Necessary Restorations (The Walsh Series) (A) (7 page)

“Third generation. That’s impressive,” I said.

Sam barked a laugh. “It’s a fucking circus, and if we could hide a body in this town without getting involved with the mafia, we’d have killed each other by now.”

Surprised, I looked up from my coffee to find Sam gazing at my chest again, and I’d never enjoyed gratuitous ogling quite so much. He was overt about it, but in a charming, curious way that I was finding increasingly tolerable.

“What are you doing today, perv?” I asked.

“I’d be interested in staring at your tits some more, and I wouldn’t mind you sucking my dick like you promised.”

“I told you to stop thinking about that,” I said.

“And I told you I probably wouldn’t,” he said. “I haven’t.”

I didn’t know what to do with his words. Was this flirting? Or friendly ball-busting? Or . . . something in between? What happened after a near-death experience, a drunken night, and a cuddlefest?

Ultimately, it didn’t matter. I wanted to hang out with Sam, and I didn’t care whether we were flirting or sparring or forging strange, new ground in the middle.

And that was the sweet little lie I was telling myself today.

“There are a couple festivals this weekend. A few bands I wanted to see. Let’s be the random, mismatched people who don’t look like they belong together.”

“Speaking of which,” he said. “What the fuck are you wearing?”

I glanced at my aqua shorts and ruffled red top. “What are you talking about? This is cute.”

Exaggerated annoyance flashed across his face. “Let’s start with the nine necklaces, and that one—” He gestured to the pendant just below my breasts. Of course he was staring at that. “Is that a fucking mermaid? You know what? It doesn’t matter. Sure, all these colors and fabrics go together, but there’s no losing you in a crowd, Sunshine.”

“And that’s why we need to hit some festivals,” I said, stifling a laugh. He was adorable when he got fired up.

Sam frowned and leaned back in his chair, his arms crossed over his chest again. The closed-off, arrogant look worked for him. “Or I could go somewhere that’s heard of Whitley Neill gin and takes the health codes seriously.”

I pulled my lip between my teeth and moved my head with the My Chemical Romance tune, “Helena,” as I considered his comment.

I couldn’t compete with Sam’s posh club scene and all the cocksucking, but I also knew he was at least eighty percent bluster. Probably more. He enjoyed getting a reaction from me, and for some reason, I liked giving it to him.

Sam reminded me of Ellie, but it wasn’t until now that I understood that thread. Ellie and I found each other at freshmen orientation, our eyes meeting across a herd of orchestra dorks. We shared identical degrees of exasperation for self-aggrandizing professors, made a run from the team-building exercises at the same moment, and found ourselves chatting off to the side at every opportunity. We thought alike and had the same humor, our families were the pinnacles of weird, and we immediately understood everything about each other. And just that fast, she was my person.

It was like that with Sam, sort of. We were drawn together, magnet to metal. There was something inside him that I recognized, and maybe it was something inside me, too. I didn’t know what it was or whether I wanted to find out, but quickly and without analysis, he was becoming one of my people.

“You can stare at my boobs all you want.” I lifted a shoulder. “I could be talked into another drunken dance party.”

He sat forward and folded his hands around my cup. “Where are we going and do you want more coffee before we leave?”

After stopping at his place, Sam met me in the North End for St. Anthony’s Feast, a gigantic Italian event with food, music, parades, and more food. Later, we made our way downtown to the Black Rose for an Irish folk festival. Sam passed on every snack I picked up along the way and looked mildly horrified when I offered, but he didn’t mind admiring everything with breasts.

There was no escaping the obvious: Sam was a shameless flirt. I wasn’t sure it was entirely intentional so much as it was an ingrained behavior like chewing with his mouth closed. I was gradually—grudgingly—realizing that his eyes automatically landed on boobs and bums.

Without a reminder, he’d speak directly to my cleavage.

