"Nice to meet you, Megan," he replied. He thought about extending his hand across the table towards her, but he got the feeling that she wouldn’t much appreciate being touched without a written notice of forewarning.
"I’m Dravid," he explained, and the waitress, trying not to look at Megan, poured them both a cup of coffee. Dravid could see some of the staff talking furtively behind the counter, as though they were trying to decide whether or not to ask them to leave or not. Dravid could hardly have blamed them. Megan was in such a state, they probably thought that he had just kidnapped her or something. Even though he was actually trying to do something good for her, he got the feeling that she wouldn’t be quick to defend him on that count.
Eventually, the waitress brought their food, but not before Dravid had a chance to take in the way Megan reacted to everything around her. She seemed to flinch at every loud noise, to jump back whenever something happened that she couldn’t instantly predict. It was clear to anyone looking at her that she had been through a hell of a lot, given the way that she looked and the way that she moved. It made Dravid’s heart hurt to think that he had added to the grief that she was probably dealing with right then. That little home she had, it might have been the only thing in the world that she could say belonged to her, and he had just gone and snatched it away like that. All because he hadn’t been able to keep a better eye out when he was bringing his bike around.
"This place has the best chicken and waffles in town," He told her, but Megan had already dived head-first into her food before she could reply. Not that she would have had much to say to him, he imagined. She didn’t seem like the type who liked to chat over dinner.
The girl was eating ravenously, like she hadn’t seen a hot meal in weeks – and, by the looks of her, Dravid supposed, she might well not have. He could see some of her bones poking through her skin, the sickly edge of someone who only got to eat when the food appeared in front of them. She had seemed totally pissed at him, but at the same time, as though she knew she couldn’t turn down this chance to actually get something to eat. You had to be pretty damn hungry for your stomach to overrule your morals.
"Hey, you can slow down," he told her. "They’re not going to steal the food from you or anything. This place isn’t like that."
Her eyes were darting around wildly, but for a moment they stilled on him as she took in what he was saying to her. He offered her a smile, and, as though on instinct than out of any place of real emotion, she smiled back at him, just for a moment. She had a sweet smile, the kind that seemed to light up her whole face, even if he could tell that she didn’t much mean it.
A few people were still looking at them, but Dravid decided that it was best just to ignore them. He could pay for her food and that was all that mattered; everyone else could mind their own damn business and he was pretty certain of that, if nothing else. She finally slowed down, actually taking breaths between bites, and he continued to try and make conversation with her. Even though he could tell that she wasn’t much concerned with small talk, it would have felt too strange for him to just sit there in silence. He wanted to speak to her. He wanted to know, on some fundamental level, what had happened that had led a girl like her to get stuck out on the street. It just didn’t make sense to him, and he had so many questions – even if she wasn’t being super-helpful with the answers.
"You know, there’s a reason this is my favorite diner in the city," he remarked. "Do you want to know why?”
She glanced up at him, and her eyebrows were raised as though she was letting him know that he could go on if he wanted. It was the closest thing he’d had to actual interest from her since they’d arrived, and he was more than happy to take it.
"I got to this country a few years ago," he explained. "Well, a long time ago now, actually. Nearly fifteen years. And I got off the plane and I knew I needed something to eat, and I saw this place open in the middle of the night and I thought – well, why not, right? I’d heard about the diners you had in America, since my dad used to live here, and I thought that it would be a good way for me to get a handle on your culture."
She leaned back in her seat for a moment, and her eyes were on him; instead of that distant, glazed look she had hit him with before. He supposed that’s what he could expect, given that she probably hadn’t eaten in days before he had come across her. Not properly, anyway.
"And I saw that they had fried chicken and waffles on the menu," he went on. "Fried chicken and waffles. I’d never heard of that before. I mean, yes, I had heard of waffles and I had heard of fried chicken, but the thought of the two of them coming together as one? It just seemed crazy to me. So, of course, I had to order it, just to see what it was like. Even if it was horrible, I had to try it."
In front of him, Megan had gone back to gnawing on one of the chicken strips, eating like a woman possessed. Her face had a little more color to it now, a little more brightness, and even with the scrub of short hair and everything else going against her, she could almost have been mistaken for pretty.
"And even when they brought it out to me, I thought it was ridiculous," he continued. "I thought it was going to be a waste of my first few dollars here, you see? A bad sign for me coming here at all."
She managed a little snort of laughter then, so he wasn’t sure that she’d actually meant it. Nonetheless, it made him smile. The sound of her laughing was something he had needed to hear since the moment he’d realized that he’d destroyed her little shelter.
"And then I ate it, with the syrup and the hot sauce," He explained, gesturing demonstratively at the food in front of them with all the adornments that came with it. "And I just thought...wow."
He sat there for a moment, remembering that moment – it was so long ago that it almost felt like it could have happened to a different person, but it had been him, it had really been him. Even though he had changed so much that he was really a different person by all measures of the term.
