“So why does Paul want to work for her?”
“Are you kidding? Paul and Piper are made for each other. They both like things to be perfect. He likes things to be organized and then he likes to keep them that way. He had a gift for making all of Piper’s problems go away—and then keeping them away. She doesn’t know what she lost today.”
“Do you . . . do you think Paul would go back to her? If I got him his job back, I mean?”
“Oh, sweetie, that’s nice of you to think you could change Piper’s mind, but you’re way out of your league. I’ve worked for her for almost two years, and as far as I know, she’s never rehired anyone to her staff.”
My heart sank. So even if I completed Piper’s quest for the perfect piece of art, she might not care. It might not matter. It might already be too late.
“I have to try,” I said quietly, firmly.
Rebecca smiled kindly and patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, kid. You didn’t know; it’s not your fault.” She reached for the doorknob. “Change your clothes and come on back, okay?”
She breezed out the door, closing it behind her.
I kicked off my shoes and picked up the pair of jeans she’d left on the counter. Slipping them on, I looked down at the cuffs puddling around my feet. I hadn’t thought I was that much shorter than Sam.
I sighed. Maybe I wasn’t who I thought I was at all.
Chapter 24
Sam
Sam looked up as Rebecca returned to the living room, picking up her plate from the kitchen on her way. He glanced back to the bathroom door. Still closed.
“She’s fine,” Rebecca said over her shoulder, a smile on her face. She sat on the couch next to Jen and kicked off her sandals. “You can stop worrying.”
“I—” Sam’s chopsticks clattered together as he fumbled and dropped a bite of food.
Rebecca and Jen exchanged a look and a small laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Will asked.
“Boys,” Rebecca said, and Jen rolled her eyes in agreement.
A few minutes later, Sara emerged from the bathroom, the cuffs of her jeans rolled up to her ankles. She tugged at the hem of her shirt as she took her place on the couch again.
“Thanks,” she said to Sam in a low voice. She flicked a glance at Paul, who was in the kitchen scooping up another serving of chicken and rice. “What did I miss?”
Sam shook his head. “I told him what had happened with Piper—and how—and why—and we came to an understanding.”
“What kind of understanding?”
“He won’t bring it up if you don’t.”
Sara zipped her finger and thumb across her lips. “Consider it not brought up, then.”
Sam reached for her plate of food. “Are you still hungry? I can warm this up for you if you want.”
She waved it off. “No, thanks.”
“So, Jen,” Will said, scraping together the last bite of curry on his plate. “What’s your story?”
“Will!” Rebecca said, glaring at him.
“What?” He blinked in innocent surprise. “A girl as pretty as Jen has got to have an interesting story.” He grinned. “What can I say? I’m interested.”
Rebecca nudged Jen with her elbow. “Feel free to ignore him.”
Jen adjusted her glasses. “I’m afraid my story isn’t that interesting. Becca and I went to school together back in Ohio. She convinced me to move here and even helped me find a place to stay. Paul and Sam helped me move in last month.”
“No wonder we haven’t met yet,” Will said. “Though I’m a little surprised Paul didn’t tell me he had a beautiful new neighbor. I thought we were better friends,” he called over his shoulder to Paul, who rolled his eyes.
Jen blushed and cleared her throat. “Becca’s told me a little about Piper. She sounds like a terrible person.”
At the sound of Piper’s name, Paul dropped the serving spoon with a clatter. Everyone turned to look at him, but he reserved his glare for Sara.
“It wasn’t me,” she whispered to Sam. “I didn’t bring it up. You heard me not bring it up.”
Sam cleared his throat, drawing everyone’s attention away from Paul. And Sara. “Jen, did you know Will is a huge soccer fan?”
She sat up a little straighter. “Really?”
“Never miss a match,” Will boasted.
Rebecca groaned. “Count me out of this conversation.” She took her plate into the kitchen and started helping Paul put away the leftovers.
Will seized the opening and took her place on the couch. “A girl who likes green curry and soccer? Where have you been my whole life?”
Jen laughed and looked down. But she didn’t move away when Will stretched his arm across the back of the couch and leaned closer.
Sam tapped Sara’s leg and gestured for her to follow him. Edging away from Will and Jen, and giving Paul and Rebecca an equally wide berth, they ended up by the still-open window.
The sun had mostly set and the sky was cooling into lavender and blue. The air was warm and comfortable.
Sara leaned toward the window, a soft breeze stirring her hair.
“Would you like to go outside?” he asked, nodding to the fire-escape landing that was on the other side of the window.
“Can we?”
In answer, he opened the window a little wider and stepped out.
She grinned and climbed out after him. She gripped the rail and turned her face to the sky. The sound of cars and people and music blended together and rose up to meet them, surrounding them with an almost tangible energy.
He leaned back against the slanted fire-escape ladder and watched her watch the city.
“I love it here,” she said with a sigh.
“I can tell.”
“You are so lucky to be able to live here.”
“Most days, it doesn’t feel like luck.”
She tilted her head at him, jutting out her hip. “What about today?”
