“Dad’s on a hunting trip..”

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Harry manages to stumble deeper into the mine to evade Burke and his deputy.

You’re surprised to still be breathing, if shakily at best. But Tom’s body is frozen against you, so much so that you worriedly pull back and raise your head enough to see his face.

“Tom?” you croak.

He’s still breathing too. It’s shallow, barely a rise and fall of his chest. His eyes stare vacantly at the spot where Harry once stood looming over both of you.

“T-om,” you repeat, clearing your throat when your voice cracks. You pull yourself up by his puffer jacket until you’re able to claw a stronghold at his collar. His hands twitch along your waist, where he’d been holding you, trying to protect you.

He meets your eyes, blinks hard, and often.

“You…” His brows furrow. “Why’d you…”

“Come back for you?” you ask, with tears in your eyes.

None of your friends had. Not Axel, Irene, or even Sarah, Tom’s own girlfriend. They’d peeled the fuck off in Axel’s car, screaming and crying.

Another gunshot echoes deeper in the mine, making you and Tom flinch badly. You grab onto his arms and try to help steady him as well as yourself.

“Come on,” you say raggedly.

You help each other off the dirt ground mixed with blood. You both are splattered with it, sticky and crimson. Your knee is throbbing and so is his arm, but you manage to limp together back to Tom’s car.

He’s still not all there. No way should he be about to put the car into Drive, but he takes one look at you, and you stare back at him, giving a trembling nod.

He floors the accelerator until it kicks up gravel and dust.

Later that night, your bed is right next to Tom’s in the Emergency Room. The nurse asks you questions you can barely answer while she treats your scrapes and cleans blood splatter off your skin—blood that isn’t yours.

You barely hear Tom speak at all. Every now and then, you look over, and your eyes meet his. Reassurance. Solidarity. Alive.

Your nails bite into your palms just to make sure.

Though you become distracted when your parents finally get there. Your mom breaks down into sobbing the moment she finds you. Your father’s eyes are misty too, but he keeps your mom from falling apart in the middle of the busy Emergency Room. There’s more commotion tonight, but more deaths than there are survivors.

You’re one of the “lucky few.” Whatever that bullshit means. There are times when your heartbeat pumps loud in your ears again, unless you’re mistaking that for the drip of an IV. You trace the path of a vein down the inside of your arm. You remember a severed one lying next to the girl you partnered with back in 11th grade Physics.

You utter a shaky sigh and rub at your face. Your mom is still pouring you more water than you can reasonably drink. Your dad is arguing with one of the policemen trying to take your statement.

Who you don’t see is Tom’s dad. You’d like to throw a fucking pickaxe at his head for your future therapy bills, but you’d settle for seeing him be here for his son.

The next time you look over at the bed beside yours, you don’t see Tom either.

“Sarah, you’re telling me you haven’t seen him at all?” you ask incredulously. “He hasn’t tried to call you or see you?”

“No,” she says, wiping the tears from her face in vain. Guilt is heavy in her eyes, in the way her lips tremble before she covers her mouth with both hands.

The two of you visit every part of town where you both know Tom liked to go, from the local bar where his dad’s friends and the other miners hang out, to the old diner that never has half the menu in stock, to the roof above the library where he and Sarah lost their virginities to each other the morning after Prom. You’d gone to the dance with Matt Lacey, a guy who ditched you to make out with Ashley, his old girlfriend.

Jesus Christ. After what happened last week, you wonder if either of them are still alive.

You and Sarah never find Tom. Not in the sleepy (traumatized) town of Harmony.

His dad tells you, with a full glass of bourbon in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other—

“If he was any kind of man, he’d stick it out and face it.”

Sarah glares at him, but your temper ignites. Before you leave the man to his vices, you grab his ash tray—handmade antique glass—and hurl it to the floor where it shatters. For one selfish, enraged moment, you hope the ash catches a spark of life and lights the whole damn house on fire.

Or at least, you hope he chokes on his cancer stick.

Somehow, you manage to finish out the rest of spring semester at college. You’re Pre-Med, and the classes are rigorous even in your freshman year. But at this point, you’re just going through the motions.

Nothing feels like it…matters anymore. Not homework or teachers or the career your parents have been prepping you for since the 9th grade. Though maybe you should become a neurosurgeon. You’d like to crack open Harry Warden’s brain and see if there’s actual rot inside.

However, you have a feeling that Harry’s brain would look the same as anyone else’s. No warning signs. No telling who’s got the disease—the kind that makes you a monster behind a man-made mask.

You bury it down and down and down.

You shove it all deep under schoolwork, your job, your family, but you feel the cracks starting to splinter off inside you. Steam through fault lines.

You’re about to crack.

You take a drive away from school that ends up taking you out of town. An afternoon turns into an all-night journey to nowhere. A day to “reset” turns into an escape.

You understand Tom a little better now.

The thought makes you sigh. Bite your lip. Worry.

Out of habit, you reach for your phone, though your thumb only hovers once you scroll down to his name in your contacts. He’s never answered you before. It probably won’t make a difference now, three months later…

But you press the green call button. You’ll just leave another voicemail, and you’ll get to hear his voice for another ten seconds.