I’d wanted to equate those habits with a lack of respect for women, but the more time I spent with him, the more I saw that argument teetering on unsteady legs. He held doors open for me and grabbed my hand when we crossed busy streets and insisted on paying for all four of my cappuccinos and said ‘pardon me’ every freaking time he blew his nose.

Sam talked about my boobs and asked for oral sex on the hour, but that was his shallow, derpy way of enforcing the perimeter. It kept me—and everyone else—far enough away to miss the sweetheart under the surface.

He rolled his eyes when I said, “You haven’t eaten all day.” I pointed to the device tucked inside his pocket. I’d seen more than enough diabetic band campers to know regular meals were essential. It didn’t make me an expert on the topic, but I didn’t mind being the voice of snacking reason. “Let’s sit down and get something.”

“I’m fine.” Sam glanced around, shaking his head as if he wouldn’t be able to find anything palatable. “Don’t worry about it.”

His words were terse, and he was stewing in obvious distress, and I probably should have backed off. Reaching into his pocket, I glanced at the monitor. Being one of my people meant I didn’t back off. “What’s low for you?”

He offered a tight shrug and some under-the-breath swearing, looking uncomfortable, and murmured, “Around the fifties or sixties.”

According to the screen, his blood-glucose was forty-one and falling. I gestured to it, meeting his eyes with a please-tell-me-you’re-seeing-this stare. “Right. You don’t like anything here.” I waved at the stalls set up around Quincy Market and he shook his head. “Is there something you
do
like?”

Sliding the device into his pocket gave me an opportunity to get a little closer and run my hand down his back. I could feel all the muscular notches and grooves that I saw this morning, and reliving that memory was a bit sinful. The sin probably had something to do with my inability to stop rubbing him.

“There’s a place near the Aquarium that isn’t awful,” he said. “But it’s fine. Let’s just stay here, and I’ll get another beer.”

“That seems like not a good idea,” I said. “Let’s go, Freckle Twin.”

The city was bustling, and every corner revealed a new celebration, and this was how I loved Boston the most. It would never be New York, and the longer I lived here, the more I enjoyed that.

Sam led us to Rosemary and Sage, a sparklingly clean, shiny restaurant with big communal tables and floor-to-ceiling windows. It was mostly empty. I assessed the menu, quickly finding salad, more salad, and sandwiches filled with salads. Everything was organic and locally grown, with the origin attached to every ingredient.

Ward tomatoes. Apponagansett peppers. Langwater spinach and kale. Barden apples. Aquidneck cheeses.

“Do you see anything you’d like?” Sam asked. He sounded apprehensive.

“Yeah, I’m good with this.” I nodded toward the menu. “I’m easy.”

We ordered, and once a greens-and-berries smoothie was in his hands, the clouds left his eyes and he loosened up. He smiled, laughing to himself as if he suddenly remembered a hilarious moment. He met my furrowed eyebrow with a devious grin.

“So you’re easy?” he said. “You could have mentioned that sooner.”

“You’re such a slutty beast,” I murmured. “Drink your juice.”

Our meals arrived—caprese panini for me, wheelbarrow of vegetables for Sam. I saw an armful of greens topped with asparagus, artichoke hearts, zucchini, peppers, carrots, celery, apples, beets, cranberries, radishes, cucumbers, mushrooms, seaweed, and bean sprouts. I didn’t think it was possible to have an entire garden in one salad, but Sam proved me wrong. He went hard with the herb vinaigrette but picked a few stray red onions from the bowl and set them aside with a contemptuous glare.

If he looked at me the way he looked at those onions, I’d promptly shrivel up and die.

“Not a fan?” I pointed to his discard pile and he shook his head. “My family, they have a Greek restaurant in New Jersey. I’m Greek, by the way. And Indian. Like the subcontinent, not the native peoples. Anyway. Everyone is conscripted into the workforce around the time they master walking and talking. For about two years, eighth and ninth grade, I think, I was stuck on pepper and onion prep. All I did, every afternoon, was chop. My entire life smelled like onions. The scent haunted me. Even when it was gone, I could still smell it. To this day, I can’t look at onions without wanting to wash my hands with vanilla extract.”

