Mrs. Wrong Last Name

Chapter Twenty-five

After a while she woke up.

The lights were low and her head was pounding. She was disoriented and had to pull it together some to try and figure out where she had been taken. She squinted her eyes and tried her best to see the rest of the room. She couldn't see Stacy and hoped to God she wasn't here. She would never be able to explain to Samson how this happened.

Her relationship with Samson went back some 22 years. She met him in the dorm cafeteria just two weeks into their freshman year at South Carolina. He was hard to miss- dark complexion, green eyes, black curly hair... and he drove a Ferrari. She came in the cafeteria late one day and found him eying the selections at the jello bar.

She leaned in very close to him, close enough for him to smell her Victoria's Secret Vanilla Lace lotion, and said "They have peach today."

He looked at her and grinned, and wondered for a second if the cafeteria was baking cookies. "Are you sure that's not orange?"

"Psst!" she rolled her eyes. "There are few in the world with my level of jello expertise, and I can personally attest to you with conviction that that is in fact peach."

He continued to look at her, suspicious like, but a smile formed on the corner of his mouth. He got the peach- all the while looking at her- and sauntered off to a table to enjoy his lunch.

She smiled at the interaction and after making her selections joined her girlfriends. "So omg, you just talked to Ferrari!" one of them said.

"Oh yeah?" she commented, knowing darn well who he was. Like she just gave out free jello advice to anyone.

"Yes- and I think he is smiling at you!"

The whole table of sorority girls turned towards Samson and he lifted his hand in a thumbs up towards her. Several of them squealed.

From that day on they had a meaningful connection.

She went on three dates with Samson in that first month and they hung out lots between classes. As it turned out his father was the president of Bolivia, and she picked his brain incessantly about South American politics. She learned many things from Samson that you can't read in a text book, such as the many ethnicities in Bolivia and the complexity in uniting them. She had never really thought before about how countries acquire their borders, but he taught her by using the US as the barometer. He pointed out the difference in Southern culture, Texan culture, Californian culture, the West, the Northeast, etc. and how each of those could stand separately as their own microcosm of ideals, morals, etc. He asked her to think about how hard it would be to unite all these different people if not for a particular idea. But most importantly he taught her that the thing that united the states was not their similarities, but their one shared value of liberty at all costs.

The idea that sometimes everyone doesn't have to be for the same thing, they can be against the same thing.

Bolivia was similar. When their borders were arbitrarily drawn, the lines bisected ethnic groups and families and separated them into completely different countries. Different politicians would play on that for their own gains, the whole idea of don't vote for me, vote against such and such policy. The more he got into it the more she learned. And she learned a lot.

Date three he told her he loved her. He wanted her to come home to the Palace with him sometime over break. She just stared at him a long time. "Samson, I can't be the person you need me to be," she said.

"You don't know what I need," he said. "And besides, there are differences in wants, needs and likes. Do I need to explain the differences to you?"