Asking for Trouble

by Mary Kay McComas

  He chuckled softly. “You could have told me.”

  “You were hurt.”

  “Not that bad,” he said. She began to relax, totally unaware of the affectionate smile on his lips. “You all right now?” She nodded, and he left her to pull herself together while he cleaned himself up.

  She sorely missed the mints she had in her purse as she stood to tuck her blouse back into her skirt and button her jacket, but the cool metal of the stall door felt wonderful on her brow as she stood wondering what she’d done to deserve the punishment her nerves were taking that night.

  Suddenly Charlie the maintenance man burst in. “Now what in bloody blue hell is going on?” he shouted. “Aren’t you two ever going home? There are cops outside looking for you. I can’t be runnin’ up and down the stairs all night, letting people in and out of the building for phone calls and such. I got work to do, and I’ll never get done ...”

  He continued to complain as Tom and Sydney walked past him, out the door and down the hall to greet the police. One of them handed over her purse.

  Sydney repeatedly insisted that Tom needed to be taken to an emergency room, but he stoically refused to go, saying that the gash on his temple looked worse than it felt and that he was sure it wouldn’t need stitches.

  They took turns telling the details of the incident and giving descriptions. The officers thought it extremely amusing that they were game-show contestants, but did manage to listen to their story with straight faces. Halfway through, the cab arrived.

  “You might as well tell him to go,” one of the police officers said, speaking of the cab driver. “You’ll need to go downtown and go through the mug books if you want to press charges.”

  Tom and Sydney looked at each other. Did they want to spend the rest of their night together in a police station going over mug shots of hoodlums who would most likely never be caught? Did they want to waste their time and efforts on what boiled down to an assault for which the youths wouldn’t receive nearly the penalty they deserved?

  “Do we have to press charges? Couldn’t you just file your report, and if the same group of boys are ever arrested, call us and let us testify then?” Sydney asked, wanting the boys punished, but also wanting the entire incident to be over so that she and Tom could go on with their date—such as it was.

  “Filing charges now would help, ma’am. Even if you’re called in to testify later, it would hold more weight if you pressed charges now. You have to go downtown to file a stolen vehicle report anyway ...” He shrugged.

  Tom turned to Sydney. “Why don’t you take the cab and go home. You didn’t get a good look at them, you got your purse back, and there’s no sense in our both going downtown tonight.”

  The black hand-held radio in the second officer’s fist was squawking and humming loudly.

  “Looks as if you’ll be needing that cab after all, folks. We have another call,” the officer said. He gave them the name of a lieutenant who would help them file their charges, wished them good luck on what was left of their date, and left.

  “This’ll work out fine,” Sydney commented a short while later as she walked out to the waiting cab with Tom. “We can stop by an emergency room and have someone look at your forehead before we go to the police station.”

  “You could still go home.”

  “I want to make sure you get some medical attention. You could have a fractured skull. We need to go someplace and have your head X-rayed.”

  “I have a better idea,” he said, holding the cab door open for her. “Let’s skip the hospital and get something to eat instead.”

  “We could do all three. Hospital, fast food, cops ... great date, huh?”

  He grinned. “Next time, I get to do the planning. Your dates can be rough on a guy.”

  “Next time?”

  “Next time.”

  Their gazes met, and the temperature inside the cab rose considerably. There was a look in Tom’s eyes that was becoming familiar to her. It made her head spin while her heart did cartwheels. It created the strangest scary-excited feeling in the pit of her stomach. It was like a joy ride, but with the option to get off any time she wanted to.

  Sydney had never liked those rides. Ferris wheels and roller coasters were for crazy people who got a rush living dangerously to flout death or for young people who didn’t know any better. Sydney had a deep aversion to death. She carried whole life insurance. She wasn’t planning to die. Ever.

  Still, she was enjoying the odd feeling of recklessness Tom inspired in her. It wasn’t life-threatening, of course, but the potential for pain and anguish were just as real as the thrill and exhilaration.