"And I’ve been coming here ever since," he went on. "Whenever I need a quick pick-me-up. Nothing gets the blood running like some hot sauce and fried chicken, right?”
"Or the arteries thickening," she joked back. He laughed. Maybe a little too loud – he could feel the eyes on him again, much to his annoyance. He felt like shooting his gaze around to ask them what it was they felt the urge to stare at so badly. He was just trying to do a nice thing for her, for this homeless girl who had obviously had a hard time in life. What had they done to make the world better lately?
"You know, that’s one of the things I liked so much about this country when I first got here," he went on. "It was all that mixing and matching. You can bring together chicken and waffles, you can bring together anything, yeah?”
She nodded, vaguely, as though she was only half-listening.
"It’s why I got into advertising," he explained. "I wanted to see if I could sell that idea to people, the bringing together of mismatched things. I’m head now, head of the strategy department, and you wouldn’t believe how many interesting people I get to meet every month."
She glanced up at him again, a flicker of interest in her eyes, clearly curious.
"I was at a lesbian bar last week," he explained. "I know, not much of a lesbian, right? Well, I needed to check out that demographic, see what they were buying, see what they were missing. And I was at a comic convention with some teenagers a few weeks before, that was fun – they like to dress up in furry costumes. Seriously! I’ve never seen anything like it. And then there was this home cooking contest that they’d invited me to judge, goodness those people are competitive!"
She was tearing off bits of her chicken, he noticed, and stuffing them into a napkin that she had on her lap, while still cramming her mouth full of as much waffle as she could manage. He winced. There was someone who had spent far too long trying to get by on nothing at all. He supposed that her stomach was so shrunken from all those years of starvation that there was only so much she could fit inside her at any g
iven time, and that she was trying to stash away the rest for later.
"Hey," he told her, reaching over to put his hand on top of hers as her fingers went flying back to the plate for another round of food to hide in her napkin.
"You don’t have to do that," He assured her, but she tugged her hand away from his and continued doing what she was doing. He sighed. He knew that it wasn’t his place to get involved, and that he had likely already done enough damage anyway, but he didn’t want her to humiliate herself like this in public.
He knew how she felt. For such a long time, he had been an alien, a fly-on-the-wall to everything that was happening around him. It was one of the things, in fact, that had made him so good at his job. He was able to step outside and take a look at all of this stuff from the perspective of someone who wasn’t entrenched in the culture. It wasn’t the nicest feeling in the world, that sensation that you didn’t belong, and he wouldn’t have wished it on anyone. And it was clear, from the way Megan was trying to stash food for later and shooting looks around the room like she expected someone to stop her, that she was hardly feeling at home in this place.
"We can get you a doggy bag," he suggested. "If you can’t eat it all here, that’s really okay. Or I can get you something for you to take back to your… home."
Home. He knew it was an overstatement for the place that he had found her in. A pile of boxes, now drenched, on the side of an alleyway. It wasn’t what any human deserved. He felt a little angry at the city, at the world, at himself, for allowing such a travesty to carry on, but at least he was trying to do something to fix it now.
Finally, it seemed like his words had gotten through to her and she started to slow down. Her movements weren’t quite as jerky or frantic any longer, as though some of her natural state had been restored. He ached for her, he really did, seeing the struggle she had not to steal and hide this food like it was the only thing that mattered to her in the world. She dabbed her mouth with her napkin – a futile task given the dirt and grime caked on practically every inch of her body – and then she spoke once more. A little louder this time, growing in confidence, just the way he liked it.
"If you can even call that place I live a home," she replied. And with that, her shoulders sagged, and she slid down in her seat. Defeated.
"I’m not leaving you out there," he told her firmly. "I can take you back if you want, but you need a good night’s rest. Somewhere safe. Somewhere you don’t have to worry."
"What are you saying?” She asked, her eyes widening. He took a deep breath. He was sure that he would live to regret this, but he didn’t have it in him to leave her out on the street again.
"Come stay the night with me," he offered her. And, for a moment, she just sat there, her mouth hanging open as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
Chapter 3
Take it all off
"Here," Dravid told her, bundling a great big stack of cleaning stuff into her arms as he emerged from the bathroom next to Megan. "You wait here, I’ll get the bath running for you..."
And with that, he drifted off, leaving her alone in his condo while he went into the bathroom.
They had gotten some seriously strange looks when they walked into his condo building together. Megan could hardly blame anyone for doing a double-take when they laid eyes on her. He lived in a nice part of the city, and she looked as though she had just crawled up from the sewers. Felt like it, too, if she was being totally honest with herself.
She couldn’t believe it when he had offered to take her home for the night. She had been suspicious of it at first, but her stomach was sore after stuffing so much food into it and yet she was still starving for more, and she hoped that he might be able to get her some more sustenance as long as she was here. He had only said one night, and she could leave the next day. If it hadn’t been for the storm outside, she would likely have said no, but she guessed he got lucky. Or she did. She couldn’t tell. There was another version of her, one that had been too nervous to crawl out of her little stack of boxes to tell him off, shivering out there in the rain, and Megan figured she could try to enjoy this while it lasted at least for that version of her.
