Handlebar Limo
Apr. 1st, 2009 06:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonThere I was: lost on the long way home.
Lisa had gotten off early from a bad day at work and was looking for a fight as soon as she walked in. At one point things heated up to the point where she was screaming through the bathroom door at me. I can’t remember her words exactly – but the jist was just how it was possible for a man to do absolutely nothing all day and still manage to waste so much of her money. I told her I didn’t know, that maybe it was a gift I was born with… or it could just be the economy? It was the wrong thing to say. I knew that, sure. But the exchange was making me too self-conscious to piss properly which kept me from thinking straight. Lisa kicked at the door and roared for me to come out so we could talk this over like grown-ups. I told her, that as a rule, I never discuss relationship issues when my dick’s in my hand.
This went over as well as one would imagine with Lisa going all Asia Argento on me. I heard her stomp off into the kitchen, muttering death threats in that cute little bible belt accent of hers, followed by the familiar sound of drawers slamming open and the jangling of cutlery as she fished for the biggest knife in the house.
I knew right then that there was only one thing to do: I tucked it back in, zipped-up, stepped into the shower tub, opened up the window, popped the screen off and climbed out. While Lisa pulled her Shining routine hacking away at the door, I took advantage of the first-floor drop out the window and quickly ran in a crouch around to the other side of the small house we rented. From there I unchained my bicycle from the front porch and rolled her quietly into the driveway – just in time – as I heard a primal wail of animal anger come banshee-roaring from around the corner of the house.
Pedaling for dear life, I got the hell on out off Dodge and drifted around the neighborhood, taking curves randomly without really looking where I was going. Robot riding. Driving while daydreaming. Zen Navigation. Two hours later and there I was deep in Downtown-Fuck-Knows-Where?
Still I had about a good hour of light left. All I had to do was stop a second and get my bearings straight. Deciding to do just that I rolled onto the sidewalk and looked around.
First thing I noticed was a stranded MARTA bus across the street. It was made conspicuous to my attention by the thick black plume of acrid smoke the bus billowed into the column of angry traffic trapped behind the sole lane it had occupied. Passengers were pouring from every available exit the bus had to offer: climbing out of the emergency exit windows and squeezing through the side-doors in a frantic huddle. Each were gasping, coughing or cursing through collars pulled over mouths to act as improvised gas masks. Some of the cars trapped behind the bus tried swerving around it. This led to a standoff with the opposing traffic coming down the opposite lane creating an impasse through which the former passengers drifted through. I watched the drivers lean out their windows to flip each other off and shout incoherently at one another. Horns were blaring wildly from one end of the horizon to the other. In the distance a siren droned uselessly trying to reach the scene. I caught the bus driver wandering through the middle of the street in a state of shell shock, weeping into his cell-phone and gesturing helplessly as he drifted through the carnage with the other passengers.
That’s when I saw her.
This one fine, young lady was coming my way – cutting off some four wheel drive Yuppie Tank in the process that tried sneaking through an opening in the jam. The SUV screeched to a halt less than a foot from her hips and blasting its horn at her furiously. The lady responded by slapping the hood with the flat of her hand and yelling – “Fuck you then, Mother Fucker!” before making her way to the corner I was parked on.
Check her out - a curve armada and coming my way!
She’s got on this tight beige tank-top number that contrasts beautifully with her coffee n’ cream skin and amplifying her ‘double entendres’ magnificently. She sways those saddle-friendly hips of hers with the confidence, having shimmied them into a pair of jeans that leaves little to the imagination. She’s stacked short and sweet with a soft, petulant angel face to match. Her hair is jet black and styled with a look that’s something out of the Roaring Twenties.
“Can I help, you?” she snaps the question at my attention forcing me to face up to wide, unwavering brown eyes.
“Yeah, um, do you know how to get to Candler Park from here?”
She eyeballs me hard and weighs the wolf stare she caught me giving against the helpless sincerity in my tone of voice. Begrudgingly she rattles off a series of turns and street names that I forget immediately after nodding along to in vague agreement.
I thank her profusely, repeat the first part of her instructions (the only part I remembered) to her and before kicking off back into the street I jokingly offer through a wry smile –
“Hey, you know if you want, you could always hop up on the handlebars here and I can give you a ride the rest of the way...”
