Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,118
back on her feet and kissed her.
“Come on,” she said. “I want to introduce you to George.”
Sam walked around the car and got in back, leaving the front seat for Clive.
Before she could say anything, he opened the other door to the back and slid in beside her.
“Oh,” she said.
“Hello, George,” Clive said, reaching over the seat to shake his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Same here,” George said.
He started driving.
She wished she could apologize to George without making Clive feel bad. Or somehow explain to Clive that George wasn’t their Uber driver, that he was doing this as a friend. She had assumed that was understood.
Sam tried to ignore her irritation.
“It’s so nice of you to do this, George,” she said. “Taking the time out of your day for us.”
“It’s no problem,” he said.
Before they even left the winding roads of the airport and got back on the highway, Clive was running a hand up her thigh. Sam pushed it away, meeting his eye, nodding toward George.
Clive looked injured.
She reached for his hand and held it, a small concession.
Every other time they had seen each other after being apart, they leaped right to the physical. When she arrived in London for the summer, he went down on her in a cab, something she thought of now with a mix of excitement and shame. On her most recent trip, they made out so brazenly on the Tube ride home from Heathrow that an old woman splashed water on them to make them stop. Without that element of the forbidden, Sam felt unsure how to begin.
“How was the flight?” she said.
“Dreadful. A small child kicked the back of my seat the whole way.”
“That’s the worst,” George said.
“I’ve got a massive headache. Do either of you have any ibuprofen, by chance?”
The way he said the word bugged her. I-boop-rofen.
“Sorry, I don’t,” she said.
“Not on me,” said George.
They were silent for a minute. “Pretty Woman” played in the background. If it were still just the two of them in the car, Sam would tell George how much she’d loved this song as a kid, how they blasted it at their neighborhood block party every summer, and all the dads danced around like fools, beckoning to their wives, who sat at picnic tables in the middle of the street, pretending not to see them.
Clive leaned forward. “George, mate,” he said. “Would you mind changing the station? This song is so treacly, it makes my teeth hurt.”
Sam’s body froze. There was no way he could have known George had chosen the music, but still she felt horrible.
“I like this song,” she said.
George switched to talk radio. A segment about an ICE raid in Texas, the mass deportation of a hundred people, some of whose children were left home alone, awaiting their parents’ return from work.
“Obama won’t let them get away with that,” Sam said.
“Your Obama has deported more people than any other president in history,” Clive said to her.
“Where did you hear that?” Sam said.
“I read it in this top-secret document called the newspaper.”
She hated when he got like this. Perhaps he felt insecure, and so he had to overcompensate. When Clive was in this sort of mood, Sam avoided making any arguments about anything, because she didn’t want to hear him say that her point was obvious, or simplistic, or that she was thinking all wrong.
“Clive, my man,” George said. “Are you a fan of the English Premier League?”
They started talking about Newcastle United. Sam stared out the window.
She was almost certain George had no interest in soccer. He had probably looked it up online, done his research, so he’d have something to talk about with Clive. George was that kind of person.
* * *
—
Once they were at the dorm, Sam led Clive straight to her room.
She needed that reliable connection, her skin against his, to remind her of what Clive meant, to help them get back to normal.
He kissed her at the top of the platform stairs and dropped his bag just inside her room. Clive closed the door behind them.
15
Elisabeth
THE WEEKEND IN THE CITY was Andrew’s idea.
Elisabeth saw it as an attempt to smooth over the fact that things between them had been terrible since Christmas. Her betrayal, which would otherwise have done them in, she was certain, had to be endured because they were married, they had a child. The god-awful tension might linger on for weeks or months or years, during which they still had to talk about what