The place was quiet when he got back to Pleasant Lane. He let himself into Miss Leona’s house, then made his way down to the guest room. He should have passed right out. It had been a long few days, and he still hadn’t recovered from the adrenaline rush from being under the spotlights on that Oscar stage. He was exhausted, but he lay awake in bed, just staring at the ceiling, wondering what the fuck was wrong with him.
Sam didn’t know what he expected. Actually, that was a full-blown lie. He’d expected he’d enjoy Helene and Ignacio’s wedding. He’d expected to enjoy a few laughs with his grandmother, and when she’d had enough he knew Jesse would come pick her up and take her home, leaving Sam to openly ogle Amanda late into the night until she gave him the signal that she was ready for the two of them to head back to her room together. He had condoms at the ready. He had more champagne chilling, a short menu of late-night snacks on deck just in case they needed to refuel between what he’d hoped would be round three and four. He’d expected to wake up early tomorrow morning and kiss Amanda, finally get her phone number, and sometime next week, he’d expected he was going to call her up and ask her out on a proper date so they could really get to know each other.
He wasn’t sure what exactly had gone wrong. Not that it mattered. Amanda had told him where she stood and all he could do, what he planned to do, was respect that. She just wasn’t into him.
Sam had to face it. He was an optimist and a hopeless romantic, and both of those things sometimes got in the way of reality. Amanda had made it clear the first time she’d skipped out of his hotel room that she wanted nothing to do with him beyond their one-night stand. Running into each other again had been pure coincidence. He’d been so amped to see her again some of the sparkly dust that clouded his brain from time to time had him mistaking that coincidence for destiny.
On planet Earth, however, that wasn’t the case. If Amanda wanted him, she would have said so. But no, she’d done her best to let him down nice and easy. She liked him, but not enough to see if what he was feeling between them could become something more. Something that at least involved exchanging phone numbers.
Sam grabbed his phone off the nightstand and rolled onto his back. He pulled up Instagram and like a damn fool searched for Amanda McQueen. There were a shocking number of people with that name. Still he spotted Cha-Cha’s bright smile in the fifth circular avatar down the list. He clicked on QueenA and quickly learned that her social media didn’t give away much about her. The photos were mostly artistic shots of various LA streets. Maybe one photo out of every twenty was a picture of Amanda herself, just a close shot on her smiling face. There was one picture of her with her parents on Christmas morning two years before.
Sam was maybe four years deep in her feed when he realized what he was doing. She’d given him the full-blown no-thank-you. He needed to let this, let her go. He closed out of her account and braved a look at his DMs. Walls did a good job monitoring them, but Sam liked to look every now and then. He scrolled back to Oscar Sunday and whoa, Walls hadn’t been lying. His DMs were filled with messages from all kinds of women. He could have had Walls lock his DMs but the way the messaging system worked he’d also miss sincere messages and tagged posts from fans. He decided it was worth it to take the bad and bizarre with the good.
He scrolled by a message from Dru Anastasia, then scrolled back again. He’d watched her show Andromeda with Lilah a few times. He liked the whole space, paranormal aspect of it, but the cast hadn’t been enough to keep him interested. Dru was beautiful, though. The message she sent was . . . it was definitely an approach.
Congrats on your win. You should take me out sometime so we can celebrate.
I think we’d both enjoy it.
She’d added a wink emoji.
The image of trying to “enjoy” a meal with Dru Anastasia flashed through his mind. There was no spark there, only cautious confusion. He closed out of the conversation and moved on to the next message from Brandon Williams21. He’d tagged Sam in a photo of what looked like a school presentation that had a big red A at the top with a scrawled note that said “Good work.” Sam smiled as he read the caption.
I’d never heard of Josiah Williams before my dad took me to see The Sky Beneath Our Feet. I decided to do my term project on Josiah and learned that he’s on my family tree. Thank you to @TheSamPleasant for bringing a member of my family to life.
Sam shared the post on his account and added his own caption, congratulating Brandon on his A and thanking him for tagging him in such a personal post. He may have been nursing a hopeless crush that had already been buried, but at least he’d helped to inspire a high school sophomore. It wasn’t what he’d expected from the night, but it was something he could feel good about. With some of the optimism restored, Sam went to sleep.
Chapter 9
It took some doing, but Amanda finally
