Laura Caldwell - Red Blooded Murder

Sam waved hi to his friend, then turned back to me. I could see some kind of struggle in his eyes, but whether it was because he wished he were on that stage or he wished he didn’t have to answer my question, I didn’t know. I used to be able to read him so well.

“I’ve cheated.” He said it simply, almost resignedly, as if it were something he’d wrestled and come to terms with.

I felt a well of disappointment. Sam was a cheater. At that moment, I wanted to look at anything but him. I picked up my BlackBerry from the table and scrolled through the texts and e-mails. There was a time when my in-boxes would have been choked with cries for help, when someone always needed me or my opinion. Now they were fairly empty, save a text from my brother, Charlie, saying he might stop by the bar to say hello.

I could feel Sam watching me, gauging my reaction to his statement.

I put the phone back on the table and thought of his ex-girlfriend Alyssa, a woman who was beautiful and reed-thin. She and Sam had dated at the end of high school and into college. She was an angelic blonde who worked in geriatric research, making the world better for the elderly. In short, she made me feel like a shallow devil-the brassy, redheaded entertainment lawyer.

I didn’t necessarily like Alyssa, but I felt pain for her now because she must have been the one Sam was talking about.

Finally, I looked at him. “You cheated on Alyssa?”

Sam shook his head. “Carrie.”

“Carrie, your first girlfriend ever?”

“Yeah.” He lifted his Blue Moon beer from the table and poked at the orange slice with his finger.

“Sam, you were like a freshman in high school.”

I thought of the monumentally idiotic things I’d done during high school. Once, when my mother was out of town and trusted me enough to babysit my brother, Charlie, I forced him to be the bartender for the monster bash I threw. He was twelve at the time. Charlie ended up drinking beer as he poured it from the keg and later threw up violently over our balcony and into the alley behind our apartment, one of the most scary and heartbreaking things I’d ever witnessed. Doing stupid things made you smarter, I figured. I’d certainly never treated my brother like that again. If anything, I had cherished and babied him after that. Oddly, he remembered the incident fondly.

“Does that really count?” I asked Sam.

“Hell, yeah. She was my first love.” He grimaced, as if what he’d done still tortured him. And that made my heart fill with love, like a balloon given a shot of air from an inflator.

“You were so young,” I pointed out. “You didn’t know what you were doing.”

“Yeah, I did.” He looked straight into my eyes. “You want to know why I did it?”

I nodded, almost afraid to say anything. This was one of the things I liked about our breakup-despite the drama and the uncertainty, we were completely honest with each other now. Sure, we were honest before all this, too, but now it was different. Now, it was microscopic, as if we were both laying all our cards on the table and saying, If we’re going to do this, here’s the truth. The real, deep-down, not-so-tidy, sometimes-it-will-make-you-flinch truth.

“You know what my dad is like?” Sam asked.

“A drunken, selfish bastard.” I had never met Sam’s dad. Neither he nor his sisters had any consistent contact with him, but I’d heard the stories.

R.T. and his band began playing. Their first number was a cover of a song by The Killers called, appropriately enough, “All These Things That I’ve Done.” The lights in the bar dimmed. The stage lights, orange and bold, grew stronger, while the music grew louder until it seemed the stage pulsed like a heart.

Sam pulled his chair closer so I could hear him. “This was a few years before my mom finally got rid of him,” he said. “Then I kind of wanted to be like him. I thought the way he acted-tough and swaggering and hard-partying-was how guys were supposed to be. So I acted like that, you know? My mom was mortified, and she tried to stop me, but I didn’t care. I just…” His words died away for a second.

“You wanted him to love you.” I watched his face for a reaction, hoping he wouldn’t close down the conversation because it was too uncomfortable, something that might have happened before our breakup.

Sam blinked slowly a few times, his brown lashes hitting his cheeks, already tan from playing rugby outside. “Yeah. Exactly. I could tell he wasn’t going to be around for long, and even though I knew he was a jerk, I was terrified of having to take care of my sisters and my mom, even though no one ever said I had to. So I drank a lot and smoked pot and just kind of pretended I was like him. And then one day…man, I can remember it exactly…I came home from school early because I wasn’t feeling good or something. And he had this girl in the house. I knew her. She was a waitress at one of the pancake houses he owned, and she was the one I’d always had a crush on.” Sam shook his head. “They didn’t hear me come in. She was on the counter and they were…”

“Going at it,” I finished for him, feeling the bewilderment and shock Sam must have experienced.

“Yeah.” He laughed, a brittle sound. “Like, right there on my mom’s countertop. I just turned around and left. I went down the street to this park and I sat there for four hours. The next night, I went to a party and picked a fight with Carrie, and as soon as she left, I walked up to this girl by the pool. We ended up making out behind the pool house for an hour.”

“And you think that’s cheating?”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “Don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, relieved to be on the same page with Sam about this, about anything.

Sam moved his chair even closer. He put his arm around my back and nuzzled my neck.

“Red Hot.” Sam whispered my nickname in my ear. “I miss you.”

I turned my head to nestle into him. But then I remembered Theo. Guilt ripped through me. I hadn’t cheated, I reminded myself. I hadn’t, I hadn’t.

But I felt as if I had. Sam kissed me, and the room seemed to disappear. In the distance, I heard the band play a slow, hard version of “Tempted” by Squeeze. Tempted by the fruit of another…Alarmed by the seduction…I wish that it would stop.

Except that I had no interest in stopping Sam now, or whatever would happen with us later that night. Suddenly, I didn’t care about the technicalities of dating two men, of whether that made me a bad girl, a temptress or a slut, when before I’d always been the pillar of fidelity, the poster child of monogamy.

“Hey, what am I interrupting?”

Sam and I pulled apart. I blinked at the figure that stood in front of our table, backlit by the stage lights. It took me a moment to make out my brother, Charlie, who wore a bemused expression on his face.

“Hey, man!” Sam jumped up to give Charlie a hug. The two of them loved each other.

Charlie returned the hug, thumping Sam on the back. Charlie had chestnut-brown hair but in the stage lights, you could see a tinge of red. He had spiral curls like mine, which he let grow a little longer than most men’s hair. He was one of the sweetest guys I knew. Also one of the laziest. Charlie had been living off a worker’s comp settlement for a few years now, and all his friends called him “Sheets” because he spent so much time in bed.

I stood, and Charlie made his way around the table. He hugged me tight, lifting me off the floor. “How are you doing, sister?” He set me down, and we smiled at each other, saying nothing. “Good,” he said, reading in my eyes that I was just fine. At least at that moment.

Sam found another chair for Charlie, and as he sat, my phone lit up. A new text message. I picked it up. Somehow I’d gotten three texts in the time Sam and I were kissing. All of them from Jane Augustine.