Page 22 of Resilience

She’d felt like she loved him earlier in the day, but that feeling had definitely waned.

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~oOo~

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She went back up to find Sam, but Chris was at the grill. Chris wasn’t very good at ASL, but she managed to get him to understand that she was looking for Sam, and he gave her the regular body language for he didn’t know: a big shrug with his hands lifted.

This birthday party could bite one. Seriously. This was worse than last year. Yes, last year’s party had been broken up by douchebags with badges, and a couple of people had had WAY too much to drink, but at least it had been fun until then.

Maybe it was time to stop with the joint parties and just go off and do something jointly. Of course, whoever they were dating next year would probably have a snit if Athena and Sam went off alone somewhere. Sigh.

There were fewer than thirty people here, which was tiny for a Bulls party (which this kind of was), and they had a whole lakefront property to roam, but Athena still had to weave around a bunch of drunk dorks who had no idea where Sam was—or no idea how to understand her question.

She finally found him all alone behind the cabin, sitting on the woodpile. He had a beer in his hand and his elbows on his knees, looking like Sad Keanu. He heard her approach and looked up, but he didn’t smile. In fact, she almost got the sense that he wasn’t glad to see her. But that never happened, so she figured she was merely picking up his overall gloom.

As she was wearing her brand-new, super-cute two-piece, she wasn’t keen on climbing up to sit beside him on a bunch of splintery chopped logs, so she stood in front of him and hooked her hands over his hairy knees. Sam had very little hair on his chest—none on his chest, actually, but some dark fuzz on his belly—but his legs were like Sasquatch, and his forearms were pretty hairy, too.

He met her eyes. Wow, he really was sad about Lark. Fuck her for hurting him like this. And today of all days!

“Was it because of me?” she asked. She shouldn’t have, and she knew that. She was also pretty sure about the answer, though she didn’t want it to be true. If it was true, maybe someday Sam would finally give a girl what they always seemed to want: Athena out of his life.

As a reply, Sam turned his head toward the lake and shrugged.

God, she was tired of all the SHRUGGING. She slapped his calf, and he turned back to her. As she started to ask him to tell her what was going on in his head, he grabbed her left wrist with his left hand and turned it so the inside of her arm was up, and so was his.

At about the same place on her forearm and his was the same tattoo. They’d gotten them for their eighteenth birthday: the quote “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us,” in the Hobbiton font.

It was a quote from The Fellowship of the Ring, spoken by Gandalf. At the time they’d gotten the ink together, the quote itself hadn’t been particularly important to them, but the source had been. LOTR had been their first fandom together, and they’d started to call each other Samwise and Frodo after the first time they’d seen the movies. They’d watched the films together first and then, when they were a bit older, they’d read the books—and then all the other books. When they’d decided to get ink together to commemorate their friendship, they’d instantly agreed to get a quote from the trilogy, and then they’d gone looking for a good one—but not the quote everybody with an LOTR tattoo got. Besides, neither of them were really wanderers. Especially not Athena, who preferred her bubble of family and school.

They’d picked a good one, one that resonated more as they grew older. But Athena wasn’t sure why Sam was so fascinated by their four-year-old ink now. His thumb brushed back and forth over her arm, as if he could feel the ink there and was trying to understand it.

She ducked so she could catch his eye and signed with her right hand, “Talk to me, Samwise.”

His chest and shoulders swelled as he sucked in a deep breath. When he let it out, she felt the breeze of it over her face. It smelled of beer. He looked past her, over her shoulder—and then, abruptly, he dropped her arm.

His gaze shifted to focus on her. Without signing, he mouthed the words, “We have an audience.”

Athena looked back and saw Hunter. He stood at the corner of the cabin, his arms crossed over his bare chest. Once he was sure he had her attention, he turned sharply around, sidestepped when that dramatic motion threatened his balance, and stalked unsteadily off.

Jesus. Everybody was such a fucking diva today.

Hunter could wait. He’d been a pill for hours now, and he was too drunk to have a reasonable discussion with anyway. Besides, Sam was the one who had reason to be in a bad mood.

“I don’t care. I’m worried about you. Talk to me.”

But Sam shook his head. “He’s obviously pissed that you’re back here with me. If you’re not careful, you’ll be in the same boat I am. Go deal with him. I’m fine.”

“If Hunter can’t deal with me wanting to take care of you when you’re sad, he can fuck off.”

Sam stared at her for so long Athena had time to wonder if he was drunker than she’d thought and had fallen into a fugue state of some kind. Eventually, he signed, “I don’t need you to watch over me. I just want to be alone.”

She was really worried now. He was acting very unlike himself, and she didn’t want to leave him alone to maybe do something stupid. “No—” she started, but stopped when he grabbed her hands and pressed them together between his own.

He used his mouth to tell her, “Go. I don’t want you around.”

Athena snatched her hands from his. He’d never said anything like that to her before.

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