by Paula Cox
I keep quiet, partly from the effort of curling seventy pounds per dumbbell, but mostly because Marco’s comments are a little too on the money. Truth is, he’s right. I am embarrassed about the whole thing. I had it all planned out in my head. I was going to march in there and charm her and by the end of the day she’d been in my car, on the way to dinner—and we’d skip dessert. Now, every time I close my eyes, I see her face, her wide-set green eyes, her cute smile, her brown hair with a kink in it. I keep thinking about that kink in her hair, which makes her look playful, wondering if she does it herself or if it’s natural.
But you couldn’t help going about it in your usual asshole way, could you, Brody?
I reckon I have Julia to blame for that. That’s not fair. You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. True, I suppose. But when you marry your sweetheart straight out of high school, only to discover she’s been cheating on you for almost that entire time, it tends to make a man defensive. Tends to make a man cocky and arrogant. Tends to provoke a man to build himself some armor nobody can break through. But then she died, didn’t she, years later? A shiver runs down my back, despite the close heat of the gym room. She was killed in a break-in and I never patched things up. Always meant to, but my pride and the pain she caused me got in the way. And what if I open myself up again? What I drop the cocky routine?
But the thing is, it’s not a routine, not anymore. Maybe at the start. But once I saw the rise I could get out of people just by being an arrogant prick, I couldn’t resist it. People take shit so seriously. People get so involved. People think life is the most serious, boring, mundane thing in the world. No wonder it’s so damn easy to get a rise out of most of them.
But Darla . . .
Dammit, I can’t get her out of my head, and that’s a stone-solid truth. I close my eyes at night, she’s there. I wake up, her face is imprinted on my vision. I work out, I see her watching me. Her pert body, her strong, self-willed expression, the way she holds herself. My mind fills with a thousand dirty images, each one harder to get rid of than the last.
“Brody?” Marco says.
I realize I’ve been curling nonstop for almost five minutes. My biceps ache comfortably. I drop the dumbbells and they clang on the tiles.
“Yeah?”
Marco waves a hand at the air. “The alarm, man.”
“Oh,” I laugh.
The alarm screams through the station.
Jonny, who left when I was lost in thought, pokes his ginger-haired head around the door.
“It’s the Coffee Joint,” he says. “You know, the place where that girl works . . .”
I don’t stay and listen. I charge from the room, down the hallway, and toward the truck.
The Coffee Joint . . . on fire . . .
Darla!
Chapter Five
Darla
Tracey, as always, finds out about the meeting with Brody.
She always manages to find out about everything that happens at the Coffee Joint. It must be Carl, I reflect, as I wipe down the tables. Carl reported back to her and now she knows about the entire ordeal. When it comes down to it, though, it doesn’t matter how she found out. Only that she did—and she loves ribbing on me for it.
The Coffee Joint is all glass windows, so that when the sun is shining, it’s like standing inside a reflective cube. Sun glares into your eyes, but the customers seem to enjoy it and so the owner never lets us use the blinds. The place is half full, many of the customers sitting by the window and watching the cars and pedestrians drift lazily down the road. I collect some discarded trays and return to the counter.
This afternoon it’s me, Carl, and Tracey. As soon as I reach her, Tracey grins.
“Hey, lover girl,” she smiles.
It’s been almost a week of this. She says it lightheartedly and I joke back, but often I think there’s a little devil hidden somewhere in Tracey. She certainly looks the part, with her slender body, her deceptively charismatic face, and her devilish pixie cut, tinged hell-red at the ends. I think of Tracey as an almost friend, one of those people with whom a true bond never forms, but who you tolerate, sometimes even like, because circumstances force you together.
“When are you going to drop that?” I sigh, as I place the trays in the washing up area. Carl turns his big beady eyes to me, squinting, and grins at Tracey’s words. Spider’s legs crawl over my skin when he looks at me like that. It’s like he’s looking inside of me. Probing, searching. He licks his perpetually chapped lips and grins again, showing his wonky teeth.
I turn away from him swiftly and go back to the counter. Tracey busies herself with the coffee machine, cleaning or pretending to clean it, and I stand at the counter, awaiting customers.
“So,” Tracey says, voice bubbly, “do you think you’ve ruined it with him then? I mean, he’s hot stuff, isn’t he? I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
“Nope,” I say.
Tracey giggles. “Oh, come on, Darla. He’s tall, strapping, handsome, charming.”
“Charming?” I cough out a laugh. “What part about handing me a wad of cash and telling me I should take more care with my appearance is charming?”
“Well . . .” Tracey joins me at the counter and continues in a soft voice: “You know, maybe he has a point. Guys really like girls who care how they look.” She holds her hands up. “I think you look gorgeous, babe, really gorgeous, but I’m not a guy and maybe I can’t judge it as well as he can, you know? I’m not saying you should take his advice, but . . .”
She lets it hang and then dances back to the coffee machine.
Customers enter, customers leave, the clock tic-tic-tics down the afternoon.
