Losing Control (3 page)

“Where will you take me?” I ask, hand hovering over his.

“Anywhere you want to go.” His response is delivered in a low, husky tone as if he’s imagining an intimate moment. It’s a tone you hear on the beach at the end of a long day spent lazing in the sun and rubbing lotion over your lover. It’s the sound you hear when an invitation is issued to come to bed—and not to sleep.

There is something between us. My eyes widen and I feel the pull, the inexorable pull of the universe drawing me closer. I couldn’t have stopped my feet if I wanted to. And the closer I get to him, the more I realize that he feels it too.

We aren’t strangers. Somewhere, at some point, we must have made a connection and we’re now recognizing it again in this lifetime.

“Hello there,” he says softly, as if we hadn’t spoken moments before. He isn’t saying hello to me. He is acknowledging that there is something special between us.

I’m inches from him, and he’s bending toward me. He’s going to kiss me right here in the street and strangely, wonderfully, weirdly I want to be kissed. New York strangers don't kiss on the street in broad daylight. We don't even make eye contact willingly. We fold up our bodies into tight, compact containers on subways and buses so we can avoid accidental touching.

Yet here I am walking straight into the arms of a guy I would never dream of dating. He's too rich, too polished, too posh for me.

My kind are the worker bees. This guy directs the bees from up high in the clouds. Yet he wants me. I can see it in his eyes, in the way that they've darkened with appreciation and even desire.

“I want—”

“I’ll take that package.” A body muscles swiftly between the stranger and me, breaking our connection. A petite woman with striking red hair plucks the box out of my hands and turns to the stranger. “Ian, why don’t you hold this?” Turning back to me, she asks, “Do you have anything for me to sign?”

I nod and jerkily pull up the app on my smartphone. As she scribbles her name down with her finger, I meet Ian’s gaze over her bent head. It’s like he’s never looked away from me. As if everything he wants is right before him.

Ian
. I like it. I like
him.
Would it be so terrible to take him up on his invitation? To go over to Central Park, take my shoes off, and hold his hand as we walk down one of the wide sidewalks and suck in the fresh spring air. Wouldn’t it be absolutely lovely to check all my problems at the gate of the park and walk inside? We could stroll to the lake and he’d place those lush lips over mine and I could feel how truly soft they were.

We’d kiss for a long time, and then he’d take me to dinner where we wouldn’t eat a thing because we would be too busy talking and laughing and
falling in love.

The woman takes the package and goes inside the shop, leaving the two of us alone.

“Is this your last delivery?” he asks. “The invitation to the park is still open, now that you’ve divested yourself of your responsibilities.”

“No.” My one word comes out with real regret because I’m staring down lost opportunity. I can’t go to the park. I can’t forget my responsibilities.

I’m her shield
.

“I’m not a fan of that word.” He steps toward me, but the owner of the wig shop has broken the spell. And a good thing, too, because I don’t have time for this man who whips up uncommon wants inside me. I know all too well that sick mothers and men don’t go together. All my energy should be focused on my mother and this minor god is too big of a distraction. Still, even knowing all that, I can’t look away from him.

I hold up my hand to stop him. “Don’t.”

Before he can say another word, I get on my bike as fast as I can and pedal away without a backward glance. There’s a sour taste in my mouth because another time, I would have followed him anywhere.

“S
IGN
THIS
.” M
ALCOLM
SLIDES
ME
a piece of paper with lots of words on it. It will take me five years to decipher all the words and he knows it—the punk.

“I'm not signing anything. Give me the package, and I'll deliver it.” I grab for the empty, dull yellow envelope that presumably is the container for these papers my stepbrother wants delivered. For the past four weeks, I’ve transported small packages for him all over the city and several boroughs. I don’t know what’s inside these packages and I hope to keep it that way. Plausible deniability and all that. “By the way, the actor guy that took the big package the other morning looked like he was going to shiv me. Maybe you outta tell your customers that you have a new delivery girl.”

