Chapter 11 #4
But there’s nothing I can do from school, and my shift at the restaurant always starts right after school. It feels very weird to go to work after being fired. I’m pretty sure they’re going to tell me to go home the second I walk in the door.
“Hey, Laura,” Alana smiles as I come through the door.
“Do you want me to work tonight?”
“Of course,” she smiles again. That’s two more smiles than I generally get from her.
This is weird. I never knew I would find someone being nice to me this unsettling.
I have a mental image of Sam having talked to these two somehow.
I don’t know when he would have found the time.
Today, maybe. When I was in class, he must have been bullying my bosses into taking me back.
Once I go into the locker room though, it’s like the other day never happened. I get dressed in my uniform, I pick up my pencil and my pad, and I tuck my emotional support romance novel into the pocket.
For most of the shift, everything is as normal.
It’s a fun job, really. I get to constantly meet little challenges and help people get a decent meal.
It’s busy enough that I get to forget about my problems and the weirdness of my life.
Table five wants extra fries. Table six needs me to get the chef to hold the onion.
Table three gets me to read them the specials six times, then goes ahead and orders off the menu in front of them. Good times.
Around eight-thirty, three men in dark suits come in and take a table by the window. There’s something about them that draws my attention. Most of the people who come into the restaurant are working people and students. It’s not the sort of place where people wear suits.
They’re middle aged and maybe younger. Not a family, though, and they don’t have the sorts of expressions on their face that people do when they’re with friends. They’re looking around as if they’re looking for someone, but they don’t know who.
They’re in my section, so I go over to get them started.
“Hello, gentlemen,” I say, smiling brightly, the way I always do. “Can I get you started with any appetizers or similar?”
They look at the menu as if they’re surprised to see it there. It’s almost like they didn’t come in to eat at all. I’m getting that prickly feeling again that seems to indicate something is fucked up.
There’s nothing I can really put my finger on, though, and at this point I’m afraid to make any kind of trouble at the restaurant, seeing as I know I’m only back because Sam talked to them. I wonder what he did. Did he ask nicely? Or did he make a threat? I can imagine it going either way.
“I’ll give you another couple of minutes,” I say brightly, leaving them to attend to another table. I feel as though they’re watching me as I go, and when I glance back at them out of my peripheral vision, all three of them are staring hard and in a hostile manner.
The hair on the back of my neck starts to rise.
What the fuck do they want? Sometimes guys hit on me and stare at me, but not like this.
This feels like I’m about to be eaten by a predatory creature—and not in a fun way.
I kind of want to leave work, but if I do that it will seem suspicious to everyone and probably piss Sam off too.
I could call him, maybe, but he’s laid up with injuries, and we’re not supposed to use phones while we are on shift.
So I come up with an alternative that the guys at the table won’t know is weird, and gets me out of the situation as much as possible.
“I think there’s something weird going on with the guys at table one,” I tell Sally. She has the other section next to mine, and she’s a good work friend.
“I’ll take them,” she says quickly. I know what she’s thinking. They’re wearing suits. They might tip well. For her sake, I hope they do.
“Want me to take one for you?”
“Yeah, you can take the guy who can barely afford to take the girl he’s with out,” she says. “I don’t think he’s going to tip at all.”
“Deal,” I say. She gives me a weird look, but I don’t care.
We swap tables all the time for all sorts of reasons, really.
Sometimes it’s because we don’t like the look of a customer.
Other times it’s because we just can’t be bothered with a certain type of person.
Sometimes it’s an ex. Or a parent. Or just a dick.
The rest of the shift is not so bad. I wonder if Sam is going to pick me up, then I remember he wants me to live my life like normal, so he’s probably not going to risk that. It’s going to be the bus home.
By the time I am clocking out, I have forgotten about the men in the suits.
“You shouldn’t have swapped that table with me,” Sally says. “They tipped a hundred bucks on an eighty-dollar bill.”
I smile and hold back the urge to tell her that I have like twenty grand in my purse still. A hundred bucks is a big deal. A lot of money to people our age.
“They must have liked you,” I say.
