Chapter Text
“[…] et eunt homines mirari alta montium, et ingentes fluctus maris, et latissimos lapsus fluminum, et Oceani ambitum, et gyros siderum, et relinquunt se ipso […]”
“[…] and men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by […]”
St. Augustine, Confessions
This she can tell you.
That the first time she sees Samuel Drake, she thinks him different.
Other people prior to him have tried to waltz in her life thinking that they could use her, her connections, her money—slightly different wordings every time, variations on well abused speeches, same old wearied patterns. By the time Sam comes into her life, she can easily recognize poisoned gestures and affectations. She may be young, but she is not stupid.
And then, Sam.
Sam, with nothing but a smile. A light and a sadness in his eyes. Sam with a story, with a past carefully crafted, Sam of incredible adventures and laughs and birds on his neck.
“A story for another time,” he had told her once.
He comes offering to help.
She didn’t ask it, but she accepts it nonetheless.
Maybe because in a well constructed network of whispers and favors that need to be called in and loyalties that seem to change every minute or so, Sam shows up without asking too much in return. He doesn’t want money. He doesn’t want secrets that can be used against someone. He doesn’t want access to anything or anyone. He doesn’t even necessarily want her.
“What you are looking for,” he says on their first meeting, “it’s in Morocco. I can get it for you, if you can give me a passage there. And a fake passport, if it’s not too inconvenient.”
His voice modulated to amusement. A corner of his mouth teased up.
But mostly what she remembers of that day is the rain. Wet fingers tapping on the glass roof and walls of the solarium in her country house, a background music of some sort. Sam with sunglasses on, nonetheless.
Maybe she should have taken a hint from that. But she didn’t.
Sam is disarming. Different and unreadable. Completely unexpected. That day, now she knows, the axis of her world shifted a degree around him. Quietly. Stealthy.
On the private flight to Rabat they sit on opposite sides of the aisle. Not too close, not too far. “A polite amount of personal space”, he would later tease her, after things like politeness and personal spaces would have been long forgotten.
But there, on that flight, she still sits enough away from him, unconsciously waiting for him to close his eyes so she can look at him and compile bits. She always had the soul of a collector, after all.
Rabat with its noises, colors and scents commandeers Sam for almost a week.
In her hotel suite, she waits for him to come back and when he finally does, blood and dirt stain his clothes, his skin, his mind.
Yet, he laughs his way into her room, handling her what she asked for—out of the back pocket of his jeans like some sort of magic trick—and sits down on an immaculate sofa, only to apologize for the mess when already too late.
This is what this man is like, she remembers thinking then. Truth is, she was so far off the mark. At least now she knows that much. But then—back then—she thought she had him all figured out.
Samuel Drake of the easy laughs, of the shaking off accidents and pain like dust, of the always a moment too late apologies. Careless, carefree, childlike.
Wrong.
At least partially so.
Back home, she quickly finds him another job. And then another. And then another.
There are several things that she wouldn’t admit to anyone, but if nothing else, she can at least still pride herself on never have lied to herself about liking Sam.
A first aid kit, a shower, a change of clothes and a good meal turn pretty quickly into a routine. He seems to never take it for granted, though. It’s only on the fourth or the fifth time that he finally looks at her curiously.
“What?” she asks picking a fry from his plate.
He has this way of sitting, everywhere and no matter what. Relaxed, cool, as if he owned everything around him and he is perfectly comfortable with the idea and thank you very much.
“This,” he says, staring at her for a moment before steering his eyes away. “It’s nice. Thank you. But you don’t have to do it. I don’t expect it.”
“You prefer me not to?” she asks softly.
One of his hands reaches the back of his neck, his gaze finds the ceiling of the room. “No. I mean, I really appreciate. I just don’t want you to feel obliged.”
She steals another fry from his plate. “I don’t.”
A heartbeat passes by quietly. “Okay.”
In the silence that follows his eyes find hers again. A chuckle escapes his mouth almost immediately, notes of awkwardness and a peculiar shyness mixed in.
She likes it. She likes it a lot.
Maybe too much.