He smirks. “Move a little faster. Isn’t that what sets you apart? Your speed?
Double rush? Triple Rush?
I was watching that show on the Travel Channel. I think your ex started working there.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. We both know Colin is an attention whore.” Everyone has a reality television show these days, including bike couriers. While I wouldn’t be a fan of my life on display and I certainly wouldn’t want to work for the barking, Ritalin-addicted dispatchers that Colin works for, I’d do about anything for money—which is why I haven’t gotten out of my chair and left Malcolm Hedder’s apartment in Queens. “I move fast on the bike, but I’m not so sure how nimble I’ll be against some dude with a knife.”

“Guess you’ll have to learn.” He smirks and taps the pen on the page near a straight line. I suppose that’s where I’m supposed to sign. I can't believe we lived in the same house for four years and didn't kill each other. Back then, we were teenagers trying to cope with the fallout of his father’s infidelity and my mother’s poor choice in partners. Not every blended family turns into the Brady Bunch.

Since Malcolm graduated high school, though, I haven’t seen much of him. Mom kept up with him, and I’d hear about him through her. He tried trade school, auto repair I think, and then left it. About two years ago, he contacted me to ask if I wanted to do some side deliveries for him, but I turned him down because I was rightly suspicious of what kinds of packages I’d be ferrying around the city.

A couple of months ago, he’d contacted me again and said he had a high-paying specialty job, but his vague descriptions didn’t interest me.

And now? Now I’ve been delivering packages for Malcolm for four weeks. And it’s been a shitty four weeks. The last good memory I have is meeting Ian, the Suit, outside the wig shop. Since then it’s been holding my mother’s head as she pukes after an eight-hour chemo session and trying to force feed food down her throat during the intervening days because Dr. Chen chastised us both about her iron levels last week.

It’s been spending every minute of every day worrying about her, and then trying to be cheerful when I’m home because she seems to have lost her smile. She talks about how she’s so done with treatment and being sick. Her eyes are often red and swollen, as if she’s spent the whole day crying.

More red meat. More spinach. More beans. About all she can stand are blended shakes. At least the strawberries do a pretty good job of hiding the spinach taste, but I can’t turn a steak into a drink for her.

The last four weeks have been nothing but pain and stress compounded by my illicit activities for Malcolm. Delivering Malcolm’s packages late at night and sneaking them in throughout the day, my nerves are stretched thinner than a bike spoke, wondering if—no when—I’m going to get caught.

I don’t know what’s in the small manila envelopes and I don’t want to know. Nothing good, that’s for sure because I’m getting paid way too much money delivering these packages. I actually have dummy packages in my pack to make it look like I’m not running around delivering drugs.

What else can be in these parcels? It’s not like my stepbrother is a lawyer and produces a bunch of paperwork every day. This is the first time he’s handed me something even remotely legal-like. I watch the sheaf of papers as if it’s a live snake and will jump up and bite my fingers if I get too close.

“Drug dealers have NDAs now?”

“If I’m a drug dealer, I guess that makes you a drug mule,” he says softly but not so softly that everyone in the living room can’t hear. His friends, two of them totally blazed, giggle like schoolgirls. “We’re going to exchange signatures. Want my help? Sign it, Tiny, or we’re done.”

His voice never wavers, which signals the seriousness of his intent.

When I called him four weeks ago, after Mom collapsed on the stairs, he’d said the special project was filled but that he’d help me out with first and last month’s rent and pay me enough to afford a handicap-accessible building so long as I agreed to deliver for him, no questions asked, for a year. I said yes.

But whoever was slated to fill the special project washed out and he asked me again, telling me that I’d either do the special project or I couldn’t deliver for him at all.

I gnaw on the side of my mouth for two seconds and then give an internal
fuck it
. There’s no real debate. I need the money, and I’m willing to do anything for it. If Malcolm doesn’t give me first and last month’s rent, there’s no way I can move Mom into the new apartment. The sooner I get her out of the dingy one bedroom with all those stairs, the better it will be. Right now she’s like a prisoner because she can’t leave without me. And she hates that I have to carry her up the stairs after each chemo treatment. I’ve convinced myself that she’ll cheer up and return to her old happy self if only I can get us into a different apartment.

