Page 30 of Sam & Justin (Gomillion High Reunion #4)

Reunion - Sunday Morning

I woke up alone.

Sam’s clothes were gone from my floor, all except for his tie.

It was the only proof that the night before had even happened.

Well, that and the used condom resting in my trash can, on top of tissues and scraps of paper.

The other side of the bed looked slept in too, more proof that I hadn’t dreamt the night before.

For half a moment, I had a glimmer of hope.

Maybe Sam had gone to the bathroom. Maybe he just hadn’t felt comfortable walking around my house naked, and that’s why his pants and shirt were gone.

Why his tie was still on my bedroom floor, a small sign to assure me he’d be back.

I waited in the bed for ten minutes. He didn’t come back.

I closed my eyes and listened. The house was quiet.

Too quiet. I pulled on a pair of basketball shorts and went to go find him.

When I stepped into the hallway, I saw that the bathroom door was open, and the room was empty.

The living room was empty. But I could smell coffee, so I went to the kitchen.

Maybe he was in there. Except he wasn’t.

It was empty too. My stomach sank through the floorboards.

He was gone.

The weekend had officially ended, and I hadn’t gotten a real goodbye.

Then I saw it: a folded up piece of paper propped up against an empty coffee mug. Beside the coffee mug was a pot of freshly brewed coffee. I ignored the coffee and the mug and went straight for the note. I unfolded it and read his scribbled text.

J,

So glad I got to reconnect with you. I want you to keep in contact, okay? Don’t want to go another twenty years not talking to you.

- S

At the bottom, he’d scribbled his phone number.

It wasn’t enough for a goodbye. It didn’t feel like it matched everything that we’d shared this weekend.

My eyes moved to the clock over my stove.

It was 10:15. I usually woke up hours before this, but at least there was still a chance.

If the motel was like others I’d stayed in, check out wouldn’t be until eleven or possibly noon.

Maybe I’d just missed him, and I could catch him before he left Gomillion.

I didn’t stop to think. I turned off the coffee maker and raced back to my room.

I picked my shirt up from the floor and slid it on.

I didn’t care that it was wrinkled or that it smelled like sweat and booze from the night before.

I just cared that it was convenient, the closest thing in my reach.

I slid my feet into the flip flops I kept by the front door and raced outside.

I barely remembered to lock my front door.

A stupid part of me hoped that his car would still be outside, that he’d still be parked in front of my house, unable to leave without a goodbye but unable to get back inside.

It was a stupid hope, and I knew it even as I thought it.

I wasn’t too surprised to find that the spot in front of my house, the one he’d parked in the night before, was empty.

I got into my car and drove like a bat out of hell toward the motel.

The entire drive there, memories of the weekend flooded me.

The moment I saw him at the welcome reception and the way we’d been paired together.

It was like fate or something. And if the universe had a say in that, then it wouldn’t let him be gone yet.

There were so many other moments that felt like fate had intervened.

Moments like me leaving my phone in his hotel room, so he had to come to the tour and I could see him a little early.

All of the conversations. The way Gabe had welcomed him with open arms at prom the night before.

And there had been choices too, choices that made everything mean so much more.

His choice to go with me to Timbers and Tallboys.

The fact that he chose to sit with me at the basketball game, at lunch, every single moment that we spent together.

He chose to share those moments with me, even though I was being pulled in a thousand different directions all weekend.

And his suit. He’d chosen to go to the thrift store and buy a suit for a prom he hadn’t even planned on going to.

Why would all of that happen just for him to leave without a proper goodbye? The universe had set up too much. He’d chosen too much. So had I.

The universe owed us a proper goodbye.

I reached the motel in record time. I could see his car, parked by a set of rickety metal stairs.

He hadn’t left yet. I exhaled as I parked beside him.

I climbed out of my car and made it to the third step before realizing that I didn’t remember what his room number was.

I’d been there, but I couldn’t remember the room number.

I’d left his cell phone number on the kitchen counter, so I couldn’t just text him and ask.

I didn’t know what time he planned on leaving, but I had nothing else to do with my day.

Well, I was supposed to go to the school and help Vanessa with clean up, but this was more important.

I wasn’t going to regret not helping tear down centerpieces and putting away tables, but I knew that if I didn’t wait for Sam to come out of that room, I would regret it with every fiber of my being.

I would look back on it every day and know that I’d messed up and missed an opportunity.

Fate had intervened again, making it where he hadn’t left yet.

It was my turn to make the choice, and I chose to wait.

I chose Sam. I went back to my car and rested against the hood.

I stood there for fifteen minutes before Sam appeared, lugging his duffel bag.

I pushed off of my car and started toward him.

The moment his eyes met mine, he smiled one of those smiles that transformed his face. “What are you doing here?” he asked as he walked closer to me.

“I couldn’t let you leave without a real goodbye.” No, that wasn’t it. That wasn’t why I was there. “No. That… Fuck, I’m bad at this.” I always had been. It was why my dating history was nothing more than a long string of failed relationships.

“Bad at what?”

I could do this. “I don’t want this to be goodbye.” The words spilled out in a rush of syllables without enough breath to separate them.

“What?”

Clearly, it hadn’t been enough breath for him to understand what I was saying. I took a deep breath and forced myself to calm down. My heart was pounding against my rib cage. At least I knew that he wanted to keep in touch. This wasn’t a big risk. Knowing that didn’t make it easier.

“I don’t want this to be goodbye,” I repeated, deliberately slowing down my words.

Sam looked at me strangely, like he didn’t understand me. I had said it clearly, right? I’d enunciated. I hadn’t rushed my words out so they sounded like an incoherent babble. This time at least.

