deadly nightshade | fever in, fever out

chapter 48: among us

Sam drove herself and Joey back to his place by the time the lake effect snow began to fall over them. There was no way they were going to stay there for very long, especially since she didn't have her boots on. He shivered in the seat next to her even though he wore a long black coat: he knitted his knees together and bowed his head to better keep the warmth in his body even though the heater was switched on. She flexed her fingers a bit along the edge of the steering wheel: those hockey gloves were back at his place, but she wondered if she could have one of those pairs of gloves with the finger tips snipped off.
Right outside of town, Joey bowed his head a bit more and his inky black curls sprawled over his shoulders like the tentacles of an octopus.
"You feel okay?" she asked him with a glimpse over at him.
"Yeah—I've just got a chill up a spine that won't go away is all."
"Would you like something warm when we get back to your place?"
"Please. I need a bit of sump'n filling, too."
"We didn't really eat much of breakfast, anyway," she pointed out. Joey shook his head about so the black curls brushed against his shoulders.
Sam wound her way off the highway and she recognized the side street from the night before. It took her a single night and a couple of trips throughout there in order for her to recall the way back to his place. Joey slid out of the front seat first once they took the same spot from the night before; Sam followed suit right behind him with her hands upon her upper arms. He reached the door first and thus he held it for her once she padded up to his front step.
"See, there's a gentleman in there," she told him in a light voice and with a nod of her head. He showed her another lopsided grin as she ducked inside: once he came in behind her, the rain began to fall out there in sheer sheets. He shook his head about even though his hair was dry.
Sam continued onward to the kitchen for his kettle: she opened the cupboard next to the fridge in search of cocoa and marshmallows, but there was nothing. He had a little bit of food on hand but not a lot. She could only assume it was because he was about to head out on tour soon that he had cleaned out his pantry, but she could feel herself growing hungry again.
"What you looking for?" he asked her once he stood next to the counter.
"When Cliff was alive, I made some Mexican hot chocolate for him one morning."
"Oh, shit—I don't think I have any of those things."
"If we were back at my place, I'd make you a cup wing bang boom. It's just the kind of day for something like this—with the cinnamon and kiss of spices."
"Kiss of spices," he chuckled at that. She turned around to find him stooped down behind the counter.
"Yeah—like a little kiss of spices."
"Spices before I head out to Europe in a few days."
"You oughta give me a kiss," she joked, and Joey raised his head from behind the counter. His lips were parted a bit; she froze in place. She had blurted it out. He had been making jokes with her with each encounter they had, especially when they were out on the hockey rink. It wasn't a joke even though she intended it to be as such.
"Did you say what I think you said?" he asked her in a low voice. Sam swallowed and she shifted her weight right in that spot. He stood to his feet, but he never moved closer to her. Those brown eyes swallowed her whole like a pair of black holes.
She shifted her weight again, and she turned her head into the partially empty cupboard next to her. Joey let out a long low whistle, and then he ran his fingers through the black curls on the side of his head. She never moved a muscle as he ambled over to the fridge for something. He took out a brown glass bottle from the top shelf.
"Put the booze away, Joey," she begged him. "I don't want you to drink. Please—don't drink. Besides you already had one earlier."
He stared at the bottle as it rested in his right hand.
"Joey—I didn't mean to say that," she blurted out, but then she realized that was the wrong thing to say. But he didn't move: he kept his gazed fixated on the crinkled label plastered on the front there.
"Joey—I—" she sputtered. Her mind went blank. "—I—I—"
Joey set the bottle down on the counter next to him and he moved in closer to her. Sam pressed her back to the wall. He brought his dark lips closer to her face. The skin looked smooth and delicate, and it made her think of dark chocolate.
"Nah," he muttered with a shake of his head.
"What's wrong?" she asked him.
"I don't really wanna do it," he confessed. "Even though I'm curious."
"Well—I don't understand?" she coaxed him.
"I mean, you said it," he pointed out.
"I was making a joke, though."
"Oh, I see," he showed her a grin again.
"It was a joke but it kinda sucked."
"Try saying it in a funny voice," he suggested.
"You oughta gimme a kiss," she repeated in a phony high voice, and that brought a laugh out of him.
"Where would you like me to kiss ya?"
"On the lips, of course."
"Which lips? The mouth or in between your legs?"
"The mouth. Although I would have to touch the lips in between my legs to get myself going." Even though she had touched herself in the past, it felt so odd to tell another person about it, especially when she didn't really feel it there in front of Joey.
"You sure about that?" He raised those little black eyebrows at her.
"Positive."
"Maybe I can do ya a favor, though," he said with a little gyration of his head.
"I'd have to get to know you a little better, though, Joey," she pointed out. "Get to know you a little better to really see how I feel about you."
