Spies&Thieves

nightmares

~ZACH~

The screams reached me far before I was fully conscious of who they belonged to.

I was up and out of the tossed around bed in less than a second. Across the room in three. Searched her face and pulled her into my arms in another.

I didn’t need to ask Bex what she was dreaming about. None of us did.

Glimmering tears ran down her cappuccino-colored cheeks, turned red now with her crying. Deep brown eyes shut closed so tight, I wondered if she could block out the world like that. Thick locks of hair ran into her mouth as she tried to get something out. But her strong and lean arms caved in and tried to make the rest of her body disappear, and it hurt and burned and thrashed within me to know that I was not the only one still suffering from insomnia and daily nightmarish memories.

“It was burning again.” Bex managed to choke out. I tightened my hold on her fragile body. Which really wasn’t fragile at all. “The school was burning and she was inside and we couldn’t get to her in time.”

Her rambling made it all worse. Of course, I didn’t have to ask who “she” was. It’d be a miracle the day we stopped remembering her mumbling and pointless wandering after running away and being kidnapped and somehow finding her way back home. I would thank every saint in the world the day I stopped seeing her kill that man on top of the hill, or stopped picturing what she looked like, dangling over the edge of a five story building in the midst of a suicide mission. I would probably drop down to my knees and bless everyone’s soul if I stopped remembering what she looked like the night two bullets found themselves in her body.

“She’s alive,” I whispered, more for my own benefit than hers.

She nodded hastily, dared a peek up at me. “Have you talked to her since the wedding?”

Right. Three months ago. I hadn’t spoken to Cameron Ann Morgan in three months.

My lips thinned out, which must have been enough of an answer, because she said, “I’ll try to get through to her today. I’ll call Langley and have them put Abby on the phone and I’ll just— we can call her today.”

We both knew that if we didn’t, we might go out of our minds. It burned within me to feel her satin skin, fill my hands of her dishwater blonde hair until they could hold no more, have her pink addictive lips meet mine in an urgent kiss.

       Bex read my thoughts. “Maybe there’s a chance we can see her soon.”

It was at that point that the alarm clock went off on the bedside table and I took in the whole room, barely brimming with light at the crack of dawn. Not minutes later were we out of the Motel 6 and waiting outside the front door for our ride.

A strong english accent broke my train of thought. “Whoever’s coming to pick us up is bloody late,” Bex said, now calm, searching the road like me. There wasn’t a trace of instability written on her stern, neutral face.

I tried to ease her doubts. “It’s probably just someone new. Takes a bit to get used to the field,” I shrugged off.

But her eyes threatened to tear down every inch of dead highway before us. Foot now tapping, she corrected me, “No. When you’re new timing is always perfect and everything you do is never late or unproportioned. Whoever’s coming knows what they’re doing and has been doing it for a while, or simply is just lazy.”

“Whoever’s coming knows how to get in your head with just some off-timing.” I smirked slightly.

Bex started to say something again, but the drowning sound of a motor came into hearing distance, and we searched for the source. Being the only car for around five miles in the middle of nowhere, I would have almost expected it to be going a little over the speed limit.