Wake for Me (Life or Death Series) (25 page)

“Oh, no,” Viola put a hand on his knee, but then she seemed to realize how he might be taking the gesture, and she quickly removed it. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding. I can’t stay with you.”

“What do you mean, you can’t stay with me?” Sam fought off a sudden wave of disappointment. Oh, man. Please don’t let him have completely misinterpreted the situation. Again. Every girl he’d ever dated had told him he was crap at reading signals. His college girlfriend told him she could die waiting for him to decide whether or not he wanted to take the next step. This time, though, it seemed like he was running before he could walk.

“Listen,” he said, feeling desperate now. “I didn’t mean to pressure you or anything. I just thought…when you said you had something to ask me, and then you talked about needing a place to stay…I just assumed. But seriously, I didn’t mean it like…I mean, I know we still haven’t talked about—”

“Sam, shut up, will you?”

Gripping the steering wheel tighter, Sam looked over at Viola. She was smiling.

“It’s fine. I only meant that I can’t stay with you, because Jacques might decide to come looking for me there. Even though I’ve tried to take precautions to create distance between us…so that people at the hospital wouldn’t suspect anything…I still don’t want to take any chances. And I definitely don’t want to get you in any trouble.”

“Oh,” Sam said finally, feeling a bit deflated. “That actually makes a lot of sense.”

“Yes it does,” she said. “That’s why I was going to ask you if I could borrow one of your credit cards to check into a hotel. I’d be happy to pay you back in cash. I have about twelve thousand with me, so if I pick something on the lower end of the scale, it should be more than enough.”

Sam nodded, but he thought ‘lower end of the scale?’ Christ!

The more he found out about Viola’s general lifestyle and thought process, the more he felt uncomfortably out of his depth. Here he was, a medical wonk, while she, as far as he knew, hadn’t even gone to college. And yet, even after a severe brain trauma, Viola managed to run circles around him in the planning department. He seemed to be outclassed at every turn.

“Viola, can I ask you a question?”

“Of course, Sam.”

“What exactly is your plan?” He glanced at her, before searching the side of the road for a good place to turn off. “And I don’t just mean for where you’re going to stay, but for all of it?”

Viola waited until he’d found a spot and put the car into park, then turned toward him.

“Before I answer your question,” she said, very carefully. “I need to ask you one of my own. I haven’t asked you directly before now, maybe because I was afraid. I don’t know. But it’s important. So please don’t make fun of me, alright?”

Her eyes were so huge with sincerity, Sam had no choice but to agree. “I promise.”

“Do you…do you think I might be crazy?”

“What?” The question caught him off-guard, because he’d thought she would’ve realized by now, seeing his actions, that he believed her. “Of course not. Viola, if I thought that, I wouldn’t be here.”

A little voice in his head whispered,
Maybe you’re crazy too
. After all, he did break into security to steal a thirty-thousand dollar gold watch earlier today. Just to prove how sorry he was, for doing his job, by the way.

“No,” he said again, reaching out to cup her chin in his hand. “I do not think you’re crazy.

Was it his imagination, or did Viola’s eyes look a bit shinier than they had before?

“God, you’re so nice.”

Okay, now Sam was imagining things again, letting his self-doubt add meaning where there was none. Because when she’d said the word nice just then? It had almost sounded like an obscenity.

“Trust me,” he told her. “I’m really not that nice.”

When he leaned across the seat to kiss her, to show her how not-nice he was currently feeling, she stopped him with a hand against his chest.

“Wait, there’s something I need to tell you.”

“Okay.” Ignoring the sting of his pride, Sam sat back. He waited for her to go on.

“When I was asleep…or whatever I was…I had these dreams. A lot of dreams.”

Sam nodded, not wanting to interrupt her. It wasn’t uncommon for someone who was coming out of a coma to go through normal REM-sleep cycles. She probably just thought she’d been dreaming the whole time, like when a person woke up from a ten-minute nap and felt as if they’d been dreaming for hours. REM-sleep was deceptive that way.

“Some of the dreams were…I guess, what you might call normal.” She shook her head, looking forward, through the windshield. “But then there were the ones I had about you. Like the one where you told me about the day you quit the swim team. When you came home and found the note.”

