Love and Marriage
Chapter Eight
As Sam, Martin and Claire walked to the front door at Danny's house the next day, Sam took this opportunity to stare at Martin. He was carrying Claire in his arms and listening to her tell him a story about one of her friends from kindergarten. Talking with his daughter was something that made him happy, and it was nice to see him smile, even if it wasn't because he was happy in his marriage.
They had actually managed to have a civil, honest conversation last night for the first time in too long. It was nice and gave her hope, but she was also trying to be realistic. One good conversation wouldn't undo all of the hurtful things that they had said to each other and it wouldn't fix their problems.
She rang the doorbell and then stepped back from the doorway, clutching the present they had brought for Kyle tightly in her hands.
Danny opened the door and smiled when he saw who it was. "Sam!" he immediately went to hug her.
He was hugging her so tightly that she was starting to gasp for air. "Danny, I can't really breathe."
"Sorry." He apologized, pulling away. He nodded a hello to Martin and then focused his attention onto Claire. "And hello Claire. How is my favorite goddaughter today?"
"Great!" Claire smiled. "Mommy said that I get cake today!"
Danny and the rest of them laughed. "Yes you do." He looked over at Martin. "There's a bunch of Michelle's nieces and nephews in the back yard that Claire could go play with if you want to take her there."
"What do you think? You want to go play with the other children?" Martin turned his head to ask his daughter.
Claire nodded and started to squirm in his arms. "Yeah."
"Ok. Let's go then." He told her.
After Martin and Claire headed for the back yard, Danny just stared at her. Finally she just got frustrated. "What is it Danny? Do I have something weird stuck on my face or something?"
"No." He shook his head. "I just haven't talked to you lately and I was wondering how things were."
"Things are fine." Sam shrugged.
"Fine?" Danny repeated. "C'mon Sam, you know you can talk to me. Right?" He was aware that he had been slacking in the friendship department when it came to Sam. But that was only because his life became so much more complicated. First he married Michelle and then all of a sudden they had Kyle. That, coupled with work, kept him busy and somewhere along the way he stopped talking to Sam as much as he had when they worked together.
She could tell that he was fishing for information about her and Martin, figuring that Martin had probably told him about their problems. While she appreciated the fact that Danny still cared enough to try and be a friend to her, she didn't want to talk about it. "Danny, even if there was something I wanted to talk about, now is not the right time or place to have such a serious conversation. It's your son's birthday party. It's a happy occasion. So let's leave all problems out of it. Ok?"
"Ok." She had a point. This was his son's birthday party and not exactly the best time to have such a serious conversation. "But maybe some other time?"
"Sure." She shrugged.
He moved to open the doorway for her. "Come on inside. Viv and Jack are here too."
"Great. I haven't seen them in a while." Sam smiled. She immediately spotted Viv and Jack talking together in a corner of the room and walked over to them. "Hey."
"Samantha." Vivian greeted with a smile and a hug. "Where have you been hiding yourself? You haven't come down to visit us."
"I have, but you guys are always out in the field." Sam replied calmly. Work-related issues were the last thing she wanted to talk about, but kept the smile on her face.
"It's good to see you Sam." Jack gave her a smile.
"You too Jack." She nodded. "So what's been going on? Anything interesting?"
"No, not really." Viv replied. "But you did miss the funniest thing at work the other day…"
About an hour later, after hearing some stories and catching up with Viv and Jack, Sam walked around the house looking for Martin. She found him in the dining room having a conversation with another woman who worked in the FBI building. Bethany Chambers. She was very familiar with Bethany and her ulterior motives towards Martin, and she knew that Martin was aware of them too. But there he was, laughing and joking with Bethany as if he didn't have a care in the world. Bethany was flirting with him yet again, and while Martin wasn't reciprocating the flirting, he wasn't trying to fend her off either.
