I follow her. I can’t help it. I need to see where she’s going, or I won’t be able to find her again. Not to mention that her being alone in the night in the city scares the shit out of me. She’s not hard enough for this place or for these people. If I let her get away from me, I might not ever find out what that tattoo means to her. And I sort of need to know now that it’s on my arm. I might be able to find her in the subway tunnel. I realized when I saw her today that must be why she looked so familiar. I’ve seen her in the tunnel, busking for change.
She crosses the street and goes toward the old bank building, the one that was turned into a shelter for the homeless a few years ago. There are people in a line outside, and she gets in line with them. She doesn’t have anywhere to stay. She’s going to a fucking homeless shelter? But before she can go inside, they close and lock the doors. The people in line stand and protest. But they’re full.
The throws her head back, her long dark hair falling even longer, reaching her ass. She’s frustrated, I can tell. But she doesn’t complain. She picks up her case, and starts down the street. There’s another shelter a few blocks over, but my guess is that it’s full, too. The shelters sprung up around here like fast food restaurants when the city began to change. But there are too many homeless and not enough places for them to stay.
I follow her, finishing my cigarette while I do. But instead of going to the next shelter, she stops and sits down on a bench, dropping her face into her hands. She’s tired. And I feel weighed down by her burden, too. I approach her and sit down beside her. She looks up, her brown eyes blinking in confusion.
“You followed me,” she says, looking up and down the street like she’s not sure where I came from.
I nod.
Her chest bellows with air, and I’m guessing that was a heavy sigh. “You don’t have to sit with me,” she says.
I look at her, and I make sure to use my voice. “Come home with me,” I say.
She looks into my eyes, hesitates for a moment, and then says, “Yes.”
Emily
He’s going to expect me to sleep with him. They usually think they can get in my pants if they give me a bed and a meal. He’s given me food, and now the bed is the next part of it. He wouldn’t be hard to sleep with. He has those dreamy blue eyes and curly locks of blond curls spring about in wild disarray all over his head.
I retrieve the money he gave me earlier from my pocket and try to give it to him. “For the place to sleep,” I say. So he’ll know I don’t plan to sleep with him.
He shakes his head, looking at me like I have lost my mind. He slides my canvas bag off my shoulder again and puts it on his. His building is surprisingly close. All this time, I’ve been staying at shelters right around the corner from this guy. And I didn’t even know he was there.
He opens the door and motions for me to step inside. “Do you live alone?” I ask.
He shakes his head no.
I stop him and press on his shoulder. “Who do you live with?”
He does that thing again where he shows me two people taller than him and two shorter than him. He lives with his brothers. Shoot. I’m not going to an apartment filled with men I don’t know. “I can’t,” I say, but he rolls his eyes at me. Then he bends at the waist and drives his shoulder very gently into my midsection. He hefts me over his back like I’m a sack of potatoes. I’m still holding on to my guitar, and I knock him against the backs of his legs with it, because I know I could be screaming at him right now and he would have no idea. I can’t talk to him. I can’t tell him to put me down.
He carries me like that up four flights of stairs, and he’s huffing a little when we get to the fourth floor. I expect him to keep climbing, but he doesn’t. He stops and opens a door, and we’re suddenly in a hallway.
My struggling has ceased, because it’s no good. He can’t hear me. He can’t respond. So, I brush my hair out of my face with one hand and hold on tightly to my guitar with the other. He opens a door and steps inside, closing it behind him.
Four men turn to look at me, flopped there like a sack of potatoes over his shoulder. I’m turned to face them as he closes the door, so I wave. What else can I do? The one I met at the tattoo parlor gets to his feet. “Who’s that?” he asks.
The tattoo guy bends over to look in my face. “Shit, Logan, that’s the girl who clocked you.”
The other men get up and walk over, too.
One of them says, “Dude, she’s got Betty Boop on her panties.” I can’t even reach back to cover my ass.
Logan lowers me to my feet. I stumble as he sets me upright, when all the blood rushes back to my head. He reaches out to steady me, and he smiles. I realize that they could all see my panties when he had me upside down, not just the one of them. The rest were just nice enough that they pretended not to look.
Logan points to each of his brothers in turn,
and motions for them to talk. “Paul,” the biggest one says, as he extends his hand.
“I remember you,” I say.