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Cate toiled with the ends of her hair, picking split ends between her cracked fingernails before flicking them away. It was the only thing she could think of busying herself with. The car had rolled a flat, and Sam didn’t know fuck about cars or how to fix them, but she insisted that he’d know more about it than she would, because he was a guy, and there had to be some innate car knowledge stowed away in his man-head.
She glanced up, careful not to meet his gaze, because she didn’t want Sam to make her feel guilty about not helping, which he could very easily do, with those big brown puppy dog eyes he had. He wasn’t looking at her, though. He’d ripped the flat tire off with his bare hands, but he couldn’t really just attach the spare with the same force. He just couldn’t make sense of it.
She shifted her focus from Sam back down to her hands. Hand, she had to keep reminding herself, since it was just the one. She needed a manicure. The chipped black polish made her want to itch.
Cate jumps, startled when Sam grunted with effort as he hoisted the car up into the air, ready to fling it as easily as she flicked little pieces of dead hair.
“Sam!” she yelped. “What are you–”
He tossed it before she could scramble to her feet and get ahold of him.
She regretted not helping him now. There was a storm brewing, up in the air and in his head. She could only see his back, but he was striding off now, away from her. Frustration and anger emanated from him, that palpable. Cate groaned and brushed the dirt off her knees as she stalked off after him.
“Come back,” she whined. “Come on, Sam.”
He had his hands in his hair, tugging, pulling, and she hadn’t caught up to him yet but she was close enough to hear him muttering to himself, nonsensical grumbling. His mind was so tattered, that even though she could calm him down, her effects would wear off, and she’d have to convince him to let her make him empty again. Sometimes he didn’t want it. He’d thrash about and make a real mess of things before relenting to it. Other times he wouldn’t say a thing. Keel over and bend his neck, cheek into her palm. It was easier when he came to her like that, like a beaten dog, nowhere else to go.
“Sam,” she called. Finally, he spun around.
“I told you I couldn’t do it!” he shouted, all quick and high strung. “I told you, I told you, and you, Cate, you didn’t stop! Just kept– Cate– you just kept saying! You can do it! But I– Cate– I kept telling you– I told you, Cate, I couldn’t do it!”
He kept on like that, rambling, out of breath, stumbling over his words but returning to her name like the throughline anchor that it was for him.
“Sam,” she coaxed his name low, looking for him in his frantic mania. His eyes were crazed, and he was tearing at his hair, and then hitting at his head, hard thumps of his fists.
“I don’t know how many times, and I tried, Cate– I tried to and I– Cate, I couldn’t, but you said– and I don’t– I said I didn’t, you didn’t– Cate, you didn’t listen–”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should’ve listened. Can you listen to me, though?”
Sam huffed to himself, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes. He didn’t say anything, just shook his head, as if in disbelief.
“We can just wait. Someone’s gonna pass by. We can flag them down and get a new ride. That would be better, I think. Do you want to do that?”
He nodded.
“Okay. Let’s sit down.”
Sam dropped himself down unceremoniously to the dirt road. Cate hadn’t even touched him, but he got this way, sometimes, where he’d do just about anything she said not because she’d compelled him to do it, but because it was easier to let someone else take over and make the decisions, do the difficult things. He liked having orders. Sit, stay. Roll over.
Cate sat down beside him, bothered about all the dirt and her shoes and her jeans, and why the car had to have broken down here, of all places, in ass-fuck nowhere, the longest stretch of two-way road and dried up grass and blood red sky.
“Someone’s gonna come,” she told him, though she said it mostly to herself. She drew her legs up to her chest and tucked her chin on top of her knees.
“Someone’s gonna come,” Sam repeated. The whole deal with the car and trying to fix the tire had really worn him out. He dropped his head down onto her shoulder.
Cate picked idly at a fraying stitch on her jeans. “Do you feel better?”