She arches a painted brow at my offer. Tilts her head appraisingly, gives me the once over, then the bike, then me again -
“Okay!” she shrugs copacetic with surprising enthusiasm.
“Seriously?” I snort a laugh trying to keep things light.
“Might as well… it’s gonna least be another hour ‘fore the next bus arrives…” she cocks her head at me with another arch of her brow, “I mean, that is if you’re serious?”
‘Of course not’ I tell myself which comes out somehow as -
“’Course I am…” and before I can rectify she’s sidling around the front tire, turns around, steps cautiously over the tire, then backs and lifts her ass up to perch on my handle bars.
“Now, you sure you can do this?” she purrs the words just right to echo off the ear as a challenge.
“Just tell me which way to go, ma’am.” I laugh, kicking us off and jumping the curb with a thud.
*****
Going uphill in Terminus is a real bitch when your lungs are coated with years of nicotine, pollen and smog pollution. Add an extra... let’s be generous… one-sixty to the mix and your humping some serious Sisyphus weight here. I’m huffing, I’m puffing, I’m doing my best to keep my eyes over her shoulder instead of squarely on the thong strap dawning over the horizon of her white belt. I’ve become acutely aware of the Egyptian musk she’s got on and the proximity of her hand to mine on the grips. We’re ten minutes into the ride, slow cruising up Dream Boulevard. She’s trying to pass the time by making light talk. Unfortunately with my cardio somewhere shy of asthmatic old man, my replies come off with the painful pauses and heavy panting of a phone sex addict.
“So whaddya do?” she giggles, “I mean when you’re not picking up women off the street?”
“Hnh … you’re my first…hnh, hnh … fare ac’shully…”
“Uh-huh… and the rest of the time?”
“I’m a… hnh… a writer…”
“Yeah… what kind?”
“Hnh… the good kind…?” I try to laugh but instead manage a dry cough.
“I mean wha’cha write about?” she looks over her shoulders at me and her face is sincerely curious.
“Hnh… uh, I dunno… hnh, fantasy, life… hnh… that place where they…hnh… meet…”
“You published?”
“Hnh… one day… hnhopefully… hnh… jes blogs f’r now, I s’pose…”
“Oh…” and it’s that same distinct ‘oh’ I get whenever I tell people I’m an unpublished author with a blog… sort of the same reaction as if I had told them I played the lottery for a living or had a promising career trying to win cash prizes found under bottle caps.
In awkward and embarrassed silence we travel another block, when...
“Hey, Baby…” a voice shouts out to my left, “… you want a real ride?”
Without me slowing down we both look over. Some prick driving a tricked out purple low rider, slow cruising down boulevard parallel to us, is gawking out a rolled down passenger window.
Before I can huff out a reaction, my passenger hollers out –
“I got a ‘real ride’, mother-fucker! Now take your sorry ass on out of here ‘fore I have my man here pull over!”
Prick in the low rider looks super-pissed. Square jawed college boy from the Midwest judging by the spiked gelled hair and wide brimmed shades no one’s had the heart to tell him went out with Jesus Jones and the rest of the early 90’s. Still he looks big enough to do some real damage and smart enough to know that I can’t. But instead of this turning into two white boys brawling deep in the heart of the hood, he cranks up the stereo and pours on the speed.
“Hnh, hnhold up now… hnhow do you know he wasn’t talkin’ to me?” I ask her and get a laugh that shakes the frame of the bike in return.
*****
We take a right off Dream Boulevard straight on down Dogwood Lane.
It rained earlier in the day so the streets still smell of wet concrete. I splash through puddles gathered in the cracks, each layered with a film of swirling pea green pollen. A cascade of deep pink petals washes over us at one point, plucked off of a Eastern Red Bud by a sudden breeze whipping around the corner. The last light of a long day clings to the darkened windows of the passing shotgun houses. Caw and respond chants of circling crows above us. Her hands over mine now. Heart racing, but not from the ride…
I stand up and peddle now. The smell of her body mingling with the damp spring dusk is hitting me hard…
We pull over in front of this white empty house with plywood boards for doors and a backyard just begging to be explored. I hop off the bike and walk it on back with her. She takes me by the hand. We stand there in a patch of dead grass surrounded by a overturned kids pool and the remnants of a jungle gym. She’s saying something but I can’t really hear a word she’s saying. I want her in that way that makes the words flutter trapped in the throat and the hands shake restless with the need to touch her. She looks at me. She understands. She kisses me… at first quick, as if it was going to be a polite peck, but then as she pulls back she really understands and pulls me into her with a strength that betrays her short stature. She tastes like cinnamon chewing gum and her full lips press into mine. She takes me by the wrist and plants a hand over her breast. My other hand slides down the waist of her jeans. Quick the fingers slip through the veil of the thong to find the truth of the moment. A hooked caress and she shudders and purrs and pushes me back and smiles as if having caught me in the act. She uncoils the bicycle chain from around the stem of my seat. She escorts me to the jungle gym, binds my wrists behind my back to the paint chipped and rusted bars…
“HEY!”
