Page 93 of The Love You Fight For
“Fuck that. I’m just as shit at this game as I’ve ever been. You’re distracted.”
I feel him staring at me, so I press my hands on the pool table andmeet his eyes.
“Have you heard from Sam?” I ask, and he shakes his head.
“She go ghost on you?”
I furrow my brow as I take his pool cue, then stick his and mine back on the wall with the rest of them.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly, trying like hell to figure out if I’m being rational or delusional. “We don’t usually talk when she’s in D.C., but before she left this last time, we agreed to stay in contact.”
I pick my beer up off the bar table beside me and take a drink. Macon does the same with his soda.
“She’s not kept in contact, then?” he asks finally, and I sigh.
“She hasn’t responded to a single text. They’ve all been read, though.”
Macon whistles.
“Leaving the read receipts on but not responding? Harsh.”
I chuckle and nod. It’s definitely harsh. And on brand for her.
She’s not been completely absent, though. Not out of the media, anyway. I’ve taken to internet searching her dad every night, and she’s always in photos. Rallies in other states. Dinners at fancy restaurants. She’s always dressed to the nines with her mask perfectly in place, and she’s never far from Ashton fucking Cartwright. Last night, she was leaving a restaurant with him and had that fucking string of diamonds around her neck.
I’m not jealous, though. There’s something else going on, and I can’t figure it out.
“I’m worried about her,” I say after a moment. “She’s so different when she comes back from D.C. I think working with her father is fucking her up. She shows up, and she’s like...drained. Miserable. She’s here just long enough to regain some life, and then she leaves again.”
I meet his eyes and find his brow is furrowed with concern, which only adds to my worry.
Sam and Macon have a complicated past. In middle school, they were close. In high school, they got closer, but then they fucked up their relationship with sex and drugs. For a while, it seemed like Macon was the only person Sam really talked to. She’d hang outwith us, but she only interacted with him. She only cared about him. Only trusted him.
Then Macon chose Lennon, and it caused a huge rift between Sam and him.
I still don’t totally understand how Lennon and Sam became friends—especially when Sam used to hate Lennon for stealing all of Macon’s attention—but now, years later, Sam and Lennon are best friends, and Sam and Macon are only acquaintances.
I know it hurt Sam deeply when Macon started focusing on Lennon. I remember seeing her spiral. Macon had always been a disaster, but she cared about him. I think she loved him in her own way. In the end, he couldn’t love her the way she wanted, and he let her go.
The look on his face now, though. It tells me he still cares about her in some way, and he knows something worth being concerned about.
“What do you know?” I ask, and Macon flicks his eyes away before taking another drink of his soda.
I wait.
He swallows. He reaches into his fucking pack of licorice and tosses a stick in his mouth. He chews. Then he looks at me.
“You know how nasty Thom Harper is,” Macon says slowly, and I nod.
I know better than most.
“Well, he’s a shitty father, and he’s allowed some things to happen to his daughter that would have gotten a less-connected man thrown in prison. And Sam is...”
He looks away, focusing on something on the floor behind me with his brows scrunched together.
“Sam doesn’t just forgive and forget,” he says finally.
I know this about her. My warrior princess. A vengeful fucking goddess. A reincarnation of Nemesis herself.
