Everybody Hurts

Chapter 20

 Moonlight crested through the window, illuminating the body of the beautiful man lying on the bed. His scars stood out, glowing like those stars that Sam had stuck on her bedroom ceiling as a kid, so pale and ghostly against the navy blue sheets. Dark brown waves surrounded his head like a halo, making him appear like a peaceful angel in his finally undisturbed slumber.

She'd woken to him whimpering again, muscles trembling under her hands as he began to plead with an invisible entity that she couldn't see. Sam had wrapped her arms around him tightly, whispering in his ear over and over that he was safe, that he was okay, that she had him, until his body calmed, his pleas finally silenced without him ever waking, a small gift. But by that point she had been wide awake, her brain unable to quiet down enough for sleep.

Knees tucked into her chest, arms wrapped around her shins, she observed Eddie as he slept. Sam's heart broke at the horrors he must have experienced, at the fact that she could do nothing to help him because she would never get past that locked door. That door that he kept shut tight against her. That door that all the others knew about. They knew what was on the other side, but that would always remain a mystery to her because he'd made a promise or was keeping her safe or whatever other reason he'd concocted to explain why she could never be let in.

Eyes closing, a tear slipped down her cheek, because she knew she had just placed herself into another impossible situation. She had willingly stepped right into a relationship with a man that she would never truly know, that she would never fully have. How could she when there would always be a part of him that was a stranger to her?

She'd told him she could do this, that she could be in a relationship with him knowing that there were things about him she could never know. But could she? Sam didn't want to walk away. In such a short time, she'd felt more for him than she had in years with Cam. Eddie stirred up feelings within her that she didn't even know she was capable of feeling. She was already in too deep for it not to shatter her heart into a million jagged pieces if she ended things.

But how could she watch him suffer night after night and not know the cause of it? How could Sam ever hope to help him, to be there for him, if she didn't know what the problem was? She tried to tell herself that it was all new, that one day he would trust her enough, but she didn't believe it. Every time that veil passed over his face, her heart cracked. Every time his eyes darkened with the ghosts of his past, it fractured that much more. And each time he woke in the night, whimpering, crying for Dustin, flailing to pull away whatever was attacking him, she felt like a weight was crushing her chest, making it impossible to breathe. She wanted to know absolutely everything about him, not even because of her nosiness, but because she cared about him.

It had been three weeks since they'd started doing whatever this was. Neither of them had put a name to it. Sam was too scared to bring the topic up again, fearing he would brush her off, insisting that they were just having fun and they didn't need to define it like he had that one night. But it was anything but just simple fun for Sam.

Eddie had burrowed inside of her, crawled under her skin, and flowed through her veins. He had completely inhabited every inch of her. She couldn't stop thinking about him when he wasn't around. She found herself looking at the clock at work, just counting down the minutes until the day was over and he'd be there to pick her up because that had become their routine while he'd been working on her car. She actually wished it had taken longer because she loved coming out of work to find him leaning against his van, the way his lips curved up into that special smile that was just for her when he saw her. Now she just counted down the minutes until she could see him again at all.

It was overwhelming. It was insane. She'd never even done that when she started dating Cam, a silly high school girl. She had no idea what had come over her but she knew she had absolutely no control of it. She wasn't a psycho. She didn't expect him to spend every waking moment with her. She wasn't angry if he had other plans. She was just always excited when those plans included her getting to see his face.