Zoya’s P.O.V
As soon as I reached home and closed the door to the cabin, I was startled to find Sam at my back. He was doing the same thing that he had done to me the other day again, that strange act that I could not very well explain as to why he had been doing such a thing. If I didn’t know better, I would say that he was… sniffing me? Taking in my scent in the same way that animals did.
But why would he do that? He was not an animal. I thought back to what he had said before as well, the one statement where he basically implied that he was not human like me. I wondered what it meant, and if it had something to do with this strange animal-like habit of his. But that was foolish, wasn’t it? There was no way. It was probably just an expression, and this was just a habit of his that I was reading too deeply into.
“Sam,” I called out, but he did not seem to be listening to me, much too deep in his thoughts to even hear me or be aware of his surroundings, or, even, what he was doing. His lips were pursed, and he had this intense yet far away and distant look in his eyes. He did not look absent-minded, but he might as well have been, by the way he was so unresponsive even as I called out his name a bunch of times.
My mind was suddenly transported back to that night, and I had a vivid recollection of what had transpired that night, that intimate secret I kept to myself and didn’t know whether he was aware that it had even happened. That kiss… I remembered it like it was happening all over again, like he had his lips on mine right now, and I was feeling the electrifying sensation of his hand on the back of my neck as he searched my mouth for… something… in a sort of rabid desperation.
I replayed the scene in my head, a guilty pleasure that I only now admitted to myself, and relished in my visit back to it, feeling the tingling sensation of his lips all over again like I was feeling it for the first time, and like he was actually kissing me right now, when in fact our current situation could not be farther from that.
I snapped out of it, a hypnosis victim snapping out of a trance, and focused on the facts, the way things actually were right now. I blinked to sharpen my concentration, and now I could see that Sam looked angry at me. He was looking at me like I had done something wrong.
Then there was this heavy feeling in my gut that I could neither ignore nor indulge. It was like an anchor, rooting me in place, and not the good kind. It was the kind where the hook got caught under the weight of the rock, and I could not move unless I cut myself free or swam to the depths to push the weight off it.
I gathered the right words to say, breathing deeply. “Is something wrong?” I asked, frowning. “What’s the matter?” Part of me feared that he would take my prompt as an invitation to start listing all the things that were wrong about me, never mind the fact that it did not have anything to do with him. It was an irrational fear, and one that was likely brought about by the trauma Ravi and my mother had caused.
Sam, ever the master of deflection, asked instead of answering, “Who were you with?”
That angered me. Why did he care who I was with, and why did it even matter? Moreover, he was making me feel like my whole existence was a mistake, like all I could ever do was wrong and nothing right. Who was he to make me feel like this? Still, the people-pleaser pacifist in me did not want to put up a fight, so in response I only asked calmly, “Why?”
Sam was not as patient as I. “Just answer the damn question, Zoya,” he snapped. He was seething now, like it really did matter to him to know who I was with. Goddamn, he was just a stranger to me, and yet he was acting like I somehow owed him… Even if the larger part of me was scared of his unruly and unpredictable behavior, the smaller part of me secretly felt giddy because he was being… protective.
That part of me was stupid, so I paid it no mind. Wanting to know the reasoning behind his anger, I answered truthfully, “I was with the sheriff, Ezra. There was an accident up in the mountains so he had brought the rescue team to help the victim. Oh, we even had lunch together after I finished work. There! That’s all I did for work today. Are you happy now? Or do I need to explain all my medical procedures to you as well? Why does it even matter to you, anyway?”
I didn’t know which angered him further, the tone with which I answered him, or the fact that I had had a meal with the sheriff, whom he seemed to dislike for whatever reason that, I could not figure out. In fact, he didn’t seem to like anyone anyway, especially not me.
“Yes,” he seethed, “I am happy. Very happy. In fact, I am so happy that I want to dance and sing. Don’t you want to dance and sing?”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I finally managed to say, and the pathetic people-pleaser in me flinched. Inwardly, I was scared that he would get even angrier and perhaps get physical with me, I could never guess what he was going to do, but I remembered the courage and confidence with which I faced him the very first night we met. That had felt good to me, and so I wanted to summon that same rush of control again.
He was about to retort, but I was having none of it.
“You know what, fuck it.” I shoved past him and went into my room, slamming the door shut in the process, not caring about his explanation or his mood swings.
I could not find any reasonable explanation for his misplaced anger, and I did not know why he thought it would be okay to take it out on me. Still, I did not want him to know that I was disappointed with him and myself, so I hid it.
The heavy feeling in my gut seemed to grow heavier with each ticking moment, and the weight doubled even more now that I was behind these closed doors, my last look of him being the frown on his face. I did not know why this situation was affecting me this way, much like how I did not understand why Sam was acting like that.
What’s worse was that this predicament just slapped the harsh reality onto my face: the fact that I painfully, excruciatingly know so little about Sam that even his real name was a mystery to me, and I realized that I did not like that one bit.