Although she could feel the jealousy and anger building within her, she didn't want to fight with him—not about this and not now. Since he hadn't noticed that she was staring at him, she decided to walk away and pretend that she hadn't seen him talking to Bethany. She entered the kitchen to calm down and found that Michelle was in there fussing over the cake. "So you made your own cake?" Sam asked approaching the cake and taking a good look at it.
"Yeah." Michelle smiled, putting the last bit of icing on the cake and staring up at Samantha.
"It looks really nice." Sam commented. She actually meant it too and wasn't trying to be nice. It was a long sheet cake. There was white icing and little patches of blue stars painted on the cake with icing. "I wish I could make something like this. Somehow I learned how to cook without burning the kitchen down, but I can't bake to save my life."
Michelle smiled sympathetically. "Well the only reason I can back so well is because my mother was always baking. It seemed like she was baking a cake, brownies, or cookies everyday. You should have seen me in high school. I was huge because my mother was always baking things for me to eat. I decided I had to go to college or else I'd never have a slim figure."
Sam laughed, glad that she was getting a chance to talk to Michelle. They had always gotten along very well. She remembered going on a lot of double dates with Michelle and Danny before they got married. "I think you made a wise decision."
"I think so too." Michelle laughed. "So how are you?"
"Fine." Sam replied.
"Everything ok?" she didn't mean to pry into Sam's life, but she could tell that something wasn't right.
"Yeah of course." Sam tried to keep the smile on her face. Talking about her problems today wasn't what she wanted to do. She just wanted to come here, celebrate Kyle's birthday, and have some fun for a change. Wanting to shift the focus off of herself, she brought up a new topic. "It's hard to believe that Kyle is turning one already."
"Oh I know!" Michelle agreed.
"You better watch out because time goes by really fast. One day you'll wake up and Kyle will be going off to kindergarten." She spoke from experience because that's what happened with Claire. It seemed like one day Sam turned around and Claire was already five.
"Time has already flown by at warp speed." Michelle confessed. "Kinda makes you want to have more children though, doesn't it?"
Sam was about to reply to that when she heard Claire's voice screaming for her. She immediately turned around and saw her daughter standing behind her. She was crying and holding her knee. "Sweetie, what's wrong?"
"I ran, and a boy tripped me. I fell and it hurts real bad." Claire sobbed.
"Well let me have a look at it." She kneeled down and looked at Claire's knee. It was bleeding a little but it was only a few scrapes—nothing too serious. Sam picked Claire up and looked over at Claire. "Where are your band-aids?"
"In the bathroom." Michelle told her. "Second drawer on the left underneath the sink."
"Thanks." Sam smiled at her before turning her attention back to her daughter. "Let's go get that taken care of, ok?"
"Ok." Claire's voice came through the sobs.
Sam entered the bathroom and placed Claire on the sink counter. Then she went into the drawer and pulled out the anti-bacterial lotion. "What color band-aid do you want? Blue or glow in the dark?"
"Glow in the dark." Claire sobbed.
"Ok." She pulled out the glow in the dark band-aid and smiled at her daughter. Her first priority was to get Claire to stop crying, and she had the perfect solution. "Claire, have I ever told you how your father asked me to marry him?"
"No." She shook her head.
Sam used her thumb to wipe away some of Claire's tears. "Well one night he woke me up and dragged me out to an outdoor skating rink." As she was telling this story, she started to clean up the scratches on Claire's leg.
"It was January and it was really cold out. I thought he was absolutely crazy for dragging me out of my warm bed at two in the morning to go ice skating, but I went with him anyway." She applied the anti-bacterial lotion to the scratches, noticing that Claire was starting to calm down and wasn't sobbing anymore. In fact, Claire was just sitting there, eagerly awaiting the rest of the story.
