Chapter Ten
Caitlin
If you’d told me I would be sitting in the backseat of a mafia capo’s car on the way to the garage where I kept my car parked, I would have laughed in your face.
Then again, if you’d told past me that I would get a fake gun, paint it, then use it to hold the same mafia capo hostage, I would have thought you needed to be committed.
And if you’d told me that during these events, I would throw up, have panic attacks, break my wrist, and fall asleep… all to learn he let himself be held captive, well, I don’t know what I would have done with that information. It was just too much.
Gavino sat beside me, his gaze focused out the window, watching a man walking a goose on a leash.
“He’s got shoes on.”
“What?”
“The goose. He has shoes on.”
I had to half-lean over him to see and, sure enough, there were little nylon shoes on its flappy feet.
“Okay. That’s really cute,” I declared.
Making the decision to look at him while I said that was a big mistake, though.
We were way too close, faces just a few inches apart. That spicy scent of him overwhelmed my senses, making my chest tighten. I mean, it had to be the scent that made it do that. Not the way his gaze seemed to flick to my lips, then back. Nope. It couldn’t be that.
Then, to make matters worse, the driver slammed on the brakes while I was still kneeling on the seat and leaning over Gavino.
I crashed into him, my face smashing into his shoulder, and my cast, well, slamming into his crotch.
I heard his breath rush out of him, then a harsh curse escape his lips.
“Sorry, boss,” the driver called. “Fucking e-bike.”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I said, shifting back into my seat and shooting him a wince. “Are you okay?”
Gavino leaned his head back on the seat, taking a few deep breaths. “Yeah,” he declared, but he didn’t sound overly convincing.
“I’ll, um, just keep myself over here,” I said, reaching to clip my belt.
It wasn’t a long ride to the garage, but the city traffic was thick enough to make the drive stretch to over half an hour.
We’d opted to take my car since Gavino said he hadn’t even turned his over in longer than he could remember.
Which was nuts. The cost of garage parking in the city was astronomical.
To just have a car sitting there never getting used was such a waste of money.
I mean, I didn’t use mine super often, but I needed it each time my father came to the East Coast because he refused to drive into the city, so I did the drive.
When we made it to my little beat-up old crossover, we all climbed out. The driver immediately went to remove Gavino’s luggage, but when I reached for my own, Gavino stepped in front of me and lifted them out himself, both men situating them in the trunk while I stood there, shifting my feet.
“Need anything else, boss?” the driver asked once he slammed both trunks.
“Nope. That’s it. Thanks.”
We stood there silently, watching the driver get in his car and pull off.
“Ready?”
“Well, that depends,” I said.
“On?”
“What kind of passenger you are,” I said. “Because I’m about to have some major feelings about the GWB, and your backseat driving is not going to help.”
“You have an issue with bridges?”
“No. I have an issue with the GWB.” Though I had been noticing that same stomach clench on smaller bridges in the past year or so. Maybe because I didn’t drive over them as much as I had back when I was in the cab with my father. And the more I avoided things, the more my anxiety about them grew.
“I can drive.”
“You don’t drive.”
“I drive. I just don’t do it often. But I’ve never had an issue with the bridge.”
I didn’t need to be asked again. I handed over the keys, watching Gavino’s brows pinch at my loaded keychain.
Not with keys. I only had my apartment, car, and my father’s tractor keys.
But I had half a dozen little charms dangling from it, including an old green-haired lucky troll in a leopard leotard from when I was a kid.
He said nothing as he sat in the driver’s seat, waiting for me to move all the junk off the passenger seat before climbing in.
“What is it about the bridge that bothers you?” he asked as he backed out of the space in a smooth, one-armed move I found a lot more appealing than I should have.
“It’s too many lanes, too long, too packed, too hectic. And there’s no escaping. You’re just trapped on that thing once you’re on it.” I felt a shiver move up my spine at just the thought of it.
“Is it better on the lower level?”
