Red-sequined dress

For Emily, whose dreaming and scheming inspired this story

‘What was she waiting for?’ Molly couldn’t believe she’d actually gone through with it. Sure, she’d been joking with her friends about it for months, but that was all it was supposed to be…a really great inside joke. And yet here she was, sitting on the spotlit stage with a grand piano in a red-sequined cocktail dress. Thankfully, the dress had only set her back $25 at her favorite little boutique on University, and the owner was right, she did feel fabulous in it. But that did not make the whole situation Molly found herself in any less stupid.

Tonight was a first. And firsts are supposed to be exciting. She’d never been one of those girls in high school. No, not one of those girls, she hadn’t even been close to that. When it came to boys, she waited until things “happened,” meaning he had to make the first move. A process she had convinced herself she was content with until she looked around and found herself surrounded by friends getting married and thinking about kids. She, on the other hand, was solidly single, or what the non-delusional call alone. Just like she was now, sitting on the stage.

They’d met a few months earlier at a friend’s dinner get together. Poor grad students and free food are a match made in heaven. Sam and John had been friends for years, doing their undergrad together at the state school. John, ever the host, jumped from guest to guest lightening the “finals time” mood with his effervescent personality. He was one of those people who never had to make friends as a kid, he simply attracted them.

The art of small talk didn’t bother Molly, but with John’s friends it felt intimidating. Being a humanities major in a sea of business and med students was not her idea of a good time. Somehow her thesis topic of road trips as metaphor for personal discovery in John Green’s novels seemed childish around students contemplating saving lives or the world’s economy. Searching for a less intimidating face, Molly noticed him. Standing alone near the stairs, Sam was scanning the room, not searching for someone, but simply taking it all in. Molly caught his eye on the next sweep, causing Sam to quickly turn away blushing. Now, shy, she thought, was something she could work with.

They bonded that night over their shared love of all things Cincinnati. Sam had grown up there before moving to the “real Midwest” as he put it, while Molly’s college roommate had insisted on a road trip there to visit the flying pigs. Wandering through later, John could only shake his head as they spent the evening arguing the finer points of Cincinnati chili. (Sam championed the 5-way, calling Molly’s love of 3-way weak.)

The conversation was easy, and soon they found other shared interests. By the end of the night Molly had invited Sam to come play with her musical theatre group who was desperate for a reliable rehearsal pianist. It was the first step on the journey that ended with her sitting on stage nervously glancing at the clock.
They’d finished the run two weeks ago, but the stage still bore the day glo X’s marking blocking cues. Molly stared at a scattering of them on stage left remembering. She’s always loved being in shows in high school. This time was no different.

There was something about theatre people that brought out the extrovert in everyone, including Sam. From his first practice, Sam seemed in his element, coaching the singers and proffering suggestions about gestures to help portray a song’s emotion. Molly found herself showing up early to rehearsals and taking on extra responsibilities just to be around when he was. As the rehearsals stretched on into late fall, Molly and Sam started walking home together so neither would have to walk alone in the dark. Molly really cherished those twenty minutes each night.

It was on the sidewalks of the dark residential streets that Molly got to know the real Sam. Not that she didn’t like the sweet, polite pianist she got to know at rehearsal, but she really enjoyed the sarcastic, snarky kid she met on the walk home. Spending that time with Sam was just comfortable. Molly never felt the need to be someone other than herself. They’d proceeded right into what she had always called the “hopes, desires, dreams” phase of a relationship, that point when you could tell that person about your real dreams, or more importantly those holes in your armor.

When it was just the two of them, Sam opened up and let his guard down. He talked about his parents back at home in Ohio and missing his little sister’s 18th birthday, and big family holidays. Molly talked about missing the small campus feel of her undergrad and being able to just walk across the hall to find a friend and respite from the stress. But most of all, she missed communal meals, all her friends gathered around the table sharing stories about their day.