About two hours later, Tracey appears at my shoulder. “I wasn’t trying to be mean earlier, you know,” she says. I can’t tell if the unadulterated horror in her voice is feigned or real. I can’t tell if she really means what she says or if she’s just saying it. That’s the main conundrum with Tracey. She’s one of those people who often sound sarcastic when saying something sincere.
“It’s fine,” I reply shortly. “Don’t worry about it.”
But it’s not fine, I think. It’s not fine at all. There’s nothing fine about it.
I sense something on my other side. I turn. It’s Carl, standing far too close, a snake’s gummy smile on his lips. A devil and an angel on my shoulders . . . more like an insect and a sociopath. But that’s cruel and I keep the thought to myself.
I take a step back from Carl, genuinely afraid that he might reach out and grab me. He has that sort of aura around him, an I’m-capable-of-anything aura, the aura of a man who’ll one day snap and try and force his lips on you.
“It was a little funny,” Carl says, his voice a monotone. He says funny as another man would say death.
“You see, even he agrees!” Tracey claps her hands together, looking like a fairy princess gone bad. “So, what’s your plan of action, Darling Darla? That’s if they ever return. Maybe you scared him off forever.”
“Good,” I say. “I don’t want anything to do with him anyway.”
A lie, but a lie designed to protect myself. I won’t tell Tracey how Brody has made a home in my mind—and other parts of me—over this past week. I won’t tell her how often, when I’m in the shower, I imagine that the blast of the hot water is actually his hand, roaming over me. I won’t tell her that twice now I’ve almost allowed my hand to slide down between my legs with his muscular image in my mind. I won’t tell her that I’ve replayed our meeting a dozen times, wondering how I could’ve handled it differently. I won’t tell her that the idea of squeezing his ripped arms makes me gasp with longing for it.
No, I won’t tell her any of that.
“I’m going to go and sort that shipment,” I say, after a pause.
“Be my guest,” Tracey shrugs.
The shipment arrived this morning and is sitting in the cellar. I’m glad for a chance to get away from Tracey’s nonstop talking and Carl’s nonstop leering.
I
go into the back, past the boxes and old chairs and tables and even a twisted and gnarled umbrella, open the cellar door, and descend.
Alone in the single-bulb half-darkness, I begin emptying and organizing the shipment, taking bottled drinks from boxes and stacking them up. Piling up the big cases of coffee, putting the perishables in the humming freezer. And as I empty the boxes, I try and empty my mind. Of sharp-tongued but possibly well-meaning Tracey, of insect-eyed Carl, and most of all of ripped, muscular, handsome, cocky Brody.
I succeed with the first two; with Brody, I fail miserably.
I’ve unpacked shipments hundreds of times. It’s rote. Like anybody completing a rote-learned task, my mind wanders. Sometimes, it wanders to the next book I’m going to read—supernatural romance, thriller, or the occasional King horror, that’s my jam—but today, Brody takes a dominant place in my mind.
I’ve watched him for a long time, and for a long time I imagined what it would be like to have an interaction with him which was longer than two coffees, three cakes, three cokes. But when the chance came . . . No, I tell myself. I was about to think I blew it. But I didn’t blow it, did I? He did.
I’m going over and over this in my mind when the room begins to fill with smoke.
At first, my mind tries to rationalize it away. Maybe it’s just steam from the coffee machine. But after half a minute, the room is so filled with smoke I struggle to see the stairs.
What the—
The fire alarm screeches from above, a sound which ricochets around the cellar. Fire!
I lurch into action, all thoughts pushed from my mind, as I charge at the cellar stairs. My legs pump and I draw in frantic breaths. But all that achieves is sucking more smoke into my lungs. I take the steps two at a time, stretching my legs, eyes watery, hazy, bloodshot and painful. Finally, I reach the top. I press my hand against the door—stuck! I press it again and manage to hold it open an inch. Peeking through the smoke-filled air, I just manage to make out a chair blocking the door, wedged between a collapsed table. Today of all days! No! No!
I try to scream. Useless. “Heell—”
Smoke clogs my lungs, blocks my voice. Fear lances through every part of me. My heart beats weakly, growing weaker and weaker, and this terrifies me more than anything. I’m scared. Shouldn’t my heart beat fast, not slow? But then my eyes begin to close, heavy like I haven’t slept in days. More smoke spills into my mouth.
Get down! a voice, far back in my mind, shouts. It’s dim and faraway and I barely hear it.
Time stretches, bends, and sometime later—minutes, hours, days?—I am curled in a ball on the cellar floor, knees to my chin, sucking in the scant air from the damp carpet. Breathe, I tell myself. Just breathe.
But it’s like there’s a quota on the air; the more I inhale, the less I have to inhale next breath. I breathe shallowly.
And then my eyes grow so heavy that I can’t help but close them.
Time passes. Hours, months, years, centuries . . .
Then, a noise, crashing and banging. Brody? I think, numb and only semi-conscious. Brody, have you come to save me? Brody?
