Quadruple Duty

Sammara looked amazing as always, even on the tiny screen. Of course I was always happy to see her face. And she mine. Only this time—

“How could you not have told me!”

My heart sank. Something was wrong.

“What are you—”

“Oh don’t even, Kyle! Don’t insult me by pretending not to know what I’m talking about. Jason told me everything. Ryan too.”

I saw anger. Bitterness. Resentment. But those I could take, those I could handle.

What I couldn’t handle was the hurt.

“I’m sorry,” was all I said at first. “I wanted to tell you. I would’ve told you, except—”

“A computer?” Her expression was disbelief mixed with outrage. More outrage though. “You picked me from some stupid computer?”

Not a stupid computer, I wanted to say. The smartest fucking computer the government owns.

“You weren’t at that bar to meet anybody,” Sammara said flatly. “You were there for me.”

I nodded. It was all I could do.

“I thought you got stood up,” she said. “I thought you were meeting someone who answered your ridiculous ad.”

Slowly, another realization dawned over her.

“Did you even place that ad?”

“No,” I admitted.

On the other side of the screen — on the other side of the world, really — Sammara shook with fury. “Well… shit!”

“Honey, please calm down.”

“Oh no,” she smirked. “Don’t tell me to be calm. You lied Kyle. You set me up, intentionally mislead me. I know all about how you were there for me, and how you delayed my actual date, and how neither one of us really got stood up at all.”

The sour feeling in the pit of my stomach intensified. I felt absolutely terrible. I wanted to hold her, to tell her none of it mattered. That it all worked out in the end anyway, and that everything I did was just to make sure we had the chance to meet her.

She was so perfect. The one person in the whole world who might actually go for what we were proposing. And yet…

“You let me go on,” she said. “All this time. Everything between us, it all started off on this one big lie.”

“Sammara, what was I going to say?” I demanded. “What kind of first date pickup line involves telling you exactly what we’d done?” She said nothing, so I continued. “Did it hurt when you fell from heaven? Or did my friends and I write a c

ustom-tailored, multi-level query to pluck you from the NSA database, like the angel you really are?”

My attempt at levity fell flat. Her face went tight with something, but I couldn’t tell what. I could see her struggling, though.

“See how ridiculous that sounds? Honestly, can you imagine any scenario where I could’ve told you what we’d done… and you wouldn’t run away screaming within the first two minutes?”

She folded her arms. But she was still silent.

“Sammara, you were everything we wanted. Absolutely everything. We had to take a chance. I had to take a chance…”

“You should’ve told me.”

I nodded. “I know.”