… she presses a long crimson painted nail against my lips. I suckle it, before it drifts down my chin, scrapes lightly down between my chest, follows the rise and drop of my belly and caresses over the buckle before tenderly reaching the zipper…
“… look out!”
I snap to and from around her bulk I see an old blue station wagon coming straight for us. Instinct tells me to hit the brakes… but if I do that she’ll go flying straight into it.
Instead I tap the brakes lightly, swerve left, adjust for the extra weight and aim between two parked cars on the block… just as another car is coming up behind us…
…she’s screaming now…
…screech of tires off the station wagon, fat face with a phone pressed to cheek framed in the closing window…
… the other car a massive dull brown blur before us…
… and with all my strength I pull up on the handle bars, popping my front tire to clear the curb and we hit the sidewalk just as the two cars slice right by us.
My passenger hops off the handlebars and gets right in my face.
“Th’hells th’matter with you?” she demands.
“I just… shit, shit, you okay?”
“You ‘bout got us both killed, y’know that right?”
“I know, I know, I’m… shit, I’m really sorry, okay… I just couldn’t see with you in front of me…”
“Uh-huh… noticed you didn’t have no trouble seeing before.”
“I got a little distracted… my bad, won’t happen again.”
She’s ready to storm off. Make her own way back. I can tell. But then she just sort of looks at me funny. Pissed off and touched at the same time.
“You’re blushing…” she says more to herself than to me.
“Adrenalin rush… blood pumping to all the wrong places…”
She looks down then back up at me.
“I can see that!”
Knowing exactly what she means I lower my face in shame and without looking at her mumble an incoherent apology.
Hands on the hips and her stance shifts from defensive to an exasperated shrug.
“Well?” she says.
“’Well’ what?”
“I’m only two blocks away… you gonna finish what you started or should I walk from here?”
*****
A sweet downhill glide has us pass two blocks with the quickness.
We pull up in front of a gated brick apartment complex – a holdover from the gentrification wave that’s swept this side of town. She hops off and I light up a well deserved cigarette.
“There y’go, Madame” I give a flourished bow without dismounting.
“Thank you” she smiles and begins to walk towards the gate. I spot blinds peeling from the corners of the windows and a obscured face staring down at us. She gives a wide dismissive wave of her hand and the faces disappear. When she reaches the door to the gate she turns around to see me standing there still.
I try to think of something cool to say, something suave, sexy and witty… but I got nothing.
“Hey, there’s something y’didn’t tell me…” she says walking back over.
“What’s that?”
“Your name.”
“Oh… uh, Jack… pleased to meet youuu…” I extend a hand out to her hoping she’ll fill in the blank.
“Sharice”
“Pleasure, Sharice”
“Well, Jack, y’wanna come in for a minute? Catch your breath, maybe?”
I think about it. I think of Sharice standing right there… and how I can’t stop thinking about how she really kisses, how she really tastes. But then I think of Lisa waiting back home for me with a big knife and another night... shit, week on the couch. But then I remember the other Lisa. The one I fell in love with all those years back… the one who liked to flash her tits at me at parties when our friends weren’t looking, the one who held me in her arms when I found out my granddad had been hospitalized with a stroke, the one who laughed at all the stupid jokes I told that no one else ever quite got.
“Naw… I’m good”
“Y’sure?” she smiles the smile of last chances.
“No, not really… but I gotta try to be, right?”
“Heh… have it your way” and she reaches over the handlebars and kisses me lightly on the cheek, “You drive safe now, okay… don’t be ‘zoning-out’ out there”
“I’ll do my best…” and with that Sharice walks into her apartment and I make my way back home, down the long hill, back to the bike trail, heading towards Lisa and her bad day and her knife and the faint hope that just this once, I made the right choice.
