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Sampson
Now…
“Sampson Ibrahim, are you telling me you’re sitting here, twenty years later, and apologizing for ghosting me after your prom? You know, totally disappearing, moving away? That?” There was fire in her pretty eyes. She was still angry, and rightfully so.
“Among other things,” I replied.
I watched her brow furrow as she asked, “What other things?”
“I…it would be better if I showed you.”
“Showed me what?”
“Why I left. Everything. But I can’t do it here. Will you come up to my room with me?”
“No,” she said without hesitation. “This is beginning to look like some sad scheme for you to fuck your first again or something. What’s going on, Sam? Things haven’t been working out with your wife or girlfriend or whatever you have?”
“I’ve…I don’t have a wife. I’ve been with other women, though. Many other women. None of them are the reason I’m here, Temple.”
“Why, then? A sudden case of guilt? Yes, you took my virginity and—”
“You took mine, too.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You took my virginity, held me in your arms all that night, told me you loved me, and then you left. Your whole family left like you were running from the law or something. After all those months we were together, all the things we shared, I gave you my fucking young-ass heart, and you didn’t even so much as send me a postcard or place a simple call to let me know you were leaving, but that was forever ago. I’ve lived several lives since then, and I—”
Leaning across the table and lowering my voice, because she’d slightly raised hers and I needed to calm the energy of this conversation down, I asked, “Have you been happy? Fulfilled? Have you felt unloved, unappreciated? Has there been something missing, a hollowness inside that you haven’t been able to fill no matter how hard you’ve tried?”
Her plush lips parted, but no words were spoken before she closed them.
“Come to my room with me. I promise you my intentions are pure. I won’t touch you, Temple…unless you ask me to.”
Her lashes fluttered and eyes lowered before she nodded her assent. “Okay.”
Temple
Twenty years earlier…
We had been boyfriend and girlfriend for a couple of months, and although I’d agreed to our little relationship on a whim, I was swiftly developing feelings for this hauntingly handsome boy with the extensive vocabulary and quiet confidence. Sampson was just different, smart but not obnoxiously so. My grades were actually better than his, but his mind? It was boundless. The things he said, the thoughts he shared, were beyond the scope of anything a regular teenager should’ve been able to grasp.
Sitting on a picnic table in a park that Sampson had determined was located at the exact halfway point between his house and mine, we huddled close together in the biting January air, kissing, talking, and just being together.
“Temple—a place of worship. Your parents knew what they were doing when they named you that.” Our foreheads were touching, and as he spoke, steam flowed from his mouth.
“Why do you say that? You worship me or something?” I asked.
“In the sense that I revere and adore you? Yes. You’re my sanctuary from the things that make life heavy for me.”
“Your parents?”
He nodded as he lifted a gloved hand to my cheek.
Sam’s parents held high expectations of him. They were immigrants, Ethiopian scholars who owned businesses and expected an insane level of greatness from their only child. The weight of thepressure on him could hobble an elephant.
“Sampson—sun.”
He lifted his head, surprise in his eyes as they met mine.
Smiling, I teased, “You’re not the only one who knows how to look up name meanings.”