"You've got a taste of it, though—you're ahead of the game already."
"Unless you wanna play a game of hockey with me," she quipped.
"Play a game of hockey and fuck yes with me," he added, and he burst out laughing right there. She tried to resist a chuckle but it slipped out from her. Why that was so funny to her was almost beyond her, and yet she laughed anyway.
"Fuck yes? What about fuck maybe?"
"Fuck maybe, fuck yes—fuck it all and fuck the pain away."
"So many fucks," she remarked.
"All the fucks in the world. All the fucks in the world in between your legs."
"Hey, now—let's not get ahead of ourselves. I already am kind of ahead of myself."
Joey raked the hair on the side of his head yet again.
"So you wanna make me some Mexican hot chocolate?" he asked her.
"Yeah. With nutmeg and cinnamon. Maybe a little star anise or something particularly special to make it a little more Native American influenced."
"Hmm—" He stroked his chin. "I dunno if I've seen anything like that here in Camillus. We'd haveta go to Syracuse, and I don't really feel like going out again."
"I can go alone," she suggested with a shrug. "I know my way back here."
"I'll be awaiting for you." He flashed her a wink and a slight pucker of his dark lips. She shifted her weight yet again and she adjusted her shirt; he was adorable with his little lopsided smile and his little cheekbones. It made her think of Lars and she wondered how he was doing right then before Metallica's first tour without Cliff onboard. Even though she made a joke, she wondered how he really felt about her.
"Would you like me to bring back something else for you?" she asked him in a trembling voice: she flashed back on the scuffle between him and Alex even though she had no reason to do so.
"Maybe sump'n for dinner and some more coffee for us in the morning. Get yourself something nice, too." He shook his black curls about and showed off his neck to her all the while. She skirted past him and her hand brushed upon his shoulder. A single touch against his clothes and she shuddered a bit. She was always alone with it, but perhaps that would change soon enough for her. She returned to the couch for her coat. The thought of going to fetch some coffee made her think of that scuffle yet again.
It was right then she had an idea.
"Do you remember where the dudes from Legacy went off to?" she asked him, to which he shrugged his slender shoulders.
"Why's that?" he asked her, and the warmth had vanished from his face at that.
"Oh—just curious."
"I dunno, to be quite frank."
"So there's 'to be frank' and there's 'to be quite frank'," she recalled.
"It's almost Frank," he said, and the grin returned to his face.
"Or sophisticated Frank," she pointed out.
"That's Frank with a suit on." And he couldn't resist the laugh right there. She slipped her coat back on and picked up the keys again.
"I'll be back soon, you crazy boy," she told him and she headed back outside, where the rain poured down, still in sheets. She bowed her head as she made her way back around the corner and towards the car: Cliff's hat was in the back seat. Hopefully, the rain continued over in Syracuse.
It felt so weird driving there without Joey or anyone else with her, but she managed to do it anyway. Right before the inner city, she took the first exit and rolled up to the first stoplight. Even through the sheets of cold rain, she recognized that van down the block, right up against the corner.
"Ask and you shall receive," she muttered to herself. She gazed up at the red light over her head, and she thought about Zelda and Belinda's remarks about their desire to do more for the boys. It was a fleeting thought, but she wondered if they had management of sorts around them, besides the Zazulas of course. She was their very first member of their fan club after all. Maybe she could do more, something more than Stormtroopers especially since she hadn't heard a word about them from either Scott or Charlie, especially since she hadn't heard a word about them following the tour from last summer.
The light turned green and she lunged forward. She took the spot right behind them: she recognized Chuck's smooth brown curls underneath his sweater hood. He turned in her direction and she flashed the headlights at him. He frowned at her and she opened the door, and poked her head out for him to see. And his face lit up at her.
"Hey, guys, Sam's here!" he declared into the back section of the van. She reached into the back seat for the hat and she put it on before she climbed out all the way. She set a hand on the crown and Chuck flashed her two thumbs up.
"Bitchin' hat, little Sammich," he told her once she came within earshot. Eric emerged from the inside there, also with a hood on his head.
"What're you guys doing here?" she asked them.
"We were about to head on back home," Chuck told her as he put his arm around her again.
"That is a bitchin' hat," Eric remarked.
"It used to be Cliff's hat," she said with a nudge of the brim.
"I thought it looked familiar," Chuck noted; she looked past Eric at that little jet black helmet of hair posted up against the van wall behind him. He lingered in the background with his hand upon his brow: single gray hairs slithered out from in between his fingers. He kept his head bowed a bit as if he had a headache: but she recognized his fine prominent features paired with that boyish round face.
"He's grounded," Greg, who sat right across from him, told her. "He's been a bad boy."
"He's grounded?" she chuckled, but she stopped herself in her tracks.
