Page 7 of A One Woman Job
“Relax,” I demand.
“How?” she breathes, looking up at me.
“I wouldn’t make you do anything you didn’t want to do.”
“What, like take a bath? Enter your home in the first place?”
“Okay, from this point on, I won’t make you do anything against your will.”
For good reason, she’s giving me a skeptical head tilt. “Say something nice. One thing. And I’ll believe you. It doesn’t even have to be about me.”
“Somethingnice?” This girl is surprising. I’ve never been surprised. Not ever. “Why?” I ask, fighting the urge to hold my breath, lest I don’t hear her answer.
“So I can lie to myself later. So I can say, ‘but he seemed so nice,’ when the police ask why I trusted you.”
I hide the danger that statement rouses inside me. “You’re not planning to call the police on me, are you, Meg?”
Despite my efforts to appear trustworthy, she’s smart, this one. She detects the danger inside of me. “No,” she whispers, slowly making a crisscross over her heart.
Weirdly, I believe her.
Or maybe I just want to. Badly.
Why?
“Something nice?” I ask.
She nods.
Has it been so long since I spoke kind words out loud? Must be ages, because my throat feels scrubbed raw when I say, “I’ve always claimed to have the best judgment, but now I’m not so sure. I don’t know how it took me a full five minutes to realize you were…”
“What?” Meg asks, after too much time has passed.
I swallow hard. “To realize you’re so beautiful. To realize you’re…”
I just keep nodding, because I don’t know how to finish that sentence. In the glow of the dim bathroom, her face dewy with steam, I’m fucking overcome. She’s a goddess.
A confused one. She looks incredulous.
“Didn’t you know you’re beautiful?” I manage, out of my depth.
“No,” she hedges. “Well, some of my customers ask me out.”
The danger inside of me is fully flexed now. “What fucking customers?”
“The ones I drive in my Uber.”
“You drive an Uber?”
I don’t know what’s happening inside of me. It’s like a terrible/wonderful swelling of responsibility and irritation and possessiveness. It’s something I have no experience controlling or feeling and it’s running roughshod through my system, setting my usual cool calculation on fire. I’m inundated by the need to know everything about this girl. Perhaps so I can solve why she’s having such a…a huge effect on me. “Why were you upset out there in the water?”
Her incredible eyes shoot to mine, vulnerable, incredible. “I don’t know,” she says, so quiet I can barely hear her. “I think because I’m so tired. In so many ways, you know?”
“Yes,” I rasp, my chest deteriorating. “Rest on me, Meg. I won’t let anything happen to you. I swear it on whatever you believe in.”
“I only believe in myself.”
Shaken to my very core, I realize that somehow, quite unexpectedly, I’ve just found my kindred spirit. In the form of a waifish girl, at least a decade younger than me. Our souls feel the same age, however. Our souls feel…like they’ve just had a reunion. “I understand that more than you know.”