Chapter 3 #2
Florida passes the window in familiar markers: Stuart, Jupiter, Palm Beach. I've driven this route before, back when I had friends in Miami, back when I was someone who visited people. That was three years and a different life ago.
At the Boynton Beach toll plaza, we slow through the SunPass lane, caught in traffic.
The lane to our left has come to a complete stop, and I see a woman checking her rearview mirror, two kids in car seats behind her.
The thought arrives with crystalline clarity: I could open the door. Run to her car. Scream for help.
My hand actually moves three inches toward the handle before stopping. He hasn't looked at me. Some terrible part of me wonders if he'd chase me. The thought makes my pulse skip wrong.
My hand returns to my lap. I'm shaking now, the visible kind that strangers would notice if any stranger was looking. He doesn't look. The traffic ahead clears, and we continue south.
Miami gathers in the distance: first as glow, then as shape, finally as the city itself.
We exit at Little Havana. Calle Ocho streams past with neon and music and the kind of nightlife I've never been part of.
He navigates without GPS, turns into an alley behind a building I can't identify in the dark.
The engine stops. He gets out, comes around, opens my door. Stands back. I climb down. He retrieves my bag, hands it to me by the strap. Our fingers don't touch.
Inside the service entrance, a single bulb casts harsh shadows.
The hallway smells like refrigeration and lime and the hot metal of industrial dishwashers.
I hear the clatter of kitchen prep somewhere nearby.
A woman with a tray of glasses looks up, sees him, sees me, looks back down at her glasses.
Keeps walking. She's been trained not to see what she's not supposed to see.
I follow the huge man up the back stairwell, the concrete steps echoing under my boots, the industrial lights humming overhead and the metal railing cool beneath my hand.
Two flights later, he unlocks the door and steps aside without a word.
Inside, the apartment unfolds before me in a single sweep—bare and efficient, maybe four hundred square feet in total.
I move toward the window, where a simple wooden desk stands beneath the pane, its small lamp switched off.
To my right, a kitchen alcove reveals a two-burner stove, a mini-fridge, and an open shelf holding three glasses, two plates, and a single set of silverware—everything pared down to the essentials.
At the far wall sits a queen-sized bed, its white sheets taut and a gray wool blanket neatly folded at the foot.
I brush my fingers over the blanket's coarse weave—soft and unexpectedly expensive.
Behind a tension-rod curtain lies the bathroom, all white tile and grout, immaculate in every corner.
A louvered closet door remains closed, its contents a mystery.
Not a picture hangs on the walls, no books clutter the shelves, no decoration interrupts the bare walls except for a small framed object by the back door that I can't discern from here.
This space smells of erasure, as if its inhabitant has forgotten they exist.
He sets my bag on the bed and says, flatly, "You stay here. Door's unlocked. Kitchen, bathroom—use them." His voice carries no invitation, only fact. "But don't leave. Or I'll know."
I shiver at the tone in his voice.
He doesn't say where he'll sleep, and I note the omission. Then he closes the door behind him, without locking it, leaving me alone in a stillness broken only by Miami's evening traffic and distant laughter drifting up through the window.
I stand in the center of the apartment, fully dressed, the duffel bag lying untouched on the bed.
Eventually, I slip into the bathroom, draw the curtain closed, and sit on the toilet lid, waiting for tears that never come.
My chest feels locked tight, terror buried too deep for crying.
Back in the main room, I settle on the edge of the bed, my palms grazing the soft blanket, its texture strangely grounding.
My thoughts drift to Papa, probably in the kitchen by now, cooking dinner for two out of habit, the pan sizzling and the radio murmuring.
I picture tomorrow's eight-year-olds, counting on me as their teacher.
For a single second, I remember Jarrod, who will wait by the movie projector on Friday night—and I won't be there.
When the door opens again, the massive man enters with a tray: a steaming bowl of soup, a chunk of bread, a slab of cheese, sliced apple, and a glass of water. He places it on the desk without meeting my eyes or uttering another word.
Then he does something I don't expect. He crosses to the back wall, where I now notice a bedroll folded almost invisible in the shadow, and unfolds it along the floor—eight feet from the bed. He takes off his boots, just his boots, lies down facing the wall, and pulls a thin blanket over himself.
My hands go still on the blanket and the breath I've been holding releases in a thin stream. He's giving me his bed and taking the floor, and the wrongness of it makes my chest tight in a way I hadn't anticipated. Kidnappers don't sleep on floors or give their beds to captives or bring soup.
I don't eat. I can't, my stomach is roiling. I just turn off the desk lamp and the room goes dark except for city light bleeding through the window, and I sit upright on the bed still in my clothes with the duffel still zipped at my feet.
Finally, I lie down and listen to his breathing in the silence—slow and measured, too controlled to be unconscious.
He's awake, of course he's awake, and we're both lying here in the dark pretending the other doesn't exist, though I find I'm memorizing the rhythm of it anyway: four counts in, a hold, three counts out, the pattern of someone trained to breathe through anything, through pain and waiting and whatever made him bleed on those knuckles.
Eight feet between us, though it might as well be eight inches for how aware I am of him, the cedar scent of him already marked into these sheets.
In the dark with nothing but his breathing to focus on, I catch myself wondering what would happen if I said something—if I asked his name, or why he's sleeping on the floor when men like him, men who appear in living rooms with blood on their hands, don't usually give up their beds.
The thought arrives unbidden, and dangerous: I want to know.