I manage to peel back my smoke-crusted eyelids long enough to see not Brody, but a giant machine. Clad in the thick armor of a fire-resistant jacket which extends all the way down to its knees, wearing goggles and a gas mask, with gloves which look like they’re crafted from metal, the machine charges into the room.
“I’ll get you out of here,” the machine says, but its voice is contorted by the mask.
The machine kneels down and picks me up in its arm.
“Are you . . . a . . . robot . . .”
“Don’t talk,” it says. “You’re low on oxygen. You might be seeing things. It’s okay. I’ll get you out of here now.”
Who are you, robot? I think, my body numb, my mind paralyzed, as the strong arms carry me from the cellar.
Chapter Six
Brody
I carry Darla through licking flames and thick smoke and finally onto the street, where ambulances and fire engines clog up the road.
The men blast the building with hoses. I glance at the building. My training tells me the fire will be out in a minute at the most. The rest of the employees, and the customers, are sitting on the curb or with paramedics. I carry Darla to the closest stretcher and lay her down.
Then, looking down at her, I take off my mask, revealing myself as the man who just saved her life.
The moment is stolen from me. Darla’s eyes are closed and the only sign she’s alive is the shallow movement of her chest. “Paramedic!” I bark. “This woman needs help, now!”
A paramedic rushes over at my booming voice and begins poking and prodding at her. I don’t have time to watch. I rush back to the building and help the men put out the fire. It licks at the rafters and with a mighty crash the roof caves in. But, after a while, the water wins and the fire peters out, leaving in place of the Coffee Joint a blackened mess of charred wood and shattered glass.
After we’ve checked that nobody’s inside, Marco walks over to me. His face is not his usual, joking mask. His forehead is creased and his lips are twisted in worry.
“Got everyone?” I say.
“Yeah,” Marco nods. “But I was just in there and it’s strange . . .”
“Strange, how?”
Marco looks over the people gathered outside of the used-to-be coffee shop. “The fire had multiple points of origin. Brody, man, I think somebody set fire to the place. At the very least, it’s suspicious.”
“Arson,” Jonny says, wandering over. “It’s textbook arson.”
“Arson,” I mutter, looking around at Tracey, Carl, and then the customers, all of whom look startled and awed with shock. “Arson,” I repeat. “But who?”
Chapter Seven
Darla
One moment I am staring at the hulking machine; the next I am sitting up in bed, rubbing at my tender throat.
Smoke inhalation, the doctor tells me. I should be fully recovered in a couple of days. I look around my hospital room. It is midday—the fire was yesterday—and the sun is high in the sky. It slants down through the blinds of my window, glowing yellow. A pile of magazines sits to my left. Fresh clothes are folded over the back of a chair. I’m wearing a thin, paper-like gown which crinkles every time I move. I switch on the TV and go to the local news. The Coffee Joint comes on after a report of an old woman’s untimely death. It is a husk, blackened wood and crystal glass, a shattered mess.
I turn it off and bury my head in my hands, but I can’t cry. I’m too numb with shock. Silly, perhaps. It was just a coffee place. But it was my coffee place. I only worked there, sure, but it felt like mine. I knew every nook and cranny. I knew that you had to crank the cappuccino refill a certain way to make sure it didn’t jam, I knew about the sticky handle on the staff toilet, that the hot water tap worked, but only if you turned it all the way.
Now . . . nothing.
I’m stewing over these thoughts when a man arrives. He wears a plain blue polo t-shirt and has the hurried appearance of a courier. The bundle of flowers he holds blocks most of his face.
“Miss Castle?” he says.
“Uh . . . yeah?”
He places the flowers on my bedside table, beside the magazines. “These are for you,” he states. “Sign here, please.”
Feeling as though I am outside of my body, as though all this is happening to somebody else, I sign his e-signature machine and watch as he marches from the room. A moment later, I grab the envelope which sits propped up between two rose stems. I tear it open and there, in cash, is two-hundred dollars, along with a note: Give it some extra thought, gorgeous. You’re beautiful as you are, but you’d be a hell of a lot more beautiful if you put some real effort in.
That son of a bitch, I think, crumpling up the letter in my hand. Does he think this is a joke? Does he think this is time for stupid jokes?
“Nice flowers,” Tracey says, as she skips into the room. She is completely unh
armed. Looks positively healthy, in fact.
“Thanks,” I mumble, thinking: Who saved me? Was it Brody? But I have no clue. The masked machine gave nothing away. “Tracey, the Coffee Joint . . .”
Tracey nods. “We’re out of work,” she says. “For now, at least. No idea how long the insurance company is going to take. You know what they’re like.”
I glance at the crumpled note, the flowers, and then into Tracey’s too-calm face. Can this day get any worse?
Chapter Eight
Darla
Leaving the hospital, I take a deep, long breath, savoring the sensation of fresh air swimming down my throat. It’s cool and refreshing, despite the heat of the day. I smile up at the sun, closing my eyes, and let it rest upon my face. Three days in the hospital and if I ever have to eat another congealed mass of something for desert again, it’ll be too soon.