Page 15 of The Backtrack
God dammit.
Sam’s eye had begun to twitch, and she held a finger to her lid as she replied, “Oh, my gosh, same!” But her tone was flat and fake, and she immediately worried Damon had noticed.
“Marissa is a surgeon at the hospital where my dad works.” Damon filled in the blanks. “He set us up on a date.”
Marissa beamed at the description as she saddled herself in a chair between Damon and Sam. Suddenly, Sam became the third wheel on her surprise catch-up with Damon. This really hadn’t been how she’d imagined the night going.
“At first, I didn’t know who Damon even was. I was like, Damon Rocha? Doesn’t ring a bell,” Marissa said with a laugh.
Sam squinted. Of course Marissa hadn’t known who they were—Sam and Damon had been total loners. He was the Romy to her Michele, minus the back brace.
“Yeah, I guess we were kind of hopeless.” Sam softly smiled and shifted her legs under the table. Her bare foot grazed Damon’s jeans and the friction she’d felt from his hand on her back earlier returned. But instead of letting her foot linger, she quickly pulled it away, and Damon shifted, too, probably to avoid any future touching.
Why was she getting flustered from being around them? Damon and Marissa were clearly happy, judging by the way Marissa smiled at him like the fucking sun shone out of his ass.
Be happy for them, Sam told herself.Smile, dammit.And so she did.
“What kind of surgery do you do?” Sam forced herself to ask. She avoided eye contact with Damon completely, even though his gaze was on her and she was drawn to look back as freely as she did in that weird high school dream she’d had.
“Sam?” Damon’s voice cut through her thoughts and she shook her head as she looked up.
“Oh, uh, yes?” Somewhere between Marissa describing her job as a thoracic surgeon, and Sam remembering her Damon dream, she’d zoned out.
“The seafood boil. Your homecoming dinner.” Damon pointed to a long picnic table covered in a white-and-red checkerboard cloth that stretched the line of the back fence. Servers poured massive steaming pots of seafood and potatoes onto the table, and the smell of salt and fish reached them almost instantly.
Sam’s anxiety had reached a bit of a fever pitch, with a leg that jittered so quickly her chair shook. Her inner need for control broke through and told her to just load a plate and stress eat her way back to happiness.
“You don’t have to tell me twice.” Sam forced herself up from the table and made her way to the lobster, fresh shrimp, sweet corn on the cob and melt-in-your-mouth fish. She loaded up a disposable bowl until the edges burned her fingers from the hot buttery grease. When she arrived back to their high top, a fresh beer waited—one of the perks of dining with the owner, she supposed. Sam ate without thinking, wanting to fill the void in the pit of her stomach.
As she ripped shrimp out of their shells and popped them into her mouth, she chewed and let the salty heat soothe her. When Damon returned with Marissa at his side, Sam took a wooden hammer from the center of the table and hit it hard against a lobster tail.
“Not sure what that poor lobster did to you,” Damon said as he twisted a crab leg and cracked it in half with his hands. “But remind me not to get on your bad side.”
“You made me wake up at four in the morning so we could wait in line to get Green Day tickets, and I still wasn’t mad at you. It’d take a lot to get on my bad side at this point.” Sam caught Damon’s eye and, for a moment, it was just the two of them again.
“These seafood boils are basically therapy,” Marissa interrupted. When Sam looked over, she grinned. “If you’re not sweating while eating, then what’s the point?”
Though, Sam noticed, Marissa was decidedlynotsweating and alsonotbeating the ever-loving hell out of shellfish. Instead, she picked up an ear of corn and took a ridiculously demure bite.
The cover band stepped up to the mic. “Hey there, we’re Fall Out Troy, and I’m Troy,” the lead singer said into the mic. “And yes, I’m aware it was a bit egotistical to use my own name, but I couldn’t help the pun perfection.”
Relieved to hear someone else talking, Sam quickly changed her line of thought. “Marissa, were you into emo music, too?”
“I’m more of a pop girl myself,” Marissa said, wiping her fingers on a paper napkin. “Taylor Swift. Britney. The Spice Girls. I never really got into grunge.”
Sam’s nose scrunched. “Would we call ourselves grunge?”
“Emo for sure,” Damon said.
“Your red-dyed tips were absolutely not grunge, and took forever to dye,” Sam practically had to shout over Fall Out Troy’s rendition of “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark.”
“And to wash out, unfortunately.” Damon ran a hand through his non-dyed hair.
“Damon!” A surfer bro wearing board shorts and a puka shell necklace slapped Damon on the back.
“Myles.” Damon turned and they did a very choreographed hand bump that Sam would never entertain being able to pull off. “Do you remember Sam, from high school?”
Lord, did everyone from their high school hang out here? Myles took in the full length of her in a way she wasn’t entirely comfortable with.