Lisa had gotten off early from a bad day at work and was looking for a fight as soon as she walked in. At one point things heated up to the point where she was screaming through the bathroom door at me. I can’t remember her words exactly – but the jist was just how it was possible for a man to do absolutely nothing all day and still manage to waste so much of her money. I told her I didn’t know, that maybe it was a gift I was born with… or it could just be the economy? It was the wrong thing to say. I knew that, sure. But the exchange was making me too self-conscious to piss properly which kept me from thinking straight. Lisa kicked at the door and roared for me to come out so we could talk this over like grown-ups. I told her, that as a rule, I never discuss relationship issues when my dick’s in my hand.
This went over as well as one would imagine with Lisa going all Asia Argento on me. I heard her stomp off into the kitchen, muttering death threats in that cute little bible belt accent of hers, followed by the familiar sound of drawers slamming open and the jangling of cutlery as she fished for the biggest knife in the house.
I knew right then that there was only one thing to do: I tucked it back in, zipped-up, stepped into the shower tub, opened up the window, popped the screen off and climbed out. While Lisa pulled her Shining routine hacking away at the door, I took advantage of the first-floor drop out the window and quickly ran in a crouch around to the other side of the small house we rented. From there I unchained my bicycle from the front porch and rolled her quietly into the driveway – just in time – as I heard a primal wail of animal anger come banshee-roaring from around the corner of the house.
Pedaling for dear life, I got the hell on out off Dodge and drifted around the neighborhood, taking curves randomly without really looking where I was going. Robot riding. Driving while daydreaming. Zen Navigation. Two hours later and there I was deep in Downtown-Fuck-Knows-Where?
Still I had about a good hour of light left. All I had to do was stop a second and get my bearings straight. Deciding to do just that I rolled onto the sidewalk and looked around.
First thing I noticed was a stranded MARTA bus across the street. It was made conspicuous to my attention by the thick black plume of acrid smoke the bus billowed into the column of angry traffic trapped behind the sole lane it had occupied. Passengers were pouring from every available exit the bus had to offer: climbing out of the emergency exit windows and squeezing through the side-doors in a frantic huddle. Each were gasping, coughing or cursing through collars pulled over mouths to act as improvised gas masks. Some of the cars trapped behind the bus tried swerving around it. This led to a standoff with the opposing traffic coming down the opposite lane creating an impasse through which the former passengers drifted through. I watched the drivers lean out their windows to flip each other off and shout incoherently at one another. Horns were blaring wildly from one end of the horizon to the other. In the distance a siren droned uselessly trying to reach the scene. I caught the bus driver wandering through the middle of the street in a state of shell shock, weeping into his cell-phone and gesturing helplessly as he drifted through the carnage with the other passengers.
That’s when I saw her.
This one fine, young lady was coming my way – cutting off some four wheel drive Yuppie Tank in the process that tried sneaking through an opening in the jam. The SUV screeched to a halt less than a foot from her hips and blasting its horn at her furiously. The lady responded by slapping the hood with the flat of her hand and yelling – “Fuck you then, Mother Fucker!” before making her way to the corner I was parked on.
Check her out - a curve armada and coming my way!
She’s got on this tight beige tank-top number that contrasts beautifully with her coffee n’ cream skin and amplifying her ‘double entendres’ magnificently. She sways those saddle-friendly hips of hers with the confidence, having shimmied them into a pair of jeans that leaves little to the imagination. She’s stacked short and sweet with a soft, petulant angel face to match. Her hair is jet black and styled with a look that’s something out of the Roaring Twenties.
“Can I help, you?” she snaps the question at my attention forcing me to face up to wide, unwavering brown eyes.
“Yeah, um, do you know how to get to Candler Park from here?”
She eyeballs me hard and weighs the wolf stare she caught me giving against the helpless sincerity in my tone of voice. Begrudgingly she rattles off a series of turns and street names that I forget immediately after nodding along to in vague agreement.
I thank her profusely, repeat the first part of her instructions (the only part I remembered) to her and before kicking off back into the street I jokingly offer through a wry smile –
“Hey, you know if you want, you could always hop up on the handlebars here and I can give you a ride the rest of the way...”
She arches a painted brow at my offer. Tilts her head appraisingly, gives me the once over, then the bike, then me again -
“Okay!” she shrugs copacetic with surprising enthusiasm.
