“You know I get motion sickness easily,” he whined.
“I brought ginger root to help with that.”
“And I hate heights.”
“Then close your eyes.”
“But I’m terrified of roller coasters.”
“Which is why I’m going to help you overcome your fear of death-defying fun. Statistically speaking, you had a 99 percent higher chance of dying in a car accident on the way here than you do riding the Thunderbolt.”
“Especially with the way you drive, the pedal to the metal,” he murmured as sweat pooled on his worry-creased forehead.
Sam grabbed his slippery hand, tugging him along the moving line of eager riders. “Come on. You’ll have fun. Just give it a chance.”
Raul shook his head, pulling away from Sam and stepping on the clog of a teenage girl behind him, who yelped in response. Raul sputtered an apology, wondering why anyone in their right mind would wear platforms to walk around in all day at an amusement park. However, if modern teens were anything like teenager Raul—who drag raced down highways at two o’clock in the morning, or on an impulse traveled cross-country with the Freedom Riders protesting segregation, which subsequently earned him a lifetime grounding sentence from his mother—most teens were not in their right mind.
“I don’t want to ride. I’ll get sick.”
“Eat this. Problem solved.” Sam handed him a shriveled root she plucked from her pocket, as if this would lessen the prospect of him vomiting all over her.
“I’m not eating that.” He grimaced at the gnarled brown lump that he was certain would only make his symptoms worse. “And I’m warning you—I will throw up on you, Sam, if I go on that ride.”
“I never liked this shirt anyway.”
Though Raul could tell she had picked out the white peasant blouse especially for this date, as it was the only fashionable top he’d ever seen her wear.
“No.”
“Please?”
“I can’t. I’m afraid.”
“Of what?”
Raul thought for a moment. “Of getting hurt, I suppose.”
Sam squeezed his clammy palm. “Everyone is afraid of getting hurt, Raul. But some things are worth the risk, don’t you think?”
Raul couldn’t waste this opportunity to throw a little jab at the girl who kept getting away. “I’m done taking risks, Sam. You’re the one who taught me that.”
Her eyebrow lifted. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Crossing his arms over his chest, he stiffened and leaned against the metal railing that wove a maze toward the roller coaster loading dock.
“It just means that I risked everything to come to this city to be with you, and I haven’t heard from you in a month. Clearly I don’t mean to you what you mean to me.”
“I never asked you to move here.”
“You didn’t need to ask, Sam. I came because I… I care about you and wanted to help you.”
“And I never asked for your help.”
“Until now,” Raul reminded her.
“One request in all our years of friendship!”
“Doing the one thing I wish you wouldn’t—going after Thomas Cook. Alone, for that matter.”
“There’s no other way for me to prove myself capable of handling my new job otherwise. If I relied on you, it wouldn’t be my credit. It’d be yours. Because you’re Raul Smothers, award-winning journalist, and I’m just Samantha Stanton, low-level advice columnist.”
“Don’t forget Samantha Stanton, who doesn’t call her friends unless she needs something.”
Sam huffed. “Don’t pin that guilt on me. You didn’t exactly make friendship with you easy. I was quite clear that I wanted to pursue my own path, a career… and if we were to…” she wordsmithed carefully, “become more than friends, you know it would derail everything I’ve worked for. I would end up exactly like my mother—a housewife barefoot in the kitchen with a baby on her hip and supper in the oven and her dreams in the toilet. That’s not me, and it will never be me.”
“What’s wrong with having a family, Sam? You act like that is the worst possible thing you can imagine.”
“To me, maybe it is. Women are not all built the same. We are not all supposed to be married, popping out kids, and cooking beef stroganoff while doting on our hapless, helpless husbands.”
Just the thought of stroganoff sent Raul’s reflux in a whirl.
“If you like the idea of family so much, why don’t you do the housekeeping and child-rearing and cooking?” Sam challenged.
“Maybe I will,” Raul accepted.
“The day I see a man barefoot in the kitchen with a baby on his hip is the day I’ll marry you, Raul.” Sam laughed as she imagined it, because in 1970 it was laughably unimaginable.
“Samantha Stanton, one day you will eat those words.”
