Chapter Ten – Midnight Sun
My mother wonders if Martin has a past.
An unhappy childhood that he wishes he could forget. A failed marriage that has left him utterly heart broken. Perhaps a secret lost child of his own that he can't quite let go of.
Samantha Spade knows everyone has a past. Some secret buried deep inside, lurking, just waiting for a chance to make an unwelcome appearance in the present to derail a life believed to have finally been on a track that's right for a change.
She's taken to watching Martin. Studying him intensely when she thinks he isn't looking, trying to decipher the complexities, to determine exactly what past secret lurks behind those beautiful blue eyes.
Occasionally he catches her looking at him that way.
"What?" he always queries searching her own eyes for answers in the game she seems to be playing with him. He's not sure what the game is. What he's supposed to do, he doesn't know the rules.
"Nothing."
It's always nothing.
"Just thinking."
He doesn't ask more questions but he continues to wonder all the same.
There's something about Samantha Spade. An enigma he is determined to get to the bottom of.
She confuses him with her coy smiles and friendly banter. The way she always stands slightly too close to him and yet he still feels a million football fields away from her.
And the way she looks at him. Like she's scoping him out. Trying to take him and turn him inside out so she can see what he's really all about. It unnerves him and at the same time he can't get enough of it.
He'll ask her out one of these days, for a drink, or dinner, or a movie. First he has to work up the courage. Maybe when he does, then he'll get the chance to really figure her out.
My mother knows the effect she has on men. She'd have to be blind not to notice the way they look at her and it makes her comfortable to know she is the one in the power seat. She made that decision after my father. He was the one to rob her of her heart, and her faith in men.
She knows that Martin wants her, that he's simply too scared, too intimidated maybe to take the first step. She leaves him for the time being. But if she's admitting it only to herself and the silence of the night, she wants him too.
She needs to play these games first. Has to give herself that power, to know the dark secrets and weaknesses that he possesses. The kind of things that if it came to the end would be the cause of her broken heart.
If she has learnt nothing else from her past, my mother has learnt falling without a safety net is simply setting yourself up to be hurt, that you need to know how to stop her heart breaking before it's broken beyond repair.
Tonight she goes home, Greg Pritchard's life of secrets playing in her mind, a movie on permanent repeat.
She wonders, not for the first time how a man can say "I love you" and mean it with every fiber in his heart and soul but then have secrets, so big that they haunt every breath he takes, echo in every step he walks.
Greg Pritchard was forced to be one of those men.
Jack Malone chose to be one.
Even now, my mother still lies awake at night and wonders how Jack could have held her and loved her with the deepest sincerity when by all accounts he loved his wife too.
She is certain that Martin is not one of those men with secrets so deep that shadows follow them wherever they go. She knows Martin is different. She knows he is honest and open and if only she could find the strength within herself to ask she wouldn't need to spend hours in the office silently looking for the answers in his eyes to satisfy her curious heart.
She should ask him. Stop these childish games she has been playing for far too long already but there's something that stops her.
It's fear.
An almost foreign concept to Samantha Spade these days when it comes to men because she possesses that infinite power. She has them when she wants them. When she needs them. It's never really about them.
And Martin isn't like that.
She's drawn to him not by choice but by a magnet pulling her towards him leaving her no other direction to go. And that's what really scares her.
He's reeling her in without even trying.
She's lost her power.
She wants him. She needs him.
It's all about him.