“I got work tomorrow,” he finally said, shaking his head.

I blinked. “I know that. I just… I don’t…

” Great. I was stammering and tripping over my words.

I could be calm and collected, delivering a speech to my former classmates, but I couldn’t get actual words out to him?

Actually, I hadn’t been that calm and collected before the speech either.

Only after I started. Which meant that maybe I’d be a bit calmer, a bit more composed, after I started this, too.

I could do this. I really could. “There’s something between us, something more than the physical.

” Surely, he felt it too. “I’m not alone in that, right? ”

“You’re not.”

I knew I wasn’t alone in feeling that spark between us. In feeling like this could be something real, distance be damned.

“Then I don’t want this to be goodbye. I want to figure it out. Keep in contact and… God I don’t even know what I’m saying.”

Sam laughed and dropped his duffel bag on the cracked concrete.

It landed with a soft thud. A moment later, his arms were around my waist, and he was pulling me close to him.

I’d watched enough sappy romantic movies to know what came next in the script, but I was still surprised when his lips met mine.

It was an answer. It was a nonverbal way of showing me he understood what I was saying, even if I didn’t. This wasn’t an ending.

That was what I got from the kiss, from the simplicity of it.

A goodbye kiss should taste bittersweet.

It should be full of yearning, of longing, of missed potential.

The kiss we had now was light; it was airy.

This kiss spoke of new beginnings, of promises, of a future that we could build together.

When he pulled away from the kiss, I knew that was what I wanted.

I didn’t know what the future would look like.

I didn’t know how we could build something when he lived hours away in King’s Bay, but I knew that I would figure it out.

That we would figure it out. If it was something we both wanted, and that kiss told me that it was, then we would make a plan.

“This isn’t goodbye,” Sam said quietly. “Meant what I said in my note. Don’t want to go another twenty years without seeing you.”

“Just without seeing me?” I questioned, raising my eyebrow at him.

Maybe I had read too much into the kiss.

He pulled his bottom lip between his teeth. “Can think of another few things I definitely don’t want to wait another twenty years to do.” He gave me another soft kiss. “Things like that.”

“So, you’ll come visit?” Sam faltered. I knew how he felt about Gomillion, but I hadn’t realized how much of a hurdle that would be in figuring out our potential future. “Or I could come visit you?”

Sam exhaled. “Both,” he said after a beat too long. “Ain’t going to make you do all the heavy lifting. We can both visit each other sometimes.”

I liked the sound of that and rewarded his answer with another kiss. Every single kiss felt like it was going to be the last one, and I didn’t want it to happen. But last kisses and goodbyes were inevitable, and he eventually stepped away from me.

“It’s time, isn’t it?”

Sam bent down to pick up his bag. “It’s that time. Already checked out, and I gotta hit the road. Need to get settled in before work tomorrow.”

“Will you text me when you get there? Just so I know you made it safely?”

The smile on Sam’s face doubled in size. “I will.” He paused. “Just gotta text me your number, yeah?”

I promised him I would. We had one last kiss at his car, and then I could do nothing but watch as he drove away.

An hour after Sam drove away, I was standing in the big gym at the high school.

A few of the student volunteers had shown up, and Vanessa was making good use of them.

It was a good thing, because I was useless.

I felt like I was walking through molasses.

Every step seemed to take three times as long, and my mind?

It was a hundred miles away. Maybe it was a couple hundred miles away.

I’d have to search the distance between Gomillion and King’s Bay to know for sure.

Vanessa kept giving me strange looks and finally cornered me when the student volunteers left to take the carts of tables and chairs back to the storage room. “Are you hungover?”

“No,” I answered. I hadn’t gotten drunk at the dance, so there was no chance of being hungover. No, this was something completely different, even if the symptoms were the same. Was it possible to be hungover from a good night, from a person?

If it was, then I was hungover from Sam.

“Then what is it?”

“I miss him.” The words tumbled from my mouth, and the weight of them almost knocked me backward. He’d been gone for an hour, and I already missed him in a way that was debilitating. I missed him in a way I’d never missed anyone before in my life.

Vanessa studied me with keen dark eyes. “He left this morning?”

“About an hour ago.”

I thought I might get some kind of sympathy, but instead, Vanessa started laughing. My jaw dropped, and it only made her laugh harder. “Justin, it’s been an hour! You’ve spent what? Two days with him?”

“And nights.”

Her laughter stopped. “Please tell me you didn’t go back to the motel with him after prom. Justin, the bed bugs.”

I rolled my eyes at her. “I told you, the motel is cleaner than it looks.”

“So, you went back to the motel with him?”

“Nope.”

Vanessa’s eyes widened. “You took him back to your place? Isn’t that a little serious for a weekend fling?” I didn’t have a chance to answer before she put all the pieces together. Her features softened, and her smile became almost dreamy. “It wasn’t just a weekend, was it?”

“It wasn’t,” I told her softly. “I think it was supposed to be, but there was something real between us. We both felt it.”

“Tell me everything.” She looked at the half-decorated walls, at the garbage cans that still needed to be emptied. “Well, tell me everything while we work.”

And so, I did. I told her our entire history, starting with tutoring him in the library.

The student volunteers came back, and I lowered my voice so they wouldn’t overhear.

I don’t think it worked, because a few of them kept following behind us like they were hanging on my every word and needed to know what happened next.

They weren’t alone in that. I wanted to know what happened next, too.

When I finished, Vanessa looked like someone had just told her some grand, epic love story. “You’re right,” she sighed. “Fate had a hand in that, but fate’s not going to be enough for it to work out.”

“I know that.”

Fate might have thrown us back together, but it was our choices that would keep us that way. And starting today, I was choosing Sam.