Tears (2 page)

“Josh?” Sam groaned, blinking.

The dream faded. The strong hands shook him mercilessly.

“Josh?” he asked again. He was no longer on the floor. He was in his bed.
The remnants of sleep clung to him, but the grip was tenuous.
The shaking didn't stop. Finally he snapped out of his miserable nightmare—only to find himself at the
hands of his RA and new suite mate, Josh Kendall. He shoved Josh away from him almost involuntarily. “Stop it. Get off me!”

“All right! Jesus, relax,” Josh said, stepping away from Sam's bed. “Calm down, man, it was just a nightmare.”

Just a nightmare.
Sam gaped at Josh. It had felt real, but there was nothing real about it.
And why is my skull still ringing?
Sam wondered, his throat parched. He brought a hand to his hair. He was sweating, a clammy film drenching his body as he struggled to focus his eyes on his disaster area of a dorm room. The blinking red light of his bedside clock read 5:00
A.M.

No. . . it wasn't just a dream, Sam realized. It was a flashback.
It was a real memory of horror that had occurred several months earlier—when he had been kidnapped and almost died.
He'd never really remembered much of what had happened. He'd spent the time in the throes of a diabetic attack, his body shutting down. Close call. For some reason, though, he'd started dreaming about it lately. He couldn't tell which parts he was making up—for instance, the part about someone asking him if he loved Gaia—and which parts were real. And that ringing—

But what was Josh doing here?

“How long have you been in my room?” Sam asked.

Josh flashed a defensive smile. “I just came in.”

“But it's five in the morning,” Sam croaked.

“I just thought maybe you'd answer your goddamn phone after the
twenty-fifth
ring,” Josh replied, his voice teasing. He began to dig through a pile of clothing—
wildly, crazily, as if he were a dog bent on retrieving a prize bone.
Finally he found the phone and answered it himself. Sam hadn't even realized that the phone had been ringing the entire time.

“Hello?” Josh barked. “Hello? God
damn!
”

“Who is it?” Sam whispered, shaking his head. He was too confused and disoriented to follow what was going on.

Josh slammed the phone back into its cradle. “It was a hang-up. You must have been having some kind of nightmare. That phone rang forever.”

“Oh. . . well, I'm sorry,”Sam mumbled thickly. He stared at Josh, a fresh cold layer of sweat settling on his brow. Flashes of the mysterious man and blood still burned through his mind.

We both tried to kill him, right, Sam?

Somewhere in the dream logic of sleep, the image had melted from Sam's kidnapping to his recent bar brawl with Brendan, his former friend and suite mate. Somehow, three nights ago, he and Josh had ended up giving Brendan a brutal beating. True, Brendan had instigated it. True, Sam had only been defending
himself.
But the incident had unleashed an ugly side of Sam's own personality that he'd never seen, drunk or not drunk.
He just prayed he never saw it again.

But luckily (or not, depending on how one looked at it), Brendan was gone. Only three days ago he had wordlessly removed his stuff from B4 and switched to another dorm. Not that Sam could really blame him. Brendan, like the rest of NYU—not to mention NYPD detectives Reilly and Bernard—believed that Sam was responsible for Mike Suarez's death. That sad truth was that Josh was the only person who believed in Sam's innocence. And Josh was still practically a stranger.

Or was he?

Sam's eyes flashed over the guy—his chiseled jaw, his spiky black hair and sharp blue eyes, not even puffy at this hour. In some ways, Josh knew more about Sam than almost anyone...even Gaia. Sam had told him about Gaia's evil foster mother, Ella Niven, whose
Fatal Attraction
—style obsession with Sam had cost Mike his life. And put Sam firmly into prime suspect territory. But Josh had pretty much saved Sam's ass. He'd set him up with a perfect alibi to get him off the hook right before he was about to be indicted. All it took was one forged chem lab sign-in sheet, and Sam's whereabouts the night of the murder were instantly accounted for.

