Page 113 of The Spider & the Storm

“Oh, right. Yeah, sure. Okay. Well, listen, once Samantha—”

“Sarah,” she corrected with a giggle.

“Right, sorry. Sarah.” Luke cleared his throat, and I tried to bite back a smile. “Once Sarah here goes home, we can talk, all right? If you want, I mean.”

“Sure,” I said, nodding.

Then, there was the shuffling of feet against the hallway carpet, and I quickly made my escape. I hurried to my room, moving even faster past my parents' vaulted bedroom, and shut my door. Then, I grabbed my sketchbook and marker and turned on my music, just in time to block out the sound of Sarah screaming in the shower.

***

Luke let himself into my room a little over an hour later, and this time, thank God, he was dressed.

“Hey,” he said, waltzing in like he owned the place.

I glanced up from the drawing I’d been working on to watch as he crossed his arms and flopped onto my bed, stomach down.

“Hey.”

“Samantha left.”

“Her name was Sarah,” I corrected, looking back down to continue my scribbling.

“Shit, why can’t I remember that?”

I knew why. The guy had been hooking up with a new girl every week for the past couple of years, or so it seemed. Sooner or later, naturally, they’d started to blur together. Names and the experiences tied to them had to eventually become meaningless.

It was sad, and no matter how much time had passed since Melanie had left, I couldn’t help but think,It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

For either of us.

“But anyway”—the back of his hand slapped my leg—“what happened with that chick you were seeing?”

“I told you,” I replied, not bothering to look up now as my marker moved across the paper in fluid strokes. “She broke it off.”

“Yeah, I got it, but why?”

I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “She said I was a nice guy, but it wasn’t working out.”

Through the corner of my eye, I watched Luke’s mouth press firmly into a terse line as his eyes dropped to the plaid blanket I'd been using for nearly a decade. I wondered if his thoughts mirrored mine—that it was never meant to be this way. That we weren’t supposed to be perpetual bachelors in our mid-slash-late-twenties without any hope of that changing anytime soon.

“Her loss,” he finally grumbled after a handful of seconds passed.

“I think …” The felt tip stopped moving against the paper as I stared at the rainy scene I’d drawn. The car driving away on a wet street, the expanse of road ahead leading nowhere. “I think maybe I’m the problem.”

Luke’s gaze swung to mine. “What? Why the hell would you think that?”

“Come on, man. I know I come on strong, and I know I’m … you know—”

“Weird as fuck?”

My eyes answered first with a slow blink. “Thank you for that. Yeah, I mean, maybe I’m just … a lot to handle or something. I don’t know. I'm not exactly normal. None of this shit is.”

“None of what shit?”

I lifted my hand to gesture at the ceiling. At the house. At the life we kept locked inside. “This!” I exclaimed in a huff of exasperation, already on the edge of spiraling.

He lifted a brow. “You mean, the house?”

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