“In some ways, yes. In others, no. Because it does quiet those thoughts about being driven right off the bridge and crashing into the water below. But it also feels a lot more claustrophobic.”
“Well, we will go the lower level so you don’t have to worry we’ll plummet to our deaths. You can just keep your eyes closed if the claustrophobia gets bad.”
He said it so casually. Like it was no big deal. Like he wasn’t judging me for my very irrational fears.
Even my father, the saint that he was, would sometimes remind me that I was irrational and that I just needed to ‘not think about it.’
“Okay,” I agreed, nodding.
I grabbed my phone out of my purse, connecting it to the radio and spent the next several minutes curating a playlist that I hoped would keep me calm as we drew closer to the bridge.
I tried to focus on the Hudson, the way the sun danced across the blue surface, making it shimmer.
Maybe I should have insisted we wait to leave until the sun set. I’d never wanted to drive on the bridge at night for about a thousand reasons my anxiety convinced me were possible, but I could see the darkness being an asset as a passenger.
A horn blew, making me jolt hard enough to make Gavino tense.
“They’re not honking at us.”
Cold crept up my spine as I reached over to crank the music louder.
“God, it’s packed.”
Gavino glanced over as we crept to a crawl.
“It’s ten or twenty minutes, max,” he reminded me. “You can get through just about anything for twenty minutes.”
He was right.
It might suck.
I might panic.
But in just a few minutes, it would be over.
We drove under the bridge, the world closing in tightly around us.
He was right. The heavy steel beams on the side did manage to erase my fear of driving off the bridge and plummeting to my death. But the claustrophobia of it intensified the further onto the bridge we drove. The air in the car felt like it got thicker, harder to breathe.
“Why don’t I have an address for your father?”
“What?” I asked, my voice breathless.
“Your old man. He didn’t give us an address when he started working for us.”
“Oh, um. He doesn’t have an address.”
“Everyone has an address.”
“He’s a long-haul trucker.”
“Who, I imagine, doesn’t work every single day of his life.”
“I mean, mostly he does. He loves it. He loves the road. The people on the CB.”
“Mostly isn’t all. Where is he when he’s not driving?”
“He usually rents a motel for a week or two in an area he wants to check out.”
“So you want me to believe he doesn’t have a home base?”
My eyes narrowed as I watched his profile. “Are you calling me a liar?”
“No one lives on the road all the time.”
“Sure they do. Haven’t you ever heard of van life? They live on the road all the time.”
“That’s social media bullshit. No one actually does that?”
“It’s not bullshit. I’ve met people who live that lifestyle. Most of them aren’t even posting about it on social media.”
“Then how are they making money? I still call bullshit.”
“Remote work! I work remotely. A lot of people do.”
“Not buying it.”
“Then you’re being deliberately obtuse. I mean, how can you say—”
“Caitlin,” he cut me off, silencing me as I tried to ignore the way my belly fluttered.
“What?”
“Look,” he said, nodding out the windshield. “We’re off.”
And we were.
The bridge was in the rearview.
The world had opened up again.
“Wait,” I said, turning back to him. “Did you just… pick a fight with me to distract me?”
“Yeah. I mean, I’m an asshole, but I don’t give a fuck about where people live. Just figured it was a good way to get all that adrenaline focused somewhere else.”
Huh.
I slumped in my seat, amazed to find that I didn’t feel that familiar jittery, fluttery sensation I usually did after I had a panic attack.
I guess he was right. I’d directed the adrenaline toward snapping back at him, giving it an outlet, so it wasn’t still sloshing around in my system with nowhere to go.
“He really does live on the road, by the way,” I told him.
“If you say so.”
“Wait. You really don’t believe me?”
“Who the fuck wouldn’t want a home to come back to?”
“I mean, I get that because I love having a home for all my stuff, but there are a lot of people who are just nomadic.”
“You do have a lot of shit.”
“You have a lot of shit too,” I shot back. “You just have more shelves and closets to put it all in.”
“Yeah, you probably got me there. Surprised you only packed the one book.”