Sure, the sign-in sheet was fraudulent. Josh's actions might even qualify as shady. They certainly went above and beyond the obligations of a good friend—and Josh barely knew him. Moreover, Josh was also an RA, sworn to uphold the rules of the school. On one level, Sam couldn't help but think that it didn't make any sense. But maybe Josh just felt sorry for him.
Whatever the reason, Sam practically owed his life to Josh. . . not to mention a debt of eternal gratitude.
Without Josh's help, Sam would have been in jail at this very moment.

So why is he in my nightmares?

“Sam,” Josh said sharply, snapping his fingers. “Are you gonna keep staring at me like a zombie, or do you want to get out of that bed and come with me for a run? You're freakin' me out here.”

Sam swallowed, unable to answer. He lowered his eyes.

“Ease up. You're out of the woods,” Josh said quietly.

Finally Sam nodded. “You're right,” he whispered. The worst was over. His subconscious was just lagging behind. “Sorry. I just need to wake up. A run sounds good.”

“Cool,” Josh said with his usual crooked smile. “I'll catch you downstairs in five. I need to do some Achilles stretches.”

“Okay.”

As Josh left the suite, Sam ran a hand through his red-blond curls and forced his legs out of bed. He looked around his room in disgust. He really needed to pull his life together. How the hell would he find sweats in this mess? Towers of socks and towels greeted him from every end. The muddy carpet was hidden by a layer of Fruit Of The Loom V necks. He still hadn't brought himself to clean up since the police had turned his room into a nuclear test site. Shaking his head, he hopped up and started rummaging. A minute later he finally tracked down a pair of sweats pinned underneath a stack of library books.

A long sigh escaped his lips. He peered through his small window at the barely lit navy sky. A run did feel like a little much at this hour. But he could use it. That, and maybe a year or two holding Gaia in his arms without interruption.

He shook his head.
He still couldn't fully digest that she was his girlfriend.
Gaia is my girlfriend.
The wait had been endless, intolerable. And as he pictured her thick blond hair, her powerful arms wrapped around his waist, the small of her back. . .

I want to make love to you.

The thought came to him, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere. Not that it was unusual. He'd been having that exact thought a lot lately. They'd barely
started going out, but the time was right. It would happen. But first he had to forget about the pressures of the past two weeks—

Another phone started to ring.

Sam jumped. It was coming from Josh's room, emitting a low buzz into the stillness of the suite. Sam stepped out of his room and into Josh's doorway. His pulse picked up a beat. Somebody must be calling for Mike. Maybe an old friend, somebody who didn't know he was gone. But why would they call so early? Could this be a call for Josh?

No, Josh had been using his cell phone. He'd hardly even moved into Mike's room. Some decent part of him was still no doubt waiting for Sam to give him the okay. And even though the Suarez family had come to clear everything out, a few remnants of Mike still remained. Remnants that Sam couldn't bring himself to remove. He stared at the ringing phone and the three dumbbells on the floor—
ghostly souvenirs from someone who would never be back.
Sam swallowed and promised that he would talk to the powers that be about having the phone number switched off that day. He took three quick steps across the room and answered it.

“Hello?” he whispered, a gnawing feeling in his gut as he held the receiver.

“Sam,” a strange voice hissed. “Good morning.”

“Who is this?” An arrow of fear darted up Sam's
spine. He couldn't place the voice. It was distorted. But whoever it was knew his name.

“A message from beyond.” The voice chuckled, a weird crackle and fizz down the line. “Your friend Mike is worried about you. He doesn't want to see you get hurt.”

Sam was wide awake now, snapped taut. Freshly rewired with fear. Someone was obviously playing some kind of sick joke. “Who the hell is this?” he spat, his knuckles white on the phone, his voice shaking.

“Do yourself a favor, Sam Moon,” the voice commanded—low and threatening now, all trace of laughter gone. “Do not touch Gaia Moore. Listen to me.
Don't touch her, or you'll be sorry
.”

Sam's mind seemed to splinter into shards as he tried to process the words. Part of him wanted to hang up and run. But the caller wasn't finished.

“Don't tell anyone about this call. Especially not Gaia Moore,” the voice continued. “Because if you do, your worst nightmares will come true.”