He made a half-hearted sound deep in his throat that didn’t really answer her question one way or another. Cate felt that Sam was sometimes embarrassed to ask for her to ease his mind. But she wouldn’t do it unless he said he wanted her to. So they then had to go through this whole pantomime of, Should I? Not if you don’t want to. I can do it, it’s fine. No, your eyes are getting red, you don’t need to. They’re not that red, it’s fine, I can do it. No, I’ll be fine. Are you sure? I mean, I don’t know, I think. Just let me. But you don’t have to. But I can if you want. And go a hundred times in that same circle before Cate just stubbornly stared at him until Sam accepted it and just took her wrist and guided it up his cheek.
Sam’s skin was so warm, always, like he'd been sitting out in the sun for too long. The first time she touched him, she felt guilty for thinking about Luke and the furnace of his body and how she dreamed of him melting her from the inside out every time he’d been in her, and how she remembered thinking that there was no one that could make her swelter this way. But then she’d touched Sam, and she felt completely haunted by how he burned the exact same way.
“Are you sick?” Cate asked. Because he was still sort of clammy even though the sun had set, and she had to reason his warmth with some other explanation besides being made up of the same chemicals and things his dead brother was.
Sam scrunched his nose. “I don’t think so.”
“Hm,” she mused.
Now that he was sated, his breathing was flat and even, and Cate felt her eyelids fluttering shut to the steady metronome of his breath.
“Are you sick?”
“No,” Cate yawned. “I’m tired, though.”
“Yeah. I wonder if this is it.”
“If this is what?”
“What we’re supposed to be doing.”
“It is,” Cate said, very certain, because it was easier to believe that it was than to wonder if it wasn’t.
She must’ve dozed off, because before she can realize it, Sam is shaking her awake. When she blinks her eyes open, there’s two bright white headlights barreling towards them. Cate jumps to her feet and waves her hands like a mad woman, eagerly flagging the truck down. Thankfully, it rolls to a stop for them.
“Hey,” Cate smiles easily at the trucker as he lowers his window. “Oh my god. Thank you for stopping. My brother and I, we’re lost. We’ve been hitching, and…”
She didn’t know what she planned to say after that, but she hadn’t needed to say much else, because the guy was all calm, even as she reached her hand inside the car to touch him. “You’re going to get out of your car and let us take it. Leave your wallet, too.”
The trucker happily obliges.
Cate didn’t feel like driving at all, completely exhausted at the turn of the day, but the idea of Sam behind the wheel was enough to jolt her awake. She angled her head towards the passenger door, even swung it open for him. He got in, obedient as ever. Cate wonders on if Sam was ever rewarded for enduring the torture after his experiments, and if that was demeaning for him. She thinks that she would have felt degraded, accepting kindness from tormentors, but maybe he wouldn’t have felt that way. Maybe he’d bend for any one that’d show him a nice gesture.
They hit a city that’s got a gas station, a motel, and a Vought-A-Burger all within walking distance. Cate pulls into the parking lot of the motel, which is only half full. She takes the cash from the wallet and hands it to Sam. “I’ll get us a room, you get us some food?”
Sam agrees because he’s already got her order memorized, and he’s eager to show her that he knows it and doesn’t need to be told twice. He takes off across the road while Cate heads into the lobby. She touches the kind old woman’s wrist and tells her that she’ll be needing a room at no cost and two key cards. She takes one and tells her to give the second one to the brown haired boy that’ll be coming in after her soon.
Cate knows that she desperately needs a shower, and trusts that Sam won’t find any trouble in the time it takes for him to get the food and find the room. She turns the knob to the highest heat and stands there under the spray, imaging her skin melting off her muscle, puddling at her feet like a wet candle. She takes a wash cloth and rubs at her arms and stomach, down her legs until she’s scrubbed pink and raw. She flings it outside the tub once she’s done with it with a wet slap, and finds then that she’s really too tired to stand. She’s always liked that she’s been tall, except for moments like these, where she can’t fit her long legs inside the tub and lay comfortably in it. She kicks her legs up the wall and lets her back rest on the floor of the tub. The water from up high hits her in the navel, but she can’t find the energy to stand up and readjust the nozzle so that it sprays somewhere else, so she stays there like that, imaging the pressure of the shower so strong, so hot, that it burns a whole right there through her middle.
