Dream Haunter (15 page)

She slumps down next to the car,
ignoring the throbbing pain that comes when blood drips from tips
of her fingers, as she cries. A few kind hearted men walk over to
her, guiding her away from the car while the rest pull the door
clean off of what is left of the car.

Sirens wail, her legs shake as she
clumsily makes her way over to the car, kneeling in the little
shards of glass as she takes in a few sharp breaths, her fingers
trembling as she reaches into the car.

Sam lays there, immobile, with blood
running from his brow to his cheek. Melody grabs on to his
shoulders, pulling his torso out of the car and laying his head in
her lap.

“
Sam? Can you hear me? Sam,
wake up! Sam?” she cries, tears burn as they use her cheeks for
their stomping ground.

The paramedics lift him from her lap,
gently laying him on a stretcher as someone checks Sam’s
pulse.

“
We still have him,” a man
with a buzz cut hair shouts as he holds an oxygen mask to Sam’s
face.

Melody stands next to the
stretcher, holding Sam’s hand tight in her shaking fist as a wave
of relief flows over her like cool rain, but is quickly washed away
with a dizzying realization: The paramedic left open options of
what could happen to Sam, plenty of things for Melody to worry
about
.

“
What if they lose him
before we get to the hospital? He only said that they still had
him, but he didn't say that he was going to make it…”
These thoughts send mental blows to Melody’s
sickened gut. The pain is so overwhelming; she feels bile working
its way up her throat, right before she faints.

………………………………………………………

*Beep.*

Something is beeping.

*Beep.*

It’s close.

*Beep.*

And repetitive.

Melody’s eyes are too heavy to lift
their lids, so she continues listening to the beeping, trying to
remember what had happened before she fell asleep.

Her nostrils flare at the smell
antiseptics and then, not so far behind the cleaning supply smell,
is Sam with his coffee and leather smell. It all rushes back to her
now; the sound of metal crunching together and the sickening
feeling her heart got when Sam’s blood oozed itself out of his skin
and slid down his pale flesh.

Melody pulls her strength from her
soul, pushing her eye lids open as she lets her head fall to her
right shoulder. Sam lay on the bed opposite of her, his skin
stitched and bandaged where the doctor had seen fit.

She throws her legs off of the bed; her
head begging her to lie back down. She interlaces her bandaged
fingers with his callused ones, not noticing the doctor slipping in
the room.

The doctor, a tall, young woman, holds
a silver clip board against her white coat, which plays off her
dark sun kissed skin in her favor.

“
He didn't suffer too much
damage; a few cuts, very miner concision, a sprained wrist and a
dislocated shoulder.  He should wake up soon. We just have him
on some pretty strong pain medication, which is why he’s sleeping
right now,” the woman smiles, showing her artificially white teeth,
before leaving the room.

Melody pulls a chair from under the
windowsill, grasping the stained wood of its back as she drags it
over to Sam’s bed. She sits down upon the green cushion, leaning
forward just enough to kiss Sam before gently laying her head next
to his hand, letting herself drift off to sleep.

………………………………………………
..

She awakes, not long after falling
asleep, to Sam’s rough thumb rubbing across her cheek. She picks
her head up, tears sliding down the creases of her bright and wide
smile.

“
Sam! Are you ok? How do you
feel?” her heart races as she speaks.

Sam smiles out of the corner
of his mouth, pushing her tears away with his thumb.
“I'm fine,” he assures her.

 
He makes a grunting
noise as he leans towards her, kissing her briefly before laying
his head back down on the downy white pillow.

A nurse walks in, her perfume hanging
around her in a dense pink cloud, using her clean fingers tap the
bag of fluids hanging next to the twin sized hospital
bed.

“
We’re just going to keep
you here over night,” the short nurse says, “And make sure you’re
ok. After that you guys can feel free to go home.”

Melody gives a polite smile as the
nurse scurries out of the room, her white Keds squeaking against
the linoleum flooring.

Melody lies on top of the white and
blue checkered hospital sheets next to Sam, nestling her head
against his chest, making sure his heart doesn’t skip a beat. Sam
holds his arms loosely around her waist, not minding that she
worries about him because it just assures him that she loves
him.

Chapter
Twenty-Three

Sam’s muscles ache and his head throbs
behind his eyes, but it’s not as bad as the pain was the night
before. He looks down at Melody, her long copper hair falling
across her face like a veil as it lies in curls across his hospital
gown covered chest. He gently brushes her hair off of her face with
his finger tips, getting lost in the innocence her face possesses
when she sleeps.

“
Good morning mister
Winters!” a petite, brunet nurse in multicolored pink and purple
scrubs chirps.

Sam had forgotten the fact that he was
in a hospital bed and not his own.

He scratches his scalps. “Oh, um, I
guess it is morning. Are we all good to go home?”

The nurse nods, smiling down at them
before her short, little legs pull her out of the room. Melody
rolls to her stomach as Sam slides out from under her, retrieving
his cloths from a white cabinet by the sink, slipping his jeans on
under the blue and white checkered hospital gown, before pulling
the gown off and reaching for his shirt. Melody inhales through her
nose, the stench of sick people giving her a rude awakening before
she sits up. Sam’s back towards her, his arms struggling to pull
the shirt over his head.

“
I wouldn’t mind waking up
to this every morning.” Melody admits, smirking as she eyes
Sam.

Sam’s back twitches as he turns to look
at her, the pale skin of his stomach and back prickling with goose
bumps. He blushes, sliding his gray t-shirt on, his skin relaxing
as the soft cotton slips down his chest.

Melody jumps from the bed, tying her
hair into a high ponytail, missing a few short curls at the nap at
her neck.

