Sam didn’t know what he expected. Actually, that was a full-blown lie. He’d expected he’d enjoy Helene and Ignacio’s wedding. He’d expected to enjoy a few laughs with his grandmother, and when she’d had enough he knew Jesse would come pick her up and take her home, leaving Sam to openly ogle Amanda late into the night until she gave him the signal that she was ready for the two of them to head back to her room together. He had condoms at the ready. He had more champagne chilling, a short menu of late-night snacks on deck just in case they needed to refuel between what he’d hoped would be round three and four. He’d expected to wake up early tomorrow morning and kiss Amanda, finally get her phone number, and sometime next week, he’d expected he was going to call her up and ask her out on a proper date so they could really get to know each other.

He wasn’t sure what exactly had gone wrong. Not that it mattered. Amanda had told him where she stood and all he could do, what he planned to do, was respect that. She just wasn’t into him.

Sam had to face it. He was an optimist and a hopeless romantic, and both of those things sometimes got in the way of reality. Amanda had made it clear the first time she’d skipped out of his hotel room that she wanted nothing to do with him beyond their one-night stand. Running into each other again had been pure coincidence. He’d been so amped to see her again some of the sparkly dust that clouded his brain from time to time had him mistaking that coincidence for destiny.

On planet Earth, however, that wasn’t the case. If Amanda wanted him, she would have said so. But no, she’d done her best to let him down nice and easy. She liked him, but not enough to see if what he was feeling between them could become something more. Something that at least involved exchanging phone numbers.

Sam grabbed his phone off the nightstand and rolled onto his back. He pulled up Instagram and like a damn fool searched for Amanda McQueen. There were a shocking number of people with that name. Still he spotted Cha-Cha’s bright smile in the fifth circular avatar down the list. He clicked on QueenA and quickly learned that her social media didn’t give away much about her. The photos were mostly artistic shots of various LA streets. Maybe one photo out of every twenty was a picture of Amanda herself, just a close shot on her smiling face. There was one picture of her with her parents on Christmas morning two years before.