As far as she can remember, she has never been a particularly shy person. Pretty much like many others, outgoing when needed, reserved by preference, guarded a degree more than many, maybe. It came with the upbringing, she believes. Imprinting.
In this regard, she is not sure when Sam started to look at her in that way that made her blush and feel nervous and aroused all at the same time, but she remembers the first time she had noticed.
He shows up with some informations about a piece she asked him to find, but he hasn’t messaged her ahead, so he catches her on her way out to an event. She is wearing a simple evening dress and heels, nothing fancy but different enough from her usual look of jeans, sneakers and plain tees. And she sees it in Sam’s eyes, as he unconsciously allows them to travel along her figure to meet up with her eyes, she sees it then and there. A bit of bewilderment, a measure of hunger.
For a man who lies so often, he has never been too good at hiding emotions.
And then he must have seen the surprise coloring her face. Something raw enough to make him feel exposed. So Sam does what Sam always does best. He quickly scrambles together an excuse and finds an exit.
Later that day she marvels at the easiness of that shift. How suddenly he has been forced to recognize her as a woman. And later that evening she touches herself thinking of him, the way he had looked at her and his hands and his voice and all the things she has been craving to do to him and wishes he would do to her.
He disappears for more than a month after that day. Two weeks in, she sends him a message. He doesn’t reply.
When he reappears into her life, he’s unanticipated. Unasked, really. Again, she would like to add.
She is at a fundraising ball and auction event and he is not there until he suddenly is. She wasn’t mingling to being with and most of her evening is wasted on the sidelines anyway, but at that point in her sentimental life Samuel Drake is slowly decaying into the shadow of a mistake she could have gladly lost herself into, hadn’t he decided to remove himself from her life. And yet, in an excellent example of incredibly bad timing, exactly when she has just started to think of him less, he decides to reappear.
You don’t get to do that, she would like to tell him. But she doesn’t. Of course, she doesn’t.
Dressed up in a sharp black tie, Samuel Drake looks like a million dollars. To her, he feels like a freshly shuffled deck of cards. You know all the suits and colors, but you don’t recognize the order. And so, Sam. His smile, his eyes, his voice (his voice). And still, it’s hard for her to reassemble everything the way she knows it. Sam, like a photo slightly out of focus, familiar yet different.
“You look beautiful,” he says, his voice vaguely catching on the last word.
“You look well and alive,” she replies before she can erase the sharpness out of her tone.
He has the decency to look embarrassed.
“I’m sorry for—,” he starts and then stops as he takes a step towards her and she instinctively takes a step back. He looks surprised. Maybe a bit hurt.
She hopes so.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“It’s okay,” she lies.
And then the song. A tune slow and sad and blue as it can be stretches between the two of them and all she can do—as she feels his eyes on her slowly charting a map of all her exposed fragilities—all she can do is look away, fidgeting with the two old bracelets she wears all the time.
“Would you like to dance?”
An unscripted question. So out of character, really.
She catches a laugh before it escapes her throat. Yes. No. What gives you the right.
But she meets his eyes—and maybe that’s her first true mistake of the evening—and holds them for a moment long enough to convince herself that she can safely say yes.
And it’s not when he takes one of her hands in his as the other finds its way to her back that she understands how lost she still really is. Or when he pulls her a little bit closer, enough for her to feel the warmth of Sam’s body. Not even then she gets it. It’s when she catches herself thinking of him reentering her life carrying the air of the evening with him, the wetness of a storm close by and a faint smell of smoke. Things that she missed. That she misses.
She registers some new scratches on the knuckles of his fingers and hints of healing wounds that his shirt doesn’t hide well enough. How much of Samuel Drake, she wonders, and what new parts of him, what other stories he has been adding to the list of the things that she is never going to know about him. That she would like to know.
And so, then and there, she finally sees it—her hearth suspended again because of one Samuel Drake.
His thumb caresses the skin of her hand slowly, a distraction as she tries to put together the pieces of a man who likes to be a puzzle.
The song fills the empty spaces where their words should be with lyrics that pull strings inside her that she would prefer to be left alone.