Molly couldn’t remember whose idea it was, but out of that conversation, ‘Thursday nights’ were born. Thanksgiving was just around the corner and neither Sam nor Molly were going to make it home to family due to work and rotation schedules. So they decided to throw a Turkey Day celebration of their own, blending family traditions of both with grad school budgets, inviting all the “homeless” grad school friends they could find.

Katy, Molly’s roommate and consummate stress baker, was thrilled to help. Then again, Molly thought, when wasn’t Katy in favor of her hair-brained ideas? It was at her urging Molly was here tonight, dressed to the nines, waiting for someone she wasn’t even sure would show!

With visions of sugar plums, pumpkin pies and dozens of other dessert ideas dancing through Katy’s head, Sam and Molly set about planning the rest of the menu. They filled the list with their comfort foods: mashed potatoes, dressing, green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, deviled eggs, and apple sauce. Neither one of them had any experience with cooking turkey and had seen enough holiday movies to know that attempting one meant a guaranteed trip to the ER or a visit from the friendly fire department, so they decided to spare at least one turkey’s life. Their Thanksgiving feast was going to be side dishes and desserts only. Real comfort food!

Sam insisted on helping, but couldn’t find his way around the kitchen. Molly remembered offering to teach him to cook some of the side dishes. Soon, their lessons turned into a weekly gig. It was payback for those lessons that she’d used to lure him here tonight. She’d finally called in the favor and asked him to teach her to play piano. Too bad he didn’t know she played piano as well as she cooked.

Molly felt bad about lying to Sam, but she had needed a plausible reason to get him there. Katy, and the girls’ mutual friend Emma, had come up with some fabulously implausible ideas ranging from starting a band (Emma), being stranded in the snow (Katy), being drafted to write an article about the dangerous lives of med students (Katy), and an unmentionable one involving a clarinet (Emma)! By the time she’ worked up the courage to actually go through with it, Molly’d missed her opportunity to use the easiest of excuses, rehearsing. But it had taken a while for the girls to convince Molly to take the first step. “Go big or go home!” Emma had said.

Everything with Emma was a sports reference. Molly and Emma met at a basketball game when fate put their tickets next to each other. Emma was a diehard fan and Molly found a soul mate that day. It was Sam’s yelling at the game on Thanksgiving that sold Emma on him. “Any man who’s highly educated and loves basketball is a great man.” Molly never had the heart to tell Emma that she was looking for a little more in a man than that, but it was immaterial by that point since she’d already found him.

Thanksgiving was a hit. The unconventional side dish-only meal was deemed a success by all. As Molly and Sam worked on the mountain of dishes in the kitchen, she floated the idea of doing dinner more often. Sure she could invite her friends over for dinner whenever, but Molly had really enjoyed Sam’s friends and watching the two very different groups interact. Hell, if she was being completely honest with herself, it was mostly an excuse to hang out with Sam. (Katy called her on it later.)

“Really? You’d be willing to do this every week?” Sam asked.

“Well, I certainly can’t afford to, but with small donations from everyone coming, yeah. I miss cooking for more than myself and Katy. And besides, Thursdays are my open days.” Molly paused before adding, “Of course, it’s always nice to have help in the kitchen.”

In the moments before his reply, Molly mentally kicked herself for the comment. It was too fast, too flirty, too forward… “Yeah. It was fun learning how to cook. If you’re willing to keep teaching me, I’ll keep helping. “ Molly was having a hard time processing what he’d said. Did Sam just agree to hang out with her once a week? Alone? In her kitchen?

Molly recovered quickly and agreed to continue the lessons, hoping she was successfully hiding her glee.
“So you think we can make this happen? Your friends will come back? We didn’t scare them away with all our humanities talk?” she teased.

“Ha! I think some of them were here just to meet some academics of the female persuasion. It’s a wonder some of those guys can function outside of the chem lab. Besides, you think any one of them would turn down your cooking?”

“You mean our cooking?” Molly had to chuckle about the male to female ratio of the party. Most of her friends and colleagues were females in the humanities. It was nice to hear that she and her girlfriends weren’t the only ones bemoaning the lack of eligible members of the opposite sex.