A rush of blood, thick and cold, sent panic coursing through Sam's body. Was he still asleep?
It was as if someone had gotten right inside his head, tunneled into his dream life.
But that was. . .
impossible.

Sam found his voice again. “Who is this?” he managed to gasp.

For a while there was silence. Then there was
another light, mirthless chuckle—more like water running through a drain than any human sound.

“Who is this?” Sam repeated, more urgently.

“
I'm watching you, Sam
.”

The line went dead.

“ARE YOU SURE YOU'RE PUTTING
enough of that in the filter?” Gaia joked as Sam tipped half a pack of coffee into the coffeemaker.

Some Male Territorial Thing

“If it isn't strong, then it's not coffee,” Sam muttered. His hands seemed unusually clumsy as he dropped mounds of brown coffee grains all over the kitchen table. He was jumpy. Then again, he'd probably already had a few cups of coffee already. “It should be somewhere between liquid and the consistency of wet tar,” he joked, but his voice was brittle.

Gaia wrinkled her nose, staring at him, trying to figure out what was on his mind. Then she shrugged and offered her mug.
If Sam liked his coffee to taste like sludge, that was fine with
her.
Because she was here. She was with him—having breakfast with him at 7:45
A.M.
on a Monday in his dorm. Just like a normal girlfriend. All in all, it was a good start to the morning. Coffee, doughnuts, and Sam: the only valid reasons to get up on a day she'd otherwise consider a write-off and maybe dodge in favor of scamming Zolov at the chess tables in Washington Square Park.

Gaia took a sip, then made a face. “Mmmm. Motor oil,” she teased.

But Sam didn't seem to hear her. He sipped from his own mug and stared out the window with a vacant gaze.

All right. Something was definitely going on here. She put down her mug and moved over to Sam, then wrapped her arms around his waist and met his gaze. For a moment they just stood there. Gaia allowed her eyes to soak in every aspect of Sam's face: the pensive mouth, the curls that seemed to change color depending on the light—
but most of all, those amazing hazel eyes. . . the patterns in the irises like shattered glass.
Or gold spiderwebs. Gaia felt her pulse quicken, her stomach flip and jangle. But Sam seemed stuck in some kind of temporary cryofreeze.

“Hello?” she whispered.

Still no response.

Gaia's brow furrowed, silently pressing him for an
answer, but this only made him look away. Her pulse slowed. She stepped back. Clearly this was not the time to make an attempt at a romantic moment or even to ask what was wrong. She didn't understand it. Sam had been like a manic-depressive ever since she'd gotten back from France—reeling from bouts of extreme highs one moment and grimly tense the next. At first she'd thought it was just the roller-coaster strangeness and freshness of their relationship. Of course, there was also the small fact that she'd taken off for Europe with her supposedly sick uncle—only to have returned with her father and discovered that Uncle Oliver was a psycho terrorist. It was a hell of a lot for Gaia to knock back, and maybe more for Sam.

All at once she felt guilty.
Maybe Sam was just plain old freaked out.
Did he even know what he'd been getting himself into by diving into this fledgling relationship with the daughter of a CIA agent? It wasn't exactly par for the course for a well-adjusted premed. Not to mention the small fact that Gaia hadn't exactly managed to tell Sam what was happening during these European high-jinks escapades. She'd e-mailed, but his computer had been taken in for repairs. Sam had been near frantic when she got back. She'd all but disappeared.

But we're cool now,
she said to herself.
Or on our way to being cool. At least we're cooler than we were when I always found myself bursting in on him and Heather
....

She exhaled slowly. Maybe it was nothing. For all she knew, Sam just wasn't a morning person. But somehow Gaia doubted that one.

Most likely it was still Mike.

Gaia hadn't really known Mike Suarez, but Sam had been devastated when he OD'd. He refused to talk about it. Gaia knew that feeling only too well. All the Oprahs in the world could glibly expound on your indisputable need to “share” when you were “hurting.”

But not everyone was the same. Grief did strange things to people.

“Are you okay?” Gaia finally asked, searching Sam's troubled eyes. “You're thinking about Mike, aren't you?”