Attach ments(46)

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“I want you to know that I’m sorry,” she said.

“You can have my jacket.”

“Lincoln, listen.” She turned to face him. He told himself not to look away. “I’m sorry,” she said.

But I feel like what happened probably happened for a reason. It forced everything to the surface.”

“What everything?”

“Everything between us,” she said, getting impatient. “Our relationship.”

“I told you, we don’t have to talk about this.”

“Yes, we do. You saw me with another man. Don’t you think that’s worth talking about?”

Jesus. Another man. Why’d she have to say it that way?

“Lincoln … ,” she said.

He shook his head, and kicked at the ground again until they were moving.

“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she said after two or three go-rounds. “I got to know Marlon when we were rehearsing The Straw. We were together all the time, and it just turned into something more.”

“But that play was in September,” Lincoln said. With new distress.

“Yes.”

“That was right after we got to California.”

“I should have told you sooner.”

“No,” Lincoln said, “you should have …not done this.”

They were both quiet for a few moments. Lincoln kept kicking, making the playground equipment turn faster, until Sam grabbed his arm. “Stop,” she said. “I’m getting dizzy.”

He dug his heels into the cold, hard dirt and hugged one of the metal handholds.

“How did you think our relationship was going to end?” Sam asked when they stopped. She seemed angry now. “And don’t say that you didn’t think it was going to end. You’re not that naïve.”

He was.

“These things end,” she said. “They always end. Nobody marries their first love. First love is just that. First. It’s implied that something else will follow.”

“I never thought I’d hear you make the case against Romeo and Juliet,” he said.

“They would have broken up if they’d lived for the sequel.”

“I love you,” he said. It came out too close to a whine. “Say that you don’t love me.”

“I won’t say that.” Her face was cold.

“Then say that you do.”

“I’ll always love you,” she said, factually. She wasn’t looking at him.

“Always,” he said. “But not now. Not enough …”

“If I was meant to be with you,” Sam said, “I wouldn’t have fallen in love with Marlon.”

Once, when Lincoln was playing croquet with his sister, she’d accidentally cracked him in the temple with a mallet. In the moment before he fell to the ground, he’d thought to himself, I might die now. This might be it. That’s how he felt when Sam told him she was in love with Marlon.

“You make it sound like it happened to you,” he said. “Like you had nothing to do with it. You make infidelity sound like a hole in the sidewalk. You had a choice.”

“Infidelity?” She rolled her eyes. “Fine. Then I guess I chose to be unfaithful. Do you still want to be with me, knowing that?”

“Yes.”

She threw back her head in disgust.

Lincoln moved closer to her. There was a cold steel bar between them (exactly the kind you’re not supposed to lick).

“Why did you want me to come to California with you?” he asked. “If you knew we were going to break up?”

“I didn’t plan it this way,” she said. Less angry now, and maybe a little ashamed. “I didn’t know when we were going to break up.”

“I didn’t know we were ever going to break up,” he said. “If you had told me that it was a foregone conclusion, I wouldn’t have followed you across the country …” He stopped talking and looked at her.

Even in the dark, even in January, even breaking his heart, she was pink and radiant. She reminded him of a rosebush flowering in stop-motion. “God … ,” he said, “you know what? I probably would have.”

They were both quiet again. Lincoln couldn’t trust himself to speak. Everything he wanted to say was wrong. Everything he wanted to say would make her want him less.

“I wanted you to come with me,” Sam finally said, “because I was scared to go by myself. And I told myself that it was okay, letting you follow me …because it was what you wanted. And because you didn’t have any other plans. And …because I guess I wasn’t ready to say good-bye to you.”