Nobody's Hero

by Melanie Harvey

  “I can’t explain it,” he said. “But it’s working for me.”

  “Rick,” she said, double stern. “Objectifying me isn’t going to make me go to — ”

  He cleared his throat. “That’s five.”

  She looked like she was going to stomp her foot, which was a riot. Unless she stomped back to the elevator. He said, “Come on,” and turned for the revolving door. When he glanced back to see if she was following, he caught her eye over his shoulder. She didn’t look ticked anymore. She looked like she thought she should have cancelled.

  “They starting the game without us, Carolyn.”

  That worked; she tried to stop a smile but couldn’t. He waited for her to go through the door, which seemed to confuse her. Rick too, until he figured she assumed he was just going to push through and let her catch the door behind him. He held his tongue, Carolyn recovered, and started through. Her dark hair spilled over her own last name across her shoulders, above Jackie Robinson’s number. The view under the tail of the shirt was worth waiting for the door.

  Outside the doorman asked if they needed a taxi, and she said, “No, thanks.”

  “Are we walking?” Rick asked.

  “Not to the Bronx.” She tilted her head toward the 59th Street intersection. “The subway’s three blocks that way.”

  Oh, hell no. “Cabs are right here,” he said. A million of them. The doorman was getting one right now. For somebody else. “I’ll pay for it.”

  Her nose wrinkled. “It’s not the money, Rick.”

  “You think I won’t behave myself?”

  She said, “No,” and nodded at the same time, which would have been funny any other time. “But we’re already late. It’ll take forever to get there in a cab.”

  “Forever’s probably stretching it,” he said.

  “What’s the big deal?”

  “No big deal.” He looked back out at the street. If he’d even thought of this, he’d have got the cab first, paid for it to wait. She watched him, her head tilted. Christ, she was gorgeous. Didn’t make him want to go in the damn subway.

  “How many elevators have you been in today?”

  “What?” He shook his head. “None.”

  Carolyn raised her eyebrows.

  “Didn’t need any,” Rick said.

  “Isn’t your hotel room on the sixth floor?”

  Had he told her that? “Well, I don’t like jogging.”

  Her teeth caught her bottom lip for a second. “So you use the stairs for exercise?”

  “Yeah.” Rick shot a look down her body, quick. “You ever considered trying it?”

  Best defense is always a good offense, but he saw a split-second of impact in her eyes, and he wouldn’t say it again. He thought she looked damn near perfect anyway.

  He did have to figure out some way to end this before it went too far.

  “You’re claustrophobic,” she said.

  Too late. “Oh, hell no.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “No.” One long step put him right in front of her, but she didn’t back up. “Phobias are irrational.”

  “So you just don’t like taking trains underground.”

  “And how is that irrational?”

  Carolyn laughed, and all the traffic noise disappeared. How did those two things hook together like that?

  “I ain’t claustrophobic,” he said, which was true. “I can fly, no problem.”

  “So it’s a disorganized disorder.”

  She smiled, and he forgot about the train for a second, because he was about to either move closer or put his hands in his pockets and back away. The first choice would probably change the tone of this really fast. Not in his favor. “Can we just take a cab?”

  “You said you could do it if you had to.”

  “I went thirty-five flights in an elevator Monday night.” To Louis’s office. Bastard. “Twice.”

  Carolyn studied him for a second. “So you don’t have panic attacks?”

  No, he didn’t have fucking panic attacks. “Look, Carolyn. You mind if we quit this now?”

  “I could hold your hand.”

  “Deal,” Rick said, and he headed for the corner.

  “I was kidding!”

  He grinned until she caught up to him. “Ha ha. Which way?”

  “Left,” she said. “It was a joke.”

  “Thought it was a compromise.”

  “No, I — ”

  “You reneging on me now, Carolyn?”

  She didn’t answer. They had to walk fast to keep up with the flow of traffic. He glanced over at her, kept his hands in his pockets. Carolyn looked caught. Why? He was the one who sounded like a damn idiot for calling her bluff, even if it did involve handholding in public. He shoved right by the thought that he actually wanted that — and that it included a subway.

  She looked like it was the last thing she wanted. He’d been sure last night when he grabbed her elbow and again this morning when he’d caught the door for her after the coffee in that hotel restaurant. He wasn’t sure now.

  They stopped for a light that was less crowded than the last. She wasn’t talking. She wasn’t laughing. He couldn’t think of anything to say. Blocked again, like when she’d said there weren’t any lyrics on the music. She said she couldn’t write either.

  “Why’d you say you can’t write?”

  He caught confusion on her face and started to explain, but she remembered.

  “I meant fiction,” she said. “Stories, novels.”

  Definitions, in case he didn’t know. “Right.” Everyone started crossing before the light turned green. “The books that ain’t boring.”

  Her mouth opened, then closed, then she looked like she had when she’d finally gone through the revolving door. “You read?”

  Her smart-ass tone went well with the apology in her eyes. “If I have to.”