"Tried a little acid," Chuck said into her ear in a low voice. "Just to see what it was like."
"Yeah—a short trip—sort of, anyways—and he's still coming down from it," Eric added, "and his parents caught wind of it. His mom was like, 'he may be eighteen now but he's still our baby!' over the phone, so I was like, 'yes, alright, Mrs. Skolnick—we'll get your little boy home soon enough. It'll probably be out of his system by then.' So when he gets home, he's gotta serve out his sentence for a bit."
Alex bowed his head a bit more and he kept his hand upon the crown, and she wondered how he was feeling right then. He was barely eighteen and yet he tried out something that seemed so strange even to her. He breathed a little hard as if he had just run a mile but he wasn't acting strange in any other way. Louie knelt down before the double doors, complete with his hair combed down flat upon the top of his head.
"Hey, you," Sam greeted him, and he showed her a big toothy grin. "How you doing?"
"I'm doing better now," he replied and he shook his head so his hair lifted off of the crown. "How's Zelda?"
"She's kicking ass right now. I guess the Cherry Suicides are trying to get something for themselves with the label, at least that's according to her."
"Awesome! I hope they get it."
"By the way, when are Metallica coming?" Eric asked her as he knitted his eyebrows together and adjusted his hood. "Do you know already?"
"Coming where? To California?"
"No, here to New York and the rest of the country."
"I think they already left, Eric," Louie confessed as he ran a hand over the smooth wave of hair upon his head.
"Left for Europe," Sam added.
"Let's see, you're a student," Louie said, "I kinda wanna see you on tour with us if and when it happens. It'll happen soon enough, we just have to—you know, record our album and get it put out and everything."
"Well, if I go along with you, I don't want you guys to stay in dingy hotels," she declared. "I went on tour with Stormtroopers last summer and we stayed in one hotel the entire tour. All over New York and Pennsylvania, Marla and I stayed in Charlie's car."
"Oh, Jesus," Eric groaned.
"But I don't think we will," Chuck assured her. "At least, that's what I think, anyway. All I know is we're staying far away from the hallucinogens, that's for sure." His dark eyes wandered over to Alex, who finally lifted his head up but he didn't appear to be looking at anything in particular.
"Hang on—when are you guys going into the studio?" Sam asked them.
"Uh, January, I think?" said Eric. "We're coming out here to do the recording, too."
"If it comes out in the spring, we'll tour over the summer," Greg added from inside of the van, and Alex shuddered in response to that.
"Dude, Sam—you gotta come with us!" Chuck encouraged her.
"Yeah, come with us!" Louie exclaimed.
"Yeah, walk among us," Eric joined in.
"I'd have to do something about school, though," she pointed out as she adjusted the brim of her hat again. "Where are you guys going?"
"We hope it'll just be all along the West Coast," Chuck explained. "Well, you're part of the fan club which means you're on our mailing list. You'll get your first perks!"
"Oh, cool! I'll keep an eye out for that."
Eric gazed up at the darkening sky and squinted his brown eyes in the wake of the rain.
"Let's get out of this rain," he said to Chuck and Louie.
"Yeah, we just stopped here to get our bearings anyways," the former told Sam as he rubbed his hand upon her shoulder.
"I like how you just unabashedly put your arm around me," she remarked to him.
"He's protecting you," Louie told her with a bow of his head. "Believe me, I did that a lot for Zelda."
"I gotta get some stuff for Joey, too—he's gotta have some stuff at the moment before Anthrax goes out soon."
"How's he doing, by the way?" Chuck asked her in a low voice.
"Oh, he's doing great. I've been trying to get him to drop the drinking lately."
"Good, 'cause if a little hit of acid can mess up our little man lead guitarist for several hours, I can't imagine what the booze must be doing to a lead singer," Eric said in a single breath.
"No idea," she confessed with a shake of her head and yet another adjusting of the brim.
"You're getting a full on lake up there!" Greg joked.
"There's a lake out there somewhere," Alex spoke out of the blue, and in an absent tone.
"Yeah, we gotta get going," Chuck told Eric, "he sounds lucid."
"Earlier, he could barely talk," Eric told her.
"You boys stay healthy for me," she decreed with her arms outstretched for him. She embraced the three of them and blew Greg a kiss, who promptly caught it and lay it across his chest. Chuck climbed into the driver's seat and Eric took to the passenger side.
"Have some tea, Alex," she said into the back section of the van; he didn't reply but she knew he heard her. Without another word, she backed away and doubled back to Joey's car. She slid back into the driver's seat and watched Legacy's van haul off into the sheets of lake effect rain. She glanced to her right and she spotted a little spice shop there on the corner in front of her. It would give her the chance to let the hat dry off a bit more as she dodged her way inside for some cinnamon, nutmeg, and chocolate.
