by KC Blake
She didn’t even have to explain it. The word “tourist” cut me deep. Somehow, I needed to make her understand that this attraction, while primal and undeniable, was not based on some kind of ignorant assumption about who she was, just based on the color of her skin or her chosen profession. She had me so scrambled inside that I was saying things the exact opposite of how I meant them. I felt like my superpower had been wrested from my hands.
“You can show yourself out.”
She got up, throwing the sheets behind her, and stormed into the bathroom. I heard the shower begin running. Although I was bewildered, and spent an embarrassing amount of time sitting up in Elena’s bed wondering what had just happened, I knew better than to be around when the water shut off. I hunted around for my clothes. Somehow, my panties had ended up clear across the room. I quickly got dressed and made my way out. When I closed the door behind myself, I made sure to test the lock. Despite being kicked out and feeling like she’d probably spit on me the next time she saw me, I wanted to make sure she’d be safe.
The drive back down the hill felt windier than the trip up had been the night before. Probably because Elena was guiding me, and as long as I’d kept my eye on her sweet little ass, I didn’t notice how small the streets were, or how all the curves were blind. Slowly, I made my way down and joined the throngs of commuters on their way into downtown. Suddenly, I remembered that I’d skipped out on Mitchell’s meeting. I pulled off at a coffee shop to try and come up with a plan.
My phone charged up right away, faster than I think I’d ever seen it. Traitor, I thought.
As soon as it booted up, I saw an ungodly number of messages waiting for me. None of them could possibly be good. The regret weighed on me like a wet coat. What the hell had I been thinking? Who was this middle-aged woman staring back at me in the rearview mirror? I forced myself to watch the traffic go by for what felt like half an hour, hoping to get lost in its hypnotic rhythm.
When I looked at the time, however, only a few minutes had passed. I knew I had to face the music sometime, and had to accept the consequences of the choices I’d made the previous evening. What better way to gird myself for the messages awaiting me than with a coffee and a bear claw?
Both the pastry and the coffee were substandard, and were not much comfort as I played through the messages. I put my phone on speaker; although angry voices might fill my car, it was somehow more appealing than having them blasted directly into my ear. The first few, unsurprisingly, were from Mitchell. They began around an hour into the abandoned meeting.
His voice was shrill and panicked, like an elf who’d dropped a mallet on his foot. He was upset, understandably. After the first few messages that began with him screeching at me, I started to skip them. The last one, time-stamped well into the early hours of the morning, was of Mitchell slurring his words and spewing abuse at me. He must have gone home and had himself a hell of a drinking session, because he neglected to hang up after calling me a bitch for the tenth time in the message. The remainder of the recording was of him snoring.
There was one more message left. It had been left around the time I was being unceremoniously booted from Elena’s apartment, which told me that it probably wasn’t Mitchell. I played it and the voice in the message nearly made me choke on my tepid coffee. It was Barbara Copper, the matriarch of our corporation, the only person the board answered to. She’d single handedly taken the company to Fortune 500 status, and the rest of us labored constantly to match her brilliance. I’d met her only a handful of times in my career; she was the type to keep a hand out of the business unless it was absolutely called for. She asked me to come to her office that afternoon, then promptly ended the call. It was like being paged by the Great and Terrible Oz.
My thoughts raced. Had Mitchell been informing on me? Was I fired? I didn’t know what to do. Going straight to the office was out of the question. I realized that I wished I could go back to Elena’s place. I actually laughed. The only logical thing to do was to go home and do my best to clean myself up. I had been up and down so many times in the last twelve hours that I looked a fright.
Plus, I had an almost superstitious faith that looking the part would help me keep my composure amid all the uncertainty that was facing me. I seemed to have misplaced all my nerve and cunning, and felt that it might be hiding for me in the pocket of one of my well-pressed suits.