No, there’s no room for debate, morals, or ethics.

“And if I sign this, then you’ll help me get the new apartment?”

“Sure,” he says easily.

I’m not sure I believe him entirely. There’s a lot left unsaid but I’ve no other options. I scrawl a few shapes on the line. I wonder if I can even be held to a contract I haven’t read. Shoving the papers inside the envelope Malcom provides because I hate looking at my stupid signature, I head for the door.

“Bring this back with his signature and I’ll sign whatever damn thing you want,” Malcolm says.

As I wait for the elevator I hear his companion call, “She can work off the debt in my bed.”

“She’d have to service a train of guys to work off the debt she’s going to owe me,” he says flatly. And he’s not lying.

The delivery address for the papers I’ve signed is in the Meat Packing District. I always hate riding down there because cobblestones are everywhere, which is hell for a girl on a bike. Plus, the numbers for some of these buildings are obscure because the more hidden the place is, the more people want to find it. I wonder how that works if there’s a need for emergency services.

After biking up and down Hudson Street a few times, I finally spot the building. The front features a corrugated metal garage door that’s completely pristine. Not a hint of graffiti, which is odd down here where everything but the glass windows have been tagged by some juvenile miscreant. I lean my bike up against the big metal door and look for a buzzer. There isn’t one. I don’t even see a side door. I bang on the metal door a few times.

At eight in the morning, no one on Gansevoort is even awake. People down here don’t start their day until eleven in the morning because that’s the soonest they can drag their hung-over asses out of bed. The life of the moneyed New York City crowd is exactly as the songs say—party all night and sleep all day. And if you want to be part of the crowd, you follow the same hours.

“Hey, delivery for. . .” I pause and look at the envelope. There are letters there, but I can’t make them out. “Delivery,” I yell again.

“In the back,” a male voice from above says, and it scares the bejeezus out of me. I jump and yelp like a dog whose foot was trampled. In the corner of the black frame of the garage door is a tiny camera and holes which, I guess, have a speaker behind them. It’s so minuscule that only if you were looking really hard could you see it. I stare at the camera for a long time, wondering who the hell is behind it. Is he staring at me?

“In the back,” he repeats, his tone a tad deeper and tinged with barely suppressed humor. I guess he is watching me stare. “Number 14001.”

His voice sounds familiar, but maybe it’s because it sounds throaty and sexy and I’d
like
it to be familiar. I still dream about the man in the Theater District.
Ian.
Knowing his name makes my fantasy life a bit richer. I hop on my bike and cycle down the long block, take a left and then I spot the alley. It’s big enough for one car or truck. I stop halfway in the middle of the block.

The building looms high and looks at least three stories. It’s all brick on the first floor with another shiny corrugated metal garage door but this time there’s a tall thin black door to the right with the number 14001 in stainless steel in the center. I lean my bike against the door and tilt my head back to look up. The second and third floors are all windows, and despite the fact that there are buildings behind me, and tall ones at that, I can still see rays of sunlight shooting in through the windows. The place must be gorgeous inside.

When I get closer, I notice the door is ajar which makes me nervous. Who leaves their door ajar in the city? Stupid people, that’s who—or dangerous ones. I push the door open, half expecting it to creak like a door to a haunted house, but it swings open like the hinges were oiled two minutes ago. The door leads into a narrow hallway that runs the length of the building. There’s exterior light from somewhere and I realize that it’s from a narrow channel that must lead to the roof. Clever design. I wonder if the roof is entirely glass or if the light is from multiple skylights. This is a rich person’s place. Only rich people can bring exterior light to a brick building surrounded by taller structures.

There are stairs with a glass balustrade that point out my path like a giant arrow. Unless my guy appears in the hallway like a David Blaine trick, I’m guessing I head up the stairs. Gingerly, I take my first step and when no sirens blast out I figure I’m safe enough. I run up the flight of stairs and at the top I see one giant—and I mean giant—space.