Sam wiped his hands on his napkin, laughing. “That sounds like child abuse.”

“Finally,” I cried. “Someone who sees it my way.”

We ate and talked, covering everything from college to local politics to regional accents to my issues with the garbanzo bean, but we never discussed last night. I was
dying
to talk about it. I knew my flirt game was hardcore, but I didn’t go around kissing dudes in bars. I didn’t wake up with them, half naked, either.

I wanted to know whether we were laughing it off as ‘oh my God, I can’t believe we got that drunk and kissed’ or giving each other the side eye like ‘oh my God, we kissed and we want to do it again.’

I craved that kind of structure. I preferred to organize relationships into clear boxes and know all the boundaries up front, but in every other part of my existence, I let life happen and didn’t worry too much about the details. If there was one thing I knew to be true it was that life would almost always go on.

After lingering at Rosemary and Sage, we traversed several neighborhoods, stopping at every event we encountered. We detoured to Whole Foods for an expertly selected bunch of grapes and ended up back in Cambridge that night, drinking beer, eating those grapes, and watching fireworks on the roof of my building. We sat shoulder to shoulder, gazing at the sky.

Sam turned to me and drummed his fingertips against my arm. “What’s your name mean?”

I waited, watching the reflection of the fireworks in his eyes and hoping his fingers wouldn’t stop. He didn’t stray far from my side today, but he never touched me without an invitation.

I’d yank him toward the fresh cannolis, then he’d slide his hand down my back.

I’d grab his hand and twirl around, then he’d grip my hips.

I’d lean against him in a crowd, then he’d shift toward me.

I couldn’t tell whether he was waiting for me to spell out my attraction to him, or he was very polite and very tolerant of my grabby hands but wasn’t into me at all. I just needed some direction from him, and I knew I was going to be rubbing all over him until he asked me to stop.

“My mother took the Greek name Theola—which means something like friendly with gods or divinity or whatever—and twisted the soul out of it until she was left with Tiel. She’s quite skilled at twisting the soul out of most things, actually.” I tipped my beer back and edged closer to Sam, my head pillowed against his shoulder. “Everyone in my family has a monstrously Greek name. Like, they couldn’t possibly exist without putting it out there, a giant fucking sign that screams ‘Everything about me is defined by my lineage and I can’t possibly have an identity unless it explicitly ties me to my ancestors.’ And it’s fine if that’s who you are, but it’s not me. I’m still stuck with a horrendously strange name, I know—”

“It’s not. I like it. It suits you.” He shook his head. “You’re pure wild. You’re something I’d find on an obscure trail in the middle of an ancient forest, in a special pocket of nature, and that’s . . . amazing.”

It shouldn’t have mattered so much that he said those words, that he could sweep all of my not-quite-this-but-not-quite-that-either away. It gave me the odd sense that I wasn’t a complete outlier and I might belong somewhere.

But that didn’t mean Sam belonged with me. I wasn’t sure where he belonged—aside from a Ralph Lauren ad—and it didn’t seem like he knew either. “What’s your story, Freckle Twin?”

He took a sip of his beer and eyed me over the bottle. “I’m fond of vegetables,” he said. “You already know my gin preferences. I bought an old firehouse, and I spend most of my time fixing it up. I draw things and call it architecture. And I enjoy camping.”

“How does one come to live in a firehouse?”

He reached for another bottle from the six pack, and popped it open with a churchkey. There was something to be said for a man who kept one of those on his key ring. “One sees the state refusing to add a two-hundred-year-old landmark to its historical sites, which basically opens it up for demolition. One then throws down some cash, moves in, and starts restoring it.”

I wasn’t sure what sparked more questions: the idea of living in a firehouse, the process of restoring that firehouse, or tossing money around. “Does it have a pole?”

“Of course,” he said. “We’ve been renovating for almost four years now, and we haven’t had the heart to remove the pole. I can’t see why we would.”