Free Grounded By You by Ivy Sinclair

really took off. Before my mom turned into a plastic Barbie doll who only cared about what other people thought of her. It’s one of my favorite memories of when I was a kid because that was a rare occurrence by the time I was like eight or nine.”
    Sam reached out, and his fingers slid down Millie’s arm. “I get it,” he said softly. Then he pointed over her shoulder. “What about that one?”
    Millie followed the path of his finger. That painting was much darker, and she felt an old echo of pain in her chest. It was a solitary girl standing on the edge of a vast ocean in the moonlight. The girl was featureless, and although the water at her feet was calm, there was something slightly menacing about the shadows from the corners of the canvas that surrounded her.
    “That’s not a memory,” she said.
    She felt Sam’s presence behind her as he moved closer. “What is it then?”
    If it were anyone other Sam asking, she would have made something up or laughed it off. She would have pretended that the image in the painting didn’t mean anything at all.
    “It was a representation of how I felt at that moment in time when I painted it. Lost. Alone. Like the whole world moved and swirled around me, but I was standing still. It was as if somewhere along the way my path disappeared and someone had hidden it away from me. In order to move forward, I knew that I would have to take a step into the great unknown and risk that it would swallow me whole.”
    She remembered those dark days. It encompassed the weeks after she came back from summer break. Her thoughts and emotions were a whirl of confusion and pain. She couldn’t believe that she was capable of leaving someone that she cared about the way that she had left Sam. She didn’t think she’d ever forgive herself for that.
    Yet he was there beside her now, looking down at her with concern and compassion in his eyes. She didn’t feel as if she deserved it.
    She choked back a sob and then she found herself in Sam’s arms. It was as if the well of emotions that she had been holding inside overflowed, and the tears fell unbidden. She cried for the little girl who learned that in order to survive in the new world, she had to grow a thick skin. She cried for the fact that she never let anyone get close to her, and then when someone finally did, she left him behind without a backward glance. She was twenty-three years old, and she cried because she knew she still had so much more to learn about life and love, and she was afraid she’d already lost that chance.
    Sam said nothing. He stroked her hair and let her cry it out. After what seemed like hours, there was nothing more to give. She turned her face up toward him and met his eyes.
    “I can’t explain why I acted the way I did at the end of last summer. It won’t make any sense, and it won’t make it better or change what happened,” she whispered. She was afraid then that he was going to tell her to go to hell. That his reappearance in her life had been just a way of him finding the right way to strike back at her for being such a bitch. “It was wrong, and I’m sorry. But what I’m really sorry for is that I didn’t say goodbye.”
    Instead, he sighed, and one of his hands came up to wipe the tears on her cheek away. “I am sorry too, Millie. There were a lot of things that were left unsaid between us. I figured you knew that, and maybe wanted to save me from embarrassing myself. I kept thinking that I did something to push you away.”
    She bit her lower lip, uncertain what to say next. She saw that his eyes drifted down to her mouth as she did it, and her heart sped up. Millie had been with her fair share of men, but this was different. There was something strangely intimate about that moment that she had never remembered feeling with a man before. When Sam looked at her, she knew that he saw her for who she was, not just some pretty face, or a person who carried the St. John name. She appreciated that