The Others - 14. Chapter 14: Talking to Sam

Ow god, I need to stop her. I’m fucking this up, right? But how…

Sam pushes me down on my bed.

I can’t let her do this. Is she only doing this to proof I’m not gay? Should I feel offended? “Sam…” I say.

“Shhh.”

“No Sam, you… we… can’t do this.”

“If it feels good, then…”

“No,” I interrupt her. “I start to believe it doesn’t work that way.” Finally her hand stops rubbing me. I immediately regret asking her to stop, but I know it was the best thing to do. “I’m very confused, Sam.”

“Why?” she asks.

“I dunno. I like kissing you, I like you… uhm… pay attention to…” I decide to not finish my sentence. I take her hands, because they are still too close zipper for me to pay attention to what I want to say. She intertwines her fingers with mine, but I don’t mind. As I already said: I like being close with her. “I’m confused, Sam, very confused.”

She drops besides me on the bed. Now we’re lying next to each other, holding hands. “Why are you confused?”

“I…I just don’t know. I’m afraid I’ll hurt you.”

“I like this, being here with you. Talking with you.”

“You only like being with me because you like me,” I explain. “And I told you I won’t be able to like you back, so why still spend time with me?”

“That’s something I can’t explain.”

“Do you think by spending time with me like this, you maybe can get me to like you?” I ask.

She turns to face me, so I do the same. Our faces are so close right now, if I wanted to kiss her, I would barely have to move my head. As she’s breathing I can feel her breath, I can even smell it. I feel the flowery gum she took earlier today and suddenly feel disgusted. I feel disgusted for kissing her, for liking the attention she paid to my sensitive parts. To summarize: I feel disgusted for being with her. And yet, I do like it too.

“You really are confusing, Adam, but I can see a loving person in you. If only you’d give yourself the freedom to like the people around you, you would find out they like you too. I like you…” she sighs and adds: “a lot.”

“I don’t want people to like me.”

“But why?” she asks. “What happened to you for you to not want any attention. You hope you can get through high school without getting noticed, but what about college. What about when you find a job? This has to stop, Adam, you need a real life. Maybe that’s why I like you, why I want to spend time with you and want to kiss you even if you keep rejecting me all the time. Maybe I want to show you what life could be like.”

I feel some tears well up in my eyes. Even if I keep shutting her out, she still cares for me. Why does it frighten me so much?

“I shouldn’t have done what I just did… push you like this,” she continues. “I think I… uhm…” A blush appears on her cheeks. “A thought about that a lot. About you.”

“I really can’t believe you like me,” I say with a crack in my voice.

“Adam, I want to ask you something. I know you don’t like talking about yourself, but after last night, I think you really have to talk about it. It’s bothering you.” She consciously adds a silence. “Who is this guy you met online?”

I’m very good in hiding my feelings and I’m pretty good in lying as well, but when Sam asks me something directly, like now, then how can I lie? She came all the way to me, told me she cared. Although it scares me, I know she is right. I always want to figure out things on my own, I don’t want getting others involved. That’s the reason why I don’t want to have any friends. But it’s like things are getting to heavy on me lately, maybe it’s because of Codey and my dad, maybe I have a limit on what I can handle on my own. I exceeded this limit. so now I need to get this off my chest. Sam volunteered, she wants to be the one to listen to my stories. But can I confide in her? “Yuri,” I respond.

“How did you meet him?”

I hesitate. “On an online forum. I went there to ask people about my sexuality, about ways to find out if I like boys or girls.”

“So you’re really gay or bi?” Sam asks a little disappointed.

“I am,” I say with a weak smile.

“Then I shouldn’t have pushed you like I did.”

I sense guilt. “No, Sam. It’s not your fault. Maybe I’m weird, but I don’t see anything wrong in it. I’m pretty sure I like guys and maybe I don’t know if I like girls as well, but does that really matter? I’m gay as far as relationships will go. I would want to spend my life with a boy, because at the moment I don’t think I’ll ever like girls, but I’m not ruling it out. But I still love you. You’re my best friend, my only friend really. Believe me, I hate the word friend, but I’d love to call you my friend.” That, I see, brings a smile on her face. “Maybe I just don’t understand, but why can’t I kiss a friend?”

“That’s not supposed to happen, Adam,” Sam says.

“According to who?”

She doesn’t answer me.

“That’s what I mean. You told me: if it feels right, how could it be wrong?”

She sighs, but not in an annoyed way. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I think in a friendship you can share things like in a relationship. I want you to feel good, I want me to feel good and when we kiss, we both feel good.”

“Are you quoting the anonymous blogger now?” Sam asks with a smile.

Woah, she reads the posts too? She said she was going to give them a chance, but I didn’t know she really reads them. I should start thinking twice before I quote myself, because I just uploaded this before she rang my bell. She can’t possibly have read the second part, but the first part said enough about caring for a friend. “Maybe I am.”

“So, tell me about Yuri, Adam.”

“He responded to my forum topic. I asked for help and he sent me a clip of a 12 year old boy who came out to his parents. He told me it maybe would, you know, ease the process of getting to know myself. It did, so I thanked him.”

“And you got in touch with him?”

“Yeah, I did. Everything went online, of course, but we managed to talk for hours every day. After a few months we decided to meet each other in person. I was going to go to his house, but the evening before I was going to leave, when I was out for dinner with my mom, a friend of Yuri texted me. Something happened. It screw up my nice dinner with my mom, but that of course didn’t matter. Apparently the best friend of Yuri’s dad died. Yuri didn’t always live in our country, before that he lived in Australia. This best friend of his dad still lived there, so Yuri and his family had to return to Australia. Our meeting couldn’t take place.”