  He dodged a lady about to run him down with a stroller. Then Carolyn dodged him, because he might have brushed against her. Another light stopped them. Had she said how many blocks it was? It was still noisy, and he’d lost track of the conversation.

  Non-fiction. “Do you want to write fiction?”

  “No,” Carolyn said, shaking her head a little. She wasn’t looking at him anymore.

  She’s lying. “You’re lying.”

  Carolyn shook her head again as the light changed and the herd crossed the street. “No, I’m not. I don’t — ”

  “Yeah. You are.” Now he sounded as sure as he felt, and her face confirmed it. “And you suck at it.”

  She looked at him funny, probably because he sounded happy about that.

  “Okay, you’re right,” she said. Admitting it? “I did want to. I don’t anymore.”

  But she did. “You’re still lying.” Some guy on the corner tried to hand him a flyer. Rick waved him off, the light changed, and they crossed another street, like it was any kind of normal night. “I’m in the twilight zone.”

  “Why? Because I lied?”

  “Hell no. You’re a woman ain’t you?” He checked to verify that. She was.

  Carolyn gave him an annoyed look. “Like men don’t lie.”

  “Everybody lies. But I ain’t never caught a woman so fast at it. Usually takes days … months.”

  Years.

  Carolyn stopped and didn’t get knocked over. The pedestrians had thinned out some.

  She looked around, but Rick looked at her. “You done it before?”

  “What? Lied?”

  “To me. Flat out, to my face.” He knew she had, at least once, when he asked what was on the iPod. “I mean except for in the green room, when you just didn’t answer me.”

  “I don’t … ” She looked away. “Not really.”

  He found the memory of the same expression on her face. “The audio stream on Baby G’s website. You said it automatically repeated.”

  Carolyn sighed. “You have to click play. And I wasn’t doing anything but listening.”

&nbs
p; “So why did you say that?”

  “What was I supposed to say?” She glared at him. “I played it twenty times in a row on purpose?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “That it so far?” he asked.

  “You’re the one who’s always saying you aren’t lying.”

  “That’s ’cause you don’t trust me,” Rick pointed out.

  “I don’t know you.”

  Her insistence that she didn’t know him was so much better than even catching her lying.

  “Come on.” She was smiling again. Then she said, “We’re late,” and he finally saw why she’d stopped here. The green ball on a stick: Enter here for the train of death.

  She turned to the stairs and glanced back over her shoulder, like she wondered if he was going to make it. He followed her, a little slower than he would have liked.

  “You know, Rick, I have heard your CDs. You sound pretty tough.”

  “People ain’t supposed to go under the ground,” he said. “That’s why there’s a ground. To stay on top of.”

  Carolyn nodded at the idiots rushing down the stairs. “They all seem to think it’s safe.”

  “I don’t know if you noticed, but most people’s crazy.”

  “I guess you would know.”

  Rick didn’t bother with a comeback. He wasn’t crazy. He’d never tried a subway before.

  He felt something then and almost jerked away, but it was her, Carolyn’s fingers twisting into his. Very distracting from the doom at hand. And a start. A weak one, but he had a damn good imagination. As if she just realized that, she started to pull away, but he tightened his grip and her arm slipped inside his, all the way up to the elbow. She looked at him like he was getting away with something, but she didn’t try to get away again. He had a feeling that if he loosed up, she still might not.

  Not that he was going to. Rick glanced down the hole. “This seem worth dying for?”

  That must not have come out right, because she didn’t smile, she bit her lip. And he was wrong about thinking he wouldn’t let go, because the instant he felt her shift, he did. Then she smiled. It seemed different from all the others, and it took him a second.

  Grateful. Terrific.

  16: Realistic Dreams

  Almost.

  The answer didn’t slip out of Carolyn’s mouth only because her teeth clamped down on her lip first. Bad enough that she’d made one inviolable rule — don’t touch him — and broken it in less than ten minutes. Nothing almost about it. She really was dying.

  Rick started down as if it were the staircase in a house he’d grown up in. So he seemed fine, but all he had to worry about was a New York City subway tunnel collapsing on him.

  She’d assumed the station would be more crowded, probably from movies. Rick waved her off at the Metro Card machines and fed in cash, muttering something about paying for it too. He navigated the touch screens, only hesitating when she reminded him they needed return tickets.

  He didn’t seem to be having a panic attack. Her cell phone was clipped to her waistband so she could call for help, because she wasn’t touching him again, even if he started foaming at the mouth. He didn’t, and the only time his hand approached hers was to pass her a card to swipe through the turnstiles.

  Carolyn studied the sign running parallel to the track, but only saw a green 6, not the 4 she was looking for. They were in the right station; “59th Street” was tiled into the wall. Air stirred with the rumble of a train coming in, and when she glanced down the track, she saw the arrow for the number 4, down a staircase through a rounded tunnel that stretched the length of three or four flights combined. Rick didn’t seem to appreciate her glancing over her shoulder as they descended the stairs, so she didn’t check on him again until they reached the lower platform.

  “You all right?” he said. Sarcastic.

