasn’t romantic, at all. And the moment we finished our burritos, we came to find you. Trust me, Julia doesn’t have any feelings for me. We’re just friends.”

Sam looks so serious, and so honest, and so fucking gorgeous, that all I can think about is how much I want to kiss him again. We kiss for a few more minutes, until a gunshot-like crack of thunder interrupts us and we both flinch.

“Man, that was loud,” I say.

“Did you know you can count how many miles away a storm is by counting between the lightning and thunder?” says Sam.

“Is that true? I thought that was one of those mythical things. Like Santa Claus. And the Tooth Fairy.”

“Yeah, right. Like the Tooth Fairy is a myth.”

At that moment, lightning whites out the sky, and our eyes lock on each other as we both count silently. Eleven seconds later, a deafening clap of thunder makes me jump, even though I knew it was coming.

“Eleven miles,” says Sam.

“It feels like Armageddon,” I say. “Not the Bruce Willis one. The biblical one. Hey, Sam?”

“Yes?”

“Kiss me again.”

We kiss more, stopping only when I start shivering so violently in my wet clothes that I can’t kiss anymore.

Sam gives me a T-shirt with
RUTHERFORD
written across the front and a pair of green Dartmouth sweatpants. I go to the bathroom to change, but my skin is so cold and drenched with rain that I’m shivering too hard to dress, so instead I decide to take a quick, very hot shower. I wash my hair with his roommate’s shampoo and conditioner (Aveda, nice) and wipe away the last inevitable residue of mascara and eyeliner with spit and toilet paper.

Then I look in the mirror. My lips are chapped and swollen, my chin is red and raw with stubble burn, my hair is wet and draggly, I’m not wearing any makeup, and I’m in boy’s clothes. I’m a total mess and I don’t care. It doesn’t matter, because Sam knows who I am no matter what I look like. And he loves me.

I am so happy right now.

I look down and see an open toiletry case. Sticking out the side is an ancient, battered panda toy. Sam’s Panda. I smile, thinking about the night he told me about Panda, on the walk back from the hospital after the dinner party. It feels like so long ago.

Holding Panda, I pad back to the sofa and pause for a second, gazing at Sam. He’s changed into dry jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt and is stretched out along the long leather sofa, eyes closed, arms crossed behind his head, a happy smirk on his face. God, he’s gorgeous. (And may I just say, his guns are sick.)

Then lightning flashes around the night sky, and I count in my head. One … two … three … four … five …

“Five miles,” says Sam, opening his eyes.

We stare at each other for a few long, silent seconds.

“Is there room for two more?” I hold up Panda.

“Panda! Oh, my God, he’s been dying to meet you.”

I leap onto the sofa and attack him with kisses, feeling like I’m, literally, physically craving him, like I want to lick and nibble and taste his lips for hours, and even then I won’t be satiated. Kissing Sam again, after a period of just a few minutes, feels like coming home. Like every bit of his face and lips and neck and jaw belong to me.

“We should move Panda. He’s really too young to see this sort of thing,” murmurs Sam.

I grin and place Panda on the coffee table, facing away from us.

“We kiss extremely well together,” I murmur.

“I know. Thank God. Imagine if you’d done that whole I-love-you speech in the rain and then I’d discovered you were all tongue or something.”

This feels different from any make-out session I’ve ever had, and I think I know why. He’s not grinding an angry hard-on against me. Or frantically clawing at my top or grabbing my ass. I know he’s turned on, and I sure as hell am. But unlike every other dude I’ve ever been with, I don’t have the feeling that he’s racing against the clock in the endless battle to get laid.

“Why aren’t you pawing at me like an oversexed puppy?” I ask at one point.

“Uh … do you
want
me to paw at you like an oversexed puppy? And how sexed should puppies be, anyway?”

I laugh, and then think for a second. “I guess not. I’m enjoying the kissing.”

“Me too.” Sam frowns for a second, as if deciding whether to say anything. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to do … all kinds of things with you. And I will. But I always told myself that if I were ever lucky enough to kiss you, I’d enjoy it as long as I could. Before sex. Before anything else.”

“You’ve thought about kissing me? Since when?”

“Oh, Angie.” Sam looks at me and smiles. “Since always. Since you stubbed out your cigarette, called me a nautical Nazi Youth, and swaggered onto the speedboat.”

I grin. “That’s so…”

“Romantic?”

“Sad, actually. Really tragic. Like, what is this, a YA novel or something?”

Sam narrows his eyes in mock annoyance. “You’re gonna pay for that.”

And boom, we’re kissing again, but this time he’s trying to torture me. Kissing my neck slowly, so slowly, until I shiver uncontrollably, his bristles scratching my collarbone. Running the tip of his tongue behind my earlobe. Kissing just my top lip, then only my bottom lip, nibbling along my jaw.…

It’s the sexiest, most excruciatingly divine thing that’s ever happened to me, and I find myself gasping, genuinely gasping for air. At one point I actually moan, running my hands through his hair, until I realize I look and sound like something out of one of my goddamn romances, and I shut the hell up.

