Nineteen

There was a large possibility what I was doing could be qualified as cheating, but going back to Adam’s house after the show and sleeping with him didn’t make me feel guilty at all. In fact, it made me feel quite the opposite. It was absolutely amazing to lie in bed with him again, completely entangled in each other.

“I f**king love Jim.” Adam announced seriously, stroking my hair lightly as he spoke. “That guy is a God-send.”

“Mmmhmm.” I agreed, reaching out and touching Adam’s cheek gently. “I missed this.”

“I did, too.” Adam sighed. “So, we’re going to do this again?”

“I want to.” I replied immediately, without a second thought. “I want to do this. With you. I can’t imagine it any other way.”

“You have someone at home.” He stated, stiffening a little. “We shouldn’t have even done this.” He gestured between our bodies. “That’s not right, Sam.”

“I don’t care about that.” I assured him. “All I care about is being with you. Consider that over. I didn’t think you were going to call, Billy told me I had to try and move on. I don’t dislike Kevin- that’s his name- but I love you.”

“We’ll have to try and make it different than last time.” Adam kissed me softly. “No more fighting over stupid things.”

“No more fighting over stupid things.” I repeated in agreement. “No more me living on the East Coast.”

“What?” Adam practically sat up he was so surprised.

“I’ll move.” I explained. “There’s no point for me to stay there and have the same things happen all over again. I need to be with you, and if I have to move, I have to move. I’ll be there, whenever you need me.”

I quoted the Baywatch theme to get a rise out of Adam, but he was too happy with my decision to even notice. We started talking about the house right away- our house. What room would become my office, what furniture I would take from my apartment; we wanted the house to feel like it was as much mine as it was his, even though he had been there for a while without me.

It was going to be great. I was going to move in with Adam and everything was going to be perfect again. We weren’t going to fight because we were going to be so happy. I was going to wake up every morning in the bed that we shared and it was going to be amazing.
My mother didn’t quite see it the same way I did; she pretty much wanted to kill me when I told her I was moving to LA. She got that maternal ‘I’m very disappointed in you’ look that I hadn’t seen since I got drunk after the junior prom and sighed loudly. We were sitting at her kitchen table, across from each other. She was looking at me, waiting for an explanation.

“Mom, I have to give it a fair chance this time around.” I tried to validate my decision. “We’re not going to get anywhere if I’m still living here. You know that if I stay here everything will be the same, and we don’t want that to happen again.”

“Honey.” My mother looked at me seriously. “Over the summer I’ve seen you grow and change more than you ever have with Adam in your life. I’ll admit that when he first left, I hoped and prayed he would come back and help pick up the pieces, but the longer he was gone, the more self-sufficient you became. You didn’t need your relationship to survive; you became more independent and even happier once you got over the initial heart break. I don’t know if you should go back to him.”

“Mom.” I looked at her like she had four heads. “I was too independent when I was with Adam. I never let him help me with anything when I should have. We always got into fights because I wanted to do everything on my own and I didn’t want him to interfere. I know I can live on my own; I’m not scared of that. I just don’t want to. I want to live with Adam. In California.”

“You were anything but independent when you were with Adam.” Holy curveball, right? “You had to talk to him everyday or else the two of you got into a fight. You fought over who was taking care of who- why did either of you need to be taken care of? You fought over what little time you got to spend together. Sam, honey, I know there are lots of problems that come with long distance relationships, and you were dealing with them as best you could, but you were far from independent. You don’t need to talk to Kevin everyday, and you’re happy with him. If you don’t talk to him it’s not a life altering catastrophe. Why would you want to go back to Adam, where everything went wrong?”

“Because I love him, Mom.” I emphasized my words my banging my fist on the table lightly. “And that’s more important than anything.”

“Even your happiness?”

“I’m going to be happy because of this.” I groaned in frustration. “Why don’t you get that? Mom, I’m doing this no matter what, so I hope you can be happy for me.”

“I’ll try, sweetie.” She offered me a tight-lipped smile.

On my way home from my mother’s apartment I called Adam to tell him what a moron she was being, and he told me that he thought mothers all across the continental United States were against me moving in, because his mother wasn’t too pleased, either. She said that our relationship was too fragile to change so drastically and it was going to end badly for us.

It was really disheartening that our mothers didn’t support our decision to move in together. As I said earlier, Adam thought his mother was the most important woman in the whole entire world, and my mother ranked pretty highly in my book. I thought their disapproval would make us second guess our decision, but Adam still seemed pretty gung-ho about the whole idea.

“I called a moving company yesterday.” He told me as I pulled into the parking lot of my apartment complex. “You said your lease runs out on the 8th, right?”

“Yes, sir.” I confirmed. “Are they going to drive my stuff all the way to your house?”

“Yeah, it’s kinda pricey but we have no other way to do it.” Adam told me. “Have you told Erin you want to transfer to the LA branch?”

“I have a meeting with her tomorrow.” I replied, smiling at how well things were going. “And am I going to fly out or drive my car?”

“Doesn’t matter. Whatever you want. It’ll probably be easier just to have it driven here so you can fly out and be here when your stuff gets here.” Adam thought out loud.

“Yeah, I’ll call about that, too. So we’re pretty much all set with this so far, right?”

“Yeah, we sure are.”

“This is going to be good, right?” Suddenly he sounded apprehensive. “I don’t want to mess things up between us again.”

“I don’t either.” I replied honestly, just sitting in my idling car in my designated parking space. “I don’t think we will. I think everything will be fine.”

That lightened the mood and we hung up the phone, and I headed up to my apartment. I had a message on my answering machine. It was Kevin. The one thing I hadn’t done to prepare for the move was tell him about it. And break up with him. He was calling to see if I wanted to go out that weekend. He said it was weird that he hadn’t heard from me recently, and wanted to take me out so we could catch up.

s***. I knew I forgot to take care of something.