“Seriously?” I snort a laugh trying to keep things light.
“Might as well… it’s gonna least be another hour ‘fore the next bus arrives…” she cocks her head at me with another arch of her brow, “I mean, that is if you’re serious?”
‘Of course not’ I tell myself which comes out somehow as -
“’Course I am…” and before I can rectify she’s sidling around the front tire, turns around, steps cautiously over the tire, then backs and lifts her ass up to perch on my handle bars.
“Now, you sure you can do this?” she purrs the words just right to echo off the ear as a challenge.
“Just tell me which way to go, ma’am.” I laugh, kicking us off and jumping the curb with a thud.
Going uphill in Terminus is a real bitch when your lungs are coated with years of nicotine, pollen and smog pollution. Add an extra... let’s be generous… one-sixty to the mix and your humping some serious Sisyphus weight here. I’m huffing, I’m puffing, I’m doing my best to keep my eyes over her shoulder instead of squarely on the thong strap dawning over the horizon of her white belt. I’ve become acutely aware of the Egyptian musk she’s got on and the proximity of her hand to mine on the grips. We’re ten minutes into the ride, slow cruising up Dream Boulevard. She’s trying to pass the time by making light talk. Unfortunately with my cardio somewhere shy of asthmatic old man, my replies come off with the painful pauses and heavy panting of a phone sex addict.
“So whaddya do?” she giggles, “I mean when you’re not picking up women off the street?”
“Hnh … you’re my first…hnh, hnh … fare ac’shully…”
“Uh-huh… and the rest of the time?”
“I’m a… hnh… a writer…”
“Yeah… what kind?”
“Hnh… the good kind…?” I try to laugh but instead manage a dry cough.
“I mean wha’cha write about?” she looks over her shoulders at me and her face is sincerely curious.
“Hnh… uh, I dunno… hnh, fantasy, life… hnh… that place where they…hnh… meet…”
“You published?”
“Hnh… one day… hnhopefully… hnh… jes blogs f’r now, I s’pose…”
“Oh…” and it’s that same distinct ‘oh’ I get whenever I tell people I’m an unpublished author with a blog… sort of the same reaction as if I had told them I played the lottery for a living or had a promising career trying to win cash prizes found under bottle caps.
In awkward and embarrassed silence we travel another block, when...
“Hey, Baby…” a voice shouts out to my left, “… you want a real ride?”
Without me slowing down we both look over. Some prick driving a tricked out purple low rider, slow cruising down boulevard parallel to us, is gawking out a rolled down passenger window.
Before I can huff out a reaction, my passenger hollers out –
“I got a ‘real ride’, mother-fucker! Now take your sorry ass on out of here ‘fore I have my man here pull over!”
Prick in the low rider looks super-pissed. Square jawed college boy from the Midwest judging by the spiked gelled hair and wide brimmed shades no one’s had the heart to tell him went out with Jesus Jones and the rest of the early 90’s. Still he looks big enough to do some real damage and smart enough to know that I can’t. But instead of this turning into two white boys brawling deep in the heart of the hood, he cranks up the stereo and pours on the speed.
“Hnh, hnhold up now… hnhow do you know he wasn’t talkin’ to me?” I ask her and get a laugh that shakes the frame of the bike in return.
We take a right off Dream Boulevard straight on down Dogwood Lane.
It rained earlier in the day so the streets still smell of wet concrete. I splash through puddles gathered in the cracks, each layered with a film of swirling pea green pollen. A cascade of deep pink petals washes over us at one point, plucked off of a Eastern Red Bud by a sudden breeze whipping around the corner. The last light of a long day clings to the darkened windows of the passing shotgun houses. Caw and respond chants of circling crows above us. Her hands over mine now. Heart racing, but not from the ride…
I stand up and peddle now. The smell of her body mingling with the damp spring dusk is hitting me hard…
We pull over in front of this white empty house with plywood boards for doors and a backyard just begging to be explored. I hop off the bike and walk it on back with her. She takes me by the hand. We stand there in a patch of dead grass surrounded by a overturned kids pool and the remnants of a jungle gym. She’s saying something but I can’t really hear a word she’s saying. I want her in that way that makes the words flutter trapped in the throat and the hands shake restless with the need to touch her. She looks at me. She understands. She kisses me… at first quick, as if it was going to be a polite peck, but then as she pulls back she really understands and pulls me into her with a strength that betrays her short stature. She tastes like cinnamon chewing gum and her full lips press into mine. She takes me by the wrist and plants a hand over her breast. My other hand slides down the waist of her jeans. Quick the fingers slip through the veil of the thong to find the truth of the moment. A hooked caress and she shudders and purrs and pushes me back and smiles as if having caught me in the act. She uncoils the bicycle chain from around the stem of my seat. She escorts me to the jungle gym, binds my wrists behind my back to the paint chipped and rusted bars…
“HEY!”