“I have a feeling where this story is heading.”

A few minutes ago I felt happy. I felt happy I finally managed to get past my fears and talk to Sam. Now, however, I feel sad again. Every time when I think about Yuri, I get sad. “I should’ve had the feeling as well. But yeah, he went to Australia and should return within two weeks. The problem was, the dead of this person got his company in some trouble. Yuri’s dad had to replace his job position. So, out of a sudden Yuri’s family decided to move there.”

“So you couldn’t meet him?”

“No. Australia is in a whole other time zone, so to be able to speak to him, I had to get up in the middle of the night. Secretly, because my mom didn’t have to know about me desperately wanting to talk to an unknown boy.”

“Does she know about you?” Sam asks.

Only now I notice she lay her head on my chest. “No, you’re the first.” I know she feels proud of that. “I got up every night. For more than a full year I spoke to him every day. I thought he made me happy, but in fact he made me miserable. Of course I thought something was wrong. He sent me pictured of himself, but not many. Every time when he promised me to send another one, his camera broke down or internet didn’t work well enough. The same for voice-chatting or face-camming. Still I believed every reason he gave me.”

“That’s what love can do,” Sam says. I can hear she is trying to smile. It comforts me.

“I once met this real life friend of him, in real life. It took away my suspicion about Yuri being a fraud, a catfisher. Why would a teenager help a weird creepy old man?” We both are silent for a minute or two. I really enjoy talking to Sam. For some reason telling what I feel to Sam feels better than posting it online and have over thousands of people read it. Now it still feels as a secret, but just our secret instead of my secret. “So yeah. His internet had more problems every day. And his health got worse, so he had to go to the hospital often. It meant I couldn’t talk to him very often, we still emailed each other, but we didn’t chat every day anymore.”

“That sucks.”

“It did, indeed. Even the emails got less as time passed. It took him longer to respond to them. Until finally, when I send him an email, I got an error message. His email didn’t exist anymore.”

“Did he have facebook?”

“No, he wasn’t allowed to. He told me he wasn’t allowed to do many things, because of his father’s job. He couldn’t tell me what his father did for a living, but I found out his address he once gave me, wasn’t his. When I confronted him, he told me about this father thing. That was the reason he wasn’t allowed to have a phone or social media account either. I was stupid enough to believe him.”

“As I said, that’s the power of love,” Sam says and I wonder what or who she is referring to.

“His friend, whose telephone number I had and still have, didn’t respond to me either. I knew his family name was made up as well, that much he admitted after I confronted him with his address. You have to know, I never really share much of myself with others. Yuri was the first person I ever really trusted. I told him my biggest secret, my sexuality, but not only that; I told him everything. In total I spend almost two years talking to him for a minimum of two hours a day and suddenly he disappeared. I can’t believe he was a fraud, why would a fraud spend so much time talking to me. This all happened when I was 13. A few years ago I was thinking about him again, I was staring to one of the few pictures I had of him. I don’t know why, but I decided to use google image search again, as I did many times. No luck, on the internet there wasn’t a picture like the one he sent me. For some reason I decided to mirror the image and search for them again.”

“Lemme guess,” Sam interrupts. “You got a hit.”

“Yeah, almost all pictures he gave me, he took from internet.”

“Weren’t all the pictures of the same guy?”

I silently sigh. That’s what I wondered as well, many times. How could I’ve been this stupid? “No, we were young, and between every picture of him there was, according to him, a year of age difference, so he changed a little bit.”

“Why would he do this to you?”

“I don’t know. That was the first moment in my life I was really happy. I enjoyed life. Then he left and I fell in a void.”

Sam doesn’t say anything and I’m glad she doesn’t. There isn’t a thing she could say right now to ease the pain I feel burning in my heart, so why would she try. I feel stupid for being this hurt by someone I don’t really know, but I spend so much of my life talking to him. It’s like I went all in, I gave him everything I had, all my emotions and all my thoughts, hoping he would double my bet. I lost. “I lost everything I have.”

“What do you mean?”

“I lost my ability to be happy.” I cry.

“You can’t lose your ability to be happy,” Sam whispers as if it’s a secret only I’m allowed to hear. “You can only lose your desire to be happy. But that you can learn again.”

“How?”

She sweeps some tears off my face with her fingers. “To find someone you really love.”

“You think so?”

“I do. Do you ever, you know, feel a nice feeling in your stomach when you talk to a particular guy or something?”

I smile a bit. “Like I feel when I kiss you?” I ask.

She blushes. “I’m not a boy,” she says.

“No, I don’t know. I don’t really pay attention to it,” I lie and think about Codey. I felt this burning sensation when he was crying on my shoulders.

“What about Marc?”

“Ow god, please no!” I scream out and we both laugh at that.

“And Seth? He is nice, right?”

I want to react the same way I did with Marc, but I simply can’t. It’s like I would hurt Seth if I did, even if he can’t hear me, of course. I don’t want to hurt Seth.

“Hmm?” she asks with a teasing smile.

“No,” I whisper. I didn’t intent to whisper, but I already talked about my body and his inability to cooperate.

“Adam, you should start looking around. You’re a good-looking guy, with a nice personality if you decide to show it. You’ll find someone, I’m sure of it.”

“Thank you, Sam.”

She shakes her head. “No, thank you Adam. Thank you for finally talking to me.” She pushes herself up. I’m still lying on my bed, while Sam is now hovering above me. I look her in the eyes.

She gets off my bed and takes my hands to lift me up. When I’m standing up as well, I lean into her. Right before my lips touch hers, I say: “We can still do this, right?”

“Of course we can.”

I kiss her smiling lips.