  “Where to?” the cab driver asked, watching them through the rearview mirror.

  “Emergency room. Fast food.” They answered at once without breaking eye contact. Tom smiled.

  “It’s fine,” he said, referring to his wound, his voice a whisper as he studied her face intently. It was a face he never wanted to forget, one he never wanted to lose sight of, ever.

  “I can still see it,” she uttered, engrossed in her own perusal of his fine features.

  “Is it making you sick again?”

  “No.” Sick was not a word she’d use to describe what she was feeling. “The streetlight isn’t shining on it. I can’t even see that half of your face right now.”

  “So it wouldn’t make you sick if I kissed you?”

  “Maybe we should try it and see.”

  “Meter’s running,” the cab driver reminded them impatiently from the front seat.

  Tom waved him away from the curb as he sucked sensuously on Sydney’s bottom lip and nibbled on her tongue. Lord, how could a kiss be so pleasing and fulfilling and make him feel so dissatisfied and unfinished?

  “Fast food?”

  He gave the cab driver a thumb’s up sign, and then used his hand to pull Sydney closer, kissing her deeply.

  Five

  HORNS BLARED. RUBBER SQUEALED on asphalt. Glass shattered. The last thing Sydney heard was the whine of metal bending, and then she felt excruciating pain.

  “Sydney? Oh, dear Lord. Sydney?”

  From what seemed like miles away, she heard Tom’s voice. She could see him, her eyes were open. But everything was very unreal. Like a dream.

  “Can you move? Try to sit up.” She saw him reach out to her, and a flash of red-hot pain shot through her body when he touched her arm. “Dammit. We need an ambulance. Somebody call an ambulance!” he shouted.

  But there were other people shouting too. She vaguely wondered if she should call the others’ attention to the fact that Tom was trying to tell them something, but it was too much of an effort.

  “Hold your arm. Here, like that. Good. Now try to sit up and see if you can get out of the car. Does your back hurt? Or your neck?”

  “No,” she said. Well, at least she thought she said it. She shook her head to make sure he got his answer. It seemed very important to him. He was extremely agitated, and he looked ... worried.

  But worried was Sydney’s forte. She worried better than anyone she knew. Why wasn’t she worried? Perhaps there was more going on than she realized?

  “Good. Just a little bit more,” Tom was saying, his voice gentle and concerned. “Careful. There’s glass all over out here.”

  “Glass?”

  “Sydney? Look at me.” She did. “We’ve been in an accident, Sydney. I think your arm’s broken.”

  At first she didn’t believe him. Then, and only because he appeared so earnest and distressed, she took a look around.

  There on the other side of the car stood the cab driver and a man in jeans and a T-shirt, screaming and shouting at each other and waving their fists in the air. Traffic in the next lane had all but come to a halt as people drove by at a snail’s pace, gawking and staring ... at her! She lowered her gaze to what dimly resembled the back seat of the cab. The car’s interior was mutilated into a hideous shape, she noted, and ... it glimmered. How odd.

&
nbsp; Upon closer examination, she discovered that it was zillions of tiny pieces of glass sparkling like stars. Why, she even had some in her lap.

  The two men in the street didn’t appear to be hurt. She gave Tom a quick once-over and then glanced past him to see where they were. She saw her office building. They were still parked in front of her office building!

  “This is a nightmare. I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone,” she wailed. “Why doesn’t it just fall on us and get it over with?”

  “What?” Tom asked, a bit flustered with her tears and disjointed babble.

  “The building! It’s trying to kill us. We’ll never get away from it.”

  “Sydney.” He put his arm around her, careful not to touch her left arm, and led her away from the cab. He tried to give her his handkerchief. She took one look at the dried blood on it and cried harder. He pried her grip from her purse and looked inside for some tissue. Not finding any, he stood up, yanked the tail of his shirt from his pants, and ripped it.