He liked how she looked, standing there in her dark red T-shirt and borrowed jeans. She looked like she was on the prow of a ship, ready to sail away, ready to face anything. She wore the same look on her face as she had when he’d first seen her outside the bookstore—had it only been that morning? it felt like a lifetime ago—but now he knew what it meant.
Sara was ready for an adventure.
“Today?” he said, watching her face. “Today feels like luck.”
Her smile lit up her eyes, and he felt a matching spark of light come to life inside of him.
“You know,” she said, turning around and leaning her elbows against the railing, “you still owe me a story.”
“I do?”
“The long-promised-but-never-delivered story of Vanessa and the pirate map. You said you’d tell it to me over dinner, remember?”
Sam leaned his head back. “Ah, yes, I remember. But”—he shrugged—“dinner is over. Guess you missed your chance.”
“That’s not fair!” she protested with a laugh.
He laughed with her, and the spark of light grew a little warmer. “Hang on, I’ll tell it. We made a deal, and I always keep my word.”
She settled back, attentive and eager. “So, you said Vanessa had a pirate map . . .” she prompted.
“Actually, Vanessa didn’t have the pirate map. But she did have something to trade.” Sam sat on a step of the ladder, hooking his heels over the edge of the step below him. “I’d had my eye on this item for a long time, but Vanessa had never been willing to let it go. Until now.”
“What was it?”
“A ticket stub from when the Beatles played at City Park Stadium in New Orleans in 1964.”
Her eyes opened wide. “Wow.”
“I know. After my friend told me Vanessa was ready to trade, I headed to her studio as fast as I could. I had a necklace I knew she wanted, so we made a deal. I left, ticket in hand. From there, I headed straight to the law offices of Durham and Little, where Mr. Little himself traded me his pirate map in exc
hange for the Beatles ticket.”
“You got a pirate map from a lawyer?” Sara threw back her head and laughed, her happiness moving along the smooth column of her throat.
“Ironic, I know.”
“Where did he get the map?”
“I didn’t ask. Besides, you know you can’t trust lawyers. Some people say they’re almost as bad as pirates.”
Sara laughed again, a bright, happy sound; Sam had to look away.
“So Vanessa traded away a priceless piece of Beatlemania for a necklace? That doesn’t seem like a fair trade.”
“It may not seem fair to you, but it doesn’t have to. It only has to be fair to the person doing the trading. It’s about what you’re willing to give up in order to get what you want. For Vanessa, the necklace was more important to her than some old piece of paper with the Beatles’ name printed on it.” Sam shrugged and tucked his hands into his pockets. “And sometimes it’s about sacrifice. Giving up more so that the other person can get what they need. Vanessa knew I needed that ticket in order to get the map. And I needed the map to finish the job. She traded with me, in part, to help me.”
Sara swallowed hard and the laugh lines along her mouth and throat disappeared. She turned away from Sam and looked back up at the night sky.
He watched a ripple of tension move through her body, down her neck, through her shoulders, past her hips and legs. Clearly something he’d said had struck a nerve. He wondered if he should ask her what was wrong; he wondered what she would say if he did.
Chapter 25
Sara
Sacrifice. Sam’s words echoed in my head. Giving up more so that the other person can get what they need.
I had been trying hard not to think of that night when my mom left, but after my conversation with my dad, I couldn’t seem to stop thinking about it. Now another memory surfaced—my mom’s voice saying, “I feel like I’m the only one giving anything in this relationship. Why couldn’t you at least meet me halfway?”
What had my mom needed that my dad hadn’t been able to give? Was that why she had left? Was that why he’d let her go? If they’d been able to meet halfway, would they still be together?
I shuddered again, gathering up those dark thoughts and shoving them away.
“Sara?” Sam’s voice was close to my ear, and I turned quickly to see him standing next to me at the railing. I hadn’t heard him move. But then, he was good at that.
“That’s an awesome story,” I said. “Thanks.”
Concern furrowed his forehead as his eyes searched mine, as though he could trace the path of pain that wound throughout me. His lips parted, a question ready to come to life on his breath. I knew what he was going to ask, and I didn’t want to go there. Not right now.
“Vanessa sounds like a cool lady.” I shifted away from Sam. A shiver took me, but I chalked it up to the night air and nothing else. I didn’t want it to be anything else.
He tapped his fingers on the rail between us. “She is. You’d like her. I think you guys would have a lot in common.”
“Because my life is full of zombies and dark magic, right?” I offered up a lopsided smile, but he didn’t take the bait.
“Because you’ve both left behind something you love.”
I gasped, feeling like I was teetering on a ledge, ready to fall.
Sam pretended not to notice, though I knew he had. He noticed everything. “Vanessa may live in New York—she may even like living in SoHo—but her heart is still in New Orleans. Always will be.” He looked down at his hands, touching his thumbnails together. “She left her home, and she’s been looking for a way back ever since.”
The gasp I had swallowed turned to ice in my stomach. “Why doesn’t she just move back, then? Why does she stay here?”
Sam looked at me, his brown eyes almost black in the shadows. “Because you can never go back. You can only go forward.” He shrugged. “Maybe her path will loop her back to where she started, but for now, she’s here. And, for what it’s worth, I think she’s happy here.”
“Even without her heart?”