Sam signs the release form that a
short, round, middle-aged man hands him, before calling a cab. Sam
and Melody stand outside of the hospital doors, breathing in the
fresh summer air, so happy to be free of the stingy hospital smell.
Sam laces his finger with Melody’s, lifting her hand up to study
the bandages wrapped around her fingers.

“
How’d you get this?” Sam
asks worriedly.

She leans against his shoulder, making
sure it’s not the dislocated one. “I was trying to get to you, but
the metal was in my way and it was all jagged… I don’t remember it
hurting.”

Sam kisses the rough bandage around her
cuts as a faded yellow taxi pulls up to the curb. Sam lets Melody
slide across the cracked, brown leather of the taxi seat, before
climbing in after her.

………………………………………
..

After handing the thick fingered taxi
driver the cash he had left in his wallet, Sam follows Melody
closely up the stairs to her apartment. He opens the white painted
metal door that leads into her apartment for her, stretching his
arm out to hold it open; the door makes a slight clicking noise as
he closes it behind himself.

The two of them stand in the brightly
lit hallway of her apartment, the smell of woodsy incents that have
long ago been burnt into ash clings to the carpet and green
curtains that hang above the only window in her apartment that
doesn’t look at a brick wall. Melody and Same stand a foot away
from each other, staring face to face like it’s been years since
they’ve last seen the other.

Melody’s eyes float around Sam, down
his swollen left cheek, to the chapped split on his bottom lip,
before making their way to the sling around his arm. Her eyes make
a trail down his legs then down to the space of beige carpet
between the tips of their feet, which have become blurred in her
vision because of the tears steaming in her eyes. Melody’s throat
tightens as she flings her arms around his neck, pulling his head
down until their foreheads are pressed together.

“
I thought that I would
never see you again…” Melody whispers as tears run down her cheek
and drip off her chin.

Sam nods, the skin on his forehead
moving up and down against hers as he wraps his arms around her
waist. Melody nestles her head against his chest, holding him
tighter the harder her tears fall.

………………………………

 “
You guys are crazy!”
the middle-aged police officer, who’s years of keeping their little
town free of crime have given him a large head, laughs.

Sam pulls at his hair, tired of
bickering with the officer.

“
I'm telling you the truth!
He wants me dead, officer.
Dead
! Jet is nothing but a criminal.
He almost killed me when he and I were fifteen, he kidnapped my
girlfriend, and now he’s coming after me… again!”  Sam
explains.

The officer laughs, flipping through
his files as he shakes his head. It’s obvious that he will be no
help to them, so Melody and Sam stand up, not bothering to thank
the officer for his time as they abruptly leave.

Sam leans against the hood of Melody’s
silver Acura, the sun gleaming over them.

“
What do you think we should
do?” he asks Melody.

Melody stands beside him, but being
that she is a good six inches shorter than him she is barely able
to stable herself against the bumper without sitting on the hood.
“They won’t listen to us Sam! There’s nothing we can
do!”

She kicks the curb, cursing under her
breath. Sam pulls her against his side. She squirms for a second,
too overcome with frustration to sit still.

“
We have to do this on our
own, Melody. No one believes us, I'm sorry,” he kisses the top of
her head, “We’re going to get through this though, I know we
will.”

……………………………………

The two of them stay awake into the wee
hours of the night, Sam leans over the computer as he sends in his
columns to the newspaper’s “Ask Molly” section. The irony is that
everyone thinks they’re asking a smart and understanding young
woman when really they’re just asking Sam, who is of simple
intelligence but has way more compassion than “Molly” would ever
have.

He finishes answering a question about
whether or not some woman should leave her boyfriend because he
informed her that he has always wanted to join the circus. Melody
peeks her head up from her notepad where she has been writing down
all the incidents that have happened with Adam. She sprawls her
legs out across Sam’s lap, pushing him away from his lap
top.

“
What was he like? Before he
beat you up.” she asks.

Sam leans back against the beat-in dark
blue couch, grasping her socked feet. “Like my brother,” he nibbles
on his bottom lip, running it over the cut from where part of the
car window had sliced it, “There was always something about him and
finding trouble, I remember having to watch the cops bring him home
almost every Saturday night, drunk but happy.”

Melody cuddles up next to him, the tone
of Sam’s voice laying weights on her eyelids. She nods, squishing
her face against his shirt. “So you guys were close?” she
asks.

 
Sam nestles his chin
into her hair. “Yeah, even though ironically he was the quarter
back of our high school foot ball team while I was the social
outcast that stalked the shelves of the local library and played
guitar under the bleachers.”

Melody sighs softly, nodding to coax
him to keep talking. He continues on, playing in Melody’s hair as
he retells every memory of Jet before he turned in to Adam. Sam
catches himself midsentence, the story of how he had met Jet during
soccer when they were eight is left hanging on his tongue, as he
realizes that Melody has gone limp next to him; soft snores
slipping out of her nose. He smiles down at her asleep on his
chest, sleep slowly taking hold of him. 

………………………………

Melody awakes upon the icy black and
white tiles of Adam’s apartment. Fear grabs at her heart,
contracting it and shoving it up her throat until there’s a dull
pulse at the base of her mouth.

“
Sam?” she
whispers.

 
Adam appears out of
the hall way that leads to his bedroom. He smiles, wiping his hands
across a red handkerchief as he walks to her on his minty clouds of
seduction.

“
Sam’s a little… tied up.”
 Adam says, a sly smile across his lips.

Melody shakes her head as she stands to
her feet, pointing her trembling index finger at him. “What did you
do to him?” she demands.

Adam smirks, turning on his heels as he
motions her to follow him down the hall way, past the trophy room
and his bed room to little room at the end of the hall, no bigger
than a closet.