  “Here. Use this,” he murmured close to her ear, as he sat beside her on the curb and put his arm around her again. She found the sympathy in his voice irritating.

  “We could have been killed.”

  “But we weren’t,” he said, knowing she was still in shock and too concerned with her injury to pay much heed to what she was saying. “Does it hurt when you move your fingers?”

  She wiped her eyes and blew her nose in the tail of Tom’s shirt, marginally aware of the aching pain and stiffness in her left arm.

  “I’m not ever going to die, you know,” she said, sniffing. “I don’t want to, and I won’t let it happen.”

  “Good. I like your spirit. Can you lift your arm up?”

  “Did you get hit in the head again?” she asked, looking at him as if she’d never seen him before. “Don’t you know what’s happening? We could have been killed. Three times tonight, we could have been killed.”

  “But we weren’t,” he insisted gently. “We’re safe. We’re not going to die. In fact, I don’t think your arm is broken after all. We’re safe and sound. We’re fine.” He started picking through hair like a mother monkey. “Looks as if you got a couple pieces of glass in your head here, but it’s not too bad. More blood than damage.”

  “What is the matter with you?” she asked, her voice rising dangerously close to a hysterical level. “You got bent out of shape about your damn car, but when our lives are threatened you act as if it’s the most common, ordinary thing in the world. I feel I should tell you, Tom, that your priorities are drastically out of order, and I have to tell you that it annoys the hell out of me.”

  He laughed.

  “Don’t you dare laugh at me!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, although he couldn’t bring himself to appear contrite. “Don’t be angry. I—” he chuckled again, “I’m thrilled that we’re still alive. I can’t remember being happier about it.”

  “Well, you have a strange way of showing it. You act as if your whole life is just one accident after another. Like you’re used to living this way,” she said, even as she rejected the idea of his being jinxed. She didn’t believe in that sort of thing.

  “I have had a lot of experience with adversity,” he said, sobering as he began to understand her true complaint. “I get paid to remain calm when those around me are devastated. I’ve had a lot of practice. I guess that’s why I save my emotional outbursts for things that don’t really matter much, like my car.”

  “You get paid to be calm?”

  He nodded. “I stay relaxed and take care of everything when other people are ... aren’t up to it.”

  She frowned. He’d brushed his profession aside earlier, but perhaps she shouldn’t have let it slip by so easily. What did he do? Control a nuclear reactor? Earthquake relief? Manufacture dynamite?

  “I thought it would take us longer to get back to job talk, but now you’ve got me curious. What is it exactly that you do?” she asked, glancing away long enough to take in the arrival of a police car.

  “Human services isn’t going to cut it anymore, huh?” He felt like a doomed man. Timing was usually a crucial point when it came to telling people about his life. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could blurt out at cocktail parties or in casual conversation ... or moments after a car accident.

  “Nope.” She was confused by his reaction. “It can’t be all that bad. You already know that I have one of the world’s most boring jobs, and if yours is to remain calm while everyone else gets crazy, there must be some excitement to it.”

  He hesitated, and then asked, “If your job’s boring, why do you stay with it? You’re bright and intelligent. You could do anything.”

  “I am pretty smart,” she said, glad that he’d noticed. “And I have an aptitude for numbers. Economics and commerce make sense to me. I read tax codes the way most people read newspapers. It isn’t exciting, but I do enjoy the problem solving it involves. Finding the errors, manipulating funds for tax breaks ... things like that. I’m good at it. That’s why I stay with it.” She paused to make eye contact with him. “Now it’s your turn. What do you do and why do you do it?”

  He looked away and took a deep breath. When he returned his gaze to hers, he seemed to have distanced himself somehow, protected himself with a hidden shield.

  “The worst part of my job is the reaction it gets from people outside the profession,” he said, his voice quiet. There was a plea for understanding in his expression and something else she couldn’t decipher. Her heart went out to him, though she couldn’t help but wonder what could possibly be so horrible. Was he the state executioner?