But, if nothing else, she will ask him something.
“Is this a goodbye?”
And if she was older or wiser or maybe just not so ridiculous, her voice would be less insecure and she would look up at him as her question comes out.
She can feel him trying to read her face and giving up, diverting his gaze somewhere else. “I… I don’t think so.”
The halo of a question mark tints his reply and she knows that this answer is probably the most honest answer he could have ever given her.
And then, in the dim lighted fringe of where most of the other people are dancing, unexpected like almost everything around and of Sam, he starts to talk.
A confession of shortcomings and sins and mistakes that, she is quite sure of it, he lays at her feet to listen to, so that she can walk away from him.
All the “my life is a mess”, the “I am a mess” and the “you are young”, the “you are smart”, the “trust me, you don’t want me in your life”.
And of all the arguments he tries to make, he doesn’t see that that one is the faultiest. And of all the times he needs to stop talking, he doesn’t realize that this one is the one. So, she makes him. Her hand reaches the side of his neck, the thumb barely touches his jawline and the rough prelude of stubble. He finally stops talking, holds his breath, stays still. And so she kisses him.
There is this moment. A heartbeat that goes by fully noticed by her in which she waits for Sam’s reaction. And then it passes and he closes the space between them, his mouth on hers again in a kiss that has no questions in it and no hesitations. He kisses her and does it so like a man who has kissed many women in his life and liked all of them. And yet, he also kisses her with all the contradictions of a first kiss, tender and hungry, tentative and claiming. Gravity—for one impossible moment—feels weaker.
Sam’s skin is traced with lines and marks of stories, some of which he tells her later that night in the quiet of her bedroom. The bedsheets are tangled around their legs, their bodies close enough to touch, one of his hands plays carefully a game of exploration on her back. Her bracelets slide a little down her arm as she raises one hand to follow the line of a wrinkle on his forehead. The bruises, the cuts, the broken bones—all of that she can easily explain. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, after all. But it’s these marks of passing time and worries and laughs that she is mostly curious of. These secret thoughts and unconfessed memories that left their impressions on him and made him the man she is staring at right now.
His hand leaves her back to caress her temple and then to hide on the back of her neck. She closes her eyes as he kisses her on the forehead. “We should really get some rest, now.”
She nods already drifting away and sleep, when it comes, scents like Sam.
The week that follows is mostly lost in bed with Sam, discovering what each other’s hands, mouths and bodies can do. When they are not making love, he meticulously extracts stories from her past, things she has never said to anybody else, or they talk about history and collections and artifacts and places Sam has seen, yet still sounding so improbable.
His phone is mostly forgotten on her nightstand, he only picks it up to answer to the random call from his brother or his friend Sully. She rolls those names—Nate and Sully—in her head musing how weird is to know so many details about two people she has never met. She is fairly sure he hasn’t mentioned her to them. The few times she catches bits and pieces of his conversations on the phone, Sam seems to always say things like “I’m kinda busy right now” or “I’m in the middle of something”. She is okay with that. After all, it’s not like she has told about him to anybody, either.
At the beginning of a new week, after a quick phone call with Sully, Sam tells her that he needs to go somewhere for few days. He doesn’t say where or why and she doesn’t ask. He wraps his arms around her waist and lifts her up, their faces at the same level for few moments.
“Hey, you,” she says chuckling.
“Hey, you. I will miss you.”
He gives her a quick kiss on the lips and puts her down before she even has the time to reply anything. And with that and a wave from the front door, Sam is gone.
Few days become a week, a week becomes two. He calls her, though. Sends her messages. His voice carries the noises of some other place, some other life, some other secret.
Upon his return, Sam’s mood and demeanor have slightly shifted. It’s in the way he hugs her, the way his eyes seem to avoid hers, the cheerfulness in his voice that sounds a bit forced, how he tries to reroute her attention to anything else but him.
But that night in bed he is deliberately slow, taking his time to retrace all her body, exploring all her curves and lines like it’s the first time, tasting bit by bit every inch of her, making sure that all she can feel is pleasure.
