A Midsummer's Day Read Online Free PDF

shouldn’t go anywhere without her inhaler.
    But that didn’t mean that she didn’t constantly forget to take the thing with her.
    “Let’s get you upstairs, love,” Vaughn said minus the cockney accent he used as a mud beggar.  He opened the door, and Johnny helped Sammie into the cool darkness.
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    “So many steps.”
    Twelve evil stairs rose like mountains in front of her.   At the top was sanctuary.  But climbing them...  Each of them was an air stealing monster.  Twelve monsters inside as opposed to one air stealing monster living in the heat outside.
    “You’re wasting valuable oxygen,” Johnny chuckled.  He lifted her up each unending step.  Thank the Gods for this man.
    The room was packed with chairs and sofas, well-worn with age and overuse but all the more comfortable for the fact.  Not every building in the festival was equipped with electricity, but this was one of them.  A dozen fans hummed in a frosty symphony that was better music than any playing outside.
    This room was sanctuary.  Actors who needed a break from the heat, who didn’t feel well enough to take their meals outside with the tourists, could escape here for a brief respite.
    The room was a blessing for Sammie on days when the delicious heat of summer and her asthma didn’t get along.  She and her boys used this room at least once a day.
    Johnny sat her in an overstuffed chair in the icy vortex of three high blowing fans.  Vaughn handed her an icy cold bottle of water from a mini fridge.
    “Where’s your inhaler, Sam?” Johnny asked.
    She ignored him and opened the bottle.  She took a slow sip, resisting the urge to down the bottle in one fell swoop.  The cool wetness travelled through her, untangling the nerves in her lungs and freeing her airways from the heat’s vice-like grip.  She took another slow sip and relaxed.  Finally it didn't hurt to take even a small breath.
    Johnny drummed his fingers on the back of her chair.  He still wanted an answer.  “Not sure,” she said slowly.  Where was the last place she'd seen the infernal thing?  “Maybe the table?”
    A symphony of snack wrappers and cellophane echoed through the room.  “How anyone can find anything on this bleeding table is beyond me,” Vaughn said, weeding through a mountain of junk food wrappers.  Empty bottles clattered to the floor in a trio of harsh echoes.
    Sammie closed her eyes.  Just because tourists didn’t come up here…  The actors didn’t have to be so bloody lazy.
    “Eureka!  Found it.”  Johnny handed the blue and gray cylinder to her.  “You really should keep this on you.  It’s too long a walk from the Grotto Stage.  You haven’t been this bad in ages, Sam.”
    Her fingers lingered over his.  Damned that smile of his that threatened to steal from her what little air she had left.  At last he turned and gave her a moment of relief from his devastatingly good looks.  She shook the inhaler.
    “Why don’t you carry that with you?”  Vaughn sat across from her in a chair stained with as much mud as he was.  That was his chair.
    “No pockets,” she gasped, and took two hits of medicine.  The inhaler and the water worked together to smooth out her breathing.  Her lungs would stay looser now.  Not perfect.  But looser.  She could live with that.
    “Sammie’s not the only one getting slapped by the heat.”  Johnny cleared a week’s worth of snack wrappers into a bin.  It seemed that the Lord High Sheriff's desire to clean up the festival didn't end in private.  “It’s unbearable.  Medical teams all over the festival are saying even those in the best of health are having problems.”
    Vaughn nodded.  “If they hadn’t roofed the seating area at the Pits, we would have had people fainting left and right.  There are no trees at our stage.”  He rubbed his arms, but the mud had baked to his skin.
    “Oh boo hoo hoo.”  Johnny rubbed his eyes.  “Mud’s practically water.  At least