"The day has barely started and my clients are already giving me headaches," she sighs, a scowl forming on her pretty face. "They may be rich to death but there's only so much my sanity can take. I wish I never met them, honestly."
Danny places himself right behind her, his hands on her tensed shoulders. He starts massaging them.
"Yeah, Sam, that's the downside of meeting people in general—they can be fantastic or they can be horrible but you can't unmeet them. No matter what, you can't unmeet people and that's just too bad," he says in a joking tone.
But his words sound familiar, they make something in Sam's head click, they bring back a distant memory that she buried. Sam remembers being seven and hearing the same words leaving her mom's mouth. If she he tries hard enough, Sam is certain she can even remember the disdain in her mom's voice.
"Yeah, that's what my mom used to tell me: 'Be careful who you meet, Samantha, you can never unmeet them.'," her tone is detached. The words just fly out of her mouth as if this was her only aim; being detached and unbothered. Danny doesn't say anything, he lets her speak, listens to her, but his hands never stop moving. She is still very tense, even under his touch. "She never said it but I knew she was talking about my dad whenever she said that," she pauses and Danny doesn't have to look at her to know that her lips are tight and her face creased. She always looks like that when she's upset; like a child whose dreams had been smashed and burned right in front of her eyes. "She hated him and I never forgave her for that."
She remembers being seven and praying under her blankets at night, asking, begging God to never, ever let her grow up as cold as her mother. But then she turned nine years old and she already lost all faith in the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus and God. By nine, she already had sadness and sorrow that couldn't disappear in water or in air, no, Sam's pain was something hard and something that remained.
It is something that she carries with her forever.
The more Danny spends time with her, the more he can distinguish the colours of her feelings and the intensity of her emotions. At the bottom of her heart, there's a little girl who has been hurt too many times and around her heart, there's a monster, a beast guarding what's left of her innocent, naïve self.
Sam protects herself like secret and Danny thinks that's brave and saddening
"Yo! Sam! You coming?" One of her clients shouts and Sam blinks. She didn't notice that Danny had stopped massaging her shoulders and had stepped right in front of her, staring at her with concern, big, soft eyes glistening with worry.
"You okay?"
"Always," she says as she rolls her eyes. "Well, I gotta go. Thanks for the quick massage," she starts walking around him but Danny stops her with a hand on her arm.
"Wait."
She brushes her hair out her face. "Yeah?"
"I wouldn't want to unmeet you," His goofy smile looks like a love declaration and her heart hurts. It would hurt even more when she leaves. "I'm glad that I met you and I'm glad that you came working at the Montecito when you did. You know I like having you around, Marquez," he winks at her. "So I wouldn't want to unmeet you, Samantha Jane. Never."
There's a sort of endless sincerity that Danny emits and he makes her feel like he would tell her the secrets of the universe if she ever asks him to. So she smiles because that's all she can do that when he's around.
"That's so sweet but what did I say about trying to charm me, McCoy?"
Hands on her hips, her head titled to the side, she smirks at him and if she was into public display of affection she would have marked him with her lipstick and kissed the smile off of his face.
"I mean it," his smile doesn't waver because he feels like he's already won for the day: he made her smile and happy. "I really do, Sam."
"I know," she says, her eyes gazing intensely into his. "Thank you, Danny."
