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Date Posted: 08:57:20 09/05/02 Thu
Author: Sabrina
Subject: Stay With Me (Short Story - PG)

Stay With Me


2:04 A.M.
June 2, 1998

“This better be good,” Mike muttered as he rolled over and blindly groped until he found the receiver.

“Hi, it’s me.”

He sat up in bed so fast he almost fell off.

“Carrie?”

“Yeah.” He voice was ragged and breathy. She’d been crying.

“Are you all right?”

“Just fine. That’s why I’m calling at two in the morning.”

He knew her well enough to know that she never resorted to sarcasm unless she was under a lot of stress.

“What’s on your mind?” he asked, trying to stifle a yawn as he stretched and worked the kinks out of his back.

“One guess.” The laugh that followed was short and harsh.

“Austin and Sami?”

“You got it.”

“Want to talk about it?”

He could hear her hesitate.

“Could you come over?”

He checked his clock. He wasn’t due at the hospital until eleven this morning. “Want me to bring some comfort food?”

He heard her sob turn into a gentle sigh. “That would be great.”





2:30 A.M.

The door opened before he had a chance to knock.

She was dressed in a pair of well-worn pajamas and her hair was pulled back in a sloppy ponytail. Her face was red and splotchy. He’d never seen anyone so beautiful in his life.

“What did you get?” she asked, taking the bag from him and peering into it as he put his keys on the table and closed the door.

“Orange sherbet, dill pickles, sour dough pretzels, chocolate fudge icing, and honey mustard,” he replied as they made their way to the kitchen.

She handed him the jar of pickles. “Wanna open that for me?”

He sat down at the small table, took the jar from her and applied appropriate pressure. She collapsed into the chair and plucked a pickle from its brine using a salad fork.

Mike watched her take a big bite, munch, and swallow. She washed it down with a swallow of Diet Coke and grimaced as the carbonation hit her sinuses.

Carrie took a deep breath, expelled it and said, “Thanks, I needed that.”

They were sitting at the kitchen table of the apartment she had once shared with Billie, which she now shared with Austin, at least on the nights when he managed to sneak away from Sami.

“He said that he needed to stay with her tonight because she was sleeping too lightly, and Will has a cold,” she explained before she ripped open the pretzel bag with a visciousness that surprised him.

She slowly pushed the bag aside with one hand and rested her forehead in the other. Mike reached across the table and took her hand in his. Simple as the gesture was, it was enough to destroy her shaky self-control.

Mike got up from the chair and and put his arms around her, made those soft, gentle nonsense noises that all of those who are born to comfort others make without thought or effort. He handed her a tissue from the box on the table and she sobbed into it as she leaned into him.

“Oh, God, what’s wrong with me?” she asked.

“Nothing. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just feeling fragile, that’s all.”

“I’m trying not to be,” she said. “Maybe I just can’t see it any other way. He thinks she’s more important to him than I am.”

“That’s not true,” he chided. “And you know better than to say that.”

“Then why would he put up with this? Sometimes I don’t understand how he can be so blind! He says he can’t break the news that she was never his wife because she still has ‘amnesia’-” Carrie made manual quotation marks in the air to emphasize her point “-and I’m supposed to just sit here and wait for him to pick the right time to tell her?”

There wasn’t much he could say in response.

She turned her head so quickly he flinched. “You would never do that, would you, Mike?”

“Do what?” he asked cautiously.

“No, you wouldn’t,” Carrie said firmly. “You wouldn’t have gotten yourself into this situation in the first place!”

“What are you talking about?” he asked lightly, trying to keep the situation from getting too intense.

She stood up and started pacing the kitchen like a caged animal.

“You would have known what was going on from the first. You can see it when someone has a crush on you. You were great with me when I couldn’t stop following you around that year before you left for Israel and I went to live in Belgium.”

She wasn’t making any sense. “Carrie, what are you talking about?”

She ignored him and kept going, her voice escalating in volume and pitch as she continued to wear a path on the kitchen floor.