After, Sam lays on his side, an elbow propped up, one hand supporting his head, the other carefully touching the bracelets on her wrist.
“How old are these?”
“Ptolemaic.”
Sam laughs. “Are you kidding me? And you wear them?”
“They were meant to be worn,” she replies in tune, gently shaking her arm to make them rattle. “First thing I ever acquired. They came with a necklace, too. A bit too much for me, though.”
Sam’s fingers reach her collarbones and lazily outline their shape. “A bit too much, uh?”
“It’s more like an armor, really.”
“So,” he says with a hint of something feral in his voice and a smile on a dangerous angle. “Let me guess.”
His fingers leave her collarbones and slowly caress a path down her cleavage until they stop at the beginning of her breasts.
“How about this long?”
“A little lower,” she replies breathless.
“A little lower,” Sam repeats with a devilish smile as his fingers move a couple of inches down. “And, let’s say, this wide?”
He deliberately traces an arc on the skin of her breasts brushing her nipples, making her catch her breath. “And one plaque?”
“Three,” she manages to say.
“Ah. Three, then.”
She does everything that she can not to moan when Sam moves on top of her.
“It must be one plaque here,” he tells her kissing her between her breasts. “And one here,” he adds capturing one of her nipples with his mouth, “and the third one here,” he finishes capturing the other.
Her hands reach his head and hide in his hair as he slowly kisses his way down her stomach.
“Quite an accurate guess,” she tells him in between short lived breaths. “I’ll have to show it to you one of these days.”
Sam pauses for a long moment, his lips still hovering on her skin. “Not tonight,” he finally says before returning his mouth to her stomach.
Not tonight, she agrees. She has no opportunity to say it, though, because all she can do in that moment is enjoying the pure bliss of Sam’s skilled tongue between her legs.
“It was between the wine and the collection,” she tells him as, in the basement, she punches her code on the keypad next to a set of double doors. “So you know.”
She gestures him to open them and a long, low whistle escapes Sam’s mouth once he sees what those doors have been hiding. Glass cases upon glass cases of carefully protected artifacts preserved for the benefit of very few people. Mostly hers, to be completely honest.
“Jesus Christ,” she hears Sam say under his breath.
She knows she technically doesn’t have to explain to him that the location of her vault had been simply dictated by the fact that, like fine wine, a lot of the pieces in her collection benefit form a strictly controlled temperature and light source, but she still fights the urge to. Anyway, he is too busy looking around to listen to her.
“What is all this stuff?”
She shrugs. “Unwanted pieces. I generally wait for the end of auctions and see what is leftover and buy something then.”
Sam shoots her an amused look and she shrugs again. “I feel bad for them.”
He laughs. The sound fills the room, somehow.
“And there she is,” Sam says, reaching the case with the necklace. “It’s even more beautiful than—” He stops, catches her eyes.
By his side, she tries to look at it as if it was the first time. The gold plaques and pendants shine bright under the spotlights and yet, somehow, they still make the gemstones shine even brighter, even better. In a riot of colors, rubies and emeralds and sapphires mix in a geometric pattern around unrecognizable engraved symbols.
“A bit too much,” she says.
“A bit too much,” he agrees.
Sam steals another look at the necklace, before turning his attention to her. “Wine?” he asks.
“You are not a wine kind of guy,” she points out in half a laugh.
“Then, wine for you and beer for me,” he replies.
And with his hands hidden inside the pockets of his jeans, his shoulders slightly hunched and an easy smile on his lips, it’s so easy—too easy—for her to picture what Samuel Drake must have looked like around her age.
Something a bit painful tightens around her heart, like the regret of not having had the chance to meet him back then.
“Are you okay?” he asks catching something on her face.
She nods. “Yes. Let’s have that drink.”
A week later, the necklace is gone.
The alarm never kicked in. No signs of intrusion.
Of course, she thinks to herself. After all, he knew exactly how the alarm system worked. She had told him. And he had seen the combination number, she had never hid it from him.
Sam, that is. Who else.
And slowly but certainly something crumbles and falls inside her.
The tears come later. And they don’t stop for a long while.