She nods off again before waking up to knocking at the door. Cate clambers out of the tub and wraps a towel around herself before opening the door.
“Hey,” Sam says. “Sorry. I wouldn’t have bothered you, but there was like, steam coming out from the door. And your food is getting cold.”
“I think I fell asleep,” Cate says.
“You’re tired,” he thrusts a Mocha Noir out between them. “You should eat.”
Sam doesn’t say anything about how stringy her hair is, and how crinkled it gets when it’s wet, and how it looks like those stale noodles he was fed in the Woods. He doesn’t say anything about the wet black makeup running down her eyes either, because at least they weren’t bloodshot.
“I think they’ll find us soon. With the chips,” Sam says, gesturing to his neck and hers as Cate takes a bite into her burger. She hands him the milkshake that they’d been splitting. “So we could just wait here until then.”
Cate wasn’t partial to accepting defeat on their first solo mission, but, what else was there to do. “Maybe next time we’ll get a better car,” she sulks.
Sam shrugs and takes a sip of the drink, even though Luke’s in his ear, taunting him about cooties and how he was practically kissing his girlfriend, swapping spit. He ignores him, dredging his fries through ketchup before swallowing two at a time.
The motel has a little pool, shoddily hidden by gates and shrubs dug hastily right beside the parking lot. Since it’s empty, there’s little risk of being noticed, and they’d been holed up here for two days and counting with no Vought in sight, they both decide they could afford a swim.
“You don’t know how?” Cate asks, gliding easily through the water with a backwards stroke as she watches Sam, unmoving from his perch on the steps.
“Well. No.”
Cate hits the wall behind her. She scowls, forgetting how small the pool was. Couldn’t even get a proper lap in.
“You don’t want to try?”
Sam wordlessly moves to the middle of the pool, where his feet could still touch. “I don’t think it’s big enough to learn in.”
“Yeah,” Cate frowns. “But it’s okay, I guess.”
They stay in the water until their fingers prune, wading around each other in hapless circles. The strong smell of chlorine made them both feel dizzy, so they pulled out of the pool and let their legs dangle in the water instead. Sam was much quieter, these days, and Cate selfishly wanted to compel him to speak to her. He’d seemed closer to the girl that had gotten him out of the Woods, which only sort of bothered her. She could have just as well saved him. Then maybe he would’ve clung onto her like that. But no. She’d been complicit in keeping him down there in the first place. All the things she could’ve done instead, had she not been so mindless. Cate kicks her leg out, suddenly annoyed and disturbed with herself, sending a splash of water to the other end of the pool.
Sam snorts and kicks his leg too, trying to make a bigger splash.
Cate would have offered to teach him how to swim, but she wasn’t sure she would have been a good enough teacher. She couldn’t remember anyone teaching her how to swim. She mostly remembered having competitions with her brother, trying to see who could hold their breath under the water longer. He never let her win, so it was never fun for her. She’d come out for air and swim away from him, and without really realizing it, she found that there wasn’t any floor beneath her feet. Sometimes you learn that you can already do things, without having to be taught how.
Since both their underwear were soaked through, they resigned to laying in bed in their towels. Cate would have to call for more, and also for toothpaste, but the phone was just too far right now. She couldn’t imagine reaching for it.
“I wish I could wake up in bed.”
“You are in bed,” Sam mumbled. “But– I know what you mean.”
Cate chewed her lip. She drew her hair between her fingers and started picking through her split ends again.
“I’m sorry, Cate.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know what you’re thinking about,” he said, turning onto his side to face her. “I just, I know you’re thinking a lot. And you have to do it for both of us.”
She frowned. “That’s okay, Sam.”
“It would be if…ugh, I don’t know. If I could do for you what you do for me.”
“What?”
“Like, calm you down. Or make you feel better.”
