Sam

Sometimes Anne fell in love twenty times in a day.

On the subway to work, she felt the warmth of a sleeve resting against her bare arm.

"Don't get any big ideas/They're not gonna happen," Thom told her as she closed her eyes and rattled along.

All of this. All of this. All of this. The first night, he held her on his knees with her head curled against his chest like a child. Then he took her face gently in his hands and looked into her eyes. "All of this just because you got silly one night and decided to talk to me." All of this. All of this. All of this.

But Bleecker Street came and she opened her eyes to the world around her. Directly across the street from her menu board were three European men in the pub window. French, she was fairly certain. They soon abandoned their post for a smoke outside, and she saw more clearly the third man who had been hiding behind the molding. He was beautiful. The kind of beautiful that sent a painful tingle through her body and limbs and fingers and made her heart hurt.

Tall, straight, and limber, he looked up at the sky. A cigarette perched between his red lips and a cloud of smoke circled his head and climbed up towards the clouds. His jeans were rolled up beneath his knees, exposing his calves. How Elizabethan it was, Anne thought, to notice those calves. She imagined herself a Phebe in the forest..."His leg is but so-so...." His head turned and looked her directly in the eyes, halting her prattling imagination.

The French re-entered the pub and Anne returned to her work of flitting about and laughing and pushing tables and doling out menus and pretending to notice them no more. But she saw them talking, she saw them watching her, she saw them finish their drinks, she saw them pay the bill, and she turned away because she couldn't bear to see him leave.

But when next she turned around, Beauteous had crossed the street and was upon her. Towering over her. And looking down at her with fantastically icy blue-green eyes. He was not French.

"All three of us fell in love with you from across the street. But I loved you the most," said Sam-from-Boston.

On the second floor fire escape, Jordan Catalano leaned back and ran his fingers through his hair. On a fire escape three stories above Jordan, Van's golden face glowered down at her from a ring of hookah smoke. The man with black hair and perpetually too-short pants passed by on her right. The man who had Aidan's chocolate eyes passed by on her left.

And there was Sam before her.