“Besides,” Sam said, “I’d come back just for the budding romance.”

“W-w-what?”

Sam chuckled. “You must have been too busy in the kitchen to see your friend Emma and John go at it. He roped her into an argument about idiocy of professional athletics and their exorbitant salaries.”

“But I thought you said romance? Knowing Emma and her love of sports that must have been quite the fight.” Molly pulled herself back into the conversation and away from the initial panic that Sam had been talking about them. She was glad Sam filled her in on this development.

Emma would be calling later to dissect it, Molly was sure, and she would have felt horrible admitting she was too distracted by her own romantic notions to have noticed.

“Clearly, you don’t know John that well. He loves a strong-willed woman who’s willing to argue. He’s already smitten. Honesty, I used to think that John wouldn’t ever find his match. Most girls are pretty willing to agree with what he says. He’s never really hurt for female companionship. Not that any of us really could complain about it, because by proxy neither did we I guess.” Sam’s eyes were twinkling.

Molly was pretty sure he was kidding, but she couldn’t help herself from responding, “Ah, so that’s why you’re friends, huh? Not too proud to take his castoffs?”

“Ouch. And the lady takes him down with one blow.” Sam mocked, staggering back against the counter holding his chest.

“All right, I’ll admit that was a low blow. Truce?” Sam nodded. “Will you tell me more about John? I’m sure Emma will be picking my brain as soon as she thinks you’ve left, and my being busy in the kitchen will not be a good enough excuse for her for not having any useful insights.”

Molly chuckled as she remembered how eager Sam was to help get Emma and John together. As she sat down behind the piano, she wondered if John knew what she was doing here tonight. John had helped arrange for the piano and spotlight to be set right. Having the volunteer business manager for the theatre company as a friend was awfully convenient. She’d made Emma promise not to tell him why she so desperately needed it claiming her best friend bond trumped the boyfriend bond, even though lately that argument was hard to make. She adored them both, but their incessant togetherness only served to highlight Molly’s own relationship status, like their basketball arrangement.

All three of them had entered the raffle but only Molly and John had ended up with tickets. As much as they both loved the games, neither could stomach going to the games without Emma. They struck a compromise so Emma would have ticket to every game and Molly and John split the rest in half. Emma was thrilled to get to share the games with “her loves,” as she came to call them.

John had offered to give his set to Emma so the girls could go together, but Molly knew the games were the only times Emma and John got “alone” time. So she sucked it up and suggested the compromise.

Katy learned quickly that game nights were a great time to study at the library, leaving Molly alone to yell at the TV and pace through the apartment as games got close. Molly knew she’d given up the tickets of her own volition, but it didn’t make watching the games alone easier to swallow, and it wasn’t like she could ask Emma for them back.

In hindsight, that situation wasn’t so bad. She did get some quality time with Sam out of it, once Molly had pulled herself out of her funk. Fidgeting with the fringe on the dress’s hem she thought about the night that came to be the basis for the inside joke and the inspiration for the evening at hand.

One of her “sad game nights” as she started calling them in her head, Sam called her out on her silence on their walk home. “What’s up Molls? You’re awfully quiet tonight. Are you ok?”

“Huh? Oh, I’m fine.”

“Uh huh, and I’m Bobby Flay. Spill. You’ve been quiet all week,” Sam noted, stopping.

“What? Can’t I just be quiet without something being wrong?” she snapped. As soon as she’d said it, Molly realized that it came out a little harsher than she’d planned. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just stupid.”

“Try me.”

“Fine. You heard about the ticket fiasco, right?” Sam nodded. “Well, it’s not my night and Katy’s holed up at the library avoiding the apartment. I’m just not looking forward to watching the game alone again.”

“Well, you could watch it with me. I know it’s not as good as being there, but hopefully it’s better than watching alone. I’ll even sweeten the pot and make dinner.”

