Chapter 10
My feet hurt. This was not a new development. My feet hurt every evening at exactly this point on my walk home, at the specific junction where the novelty of leaving the office wore off and the remaining eight minutes of pavement became personal.
I had considered taking taxis. I had also considered the fact that I was still quietly rebuilding my savings after a certain catastrophic Friday night involving a credit card and a series of decisions I was actively not thinking about.
So. Walking it was.
The evening crowd was thinning by the time I reached my street. I shifted my bag on my shoulder and switched my earphone to one ear - old habit, easier to hear the city when you weren't completely sealed off from it.
Oliver had called twice today. I had declined both times with the specific efficiency of someone who had run out of guilt and was operating purely on exhaustion.
He had texted after the second call.
We need to talk, El.
I had read it. Locked my phone. Gone back to my spreadsheet.
There was nothing to talk about. There was nothing left that I wanted to hear.
The anger had burned itself out somewhere around week two and what remained was something quieter and considerably less generous.
Disgust, maybe. The particular kind that came not from hatred but from clarity and from seeing something exactly as it was and wondering how you had ever seen it any other way.
I was done.
I was so completely, thoroughly done.
I rounded the corner toward the alley shortcut, looked up-
And stopped.
A man was standing at the mouth of the alley between the pharmacy and the dry cleaner, which was strange because no one stood there. It wasn't a standing place. It was just a gap between buildings that smelled like cigarettes and old rain.
He was tall. Dark jacket folded over one arm.
His shirt was, well it was ruined. Some kind of stain, dark and extensive, spreading from his collar downward with the comprehensive coverage of a genuine disaster.
His hair, which I had the distinct impression was usually more composed than this, had clearly lost an argument with something recently.
He looked, in short, like a man who had been having a very bad afternoon.
He also looked familiar in the way that certain things were familiar - not clearly, not completely, like a word you knew but couldn't quite place, hovering just at the edge of recognition.
He stepped toward me. I stepped back automatically, my shoulder blades meeting the alley wall before I'd consciously decided to move. His arms came up on either side of me. Caging. Unhurried. Like he had all the time in the world and this was simply where he had decided to be.
I looked at his arms. At the tattoos curling past his wrists and up toward his collar.
My brain caught up approximately two seconds later.
"Give me the chain." He said, ordered.
Robbery. This was a robbery. People survived robberies every day. Just give him the chain and he'll leave and you can have your heart attack in the privacy of your own apartment.
I reached up with hands that were absolutely not trembling and unclasped my chain. The small gold one my mother had given me at seventeen. I placed it in his palm.
He looked at it. Something moved across his face that I couldn't fully read. He looked back up.
"What is this?" he said.
"A chain," I said. My voice came out remarkably level. "Now please let me go."
Something shifted in his expression.
"Don't tell me," he said quietly. "You've forgotten me, kitten."
Kitten.
I knew that word. I knew the specific way it had been said - low and deliberate, like he was trying it out for the first time. I knew the voice that went with it. I knew -
The bar.
The room full of suited men.
The couch.
You'll do.
Oh.
Oh no.
I looked at him. Really looked. Past the ruined shirt and the displaced hair and the general air of a man whose evening had not gone according to plan.
Underneath all of that was the same jaw, the same stillness, the same eyes that had looked at me across a very expensive suite like I was the most mildly interesting thing that had happened to him in recent memory.
It was him.
The escort.
Standing in an alley off my regular route home. Stained shirt. Rumpled hair.
Apparently reduced to cornering women on their walk back from work.
Oh the poor thing.
Something in my chest did a complicated thing that had nothing to do with fear.
I looked at him properly now, at the shirt that had clearly seen better days, at the jacket folded over his arm like he'd had to remove it in a hurry, at the general impression of a man who was trying very hard to maintain dignity in circumstances that were working against him.
He had followed me here. He had known my route. He had waited.
I thought about the three hundred dollars I had left on the nightstand. Clearly not enough. He'd had to come find me himself. That meant things were difficult. That meant the three hundred hadn't covered whatever he needed it for.
I looked at his shirt again.
He couldn't even afford to replace it.
My heart did something embarrassing. I had grown up watching my mother feed half the neighborhood because she couldn't walk past hungry without doing something about it. Apparently that instinct had survived twenty something years and one catastrophic betrayal completely intact.
I should walk away. I should absolutely walk away.
Oliver's face flashed through my mind. Anne's laugh. The Cartier watch on the bedroom floor.
I looked back at him.
He was still watching me with those quiet unreadable eyes. Waiting.
"Are you okay?" I heard myself ask.
He stared at me.
"You look like you've had a rough day," I said.
The silence that followed was the kind that happened when someone had prepared for one conversation and found themselves in a completely different one.
"I've had better," he said slowly. Like he was testing the ground before putting weight on it.
"Is that curry?" I asked, looking at his shirt. The smell made it fairly obvious.
"Yes," he said, with a clench of his jaw that suggested the subject was not his favourite.
I looked at him for a moment longer. At the tattoos and the ruined shirt and the patient way he was standing there like he was accustomed to waiting for things.
You can't walk past something that needs help, Elera. My mother's voice. As clear as ever.
"Have you eaten?" I asked.
Something moved across his face. Gone before I could name it.
"That's not-"
"I live two blocks from here," I said. "I was going to make dinner anyway."
He looked at me for a long moment.
I looked back.
"You don't know me," he said carefully.
"I know enough," I said.
Which was not strictly accurate but felt true in the particular way that things felt true when you were running on instinct and stubbornness and the ghost of your mother's voice.
The corner of his mouth moved. Almost. Not quite.
"Enough," he repeated.
"Are you coming or not?" I said, and picked up my bag and started walking without waiting for an answer.
Behind me, after a pause of exactly three seconds, I heard footsteps follow.
I did not smile.
I absolutely did not.