“How was your night?”
“Another intellectually stimulating evening working as a cocktail waitress. And yours, Mr. Goodnight?”
“You know. Unicorns and rainbows and shiny happy people holding hands. The usual.”
Samantha laughs, a succession of short chuckles building gradually to a big, artless, cackling finish. This is the sound that drew Dean to his girlfriend in the first place, this infectious, snowballing laughter. A sound so sure of itself Dean thinks he might burst into bits just hearing it.
“You think I’m funny,” Dean says. He feels himself smiling.
“I do.”
Laugh lines fade into faint tracework around her grin.
“I went to the library before my shift,” Sam says.
They sit barefoot at the small moonlit table, passing a dimpled silver spoon back and forth, dissolving stubborn cubes of sugar in steeping cups of tea.
“I sat on a big yellow beanbag in the children’s section. The tables and chairs were doll-sized. I looked like a giant next to it all. Funny though. I felt small on the beanbag. Swallowed up by it. I read Shel Silverstein and when I was done I couldn’t stand. My legs fell asleep. I had to ask the librarian to help me up.”
Sam taps the spoon on the chipped rim of her teacup and a string of bright chimes rings cleanly through the muffled quiet.
“I don’t know Shel Silverstein.”
“Oh he’s great.” She hands the spoon back to Dean. “I used to recite Where the Sidewalk Ends over and over when I was a girl.” Sam closes her eyes, palms outspread on her knees, like a faith healer working at miracles, and leans into the headwinds of some remembered breeze. The poem she reads has the abstracted quality of myth, calcified flowers and black smoke billowing and compassionate, oracular children, wise beyond their years.
Sam’s fingertips drift up Dean’s forearm, linger there a moment, courting.
“It sounds sad,” he says.
“I never thought so.”
Dean douses the edge of a sugar cube in his tea and the pristine crystals darken in a flash. He reels the tea bag up by its string, squeeze-drying the sodden lump over his cup. Muddy runlets silt down his fingers. Dean tosses the spent bag into the wastebin, where it bickers against a half-empty birth control pillpak.
They have agreed to stop talking about having kids. And yet the subject persists, an almost physical presence in the silences between the things they say. More and more lately, when they talk, Dean feels crowded against the contours of Sam’s burgeoning maternal urge.
“What are we talking about?” he asks.
She takes the dark, damp cube from Dean and lifts it into her mouth, sucking the sweetness hard between white teeth. Sam stands, she’s still not answering, rolls the sugar on her tongue, walks away smiling.
Dean finishes his tea.
She’s waiting for him in the bedsheets, windows flung wide to the star-spangled night.
“Dean,” Sam calls from the bedroom. “It’s late. Where are you going?”
But he’s already changing into running shorts, retrieving his keys.
“For a run.”