Cate furrowed her eyebrows. She wasn’t sure what to say to that.
“I don’t know. If there’s anything I can do, I’d do it. You know?”
“Yeah,” she said, only because she really did think that he would.
Vought’s not coming. No one’s coming. You fucked up big time, little girl. You picked the wrong side. No one’s coming to save you.
Cate blanches, sitting up quick. The clock taunted 3:54 am. She groaned, covering her face with her hands.
“Hey,” Sam whispered. “Are you awake?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Sorry, did I wake you up?”
“No. I can’t sleep eit—”
“Do you want me to—”
“No.”
Cate furrows her eyebrows. “Sam, if you can’t sleep and I can help, why don’t you just let me?”
He sat with that, absorbed it. Instead of conceding, he shook his head and moved out of his bed. She wasn’t sure what he was meaning to do until he lifted her sheet and got into her bed, with her.
“Um.”
“I don’t want to go to sleep until you do. For once.”
“Um?”
Sam sighed. “Maybe it’s a guy thing.”
Cate blinked. “Okay, but–”
“Lay down, Cate.”
She did. And then he did, too, still watching her.
“What do you dream about?” Sam asks.
She didn’t want to burden him with the recent one, thinking her wavering faith might sway him too, and she didn’t need that. She didn’t want to talk about her other dreams, either, the ones with Luke. She tries and tries to think of a good one, but nothing comes to mind.
“I dream about the Woods,” he admits quietly. “Still. I can’t get it out.”
“Oh, Sam,” she frowns. “Why didn’t you tell me? Come here. I’ll take it away.”
But he shakes his head, grabbing her wrist before she could touch his temple. “No, I need to keep that. It reminds me that we’re doing the right thing, here.” He takes a breath. “And. I know you were just doing what you had to. We were both prisoners there.”
Cate swallows and nods, sealing her eyes shut.
With her eyes closed, Sam feels brave enough to move his wavering hand over to her throat. Her eyes flash open as his fingers wrap around it.
“Just let me see something,” he mumbles. Cate says nothing.
His hand curls around her neck, not tightening or constricting. Just touching, if anything, as if to feel her pulse, her life in his soft grip. Her throat bobs, tendons flex, and she tips her chin, parts her lips. She sucks in some air before he covers her, pressing his mouth to hers.
And then she closes her eyes again, accepting this. He tasted sweet, like the milkshakes they’d been sharing all week, and his lips were so plump, plumper than Luke’s. She winced. She needed to stop doing that.
“Did I hurt you?” Sam pulled back when she had flinched, paranoid.
“No,” Cate whispered, dragging him back down to her, cupping his cheek in her hand. “Don’t stop.”
Sam moves the hand he’d splayed on her throat up to touch her lips. They were red, where he’d bitten. But soft, careful not to draw blood. He smiled. He could be soft.
“Okay,” he breathed, “okay.”
Cate does a quick once over in the bathroom. One half arm, one full arm. Two legs. Two eyes, two clear eyes, no red.
There was no bruising on her neck, which she was surprised by. Only some down by her thighs in the shapes of his fingerprints, where he’d pried her open and devoured her, so she couldn’t complain. It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried to be careful. She was almost exhausted with how many times she had to say she was okay.
She redresses in the same clothes she’d been rotting in all week. Cate had been upset by the dirt earlier on, but now realizes that she’d rather burn these clothes than wear them again. But when she steps out of the bathroom, Sam smiles at her as if she’d been wearing a ball gown.
“Pretty,” he says. She rolls her eyes and ruffles a hand through his hair.
“Come on,” she says, bringing her foot up to his knee. Sam knots her laces and then gestures for the other shoe when he’s done with the first one. “We shouldn’t keep them waiting. Don’t want to be in more trouble than we probably already are.”
“I think we’ll be okay,” he says, tugging on her shoe strings to make sure they wouldn’t come undone. He looks up at her. “Right?”
“Yeah,” she nods. “We’ll be good.”