"There you go," Dravid told her, as he emerged from the bathroom. "I put some clothes in there – I only had mine, I’m afraid, but I’m sure they’ll fit you fine."
"Thank you," she mumbled. It had been such a long time since she’d said that to anyone. It had been such a long time, she reasoned, since anyone had had a reason to get her to say that. She knew that it might have seemed a little rude of her not to be more thankful to him, but she didn’t know what else she could say. She was so utterly overwhelmed by his kindness that she forced herself to just speak the words out loud without panicking and running off, sure that this was some kind of trap.
She slipped into the bathroom with all the stuff that he had given her, and inhaled the steam that was filling the room. She made sure the door was locked before she started to undress; she didn’t want him busting in at an inopportune moment, after all. Which she was sure he would try to do. Why else would he have brought her back there, she wondered, if not for something to do with getting her naked and in this bath?
It had been so long since she had taken off those clothes she found that some of them had practically melded to her skin, and she had to pull them out of scabs and sores that had formed from her constant sitting on the cold, hard sidewalk. She winced as she tossed them aside, and they landed in a muddy brown pile next to the toilet. She double-checked that the door was locked, and then slipped into the bath, ready to close her eyes and try to forget about the storm that was raging outside.
It had been so damn long since she’d had a bath that she’d almost forgotten how it felt. The warmth of the water seemed to curl up and through her all at once, right through to her bones. She tried to relax into it, but the water was already starting to get muddy from all the junk that was washing off her as she lay there in it. She reached down, starting at her feet, and remembered all the cleaning stuff that she had been given.
Grabbing some shower gel, she reached down and started at her feet and worked her way up and over her legs. It wasn’t often that she was confronted so blatantly with her own body, and she wasn’t sure that she liked what she saw. She was practically emaciated, her bones sticking out of her at odd angles, her legs practically withered down to the bone. Her stomach was distended from all the food she had just eaten and that her body was still trying to get some use out of, and the scent of the lime shower gel filled her senses as she focused on just getting herself clean. That was all that mattered. Getting clean.
She tried to fiddle with the hot water and pour some more into the tub, but nothing was coming out, and the water was darkening with every moment that passed. She considered calling out to him, but thought better of it. No, that wasn’t a good idea. Not now. Not yet. Not until she had a better grasp on what exactly he had brought her here for in the first place.
She had her suspicions, to say the least. Megan had spent a lot of time around men who wanted to hurt her; it had started with her family and only grown more apparent to her from there on out that men saw her and caught sight of someone that they could easily hurt and use for their twisted desires. Why would this man turn out to be any different? He might have seemed nice, but that didn’t mean anything. She had met plenty of men who had seemed nice, right up until the point when they had turned on her and made her feel like a fool for believing for an instant that there was any hope for her this time around.
He was probably lurking outside the door right now, waiting for the chance to pounce. Probably just wanted her clean before he started doing whatever it was he wanted to do to her. She had no idea why, but the thought of that made her stomach churn. Even when she felt like she was too exhausted to really be frightened, she would find that fearful burning energy deep inside her that reminded her that these reactions were built deep into her psyche and that there was nothing she could do
to escape them. Fear, it seemed, was a powerful teacher, and she had learned too many lessons from it to forget by now.
Grabbing the facewash, Megan scrubbed her face quickly and went to splash it off with some hot water – however, the tap had started to go cold already, much to her annoyance. She grabbed a towel and cleaned her face, and then felt a rush of dizziness wash over her. She wasn’t used to the steam, to feeling so hot all of a sudden, and she knew that she was just going to faint if she tried to get up too quickly.
But she wasn’t going to get clean in this bath, sitting in all the filth that she had accumulated over the last few months. She had no idea how long it had been since she had pulled together the money to get a cheap room for the night and use a shower to get the grime off of her. No wonder people hurried past her on the street. They were probably holding their breaths at the horror of the smell that came off her in waves.
Making a noble attempt to climb out of the bath without falling over, Megan pulled herself to her feet and then swiftly fell. She made a loud clatter that must have attracted the attention of the man outside, because she heard a knock on her door at once.
"Is everything alright?”
She grabbed a towel and wrapped it around herself. She needed his help, whether she wanted to admit it or not. She had already let things go this far, why not allow them to go all the way?
She pushed back the bolt on the door and opened it a crack, so she could peer out with one eye and gaze at him.
"I need help," she replied, and he nodded.
"Can I come in?" He asked, and she hesitated for a moment before she stepped aside to let him enter. It wasn’t in her nature to let strange men get any closer to her than they utterly had to be, but it wasn’t like she had much of a choice right about then.
He came inside, and paused for a moment, clearly shocked by the sheer amount of dirt and grime plastered all over his bath. She looked to her feet, humiliated by it.
Megan Disgraced Page 2