"There wasn't anyone else there since it was late, so we skated around the rink for a few minutes. We were opposite sides of the rink, but all of a sudden I see him pull out this ring box and I'm wondering what he's going to do." She tore open the band-aid's wrapper and placed it over the scratches. "Well he started to skate over to where I am, still keeping the ring box in his hand, but he tripped over himself and fell face down onto the hard ice." Remembering the image of Martin falling down onto the ice brought a huge smile to her face. He fall was anything but graceful and he had landed with a huge thud onto the ice.
"Was he hurt?" Claire asked, enjoying the story and forgetting about her previous injury.
Sam laughed. "No, he wasn't hurt but his ego was bruised. Anyway, when he fell, the ring box slid across the ice and stopped right in front of where I was standing. So as he was getting up, he told me to open the box. Next thing I know, he's on one knee asking me to marry him."
"That's a good story." Claire smiled widely.
"Yeah, it is." Sam agreed. "So how does your knee feel now?"
Claire looked down at her knee and then back at her mother. "It doesn't hurt! Thanks Mommy!" She reached out and wrapped her arms around her mother's neck, placing a kiss on her cheek.
"You're welcome sweetie." Sam smiled, helping Claire jump down from the sink counter. "Now go back out and play some more. It's almost time for cake." As an afterthought, she added, "and later I want you to point out the boy that tripped you." She had already made a mental note to have a talk with whoever the boy's mother was. No one gets away with tripping her daughter.
"Ok." Claire nodded. She ran out of the bathroom, eager to go back out and play again.
Sam stayed behind in the bathroom, throwing away the band-aid wrapper and putting the anti-bacterial cream back into the drawer. She was about ready to go back out into the party when she saw Martin standing in the doorway.
Martin had run into Michelle and she had told him about Claire falling down. He came to find Sam and make sure that Claire was ok when he heard her telling their daughter the story of how he proposed. It caught him off-guard slightly, but it was nice to remember that happy memory. It was even nicer that she was remembering it in a positive manner.
He had hid out of sight when Claire left the bathroom, hoping to catch Sam by surprise and talk to her alone for a few moments. They still hadn't been given a chance to talk since last night and there was something that he still needed to tell her. So he waited until Claire left before stepping into the doorway of the bathroom. At first Sam didn't notice him, but then she turned and saw him. "Hey."
"Hey." She replied, surprised to see him there.
"Can we talk for a moment?" He asked. God this was awkward. It was never awkward in the past, but things had changed.
"Uh, sure." She hesitated for a moment, not really sure she wanted to press her luck. They had one good conversation. The last thing they needed right now was to try and capitalize on that.
He entered the bathroom and closed the door, leaning up against the door while Sam moved back a few feet and leaned against the sink. "Is Claire ok?"
Claire. That was a safe subject. "Yeah. She's fine. She just scrapped her knee. I slapped a band-aid on and sent her back out there."
"You did more than that." Martin pointed out. "You distracted her by telling her a story and made her forget about her pain."
She looked down at the floor and could have sworn that she was blushing. He was listening to her tell that story to Claire? "You heard that?" She finally asked.
"Yeah. I didn't mean to eavesdrop…it just happened." He explained, hoping she wasn't going to be mad at him for that and start yelling at him.
"Well that was just the first story that popped into my head." She reasoned, feeling the need to defend herself.
She was being defensive, but he didn't understand why she felt like she had to be. "I thought it was a great idea. You're really good with her."
He was complimenting her? No, that couldn't be right. He hasn't complimented her parenting skills in…months, maybe even years. She had to be hearing him wrong.
He could sense that she was having a hard time believing his sincerity and decided to expand upon his compliment. Leslie was right. He needed to tell Sam about the good job she was doing raising Claire. "I know I don't tell you this enough, but you're a really good mother. You sense what she needs and you give it her. I just thought you should know that." Not wanting to tempt fate, he decided to make that be the end of their little conversation and left the bathroom before she could say anything.
She stood there in the bathroom, watching him walk away and wondering why he was suddenly complimenting her skills as a mother. The events over the past two days were really confusing her—but in a good way.