Molly paused, so she didn’t look too eager to agree. Sam misinterpreted her hesitation, jumping in to add, “Come on. Give me a chance to show off my newly acquired skills.” He looked over giving his best puppy dog eyes.

“Ok. Show me what you’ve got.” Molly begged off until game time, citing a fabricated need to run to the store.

“Nope, you’re coming home with me. Someone has to make sure I don’t burn down the house. The guys would never let me live that down. Besides, I’m making dinner, you don’t need to buy food tonight.”

So much for going home to compose herself and change out of her self-described “teacher clothes,” Molly thought. She’d spent the afternoon dealing with freshman comp students and their paper revisions. “Alright, I give up. You win.”

He apparently wasn’t kidding when he said he’d need supervision. The usually bustling house, or so she’d heard, was empty. “Where are the hoards of roommates tonight?”

“Um,” Sam wandered around the house picking up, leaving Molly standing awkwardly in the entryway. “John’s at the game, Max works nights, Jason hardly lives here anymore...” Molly raised an eyebrow; Sam caught the look. “Girlfriend.”

“Ah and Ryan and Mike?” Molly still couldn’t believe six of them lived together. In the 4-bedroom house, she knew John and Sam shared a room, and guessed that Ryan was probably enjoying a room to himself with his twin Jason shacking up with a girl. Maybe their busy schedules made that many housemates bearable.

“They’re...uh...out.”

“Out?”

“You didn’t hear it from me, but they’re convinced game nights are the best time to pick up desperate girls at the bar, or tickets to the game, whichever is easiest. Their words not mine I swear. Unless John’s home, ‘fight night’ is pretty calm around here.” Sam came back to the entryway, apparently satisfied with his sixty second cleaning spree. “Come on in and stay awhile,” he said beckoning for her to come into the house.

Molly loved that Sam’s idea of cooking dinner was making boxed mac and cheese and chicken nuggets. It certainly made the supervision easy. They were also done with dinner well before game time.

He’d played for her that night. Just for her She chuckled at the keyboard half-buried under a stack of textbooks.

Molly sang along when he pulled out the showtunes book. Soon it was time for the game to start.

Sam wasn’t quite as intense as Molly was, but somehow she felt comfortable around him. They’d both grown up in sporting households. Yelling at the TV and pacing was normal.

During the half time interviews, Molly heard the arena announcer introduce the dance team. “Ha! One good thing came out of missing the game. No dance team routine.”

The first few strains of the pop-i-fied tango music were noticeable under the commentary just before the official halftime broadcast began. “Ugh. Tango? Really?”

Sam looked at her amused. “Am I missing something? Do you have a deep-seeded hatred of the dance team for a reason? You don’t seem the type.”

“The type?”

“You know, the type to hold a grudge against someone. What’d you try out in high school or something?”
Molly burst out laughing. She was laughing so hard, Sam looked on with a little fear in his eyes. “Probably questioning my sanity,” thought Molly.

“Sorry. Can you really see me dancing around in some red-sequined outfit to an awful pop princess song?”

“I’m guessing this is the wrong time to say red sequins would flatter you?” he teased.

Molly playfully smacked him. “You’re such a boy.”

He grinned. “Sad, but true. But that’s what you love about me, right?”

“Right. Something like that,” Molly replied sarcastically. “Ugh Maybe I would take the dance team routine over you…”

“All right..Truce? I’ll even wave the white flag of ice cream.”

The dress had been her idea later. Rehashing the story later, Emma had loved Sam’s vision of her in red sequins, deciding red was clearly his favorite color. Any time Molly wore it after that Emma teased her about wearing it for him. If the school color hadn’t been red, it might not have been such an issue. But Emma had insisted if Molly was going to seduce Sam, she’d better do it in a red-sequined dress. “He practically begged for it already. I can see it now, your bridesmaids will be …”

“Like a row of Las Vegas showgirls?” Molly interrupted Emma’s day-scheming, as she called it. “You’re planning my imaginary wedding to a boy who doesn’t even like me?”