“I’m pretty sure you knew that I spent that summer trying to be wherever you were. I went to all of your baseball games, and I kept score for your team just so I could see you every Saturday! I spent that summer wearing a bikini because I thought you’d like it! And do you know what you did?”

She stopped in front of him, dropped to her knees, rested her head on his thigh. Her voice was soft and weary as she finished.

“You treated me like I was a human being. You were so careful of my ego and you never once made me feel like I was ‘just a kid.’” She shook her head. “I don’t know how you did it, Mike, but you managed to make me feel confident, and you were always the perfect gentleman. Maybe you never even noticed me in that way.” She laughed ruefully, “Or maybe you’re just perfect, period.”

She felt his fingers brush her hair back from her face and she leaned into it, sighing softly.

“I’m not perfect, Carrie, so don’t go putting me on a pedastal,” he said, surprised by how tired his own voice was. “I noticed, believe me, I noticed.”

“Tell me,” she whispered. “I think I’m more than due for an ego boost.”

Mike closed his eyes and he stroked her hair.

“When you went to my games, you wore cutoff jeans and your shirt was #26, one number below mine. You had an anklet with dark blue and light blue beads. You had, and still have, world-class ankles and feet.”

He felt her smile against his knee.

“And I thought that bikini you had, the light blue one with the embroidery on the right hip and left…um, chest area—”

She giggled as he fumbled for an appropriate term to describe that part of her anatomy.

“Well let’s just say that was pretty much torture. That, and the way your legs looked in those cutoff shorts…Jesus.”

She went still as his hand tightened involuntarily in her hair.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” he said, removing his hand from her hair.

“It’s okay,” she soothed. “I’ve got a tough scalp.”

“No, I mean, you were just sixteen. I should have been shot for having those thoughts.”

She could tell by the tone of his voice that he had been living with more than his share of guilt for the past seven years. At the moment, she was feeling pretty damn guilty herself. She’d dragged him out of his bed and made him come over and listen to her bitch, moan and complain, and now all she could think about was how good and warm his hand had felt in her hair.

Carrie watched as he got up from the chair and put the sherbet in the freezer. She got up and gripped the back of the chair with both hands.

The silence which had been so light and comfortable moments ago was now tense and heavy.

“You must be beat,” she said, trying to regain her composure.

“Yeah. It was a long day.” He wouldn’t look at her as he put the Diet Coke in the fridge.

“Thanks for coming over.”

“No problem.”

Mike picked up his keys from the table and Carrie walked him to the door.

He was about walk out of the apartment when she moved into his arms. He more than met her halfway. It was a full body contact hug from ankles to shoulders, replete with tension and warmth. Carrie pressed her cheek against his chest and Mike rested his against the top of her head and they just stayed that way for a full minute.

“You’re good for my soul, Mike Horton,” she whispered. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

“Same here, Carrie Brady,” he replied, kissing the top of her head and rubbing her back. “You’re gonna be all right.”

He walked out the door and she closed it gently behind him.

Carrie rested her forehead against the cool wood for a moment before she turned around and sank to the floor. She drew her knees up and folded her arms around them.

It terrified her to realize that the pleasantly warm feeling that surrounded her heart whenever she was with Mike had escalated in temperature and spread through her entire body.

“Deep breaths,” she whispered, trying to get control of herself. But her pajamas smelled like him and that just made it worse.

“It’s just the emotions,” she muttered, shaking her head. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

Carrie got up and went to her bedroom, crawled in between the sheets and pulled them up to her chin. She yanked the pillow from the other side of the bed under the covers and curled up around it.

“Close your eyes, and don’t even think about going there,” she told herself as she reached behind her head and turned off the light.

She was almost asleep before her undisciplined mind went there. Damn, she was impressed by the level of lascivious thought she was able to entertain.

It took her a moment to get herself under control.

“Yes, he is sweet. Yes, he is kind. Yes, he is gorgeous. No, he is not an option,” she told her brain.

Are you sure? her heart said, having the last word.

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