When you haven't seen him in so many years. When the photograph in your mind morphs what is real into what is not. When sadness and despair and loss overwhelm your senses. When your dreams become nightmares.
Sam looked like himself. He wasn’t my type if you called my type a type. He was tall. I can still stretch out my arms after all these years and rest them where his shoulders were. His hair was cut kind of short for the day and he had a mustache. I kind of wondered about the mustache since he had such a beautiful face. He had the kind of skin you’d kill for. I wanted to touch it everywhere. He had a big Kennedy smile with perfect white teeth. When he’d laugh, and he laughed often, you wanted to know the joke, to be in on it. That’s what I remember, him sitting at the little bar at Mo’s on his corner barstool smiling his smile. He could make something funny out of anything. He was good-looking in the kind of way Southern women like. The girls who hadn’t yet married, their biological clocks tick-tocking to the sound of clanging wedding bells. I’d hear them talking over their glasses of dry white wine about men they wanted, men like Sam. Accomplished, but also sensuous.
Hot and sexy was a rare commodity in Beaumont, so a guy like Sam really stood out.
He had a good job as a Texas Government college professor. You have to be smart as a whip to teach people this state’s mess of a constitution and he was good at it. He’d let you know loud and clear just how fouled up Texas lawmaking was. He was the kind of man who becomes more and more the more you get to know him. And then, before you knew it, you couldn’t live without him. Looking back on those nights at Mo’s, I try to remember the first time I saw him. To be honest, I can’t recall and I’ve tried hard. The period before I knew Sam runs together like an impressionist painting, the colors transient, somewhat like the people from my past and memories they left behind.
from Jules, the Truth Finder. Read the first three chapters with this special opportunity.