“What do you mean he doesn’t like you?” Katy hollered from the kitchen. “He sounds enamored.”

“Yeah with someone else.”

Katy joined Emma in the living room with warm chocolate chip cookies in hand. “Oh sweetie. Why do you say that?”

Molly tried to pull herself together. The pieces had fallen into place earlier in the day. “There’s another girl.

Remember when I was over at the house for the game? Well when I was in his room…”

“Oooh.”

“Moving on. I saw like three pictures of him and this girl. All really lovey dovey.”

“Oh hon,” Katy put her arm around Molly.

“And then he went to that basketball game with her.”

“Wait, you mean the game you saw him at for 30 seconds? How can you even be sure it’s the same girl?” Katy asked.

“It’s her. I know. It’s probably the girl he was watching on YouTube before he snapped his laptop shut yesterday.”

“Wait you saw Sam yesterday? Where? When?”

“We had a study date at the library. But you’re missing the point. There was something or someone he didn’t want me to see. And then there’s the song. He played a song he’d written that night at his house. It was beautiful, but it was titled ‘For Lindsey.’ Clearly it’s serious with this Lindsey if he’s writing her a song.”

Emma, who had been suspiciously quiet during the entire rationale, chuckled. “Molly I love ya, but you are the least attentive person I know. Lindsey? Really?”

Molly was truly confused now. “Yes, Lindsey.”

“As in his 18 year old sister Lindsey?” Emma asked.

“His sister? But they looked nothing alike. Wait, his sister’s name is Lindsay? How do you know?”

“John. He told me all about the song. It was Sam’s gift to his sister. John helped him record it because he didn’t make it back for the party, remember?”

“Oh my God, I’m such an ass.”

“I can’t explain the computer yesterday, but the rest of it was Lindsay. As for the looks, she’s adopted. You knew that. Molly, don’t let your jealously get the better of you.”

“So what does this mean?” Molly muttered, mostly to herself.

“It means it’s time for operation red dress to begin,” Emma said gleefully.

That was all the encouragement she’d needed at that point. Molly had bought the dress the next day.
Molly was yanked from her daydream as she heard an outside door slam. Was that footsteps she heard? No one else was supposed to be here, but Sam wasn’t the only one with an extra set of keys.

She squinted at the door as it creaked open. With the spotlight shining in her eyes, she couldn’t see the source of the heavy footfalls. Her heart raced. She hadn’t really thought this part of the evening out. Molly wouldn’t allow herself to believe it would happen. It was her coping mechanism. If she never really expected things to happen, she was never disappointed when they didn’t come to fruition.

She exhaled loudly, and only then did Molly realize she’d been holding her breath. The source of her apprehension had gotten close enough that she could finally make out the face. It was him!

Sam grinned like an idiot when he saw her reaction. He bounded up the steps to the stage dropping his music and coat as he did. He wrapped her up in the bear hug and swung her around. When he finally put her down,

Molly just stared incredulously. Sam flushed under her gaze.

“Um...hi,” he stammered.

“Hi. I’m glad you came.”

“Of course, I came. I owe you piano lessons remember?”

“Oh.” Molly’s face fell. Did he really think that was what this was all about? She hesitated. She was about to look like the biggest ass in the world. He chuckled. What was so funny? Did he enjoy making her squirm?

“Of course when I realized what you were really after ...” he teased. “I was still happy to oblige.”

It was Molly’s turn to blush. “Uh..oh. Um...how did you know?” Yeah, that was smooth she thought to herself.

“You, Miss Molly, aren’t the only grad student with the power of Google at their fingertips. You looked
adorable in your 11th grade recital by the way. After finding that on YouTube, I thought I got the idea. I wasn’t completely sure I was right until I saw this dress,” he said fingering the strap on her right shoulder.

“I hadn’t thought about that. You got me.”

“Yes I did.” He pulled her closer, and whispered in her ear, “And if you don’t mind, I plan on keeping you.”