“Two, technically, since you made me start that one that’s been on my Tbr for about a year and a half, and now I’m hooked. But I brought my e-reader.” His lip curled at that. “Not an e-book fan?”
“I’m sure you noticed I’m a physical media kind of person.”
“I get that. I’ll always prefer a physical book, but when you’re limited with space, ebooks are a great option. It was basically the only way I could feed my book addiction all my childhood. Did you pack any books?”
“One.”
“Just one?”
“It’s five hundred pages. I figured I wouldn’t have a lot of time on a road trip anyway.”
That was true. Especially if he went ahead and continued to drive. Which I would be completely okay with.
Maybe this was why I never really loved driving myself. I was raised to be a passenger princess. To handle the music, read books, nap, and point out road signs or cute animals. Though, I wasn’t sure a guy like Gavino cared about that kind of thing.
“Do you like animals?”
“What? Where did that come from?”
“I always used to point out animals to my dad while he drove. And I will probably be doing it on this drive too. I was just curious. You don’t have a pet.”
“Not for lack of my cousin trying to force me to get one.”
“So you don’t like animals.”
“I like animals more than most people.”
“But?”
“But I wouldn’t look forward to the forced social interactions that would come with walking a dog.”
“Which is why cats are such a great option for introverts. You don’t even need to leave the apartment.”
“Never considered a cat. You don’t have a pet.”
“They’re not allowed in my building. Not even caged pets.
Which I’m not sure they’re actually allowed to tell me I can’t have.
But, yeah, I’d love a cat. I used to find them at truck stops all the time as a kid, and I hated that after I fed them and loved on them, we had to drop them off at a shelter to find a home. ”
“So you drove with your old man a lot?”
“All of the time after my mom died. Though there was one summer when he dropped me off with my maternal grandparents, who seemed no happier to have me than I was to be there, so I wasn’t sure of the reasons there.”
And, come to think of it, that was when I’d had my first real instance of an anxiety attack.
The night after watching my father drive away, leaving me with people that I only knew from the occasional phone call on holidays.
Whose house smelled like stale cigarettes and mothballs.
Who had really strict rules about food and bedtimes and chores.
“You didn’t ask?”
“My father said he thought kids needed more structure than the road. But after the sixth week, I think he knew that I was not handling it well.” I paused, not knowing why, but feeling compelled to tell him.
“That was when the anxiety attacks started. But I had no idea what they were. And my grandparents were old school, so they would just punish me or tell me I was being an attention whore.”
“Was your dad better about them?”
“They almost went away when I was back with him. But when I left for college, that was when things really ramped up.”
“The fuck would possess you to live in a big city when you have anxiety? Everything is too loud, bright, rank, and crowded.”
“The walkability, honestly. And I think, maybe a bit naively, that I thought I would have lots of friends and would be going out to clubs and events and such all the time.”
“Kind of like someone who lies awake at night, making all kinds of plans for the next day to meal prep and work out, like they’re suddenly going to wake up a different person from they went to bed.”
“Yeah. Something like that. But also, I didn’t have a lot of experience with my peers. I was on the road with my father. Around his adult friends. Trying to make friends with people my own age was a whole different thing.”
“I don’t have any friends,” he told me, shrugging.
“Who was the big guy then?”
“The big guy,” Gavino repeated with a chuckle. “That was Leo, one of my brothers. I have a lot of family.”
“Are you all close?”
“Not as close as they all want to be with me.”
“Why not?”
“They call me a hermit. Or antisocial. I just… like being on my own. Family get-togethers are a little overwhelming.”
“I can understand that. But it must be nice to have so many people vying to spend time with you. They love you enough to keep trying. You’re lucky.”
I just had my dad.
And, now, no one.
As if sensing my thoughts, Gavino glanced over. “We’re going to figure out what happened with your father.”
I didn’t know if that was comforting.
Or terrifying.
But I wanted to know.
And as crazy as this was to admit, even just to myself, I felt better about finding out with Gavino at my side.