You’re waiting to hear his “Sorry I missed you,” voice. What you get is…

“Hello?”

You’re so shocked you almost drop your phone, gasping, swerving near an SUV who honks their horn at the crazy girl on the highway. Eventually you get the phone back to your ear.

“Tom?!”

“You okay? I, uh, heard something drop…”

“Yeah, I’m fine, just coordination challenged as usual. But God, Tom, where are you?”

He hesitates to answer. You start to worry that he’ll hang up.

“Hey, look, I know. Okay? I don’t blame you for leaving. I might’ve, um, ditched town too for a while.”

“Really?” he asks. “…Where are you?”

You tell him the exit you just passed and where you plan to get off the highway the best you can. He knows you’re a little directionally challenged too. But the sound of his small chuckle is enough to spark some warmth in your chest, something you haven’t felt in months.

Within a couple of hours, he meets you at the closest hotel you can find. You consider checking in when you get there before him, but you don’t want to risk missing him. You sit in an old chair in the lobby with your small duffel bag by your feet, and you wait.

Soon enough, you hear the rumble of his Jeep as it pulls up outside, cutting out when it parks. You stand to your feet, antsy and shifting on foot to foot. But your breath stills when you see him in that old gray hoodie of his, hands in his pockets, his body a little hunched like he’s shielding himself from the world. His eyes scan the lobby until they catch on you.

His face softens. He stands a little straighter, just enough to let you in.

You almost knock him over in a hug. You’re a little surprised by how tightly he holds you back. An unsteady breath escapes him.

You don’t know that his eyes shut tight for a second. That the sight of your smile made the numbness inside him thaw, at least for that moment. That the feeling of you, steady and warm and real, grounds him enough believe you’re really here.

You pull back just enough to see his face, smiling through your tears. He stares down at you at doesn’t know what to say. It’s almost like that night in the hospital again, when he realized who his true friends were. 

Until you smack him on the arm.

“Ah!” he flinches.

“Where the hell have you been?” you snap. “Sarah’s been worried about you. I’ve been worried about you! We didn’t know if something…”

“Happened to me?” Tom wryly supplies.

Your lips purse. Somehow, it just makes him smile. He takes your arms gently.

“I’m sorry,” he says. His gaze falls. “I just…I couldn’t take it anymore, you know?”

You nod, latching onto him too. “Well, I want to hear about it. You…want to grab dinner or something?”

Tom hesitates, but he sees a sign behind you and points up ahead.

“Looks like this hotel has a restaurant,” he says. “Are you gonna check in first though?”

You look over at the hotel reception desk, where the line has shortened. You smile back up at him.

“Only if you’re staying too.”

It’s an almost cheeky challenge. Tom huffs, but he realizes he has no real reason to say no. And at this point, he doesn’t want to. He withdraws his wallet from his pocket and pulls out his credit card.

“Dad might’ve talked a lot of shit before I left, but he hasn’t cut me off just yet,” he says, with a hint of that boyish grin you’ve known since the eighth grade.

You smirk. “Well, if we’re putting it on daddy’s card, might as well spring for the room with the jacuzzi tub. I’ve always wondered what those little jets feel like.”

Tom pauses in his steps. His brows raise at you.

“What, same room?” he asks.

You blink, realizing what you just said. Your mouth opens, but very little sound comes out as you stare up into the curious green of his eyes, like he’s trying to figure out what you really want here. The problem is you’re still trying to figure that out yourself.

“I mean, whatever,” you shrug. “It’ll be cheaper, right? Two queen beds.”

Just then, a reminder tugs sharply in your mind, making you pause. Sarah.

You don’t know if they’re even still together, but you don’t want to assume the worst either. Sarah’s your friend too. You know she loves him.

You offer him a smile, but it doesn’t reach your eyes.

“Actually, you know what? It’s okay, I can just get my own room,” you say, patting his arm.

What you don’t see when you go on ahead to the reception desk, is the way Tom heaves a sigh. He glances down at the many missed notifications on his Palm Pilot: voicemails, calls unanswered, even emails. He’s too much of a coward to open any of them.

So he’ll stay here with you, just for the night to make sure you get home okay tomorrow.

But the truth is, he has no intention of going back to Harmony.

AN: Cue the Law & Order: dun dun 😂 We're easing into this one, but from here on out, we're going off the canon road...

Next Time:

You linger at your door and take a chance on looking back at him. He’s standing there with his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

“You okay?” he asks, because he’s Tom. He’s always had that boy next door vibe, with the earnest eyes and boyish smile. You hadn’t seen it as often after what happened in the mine last year.

“I almost feel like I’m not gonna see you in the morning. Like you’re going to take off in the night or something,” you say.

“After what I paid for the room?” Tom tries to joke. It doesn’t land. He sees it in your face, so tired and sad. He feels guilty for being the one to cause it. You’re the last person he wants to hurt.

“You’ll see me in the morning,” he promises.

“And after?” you ask, with a challenging brow raise. “Would you…come back with me?”

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