Chapter 5 #2
He huffs. “That eliminates, what, ninety percent of the words I want to say?”
“Good. Use the other ten to confirm you’ll follow the protocol.” I angle my knees away and they boomerang back on the next turn anyway. “We are not doing nostalgia.”
“We are in a time machine,” he counters, gesturing to the fogged windows, the heater, the rain that made us a closed system. “Feels like that night after the charity gala. Same weather. Same city pretending it’s not listening.”
The memory zips through me wearing neon and a bad idea. I pin it with a look that says no. “Different us.”
He studies my profile like the answer’s written there. “Is it?”
“Yes,” I say—too fast, then steadier. “It has to be.” I scrape condensation off the glass with the side of my hand and watch a smear of taillights stretch like a lie that wants to be true. “We do our jobs. We don’t… revisit.”
He turns his face to the window, reflection pale in the glass. “For the record,” he says, quiet like confession without the sin, “I’m not trying to pull you back somewhere you decided not to live.”
The words land under my ribs where secrets go to breathe. “Good,” I say, because anything else would be gasoline. “Thank you.”
“Doesn’t mean I don’t think about it,” he adds, then bites it back like it got out on its own. His jaw works. “Forget it.”
I don’t. I can’t. I switch tracks before my heart jumps them. “You tell Collins I’ll staple his mouth if he makes another bench joke?”
Jason’s mouth twitches. “Told him he was an idiot. He apologized.”
“Miracles,” I say, and this time the smile escapes. It sits between us, small and bright, lighting nothing and everything.
The driver cranks the radio up to drown a siren and mutters, “Honeymooners, am I right?”
I bark a laugh too loud. Jason does, too. We laugh until it sounds wrong, then swallow it whole, both of us staring forward like the future is a windshield we can muscle clear if we keep the wipers going.
My phone vibrates against my thigh, a little bee trapped in wet denim. I fish it out, thumb smearing a crescent in the condensation on the screen. Nolan Blackwood flashes across it in clean white letters that look like consequences.
Jason’s eyes catch the glow, then flick to my face. The cab rocks through standing water; wiper blades do their anxious metronome. I picture Nolan in his glass office, city lights knifing up around him, looking at a spreadsheet with our names under a column labeled Risk.
I should answer. I always answer. That’s the job: show up, even when the storm is inside the car and has my pulse.
“Take it,” Jason says, low—he can read the name upside down and knows exactly how many zeroes come with it.
The driver brakes to avoid a hydroplaning sedan, and my body leans—toward the screen, toward Jason, toward a decision I’ll have to live with when the heater isn’t fogging my judgment. For one suspended second, I choose not to be a chess piece on someone else’s board.
I hit Silence. The call vanishes, leaving the echo of its importance behind. A red missed-call badge blooms like a wound.
“Riley,” Jason says—warning and worry tangled.
“I know.” I shove the phone back into my pocket where it burns and pretend I’m proud of myself for choosing the moment over the man who signs my checks. “He can wait five minutes.”
“Blackwood doesn’t wait,” Jason says. It isn’t criticism; it’s weather. “He starts counting.”
I stare at the blurred smear of taillights and ask myself who I’m protecting—my job, my heart, Jason’s reputation.
If I answer in front of him, I’m the trainer who can’t draw boundaries.
If I ignore it, I’m the employee who goes rogue.
There’s no clean square to stand on, so I do what I always do: plant my feet on the least slippery one and pray friction shows up.
“Look at me,” Jason says, and I almost don’t because that used to be step one toward losing an hour and my good sense. I do anyway. His eyes are steady—the blue of cold water that still knows how to hold. “You don’t have to prove anything to me. Answer him next time.”
“Next time,” I echo, tasting guilt like pennies. The phone starts vibrating again. Same name. Same gravity. My thumb hovers. I feel Jason go still beside me, a heat I can measure without touching. I press Silence a second time.
He exhales, a sound between acceptance and you’re going to hate that later. He isn’t wrong. I’m already writing the email in my head: Apologies, Mr. Blackwood. We were in transit during inclement weather; safety first. I will not add: I didn’t want him to hear me say your name.
“Why does it feel like I just chose you over my career?” I ask, mostly to the fogged window. The question hangs ugly in the cab’s hot breath.