  Somebody jostled her, and he put a hand on her arm, protective, not seductive. It was hot down here, but her skin still felt cold the second he let go. She had to get over this, but all she could think …

  No. Think about something else. “Are you all right?”

  Rick made a face and glanced up at the ceiling. Then she felt his hand slip back into hers. “I shoulda held out for a blow job.”

  Her brain tried to tell her that was not funny, but the admonition came too late. She clamped her free hand over her mouth before the laugh came out.

  His eyes lit up. Then he shrugged. “That’s six.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  He tapped her hand — the one covering her mouth. She gasped, he grinned as he dropped her other hand, and then the train pulled in with a rush of wind and noise, and all she could do was thank God for the timing. Rick snagged two seats in the air-conditioned car before she’d recovered enough to look.

  If he was claustrophobic, it was hard to tell right now. He’d seemed on the edge of bolting outside in Central Park. Claustrophobia wasn’t about closed spaces, though. It was about being unable to escape, a fear of feeling trapped. And that was what a bachelors in psychology got you, a lot of unemployable knowledge.

  The doors closed and the train started as the loudspeaker announced the next station.

  “Why don’t you write what you want to then?” he asked.

  He wasn’t looking at her, he was looking out the windows at the light turning to darkness. Of all the subjects he could pick to distract himself.

  She shook her head. “I can’t.”

  “You tried?”

  He’d lowered his voice to match the hush in the car. When she looked around, her eyes didn’t connect with any other passenger’s, not even by accident. “Can we talk about something else?”

  Rick shifted to face her. “Why?”

  “Because … ” She glanced across the aisle at an NYPD ad for new applicants. “It is what I wanted, once. But it was an unrealistic dream, okay?”

  Rick’s eyes smiled. “Carolyn, they ain’t no other kind of dreams.” Then he smirked. “Only the nightmares are real.”

  She started to respond, but he didn’t give her time.

  “Who’s your favorite writer?”

  That was easy. “Octavia Butler.”

  “She any good?” he asked.

  “Of course not. Isn’t it obvious that I only like really bad writers?”

  He grinned. “So who says you can’t write like her?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  His eyes narrowed as the train pulled into the next station. She glanced at the map with the green stripe, lights marking each stop. They had a long way to go. Rick was still quiet when the train pulled out, and she wondered if he’d misinterpreted her.

  “What I mean is the woman is — was — brilliant.”

  “You seem smart enough. Keep trying to get away from me.”

  Look how well that was working. “She wrote science fiction, and it seemed so real that you started believing this is the way it will be, like she was describing something that already happened.” She shrugged. “I can’t explain it.”

  “Did you ever think maybe she just got herself a kick-ass producer?”

  Carolyn laughed.

  “You never know,” he said. “It happens.”

  “So Zeus is really behind it all?”

  “Fuck that,” Rick said easily. “It’s better than when it started though.”

  “I guess it’s similar in some ways. But Zeus couldn’t turn you into a … ” She fumbled over the word ‘superstar.’ Guillotine proved that didn’t mean ‘talented.’ “You had it to begin with. Maybe he makes it better, but he couldn’t stick a pen in his hand — ” Carolyn nodded at a middle-aged Latino holding onto the pole a few feet away “ — and tell him to whip him up something like ‘Don’t Forget.’”

  His first album, the song and still one of the most powerful she’d ever heard. When his lyrics didn’t make her laugh or make her think, they made her stomach hurt. This boy and his plea … d
on’t forget me. He had to have been born with it.

  The man on the pole didn’t look at them, nobody did. She saw a lot of headphones and reading materials. A few people slept, and she wondered if they ever missed their stops. Carolyn glanced at Rick, because he hadn’t replied to the ludicrous suggestion that anybody in the known universe could do what he did. Maybe he’d said it enough in his songs, because he just leaned against the seat, his gaze no longer cutting back and forth from the darkened windows.

  “I’m just not a writer,” she said, so softly that she wasn’t sure he’d hear her.

  “But you already wrote a book.”

  She almost groaned. “That’s different.”

  “How? They both got pages and covers and they both full of words.”

  She searched for an analogy. “Country music. Could you do country?”

  “Hell, yeah. I’d hurl afterwards, but I could do it.” He puffed his cheeks out and clamped a hand to his stomach. A visual aid, in case she missed the audio.

  “So it’s not because you can’t sing.”

  “Oh, I can sing, I just don’t. And I’d have to think up something about loving my mama.” He said it so casually that she wondered, but he barely paused. “Don’t know about those hats, either. And the pants look too tight.”

  She tried to imagine him without the Nailers cap, baggy pants, the ink everywhere. “I think you’re probably where you’re supposed to be.”

  He shrugged. “Still. If I wanted to.”

  All that time thinking up new ways to say how great you were must really pay off. “Maybe with a change in writing style.”

  His eyes lit up. “Or a change in mamas.”

  Was it true? If so, whoever had given birth to Rick and Jesse hadn’t earned a single mention in any of his songs.