“Yeah. I should have got the cute one’s number,” she says.
I go and wait for the bus. I have memories of what happened that fateful night the creep tried to get me here, and what Sam did to him as a result.
I forget about that more often than not.
Strange how very terrible things can sort of fade into the background most of the time until they are triggered.
The bus comes. I get on. No freaky evil guy tonight.
I guess I should think about catching up on some of the reading I’ve gotten behind on since all this stuff happened.
I remind myself that school is important, and work is too, and whatever is happening with Sam is probably just a temporary thing.
He’s a bad guy, even though he’s hot, and nothing good can come of knowing him.
The sex is incredible, though.
The bus rolls into the interchange. Usually there’s a wait for the next one, but tonight my connection is standing at the next bay already. There’s nobody else on it, but that’s not unusual. Most people are at home and in bed by this time.
I get on the bus and sit close to the front. It heads off, and at the next stop we pick up a couple of men.
They look familiar.
It’s the guys from the restaurant. They get on without looking at me and sit somewhere behind me. I don’t dare turn around and look. I feel like a kid in bed who just heard something go bump in the night. If I don’t make them real, then they won’t be real.
I look out the window. Maybe I’ll catch something interesting in the reflection. That’s when I notice that we’re not on our usual route. We’re not even in the right neighborhood.
“Um, driver?” I ask. “Is this the right bus? Is it the 4…”
I don’t even get to finish the question, because the driver looks around from his seat and I recognize him. It’s not the usual driver. It’s not a person who looks anything even remotely like a normal driver. Instead it’s one of the men from the restaurant wearing a driver’s cap.
I don’t know what to do. I try pressing the button for the next stop, but all that does is make the man behind me chuckle.
I can’t pretend that this is normal anymore. I’m being abducted in a city bus.
I pull out my phone, planning to call Sam.
It is smoothly removed from my hand with a relatively gentle touch. “I don’t think we need you doing that, do we?” one of the suited men asks.
The spell is broken. We’ve talked to each other. We’re all openly acknowledging that each other exist.
“What are you doing?”
“We’re going to talk to you about your boyfriend,” they say.
“Dave?”
“What? No. Who the hell is Dave? We’re talking about the man currently posing as Samuel Rollins.”
“You mean my… psych lecturer? He’s not posing. He’s really a psychologist. He’s famous. What is this? Is this for extra credit or something?”
I am just saying anything I can think of to seem and sound innocent. Playing dumb is the best way. If I so much as admit there’s anything intimate between Sam and me, there’s a real chance they’ll kill me. People capable of an elaborate plot to kidnap a coed with a city bus are capable of anything.
“We know he is in your apartment. He was followed there.”
“If you followed him there, why don’t you just get him?
” It’s a disloyal thing to say, but I don’t want them thinking I am loyal.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but I have a test in the morning, and if I miss it I’m going to be down twenty percent on my grade in history, and I’m already down in English, and I don’t have the money to be re-sitting papers, so… ”
“Quiet,” the man behind me says.
“Did you buy the bus? Did you rent it? Is it a city bus, or did you get one and make it look like one, because that has to be expensive as all hell.”
“Quiet,” he repeats.
“Can I have my phone back? I was watching some reels about narcissists,” I say. “I had just got to the part that tells you what you’re supposed to do, and I really want to know.”
“No contact,” the other guy behind me says. “Only way to deal with them.”
“Is that right?”
“Yep. Had to do it with my…”
He gets a nudge in the rib from his other suited friend. They’re not supposed to be talking to me about anything. It’s the youngest of the three who had something to say about an ex, I bet.
But that’s the end of the conversation in this weird, overly engineered abduction.
A few minutes later we drive into a warehouse that makes the bus look relatively small, and then I am disembarked out of the bus to a chair that faces a desk on which a lamp is placed.
I thought these men were criminals. Now I’m starting to think they’re something worse: government agents.
This plan is completely over engineered and could have been done in an office.
There’s drama here that doesn’t need to be here.
They’re making a show of power, making it clear I can be plucked from my life without anybody knowing.