“Happiness can be close by, even if your heart is far away.”
I felt like our conversation was suddenly as precarious as the landing beneath my feet. It looked solid enough, but there were dangerous gaps between the rails, places where uncertain feet or unspoken words could slide through.
“I don’t know if I can believe that,” I said quietly.
“Then don’t,” Sam said with an equally quiet shrug. “You don’t have to believe in happiness for it to exist.”
I clasped my hands together and let them dangle over the edge of the railing. When my mom had left, she had taken a part of my heart with her, and the hole she had left behind had only grown wider and deeper over the years. I kept trying to fill it with happiness, but it never seemed to be enough.
“I believe that happiness is always there,” Sam continued, looking up and away at the faint stars struggling to peek through the night. “That’s why we have to keep looking for it. Because we can’t always see it.”
“And is that why we have to find it? Because it doesn’t always find us?”
He turned to me, the light reflecting like stars in his eyes. “Sometimes it does, though. Even when we aren’t looking for it.”
Another shiver ran through me, but this time it was a warm wave that traveled from the top of my head all the way down to the tips of my fingers and my toes. I tried to take a breath, but I couldn’t seem to convince my lungs to work, and what little air I managed to inhale smelled like Sam.
I suddenly remembered holding his hand in the elevator to Piper’s place, the brush of his thumb against my cheek, the pressure of his fingers on my leg. My skin tingled everywhere he had touched me today, a sharp prickling like my body was waking up from numbness.
“Maybe Vanessa could make us a voodoo doll of Piper that we could poke with pins until she gave Paul his job back.” I said it as a joke, hoping to bring the conversation back to safer ground and, I’ll admit, to make Sam smile. It worked: his lips pulled upward and a quick chuckle escaped. I felt like I could breathe again. Like I had been released.
He slouched against the railing, his attention shifting away from me, diffusing in intensity but not entirely disappearing. “You want to resort to black magic to complete your quest? That doesn’t seem very noble.”
“Nobility is overrated. Piper made this personal. I’m out to win.”
“Winning is overrated,” Sam countered.
“Said by the boy who wins all the time.” I rolled my eyes good-naturedly. I was glad to be back on familiar ground, joking and teasing with Sam. His earlier intensity and seriousness made me feel unsettled; I didn’t know what to do with my emotions. “Okay, so maybe the voodoo doll isn’t the way to go,” I said, feeling my way through a new idea. “But what if we’ve been looking at Piper’s request all wrong?”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve been looking for something we could frame and hang on a wall. Art or sheet music, right? And we’ve been looking for something local—or at least, we’ve been talking to people you know, like Daniel and Aces—but what if what will make Piper happy isn’t artwork at all? What if it’s something else? And she never said it had to be from New York.”
“Are you saying you want to go to Jersey?” he asked, his humor laced with disbelief.
I waved my hands in front of me, the idea continuing to crystallize in my mind. “No, no, I’m wondering if you think Vanessa would have one of those elaborate masks people wear during Mardi Gras.”
“You’ve been to Mardi Gras?” Sam asked with raised eyebrows.
“No, but I watch TV.”
He nodded, granting me the point, and then cocked his head in thought for a moment. “It’s not a bad idea.”
“Are you kidding? It’s a great idea!” I grinned, elated. I pushed away from the railing and gestured as the words spilled out of me. “Piper said she wanted something bold
and unexpected, right? Well, there’s no way she’ll be expecting this. If it had some of those fancy sparkling crystals on it, and, oh, maybe we could find one with hot-pink feathers, and—” I stopped at the look on Sam’s face. “What? What is that look for?”
He held my eyes with his and didn’t let go. The lines in his face softened as his earlier smile returned, but this time with an unexpected shyness. “I was just thinking that I’ve never met anyone like you before.”
“Oh.” I felt heat rise in my cheeks, and I was grateful for the cool night shadows.
“You’re wrong about one thing, though,” he went on.
“I am?”
“I don’t always win.”
I twisted my lips down. “I seem to recall you saying that you can get whatever you want, so forgive me if I don’t believe that.”
Sam shook his head, suddenly serious. “I said I can find anything I need. That’s a long way from getting whatever you want.”
I leaned against the metal ladder and looked at Sam out of the corner of my eye. With the glow of lights from the apartments around us and the streetlights below us, Sam’s brown hair seemed closer to gold, but his eyes remained that warm, chocolate brown. The play of light and shadow on his face made him look foreign and familiar at the same time.
My heart picked up a step, and I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. The prickles returned to my fingers, my cheek, my leg. “So . . . what is it that you want?”
For a moment, his face was open and unguarded. I saw a thousand answers pass through his eyes before he managed to control his expression. He took a step away from me.
A bang on the window shattered my thoughts and made me jump.
“Hey,” Will called out, knocking on the window again. “If you two lovebirds are done out there, Paul says to come back in.”
I looked at Sam, but he was back to being all business. The vulnerability I’d seen and the closeness we’d shared was locked away. His fingers twitched on the railing, unsettled and unable to stay still. “We should go in,” he said, his tone and his words clipped. “I’ll call Vanessa about your mask idea. See if she has anything that we can use.”