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

May - One Week Until the Reunion

There was only a week left until my high school reunion.

For most people, that would mean a week of packing and confirming that their travel arrangements were in place.

It would mean a week of texting with their high school friends and trying to make plans, or maybe they’d spend the week trying to figure out how to make their lives sound more impressive than they really were.

For me, it was a week of trying not to pull my hair out.

It meant a week of stress and sleepless nights.

That was the life of a former class president, I guess.

Luckily, I still lived in Gomillion. I didn’t have to worry about finding a place to stay.

I didn’t have to worry that the only good hotel in town would be booked up or my flight would be delayed, and I’d miss the opening reception.

Instead, I had to worry about issues with the food and florists.

I had to worry about the fact that the custom balloons we’d ordered from the party supply store a town over hadn’t come in yet and might not make it in time for Saturday night’s prom.

I had to worry about vegan food options for the receptions and prom and special drink menus at Timbers and Tallboys, the local pub.

I had to worry about last minute RSVPs from people who didn’t think the deadline applied to them and just hoping we had enough food to feed everyone.

In other words, I had to focus all of my energy on planning the event and a to do list that had clearly descended from the mythological Hydra.

Every time I crossed something off of it, two more tasks popped up.

I didn’t think I’d get everything done, even with the help of my trusty co-conspirator, Vanessa Smythe Newton.

She was the current assistant principal of Gomillion High School and my man on the inside.

Unfortunately, it meant that she wasn’t able to help out during the school day.

I wouldn’t have been able to either if I hadn’t taken the week off from my day job at City Hall.

Even while on vacation, my phone was blowing up with texts and emails.

Rachel Mendoza, the Gomillion City Planner and my immediate boss, was the kind of woman who was always in charge of everything.

She was independent and took no shit from anyone.

She was also, apparently, a lot more dependent on me than I thought.

Or maybe my organization system was just a pain in the ass for her.

Either way, I was this close to blocking her number for the week.

Okay, I wasn’t. I replied to every text message and email.

I might have been a workaholic. There was a good chance that three ex-boyfriends and two ex-girlfriends were entirely correct.

They’d all thought I made myself too available to my boss and not available enough for them.

It was just one of the many reasons most of my partners broke up with me.

When my phone chimed for the seventeenth time that day, I was tempted to throw it out of my car window. Instead, I stole a glance at the notification on my screen. It was from Vanessa, and it contained only three characters: 911.

Fuck.

I hit the call button on my steering wheel. “What’s the emergency?” I asked as I braced myself for another disaster.

“Hello to you too,” Vanessa greeted with a laugh. I hated that she could laugh after sending a 911 text.

“Hi. What’s the emergency?”

“Remember how I said I could meet up with Mose tonight to confirm details for the after party?” I didn’t like where this was going.

After a few moments of silence, she continued.

“Josiah was supposed to be going to the school board meeting tonight, and he just told me he can’t make it. So, guess who gets to go instead?”

I groaned. “Seriously, V?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know. I’ll handle it. Text Mose and let him know I’ll be there?”

“Can do.”

At least that was one thing I didn’t have to do, even if the meeting itself was another item on the ever-growing list. Vanessa and I talked for a few more minutes, ironing out final details, before we hung up.

I pulled my black leather planner—my lifeline—out of my glove compartment and opened to that day’s list of tasks.

I sighed as I wrote down the time I was now supposed to meet with Mose at Timbers and Tallboys.

At least I would have a scheduled time to eat something instead of slurping down a bowl of ramen noodles hours past my normal dinner time.

The rest of the day was spent doing things for the event.

I talked to the florist and picked out new flowers to replace the ones we’d originally ordered that weren’t going to be delivered thanks to some pest problem at their supplier’s.

I met with the DJ and went over the final playlist for the prom.

I stopped by the office supply store for name tags, markers, pens, and other necessary supplies.

By the time I pulled into Timbers and Tallboys hours later, I was exhausted.

I really wish Vanessa didn’t have that school board meeting.

Mose greeted me at the door with a beer.

I followed the great bear of a man to the bar and requested an order of wings.

My stomach was grumbling, and I needed an energy boost. If I didn’t get something in me soon, I was going to get hangry.

No one wanted that, least of all me. I still had too many things to do that night when I got home, and it would be a pain to do it if I was getting frustrated at every little thing.

The meeting with Mose was fast.

He confirmed that he’d have enough staff to handle the influx of alumni that would be there. I confirmed the current number of attendees. “But plan for more. I’m still getting RSVPs.”

Mose raised a questioning eyebrow at me. “You didn’t give them a deadline?”

“I did,” I grumbled. “Apparently, my former classmates either ignored it or decided it didn’t apply to them.” And what was I going to do about it? Tell them that they weren’t allowed to come because they’d missed the official deadline?

“How many more should I plan for?”

I wanted to tell him that it was his bar, and he and his co-owner could figure that out themselves.

I wanted to scream into the plate of chicken wings the bartender had just placed in front of me.

Instead, I picked up a flat piece and ate it.

Just the one bite calmed the hangry beast growling inside me.