… she presses a long crimson painted nail against my lips. I suckle it, before it drifts down my chin, scrapes lightly down between my chest, follows the rise and drop of my belly and caresses over the buckle before tenderly reaching the zipper…
“… look out!”
I snap to and from around her bulk I see an old blue station wagon coming straight for us. Instinct tells me to hit the brakes… but if I do that she’ll go flying straight into it.
Instead I tap the brakes lightly, swerve left, adjust for the extra weight and aim between two parked cars on the block… just as another car is coming up behind us…
…she’s screaming now…
…screech of tires off the station wagon, fat face with a phone pressed to cheek framed in the closing window…
… the other car a massive dull brown blur before us…
… and with all my strength I pull up on the handle bars, popping my front tire to clear the curb and we hit the sidewalk just as the two cars slice right by us.
My passenger hops off the handlebars and gets right in my face.
“Th’hells th’matter with you?” she demands.
“I just… shit, shit, you okay?”
“You ‘bout got us both killed, y’know that right?”
“I know, I know, I’m… shit, I’m really sorry, okay… I just couldn’t see with you in front of me…”
“Uh-huh… noticed you didn’t have no trouble seeing before.”
“I got a little distracted… my bad, won’t happen again.”
She’s ready to storm off. Make her own way back. I can tell. But then she just sort of looks at me funny. Pissed off and touched at the same time.
“You’re blushing…” she says more to herself than to me.
“Adrenalin rush… blood pumping to all the wrong places…”
She looks down then back up at me.
“I can see that!”
Knowing exactly what she means I lower my face in shame and without looking at her mumble an incoherent apology.
Hands on the hips and her stance shifts from defensive to an exasperated shrug.
“Well?” she says.
“’Well’ what?”
“I’m only two blocks away… you gonna finish what you started or should I walk from here?”
A sweet downhill glide has us pass two blocks with the quickness.
We pull up in front of a gated brick apartment complex – a holdover from the gentrification wave that’s swept this side of town. She hops off and I light up a well deserved cigarette.
“There y’go, Madame” I give a flourished bow without dismounting.
“Thank you” she smiles and begins to walk towards the gate. I spot blinds peeling from the corners of the windows and a obscured face staring down at us. She gives a wide dismissive wave of her hand and the faces disappear. When she reaches the door to the gate she turns around to see me standing there still.
I try to think of something cool to say, something suave, sexy and witty… but I got nothing.
“Hey, there’s something y’didn’t tell me…” she says walking back over.
“What’s that?”
“Your name.”
“Oh… uh, Jack… pleased to meet youuu…” I extend a hand out to her hoping she’ll fill in the blank.
“Sharice”
“Pleasure, Sharice”
“Well, Jack, y’wanna come in for a minute? Catch your breath, maybe?”
I think about it. I think of Sharice standing right there… and how I can’t stop thinking about how she really kisses, how she really tastes. But then I think of Lisa waiting back home for me with a big knife and another night... shit, week on the couch. But then I remember the other Lisa. The one I fell in love with all those years back… the one who liked to flash her tits at me at parties when our friends weren’t looking, the one who held me in her arms when I found out my granddad had been hospitalized with a stroke, the one who laughed at all the stupid jokes I told that no one else ever quite got.
“Naw… I’m good”
“Y’sure?” she smiles the smile of last chances.
“No, not really… but I gotta try to be, right?”
“Heh… have it your way” and she reaches over the handlebars and kisses me lightly on the cheek, “You drive safe now, okay… don’t be ‘zoning-out’ out there”
“I’ll do my best…” and with that Sharice walks into her apartment and I make my way back home, down the long hill, back to the bike trail, heading towards Lisa and her bad day and her knife and the faint hope that just this once, I made the right choice.