She bowed next door for those tiny marshmallows, and soon, she ducked back into the car: Cliff's hat was soaking wet from the rain water and she let out a loud sigh as she lay on the seat next to her. His scent would be washed out for sure at that point, replaced by that earthy rain smell.
Sam drove back to Joey's place, which proved to be a little bit more difficult given the amount of rain that was falling right then: she had to peer past the literal rivulets on the windshield just to see the street signs. But she recognized that art shop across the street and she made that same right hand turn. She bounded into the parking lot and she hurried back to Joey's apartment. He greeted her with yet another lopsided grin and his inky black hair tousled over his shoulder: as she rubbed the rain water from her eyes, she noticed the glisten to his curls. He also had put on a different shirt from before.
"D'you take a shower?"
"I sure did!" he replied. "I had been meanin' to, anyways." He then rubbed his hands together. "So—this Mexican hot chocolate for the two of us?"
"I served it to Cliff one time when he visited me, and I wanna give you a little taste now."
Sam put the jars of ground cinnamon and nutmeg on the counter, and she reached into his cupboard for a pair of mugs.
"What if we add a little bitta—" He hesitated as she put on the kettle.
"A bit of what?" she asked him, and she turned around to find him making a drink motion towards his dark lips. She rolled his eyes.
"What? It's Mexican. How 'bout we make it a little Irish, too?"
"Joey—no." And yet she couldn't help but laugh at that.
"If we serve it with a bit of pasta, it becomes Italian," he continued.
"Really?"
"Nah, I just made that up. I dunno where that would go, to be honest—and I'm half Italian!"
She laughed at that as she poured the dark cocoa into their mugs. She then thought about the other side of Joey's heritage, especially with the curls and stray ringlets all about his head.
"What about Iroquois?" she asked him as she followed it up with the nutmeg.
"Iroquois, you put it in the ground and hope for the best."
"Wouldn't that taste like dirt, though?"
"Maybe. Or it might be poured all over my skin for all we know. At least, that was the impression I got growing up as a half blood boy among a shitload of white people."
She wrinkled her nose at that, and he nibbled on his bottom lip.
"What if I take a few of those tiny marshmallows and rub them all over my belly?" he quipped.
"You do that, I might lick them all off," she joked, and he clapped his hands together he laughed so hard.
She could hear the kettle boiling right behind her. Joey then leaned his hip against the edge of the counter top and he folded his arms across his chest. She had seen him not even a few hours ago, and yet he was already lucid again. The man could hardly hold his liquor for very long and yet he was lucid again: it made her think of Alex and when exactly he took that hit. She poured the near boiling water into the white mugs and she let the ingredients mix together by themselves before she added the cinnamon and stirred it all together.
A few marshmallows into his mug followed by her own. Joey picked up the mug before him and he raised it to her. She followed suit with both hands.
"To the tour," he said.
"To art," she added.
"To art!" he added with a twinkle in his eye. "And to new music in the future as well."
Eric and Greg had mentioned Legacy would go into the studio themselves in a couple of months time for their very first album. She even opened her mouth a bit as if to mention it to him. But he had such a cold reaction to her asking about Legacy earlier, and thus she pursed her lips together at the thought and corrected herself.
"To brand new music—all around," she followed up, "from everyone." And they clinked their mugs together in a toast.
She loved Joey but there was something about Alex. She thought about the mysterious man in her dreams, and yet she was convinced that there was no way that was him. And thus maybe it was because he was still a teenage boy. There he was, nestled there in the back part of their van, at the end of the hallucinatory trip, but he struck her as small and gentle, and even precious. That little plume of gray at the crown of his head made him older but it also added to the roundness of his face. Eric even referred to him as his parents' little boy after all. He was still a young boy, even with that big jarring voice and those grays.
She loved Joey but she needed to protect Alex. She kept that firmly in mind as he lowered the mug down to his chest.
"Holy shit, that's excellent," Joey remarked. "The spice comes in at the back, too, I love that!"
"It's not the traditional way they make it south of the border, but it's something, though," Sam confessed with a shrug of her shoulders.
"Is that why it took you so long to get back?"
"Yes. I was—looking around for the traditional way of making it, just to kind of change it up from when I served it to Cliff, but—I decided to go the basic route."
"Sometimes basic is all that's needed," he assured her with a raise of his eyebrows. He brought the mug to his dark lips again for another sip.
"I got you more coffee, by the way," she added, and he moved his free hand out for a high five from her. She loved Joey a lot and she was comfortable around him, but she had no idea what he would do at the mere mention of Alex, or the fact she still smelled like Chuck. For all he knew, however, it still lingered from the day before. She hoped to keep up the lie because the idea of the man she loved going nuts about the other five men she loved made her squirm in that very spot.