Jason flinches like I hit him. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Make me the excuse.” He swallows. “If you pick me—” A humorless breath. “—pick me. If you pick the job, pick it. I can take losing to work. I can’t take being your alibi.”
The words land right where Sophie warned me they would. I tuck them away, not because I don’t feel them, but because I can’t address them without setting something on fire in a moving vehicle. “We’re not picking anything,” I say, too bright. “We’re surviving a rainstorm.”
The driver chuckles at something on the radio and mutters, “Welcome to married life,” to the windshield. I let the joke pass through me and out again, like weather.
My phone goes silent, then dings—a voicemail. The weight of it shifts in my pocket like a small stone I’m choosing to carry instead of throw.
I tell myself I’ll call back from the lobby. I tell myself I’ll call back the second we hit carpet and I can see straight. I tell myself a lot of things that sound like plans and feel like hope.
“Hotel’s up in two blocks,” the driver announces. “Hold on, love birds.”
“We’re not—” I start, and bite it off. The cab’s tires hiss. The wipers climb the glass. The decision I made stares back at me from the black screen like a reflection I don’t recognize.
The driver downshifts into a pond masquerading as an intersection. The tires skim, catch, then let go entirely. The cab slews sideways like a fish trying to jump its own stream.
“Hold on,” the driver barks.
There’s nothing to hold onto. The world yawns—the wet street, the smear of brake lights, the stupid bobblehead on the dash that nods like it knew this was coming. My stomach drops hard enough to make space for fear to step in wearing cleats.
The rear end swings and suddenly a row of horn-blaring cars is where empty road used to be. Metal screams somewhere close; a truck’s grill looms. Time stutters, stretching thin and mean.
Jason’s hand finds my waist on instinct, a clamp of heat and command.
He hauls me toward him as the cab fishtails the other way, and I crash into his chest with a sound I don’t recognize as mine.
He is brick and breath and the fast drum under my ear that says he’s not scared; he’s furious at physics.
“Riley,” he says, like a swear and a promise.
“Don’t—” I start, but I’m already gripping his T-shirt with both hands because the belt bites and the window rushes close and his body is an answer my nerves choose without consulting policy.
The driver saws the wheel; the taxi shudders.
Horns bay. Light skids across wet glass, bleaching the world to a single frantic white.
We slide—right, left—then snap straight so abruptly my teeth click.
My vision fuzzes, then sharpens too much: raindrops needle the streetlights into starbursts; the mirror shakes; Jason’s thumb digs into the notch of my hip like he’s trying to anchor us to the planet.
“We’re okay,” he says, breath hot against my temple. The words land in pieces on my skin: we, okay. Both are a problem.
“Hands,” I manage, which isn’t a sentence, just a rule remembering it exists.
He doesn’t let go. He looks down instead, and our faces are stupidly close—bare inches of wet air and worse ideas. Water beads on his lashes, makes his eyes brighter, meaner, blue like an emergency sign. My name is still in his mouth. Something like a yes is in mine.
Outside, the driver curses the universe in a language with more consonants than mercy. Inside, the heater wheezes and the radio fuzzes and all of it is background to his hand. My body is traitorous, heat licking out from where he holds me until it finds my pulse and starts playing drums with it.
“Let go,” I whisper—and don’t move. I can feel the shape of his answer before he gives it: the hesitation he rarely allows, the awareness of every line we drew and keep erasing with our feet.
He releases by degrees, not a drop but a slow surrender that leaves fingerprints my skin will read like braille. The absence is louder than the contact. I route air back into my lungs and face forward, planting my palms on my knees as if I can press the world flat.
The hotel’s sign flares around the bend—a blue crown smudged by rain.
Relief hits, then bucks. The cab hits another slick patch and the lights go out—not outside; inside.
The dashboard dies; radio quits; wipers freeze mid-arc.
We lurch into a darkness so total it feels physical, a black you could bruise on.
“Power cut,” the driver says—panicked and unhelpful—wrestling the dead wheel.
Horns detonate behind us. The taxi spins a quarter turn, momentum grabbing the frame like a bully’s hand.
Jason’s fingers catch my wrist. “Sunshine—”
The world tilts. Tires lift. Black swallows blue. My mouth shapes his name and the sound is yanked away as the cab drops into the dark.