  “I never know if women are interested in me or the mysticism associated with what I do.” He shook his head in confusion and laughed. “Frankly, I’ve never been able to get into the mystical end of it. I’m more concerned with the here and now. But I guess I can see where it might have an appeal to certain types of women. My ex-wife for one.”

  Sydney was beginning to get the creeps. His words weren’t making sense. What was he? A psychic? An American guru? Voodoo priest?

  “I really tried to understand that part of her, but it was just too weird,” he said, his thoughts in the past. “I didn’t even know about it until after the wedding, and then it just got worse and worse.”

  “What got worse and worse? What did she do? What do you do?”

  “Ma’am?” They both jumped, surprised by the police officer standing over them. “The driver says you were injured. Do you need an ambulance?”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” Sydney said. “My arm was hurt, but I don’t think it’s broken. See, I can move it and everything.”

  “She needs to go to a hospital,” Tom said firmly, scowling at her. “She can’t lift it over her head.”

  “Well, if it’s not serious, we can drop you off at Mercy when we’re finished here,” the officer said kindly, eyeing Tom’s facial laceration. “You might want the gash on your head looked at, too, sir.”

  Tom touched his forehead gingerly, as if he’d forgotten all about the previous incident. He chuckled. “This didn’t happen in the accident. We’ve ...” He looked at Sydney. “We’re having one hell of a night.”

  Against her will and for no clear reason, his comment struck her as ridiculously funny. Sydney began to laugh, and it felt wonderful. It wasn’t a wild hysterical laugh. It was a good, sane laugh that came straight from her heart. It released the despair and the sense of danger and helped her give up her worries.

  She laughed until there were tears in her eyes, and through the blur she looked at Tom and felt friendship and camaraderie. She sensed she could trust him, depend on him to bring light into the darkness and make the unbearable tolerable. She was drawn to his optimism and easy, lighthearted nature.

  He was a stabilizing force in her life. And she wasn’t so ignorant or infatuated with the man that she didn’t know his actions were quite deliberate. She’d heard the panic and fear in his voice after
the accident, when he thought she’d been injured. She’d felt the gentleness in his touch. She’d seen his strength and his capacity for anger and rage in dealing with abuse and cruelty. In his eyes she’d seen intimacy, warmth, and a giving nature.

  No, the man was no fool, she decided, watching him talk with the policeman. He’d felt everything she had felt. The shock, the fear, the pain. But he’d put it aside to meet her needs.

  “Did you see what happened?” the officer asked, the question addressed to either one or both of them.

  Tom’s eyes twinkled merrily, his lips twitching with restrained mirth. She frowned until she recalled what they’d been doing at the time the accident occurred. She burst into giggles once more.

  “It happened very quickly,” Tom told the man with a straight face, not unaware of or ungrateful for the timely delay in having to tell Sydney what he did for a living. He wasn’t ashamed of what he did, mind you. But it was a delicate subject, and he preferred to explain it in his own way, in his own time. “We didn’t see anything.”

  “Do you know if your driver turned to look behind him before attempting to merge with the traffic? Or did he just pull out?”

  “I really couldn’t say,” Tom said, laughter quivering in his voice. “I ... we were preoccupied at the time.”

  “Oh” was all the officer said, as his features took on a knowing expression. He glanced from Tom to Sydney and smiled. He cleared his throat loudly. “Well, in that case I guess I can run you two up to Mercy Hospital real quick and come back for my partner. It won’t take two of us to direct traffic till the tow truck comes.”

  Sydney caught the word hospital and sobered immediately.

  “No. That’s not necessary. I don’t need to go to the hospital,” she said, a familiar feeling of panic rising up inside her and sticking in her throat. “Really.”

  “Are you nuts? Of course you need to go,” Tom said, frowning at her. “If your arm’s not broken, then your shoulder is. You can’t lift your arm. You need help.”

  “I can lift it,” she said unequivocally. She got it as high as her left breast before she whimpered with the pain.