Author's Note: Thanks for all the helpful feedback! This one isn't going to be too long, I can tell, but I hope yall like it. I'm enjoying working on the storyline. I mean, let's have some pity for Martin. I cringe when he's with Sam, but he's a sweet guy. Let him down gently, eh? Thanks. LV
Don't own any of this, please don't sue :-)
Chapter 2
Jack put his car in reverse and spun out of the driveway. He tried to think of where she'd go, where she'd run. He vaguely remembered her talking about an aunt who she used to run to when she was young and needed shelter, but doubted she'd go there now. The name stuck in his mind. Dalloway. She'd spoken of the name before, but when? He drove back to the highway and quickly aligned himself on the route to her apartment. He would find her. He had to.
It grew harder and harder to drive through the river of water that began to flood the roads. Jack's window wipers slapped frantically across his vision as he squinted through the rain and he flicked on his bright lights. A sinking feeling in his stomach spread throughout his body, but he refused to acknowledge it. Sam, where the hell are you? And why does that name 'Dalloway' keep coming back to my mind? Jack screeched to a halt and slapped the steering wheel.
"Dalloway's on Eighteenth!" He murmured breathlessly before speeding off, his wheels hydroplaning on the slick surface. Why didn't he think of it before?
"For God's sake, Sam, pick up!" Martin muttered desperately into his cell phone that rang at his ear. He drove past her condominium and searched for her car in the garage and found that it was empty. Martin parked in the drive and leapt out of his car. The rain immediately drenched him as he ran up to her door and banged on it several times with his fist.
"Sam!" he bellowed. "Sam, are you there?" He rang the doorbell fruitlessly and turned around in frustration. Her tall figure flashed through his mind and he concentrated on her face. He blanched. He saw every curve of her body, every strand of blonde hair, but he could not bring her face out of the shadow that it was cast in. Martin ran a hand through his sopping wet hair and forced the thought from his mind. He padded down the condo steps and got back into his car which was still running. Where would she go at a time like this? Wryly, he realized that this was something Sam would never come to him of all people about.
It was like she was running from him.
Sam could feel nothing in her body any more. She reveled in the numbness that spread from her fingertips to her toes. She lay sprawled on the hood of her car, clothes and body completely saturated with rain. Her hair clung like a second skin to her neck and she no longer felt the cold that had stung her at first. The rain covered her like an enveloping blanket.
Her lips moved slowly, curved in a morose smile.
"And reaching up my hand to try, I screamed to feel it touch the sky…" Sam murmured, reciting her favorite poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. She stared with her eyes half open at the drops that fell at her like gentle daggers . "I screamed, and lo, Infinity came down and settled over me…."
The street lamp which had illuminated the empty parking lot of her cousin's restaurant suddenly flickered and went out. Sam shivered.
She was bathed completely in darkness.
He was only five miles away. Five miles. It may as well have been five hundred. With every inch that his car crept along the flooded street he had to wait ten seconds while a tumultuous gush of rain poured over him, then sporadically let up. Hang in there, Sam. Jack begged silently, his whole body tensed over the arch of his steering wheel. Just hang in there. He glided under a stoplight which swung in the rain like a glowing red eye. Only a few more blocks. Sam's cousin, he remembered, owned a family restaurant called Dalloway's. She had told him that when she was little, she'd hide out behind it so her family couldn't find her. It was her sanctuary. Some things never change.
Jack pleaded to God that she was still in her car. The downpour would be her death if she was exposed to it for too long. He passed two street signs that read Fifteenth St. and Sixteenth St. as the roads steadily worsened. Jack wondered if Martin had found her already. He clenched his jaw unconsciously and drove on.
Martin sat, disgusted, in the parking log of a gas station with his hands limp between his legs.
He had no idea where to look for her. Not one fucking clue. She could be sitting in her favorite café, the favorite café that he didn't know about, having a mocha. She could be at her favorite restaurant, also unknown to him, or parked under her favorite part of Central Park, foreign as well. Martin smothered his tired features with his hand and stared at the rain still streaming down his window. He knew nothing about the woman he was sleeping with. The woman he was in love with. She'd never told him; he'd never asked.
Martin kicked the car door open and ran to the run down Mini Mart next to the gas pumps. He nodded to the fortyish woman with hot magenta nail decals and bought a coffee which tasted like burnt toast. He leaned against a refrigerator stacked with six-pack upon six-pack of canned beer. Martin wondered if Jack had found her already. He clenched his jaw cynically and let the toxic liquid fight its way down his throat.
