Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,37
was up late pondering this.
She had asked Clive about previous relationships. He told her he had never been involved in anything serious.
“What about you?” he said.
Sam told him about Sanjeev, how they were together for three years, how she got along with his sisters and parents and sometimes missed them.
“But that wasn’t serious,” Clive said. “You were in high school.”
He said it like it was a hundred years ago, when, really, it was three.
First thing the next morning after coming across the “Laura” folder, Sam said, while they were still in bed, “Laura is a nice name. I always thought I’d maybe name a daughter that one day. Laura. It’s pretty, right? Like Laura Linney.”
She thought he might say, I used to have a girlfriend by that name. Or that his expression would give something away.
But Clive only said, “I have no idea who Laura Linney is, but sure,” before wrapping her in a hug and kissing her all over her face as she screamed in delight.
They had sex every day, at least once. It seemed to smooth over any tensions, any doubts in her mind.
* * *
—
Sam and Clive ate dinner in the park most evenings. They might pack salad and cheese sandwiches and a bottle of cheap white wine, but still it seemed romantic to sit on a blanket in the grass, side by side.
She tried not to think about leaving. The idea of it seemed impossible. That she should return to her life at school without him there beside her in bed each night; without waking up in the morning to the sound of him whistling in the shower. The smell of Clive’s skin was enough to make her want to cry if she imagined herself no longer knowing it. When Sam talked to her friends about plans for next year, she could tell that none of them expected her and Clive to continue together. It made her want to hold on even tighter. She thought of her mother’s warning that she would never return. Part of her wanted to stay.
One night toward the end of the summer, watching Clive make a funny face as he bit into a baguette, Sam began to cry.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do without you,” she said.
“Then marry me,” he said. “And you won’t have to find out.”
Sam laughed through her tears. “My mother would kill me if I didn’t go back and finish school.”
“That’s nine months,” he said. “You’ll go and you’ll finish, we’ll visit each other, and then you’ll come back here, and we’ll get married. What do you say?”
All this time, her life had been going in a certain direction. But she saw now that it didn’t have to stay that way. Things could change. Things ought to change.
“Okay,” she said, feeling elated, and a bit ill.
He kissed her, and rolled her onto the blanket.
The following Saturday, Clive told Sam he was taking her ring shopping. She pictured the two of them in a jewelry shop, everyone wondering what they were doing together. She pictured Clive wincing at the price tags, as he did sometimes when he read a dinner menu in a restaurant.
“Flying back and forth to see one another for a year is going to be expensive,” she said. “Maybe we should hold off on a ring and save our money. I don’t even care about a ring, to be honest.”
Clive smiled. “So practical,” he said. “All right. But there will be a ring one day. I promise you that.”
Sam felt relieved that there would be no ring for now. She chose not to spend too much time wondering why.
From then on, whenever Clive introduced her to anyone, it was as his fiancée. She told her friends that they were kind of engaged. She didn’t dare tell her parents, which seemed like a bad sign. But Sam never voiced her doubts to Clive. She left London with the understanding that the separation was temporary.
They had made promises, but back at home, her real life had resumed, poking holes in the fantasy. The problem was Clive had been in his real life all along. Sam loved him. She did. But sometimes she could project herself into the future, see herself married to someone more appropriate. Or was that her fear? Other people’s voices in her head? Everyone said to go with your gut, but when Sam tunneled down and listened, she couldn’t hear anything one way or the other.