“What?” Sam felt a prickling sensation at the back of his neck. The night he’d told her about that, she’d been in the deepest part of her coma. It was the day after her accident, and he’d gone into her room to apologize for failing her as a doctor. Instead, he’d ended up spilling his guts over her comatose body like her room was some kind of confessional. Jesus, he might have even cried a little bit. “How could you possibly remember that?”

He might as well have been talking to himself now, too, for all the attention she gave him.

“It wasn’t so much what you said that made me believe it was real,” she continued, as if speaking to the taillights of the passing cars. “That it wasn’t just another one of my messed up dreams. It was the way you made me feel. Like for the first time, I was safe, and someone understood me. Not just after the crash, but for the first time ever. I didn’t have to pretend with you, or put on a brave face. I didn’t have to play games to get you to like me.”

“Games?” Sam found himself focusing on the most insignificant part of what she’d said. Deep down, he blamed Jacques Gosselin and his stupid comment about Viola being a master manipulator. “What kind of games?”

Her eyes flitted around, settling on nothing in particular. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Sam.”

Frustrated, Sam blew out a breath. “Fine, let’s start simple. Why did you kiss me the other day, in Psych?”

Slowly, her eyes returned to his. “Because I was angry.”

“And what about before?” he pressed. “What about that night at the bar? Did you really forget about…that? Or have you been pretending?”

She swallowed, dropping her gaze to her lap. “After…after the first time we met, I started dreaming about you quite a bit,” she said. “And every time, no matter what we were doing in the dream, I knew that what I felt for you was real. But…it scared me, because I didn’t understand it. I still don’t know a lot of things about that night. Something important happened, that’s all I know. I can’t really explain it.”

Sam shook his head, trying to absorb what she was saying, what it might mean. But he couldn’t, because nothing remotely like this had ever happened to him before. All his life, he’d felt out of his league. Either he’d played it way too safe in his choice of a girl, or he’d pined secretly over prospects that didn’t even know he existed. The thought that a girl like Viola even thought about him at all—as anything more than a doctor, or a friend—was mind-blowing. But was it enough?

“What do you mean, what you felt for me?”

Finally, she turned her body toward him. “I felt like I could trust you. Like out of everyone I knew, you were someone who believed in me. Not just that I would wake up one day, but that I was someone worth saving. Was I right? Can I trust you, Sam?”

Swallowing past the lump in his throat, Sam nodded. “Yeah.”

“Okay then,” she said, looking back out the window. “When I start to feel like you trust me as much as I trust you, then I’ll tell you my plan.”

Sam cleared his throat, and put the car back into gear. “Fair enough.”

He pulled back into traffic, heading for the nearest ramp onto I-80 West. “You might think a hotel is the best place for you to hide,” he said, “but I think I know of somewhere better. Somewhere you’ll be safe, and taken care of, even while I’m at work.”

Viola eyed him curiously. “I’m listening.”

***

Five hours later, Sam pulled up in front of his mom’s house in Syracuse.

He turned off the engine and looked at Viola, half expecting her to make some kind of critical comment about the size of the house, or its location. But instead, she was staring out through the windshield, eyes wide with something like wonder.

“This is where you grew up.”

“That’s right,” he told her. “I realize it’s not much to look at, compared to the places you’re probably used to, but--”

“I love it.”

Sam smiled, climbing out of the car and circling around to open her door.

The drive up had been surprisingly devoid of awkwardness. Instead of talking about the tough subjects—like Viola’s parents, or her dreams, or their increasingly complicated relationship—they’d mostly just talked about Sam. His undergrad years, how he’d decided on internal medicine as a specialty…at one point they had even broken into a heated debate about which TV shows gave the most realistic portrayal of hospital life. Viola thought it was
Gray’s Anatomy
, while Sam maintained that his life was a lot more like
Scrubs.