I took a deep breath and ate two more wings before I was calm enough to answer him.

“I’d say plan for twenty more? Maybe twenty-five.

That can cover additional plus ones too. ”

Mose nodded. We talked through a few more details while I finished my plate of wings.

It wasn’t enough to count as dinner, but it was enough to power me through the meeting.

When we finished, I excused myself before we could start the tedium of small talk.

I had a long night—a long week —ahead of me, and I couldn’t waste time chatting with someone I barely knew just because it was the polite thing to do.

I made it home shortly before nine, and even after the wings, my stomach was growling.

I fed my cat, Biscuits, and made myself a bowl of chicken ramen noodles.

It was hardly the best meal I’d ever eaten, but it did what it needed to do.

More importantly, it was quick. I’d had more than one ramen noodle meal in my life.

It was the gourmet meal of choice for the modern workaholic, after all.

At least it was for this modern workaholic.

Once I had my ramen noodles in a bowl, I sat down at my small kitchen table and opened my laptop.

There were two new (late) RSVPs in my inbox.

I pulled up my spreadsheet and updated it with their information.

At least the list was long. It meant that the first twentieth school reunion for Gomillion High School would be successful.

Mark that as a check in the W column.

Neither of the two names were impressive to me.

One of them was a girl I think I had a math class with.

I hadn’t really interacted with her much.

The other name didn’t spark a single memory.

Gomillion might have been small, but that didn’t mean that I remembered every single person I’d graduated with.

Especially not the ones who left town after graduation.

Once the two names were in place, I sorted the list alphabetically.

I had to do it every single time I added a new person, because it drove me crazy when I couldn’t scroll the list of names easily.

Curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to look up a few old friends.

I couldn’t remember if they’d RSVPed. I caught the name of one of the people I was looking for, Peter Lorde.

We’d played Dungeons and Dragons together in high school.

I began to scroll checking for the other guy in my year that had been in our game.

I could have just called Gabe, but this way didn’t take extra time or risk being roped into conversation I was too busy for.

Then a name caught my eye.

Samuel Masters.

A rush of memories hit me like a tidal wave.

I remembered the cracked leather jacket he always wore and the way his dark hair fell into his pale gray eyes.

I remembered his chipped black nail polish and the way he’d scared me when he’d first sat down across from me in the library, a smirk on his full lips.

His voice had been deep, even then, and he had a distinctive southern drawl, stronger than most of our peers.

I used to think he put it on to make himself seem more bad ass or something, and then I got to know him.

Or well, I got to know him as well as anyone outside of his group of hooligan friends ever did.

I knew the way his brow furrowed when he focused on a complicated math problem, and I knew the way his lips snarled up in frustration when he made a simple mistake.

I knew how hard he’d worked to walk across the stage, even though he’d been at the bottom of our class.

More than anything, I remembered the way his face lit up when he was handed his diploma. I could see it from my seat in the audience. Back then, I didn’t recognize what I felt when I saw that smile. There were things I hadn’t learned about myself yet. In retrospect, it was pretty obvious.

I’d had a huge crush on Sam Masters in high school.

I wondered what he was doing now, how he was doing now.

I shouldn’t. I knew that I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t stop myself from typing his name in the search bar of my favorite social media site.

There were at least a hundred different profiles under the name Sam Masters, but only one was him.

I recognized the smirk in the picture immediately, even though that was the only familiar thing about him in his profile picture.

He was dressed in a light blue button down, and his black hair didn’t fall into his eyes. He looked so professional.

I clicked the profile and saw that he was a therapist now, still in South Carolina. I clicked on the pictures, and my jaw dropped.

The professional profile picture was not the full story.

There were pictures of him in faded jeans and tee shirts.

There was a picture of him laughing as he polished a black motorcycle.

There were a few pictures of him sitting on the beach, cigarette perched between his lips.

There were pictures of him at concerts that looked loud, a bottle of beer in his hand.

There was a picture of him shirtless, tagged by some guy named Axel Whitlock.

My mouth watered as I looked at the art tattooed over his torso.

One tattoo, a black bird taking flight over his right collarbone, was still red and angry around the edges. It must have been new.

He’d grown up hot.

I wondered who Axel Whitlock was to him, especially as I scrolled further through the pictures.

There were so many pictures of him with this Axel guy.

There were pictures of them in a garage, working on motorcycles.

There were pictures of them sitting at a dive bar that made Timbers and Tallboys look like a fine dining establishment.

There were a lot of pictures of him shirtless, each tagged by Axel and featuring a new piece of art on his skin.

I forced myself away from his pictures and looked through his feed. It was a mixed bag of therapy memes, resource hot lines, and articles about car and motorcycle repair. There was very little about his personality.

I looked at his About Me section and discovered that he was divorced.

I wondered if any of the pictures I’d seen from the past few years of his life showed his ex.

This time, I was able to resist temptation.

I didn’t need to cyberstalk the guy I used to tutor to that degree.

Besides, he didn’t have any partners listed now.

It did, however, say that he was interested in men.

Suddenly, all of the hard work I was putting into throwing the perfect event seemed that much more worth it.