He fell back on the pillow. “Fuck, I’m so sorry, Ellie. I fell asleep.”
“It’s okay.”
“No it’s not. I had one job.”
He was distraught.
“Sam. It’s okay.” I wiped his hair from his forehead. He was sweating. Trembling, I realized, as I pressed my fingers to his.
He pulled my hand into his, squeezing it as he met my eyes before letting it go. “I’m okay. You should go back to bed. I can stay up now.”
He tried to sit.
“No.” I placed my hand on his chest. His heartbeat skipped fast under my palm. I gently guided him back down. “Tommy’s okay. We talked. He’s going to come talk to you in the morning.”
I kept my hand on his chest a moment, not wanting to leave his beating heart. “What happened, Sam? What were you dreaming about?”
Sam swallowed, his eyes on mine. “I dreamed about the time we were apart, Ellie.”
He said it like the first time we were together and now was a continuous thing, only with an interruption. Out of nowhere, I remembered his parting words to me in that hotel room.
I’m going to show up for you.
“What happened?” I whispered. “Where did you go?”
He held my gaze a moment longer, then pressed a hand over mine on his chest. With his other, he lifted his hand to cup my face. I leaned into his palm, my heart feeling like it was sliding across a hot surface with no edge. Like soon it would fall away and I’d never get it back.
“I’ll show you,” Sam said, his voice gravelly.
I held my breath.
He seemed to hesitate, then he reached his hands down to his belt buckle.
My stomach seized. It must have shown on my face because he laughed softly. “Not that.”
His smile fell away though as he undid his pants and slipped one side of his jeans down, as well as his briefs underneath. I couldn’t help the swoop of my stomach at seeing this private corner of his body.
But what he’d revealed wasn’t salacious. It was a pink, puckered scar, the size of a quarter.
“That’s where the bullet went through,” he said.
My stomach plunged. “Bullet?”
He turned so he was lying sideways on the couch, sliding his pants down more to reveal an angry red line that disappeared almost down his thigh.
“That’s where they did the surgery to fix it.”
I was quiet, staring, my mind spinning. He didn’t have these scars the last time I’d seen this part of his body. In between then and now, Sam had been shot. Had surgery.
It was then that he told me the whole story. Less than a month after that fateful night together, right around the time I realized my somewhat irregular period was seriously late, Sam was shot and left to die. He told me about his friends. How they hadn’t made it. How he didn’t know any more about their story now than he did then. He kept pausing, skating over details, and I told him I was okay with hearing it all. I wanted him to share everything; for me to relieve his suffering by bearing witness to his telling of it.
So he did. He told me the details that haunted him. Right down to the tattoo on the chest of the man who’d shot them all.
“I don’t know why he didn’t kill me,” Sam whispered. “Maybe he thought I’d bleed out. Like those kids withTommy.” He gritted his teeth, and I saw now how deeply hearing about Tommy had affected him. It had likely been what triggered his nightmare.
“Whatever the reason,” he said now, “It was unfair. I should have died that day too.”
Sam didn’t know how he got to the hospital in the city. Maybe the clerk in the store. Someone told him later he may have been airlifted. But he didn’t remember any of it.