Sam had asked Viola about her education, too, but her answers were always much more succinct. Overall, she’d seemed to prefer talking about the places she’d traveled and the things she’d seen, rather than re-hashing her favorite school subjects. He never found the guts to ask her about her relationship with Aiden, though. Around midnight, they’d gone through an all-night drive-through for coffee, because not much else was open. She drank hers black, without even wincing.

As he unlocked the front door and led Viola into the living room, Sam looked over his shoulder and put a finger to his mouth, cautioning her not to make too much noise. He’d called and left a message on the way up, warning his mom that they were coming, but it had been after eleven o’ clock. If he was right and Mom had gone to bed before checking her messages, the shock of waking up and seeing a strange girl in her house might actually give her a heart attack. After which, she’d promptly interrogate Sam—using motherly torture methods like naked baby picture blackmail—to find out everything there was to know about Viola.

Since Sam himself didn’t know even half as much as he wanted to, he had a feeling it would be better if he let Viola introduce herself, in the morning, when everyone was feeling rested. Possibly while Sam was safely away, driving back to Brooklyn.

Because if there was one thing he’d realized on the drive up, it was the fact that he had no self-restraint where Viola was concerned. He was past the point of moderation, and fresh out of caution. For the first time in his life, that seemed like a good thing. Except, she’d told him she trusted him. At the moment, he was the only person in her life she could rely on. If he took advantage of her now, he would be no better than Aiden. Who—he’d realized on the drive up—she’d never actually broken up with, as far as Sam knew. Yet another reason for him to give Viola some space for a day or two, while she figured things out. While he figured his own stuff out, or tried to.

“You can sleep in my old room tonight,” he whispered, grabbing Viola gently by the shoulders, and trying to pretend like he wasn’t affected by the way she was smiling up at him in the dark. “Just give me a second to grab some blankets. I’ll make up the couch for myself.”

Seeing her nod in response, Sam left her standing in the dining room and went into his bedroom to take some extra blankets and a pillow from the closet. On his way back out, he passed his mom’s bedroom, noticing for the first time that the door stood open.

That was weird.

Poking his head into the room, he could see that the king-sized bed was empty and still made.

“Mom?” He walked carefully into the room, toward the master bathroom. The door was closed, but there was no light coming from underneath. After a brief moment of hesitation, he opened the door. The bathroom was empty.

“What the hell?”

Turning on lights now, Sam walked through the rest of the house, searching for any signs that his mom had had an accident or taken herself to the hospital. With every empty room, his blood pressure rose a little bit. He even checked Ben’s room, but she wasn’t in there, either. As usual, it looked like no one had been in there in years.

When he returned to the kitchen, Viola was standing in front of the refrigerator, gently running her fingers over the pictures and elementary-school crafts that were taped all over the front.

“This is weird,” he told her, no longer bothering to whisper. “My mom is usually home, and asleep by now. I’m going to call her cell and make sure everything’s okay.”

When Sam crossed to the kitchen phone, he saw that the answering machine light was still blinking. There were four messages. One of them was from Caroline, which he quickly skipped after a few words. No sense in Viola getting the wrong idea about
that
whole situation. Two of them were from some guy named Rodger, and the last one was his.

Hey, Mom, just wanted to let you know that I’m on my way up to Syracuse. I should be getting there late, so don’t wait up. And don’t freak out, but I’m bringing…a friend with me. I hope it’s okay with you if she stays for a couple of days. I’ll make it up to you in home repairs, I promise. Plus, I think you’ll like her. She’s really
—

Sam stopped the message, and deleted it, before the rest of the message he’d left from a gas station in Stroudsburg could blare through the kitchen.

Pulling the phone out of the cradle, he dialed his mom’s phone. The call went straight to voice mail. “Hey, Mom, I just wanted to let you know that I’m here at the house, in case one of the neighbors calls to tell you someone’s trying to break in, or whatever. Call me when you’re on your way back, and I’ll—“

“Sam.” He turned, just in time to see Viola stifle a smile. “Look at this.”

On the side of the refrigerator was one of those gigantic desk calendars. While he was growing up, his mom had used it to keep track of everything from dental appointments to upcoming Robert Redford movie premieres, using different colored pencil for each event. For the current week, there were five days marked off in red: Spring Break, it said, in big block letters.