I'm Not Sam

I’mmmm commming!

I could cry or laugh out loud, this is such fun. I stay with her, ratcheting up the pace, the pad of my thumb buffing her clit, fingers pressing hard, sliding along the warm wet wall of her insides.

Oh! she says and ohhhh! and holds the moment suspended inside her so I hold too while she trembles all around me and then lets go. I work her a little more, smooth and gentle now and she jerks and spasms. Internal electricity. I know the feeling.

She laughs. The bawdy laugh. The one reserved just for me.

“Bastard!”

“You love it. You know you do.”

“I know I do.”

She kisses me the way you kiss your lover when he’s made your day. I kiss her back. She’s made mine.

While I’m heating up the bourguignon, preheating the broiler for the garlic bread and boiling water for the noodles I ask her to go into the study and have a look at Samantha, see if I’ve got the spatter right. She comes back in a little while.

“You’ve been doing your homework,” she says. “Studying the photos. Good.”

We’ve got morgue photos and crime-scene photos pretty much all over the place. In my study, in the bedroom, on the bookshelf in the living room. We have to hide them from the guests.

I’d made the mistake a few years back before her mother died of leaving a series of full-color shots of a Mexican drug dealer lying by the roadside — his severed arms and legs piled on top of his chest and his head split open by a machete — left it on my drafting table when her mom flew in from Boston. One look and her face went white.

Try explaining to a sixty-five-year-old woman that this was research for what she’d consider a comic book.

“It’s pretty much perfect,” Sam says, “in a larger-than-life kind of way.”

That makes me feel good. She’s got it exactly.

“Right. That’s what we’re after. Realistic and over-the-top, both at once.”

“I can’t wait to see how you’re going to put her back together.”

“Neither can I.”

Dinner’s fine. I don’t burn the garlic bread and the noodles are al dente. We’re lingering over our second glasses of Merlot when I get this look.

“What?” I ask her.

She smiles.

“I was just thinking,” she says.

Unusual for me to go twice in one night but not unheard of and we’ve had that excellent dinner and the wine. There’s a familiar moment of unease when I glance over her shoulder at the glassed-in hutch and her eight, thirty-year-old Barbie dolls are staring at me, not to mention Teddy Davis, her very first teddy bear, threadbare and crunch-nosed, with these strange, droopy, deeply-cleft buttons for eyes — buttons that actually resemble slanted squinty eyes — and this down-turned pouty mouth, so that he looks sort of like Bette Davis on heroin. It’s unnerving.

But that passes. She sees to that.

And this time, for me at least, it’s even better.

I go a lot longer and she’s right there with me all the time. We’re a two-man band. She’s on rhythm and I’m on lead. She’s figure and I’m ground. We don’t exactly come together but it’s so damn close that I’m still hard inside her when she does.

We always make love with the light on. We figure the dark is for sissies. So that when I roll away I’m able to see the sheen of sweat down her body from her collarbone to her thighs. Sweat that’s part her and part me.

And I think, don’t ever let this stop. Don’t ever let us get so old or tired or used to one another that we don’t want this.

The thought comes to me just as I’m about to nod off to sleep.

Be careful, brother, what you wish for.

I wake to a sound I’ve never heard before.

It’s the middle of the night, it’s pitch black but I’m awake so fast and so completely it’s as though somebody’s slapped me.

It’s a high thin keening sound and it’s sure not Zoey with her toy. I reach over to Sam’s side of the bed. It’s empty.

I pull the chain on the bedside lamp and the bedroom suddenly glares at me. That keening sound rises higher and more urgently, as though the light were painful.

I see her. There she is. On the floor in the corner wedged between the wall and the hutch, facing the wall, her naked back to me, her arms clutching her knees tight to her chest. It’s not cold but she’s trembling. She glances at me fast over her shoulder and then away again but I see that she’s crying.

That sound is Sam, crying.

But I’ve heard Sam crying when her mom died and it doesn’t sound anything like that. This doesn’t sound like her at all.

I’m up and out of bed, going to her, to take her in my arms and…

“Nooooooo!” she wails. “Noooooooo!”

It stops me dead but I think, that’s not her. That’s not her voice. All the time knowing that’s impossible.

“Jesus, Sam…”

“Don’t!”

And now her left hand is darting through the air over her head like she’s shooing away a sudden flock of birds.

I reach for her. She sees me out of the corner or her eye.

“Don’t…touch!”

To me the voice seems maybe an octave higher than it should be. What the fuck?

“Don’t touch,” she says, a little calmer this time. Through sniffles. And that’s when it hits me.

It’s a little-girl voice. Coming from my Sam.

Under other circumstances I could almost smile at the sound. Sam playing the widdle gurl. But these are not other circumstances. The look in her eyes when she glances at me is not funny.

Okay, she won’t let me touch her but I need to do something to comfort her. Plus she’s naked. For some weird reason that bothers me. I get up and pull the blanket off the bed. Kill two birds with one stone.

I go down on my knees behind her and hold the blanket out to her.

“Sam, here. Let me…”

She bats at me with both hands, hard and fast, and now she’s crying again.

“Don’t touch me…you hurt me!”

“Hurt you? Sam, I’d never…”

“Not Sam!”

“What?

“I’m not Sam!”

And now I’m way beyond confusion. Now I’m scared. I’ve slid down the rabbit-hole and what’s down there is dark and serious. This is not play-acting or some waking bad dream she’s having. She’s changed, somehow