“Everything about you feels good,” Sam murmurs a little while later. “You’re just right.”

“That’s just what I was thinking about you,” I say.

“I wanted to kiss you so badly that night we were in your bed.… God, I couldn’t sleep. I just lay there, listening to you sleep-grunt all night like a baby hippo.”

“I do not sleep-grunt! And you nearly did kiss me! The next morning … we were snuggling.”

“We snuggled? God, and I slept through it? I will never forgive myself.” Sam kisses me again. “I love your bottom lip. It’s pouty and demanding, did you know that? It never wants to be left out of anything. But then, ah, your top lip, it’s all innocent and hopeful.… It’s so hard to choose my favorite.”

“You really shouldn’t play favorites. It’s not fair.”

“I know. And God knows what I’ll do when I get to your perfect breasts, it’ll be like a sexual
Sophie’s Choice
. Okay, are you hungry? Wait, what am I asking. Of course you are. Come on, let’s eat.”

We head to the kitchen, holding hands. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so happy. I feel like I must be glowing like the goddamn sun.

As Sam riffles through the big steel refrigerator, I take a moment to gaze out at the storm still raging outside, and around the apartment again. It’s not at all what I expected from a couple of twentysomething guys sharing an apartment in Fort Greene. I figured it’d be some studio dump, all beaten-up bedbuggy Ikea sofas and dust bunnies. You know, dirty magazines and empty toilet paper roll in the bathroom and a crusty bottle of ketchup in the fridge. But it’s serene, stylish, and very clean.

“This place is totally incredible,” I say. “Is your friend Pete gay?”

“No, he’s not, he just likes to do everything right,” says Sam. He looks over his shoulder at me and grins. “How do you feel about grilled cheese?”

“I feel amazing about it.”

Sam pulls out a loaf of sourdough bread, some cheddar cheese, and a huge block of butter. Then he takes a big frying pan out of a drawer and turns on the stove.

“This is going to blow your mind,” he says, so intensely that I crack up. “Laugh it up, sweetface. Just you wait. I showed Vic how to do this the other day. He said it was the best grilled cheese he’d ever had, and he’s been eating grilled cheese since before television was invented. First, we brown the butter.”

“You want to burn the butter?”

“
Brown
it. Over low heat. You culinary philistine.” Sam leans over to kiss me. “I take it back. You’re not a culinary philistine.” Then he looks at the pan, bubbling with three giant blobs of butter. “You need to keep stirring it while it bubbles till it turns brown and you can smell … ah. Perfect. Now, the bread.” He puts four slices in the pan. “We let them hang out in there for a while. Come here again.” I grin and lean in. God, I don’t think I will ever get tired of kissing him.

After a few minutes, Sam leans back and looks at the pan. “Now we salt them, sea salt only, of course, I know how you feel about sea salt. Add some nice thick slices of cheese to two of the slices, flip the other two over as lids, and put the lid on the pan to let the cheese melt.”

“And when do we kiss again?”

“We kiss … again … now.”

Being with Sam is so sexy and giggly and easy. It feels just the way you always hope kissing will feel when you’re growing up, you know? Effortless and intimate and romantic. It’s just right.

There’s a flash of lightning, and three seconds later the thunder claps louder than ever, like a gunshot going off, echoing around the apartment. I jump at the noise and pull Sam even closer to me.

“The storm is getting nearer,” I murmur into Sam’s lips.

“Are you scared?” he murmurs back.

“Right now, I’m not scared of anything.”

Sam shifts his body slightly so he’s leaning fully into me against the kitchen counter, and something changes. He’s so much taller than me that I can barely reach up and around his shoulders. Isn’t it so weird how guys are always taller than you think they’re going to be? Or maybe I just think I’m a lot taller than I really am. I don’t know … oh man, the kissing is good.

After a few minutes, I get the inevitable crick in my neck, and I hoist myself up so I’m sitting on the kitchen counter and we’re kissing face-to-face. With my body pressed hard against his, I wrap my legs around Sam’s waist and nuzzle his neck until I feel his breath coming out all shaky. I shiver inside with joy at the idea that I’m the person making him feel so excited.

Eventually, he can’t take it anymore and pulls me hard against him with a little growl, kissing me even more passionately. This is different kissing now, it’s kissing with intent, serious kissing, kissing that’s going somewhere, and I know where it’s going and I want it so much but I’m scared, though I don’t even know why, and I run my hands under his T-shirt and wrap my legs around him tighter and let myself imagine what it would be like to be naked with him, what this would be like if we were in bed, what it would be like to—

Then Sam pulls back and looks me in the eye.

“I really do love you, Angie James.”

“I really do love you, too, Sam Carter.”