Chapter Eleven
Despite putting on what I considered to be my game face and my uniform, nerves were still jittering from within my bones as I made my way up to Mrs. Copper’s office. I'd never been fired from anything before; any job I'd ever left had been to make some great leap upward. However, I was glad that it would be her doing the firing, and not Mitchell. If it'd been up to him, I'm sure he'd have done it by meandering around my office with his hands stuffed into his pockets, going on and on about how "sorry" he was, while barely concealing a look of glee behind his beady little eyes. Granted, I had no idea how Barbara would deliver the blow, but I imagined that at least it would be done with a little more class.
As I sat in the lobby, I realized that I hadn't actually seen or heard Mitchell when I'd stopped by my office. It seemed strange; it was more like him to be lying in wait for me to give me the business, if not to gloat that I was being called on the carpet for letting him down. I just assumed that he was too hung-over to rub my face in it. It was dreadfully quiet, a stark contrast to our floor, where phones were constantly ringing and people hollered to one another instead of actually getting up. I should've bothered to prepare a speech of some sort, but I didn't; I deserved what was coming to me. I found myself longing for Elena the way one might long for a security blanket.
Finally, the big wooden door opened up. I expected to see a secretary, but it was Mrs. Copper herself. She was a sprightly old lady, and greeted me with a surprisingly firm handshake. There was no maliciousness in her bright, blue, twinkling eyes, despite the fact that she’d likely learned some unsavory things about me recently. She led me into her office, which, to my surprise, wasn't much different than mine, albeit with a much better view.
She must have noticed me gawking, because she chuckled and said, "Well, we must move you to a better location if you're this impressed with the view of the mountains."
Was she testing me? I didn't know what to say. Why would she talk of moving me if she'd probably called me up here to give me the chop? She studied me for a moment, then tapped on a manila folder on her immaculate desktop. I felt like my whole career was somehow inside that folder.
"I didn't build this company by being well-versed in small talk, Ms. Murphy, so I'll get right to the point. It's come to my attention that you skipped out on a meeting arranged by your colleague."
“That’s right.”
“What did you know about this meeting going into it?”
I racked my brain. No matter what I said, I knew that it would sound like a lie. I told her that all I knew was that Mitchell was backing out of a deal. As to the particulars of the aborted deal, I had no idea. She looked down at the file, then turned her gaze out the window.
“Is that all you knew?”
The way she said it made me question what I’d just said, as though I could no longer trust myself. I only nodded, before my mouth went off spouting words, just to have something to say in response. She stopped me with one wave of her delicate hand.
“I believe you. I didn’t think you had anything to do with it.”
I felt like I was missing something.
“With… what, ma’am?”
She smiled and leaned forward. There was that twinkle in her eye again.
“Well, it turns out that Mitchell was telling some tales to our clients. I don’t know how much I’m technically allowed to tell you, but considering that it nearly cost you your career as well, I feel it would be unfair not to fill you in.”
The wheels were turning now. Just what the hell was going on?
“The long and short of it is that M
itchell was conducting something of a Ponzi scheme, in-house. Promising payoffs to one startup while pocketing money from another for jobs he hadn’t completed. Those boys you were supposed to meet with last night were the alarm we could no longer ignore - they got in touch with me directly yesterday and told me what Mitchell had promised them. It was dismaying, to say the least.”
She gave me a second to let that sink in. It was like suddenly, all the pieces of a puzzle I didn’t know I’d been assembling came together. Everything Mitchell had done in the past few months made sense: all the veiled threats, all the offers to be the intermediary between me and the board. They were all efforts to get me to do work on his behalf, in order to keep his scheme afloat.
“Had you gone to that meeting, Ms. Murphy, you would have been implicated as well. And you would be out on the street right now, with Mitchell. Now, the rest of the board tried to talk me out of calling you in for a meeting, but I told them that I had a good feeling about you.”
She leaned back in her chair. I felt like a third grader in the principal’s office.
“I’ve watched your progress since you joined us, you know. You are a bulldog. I told the board that you simply didn’t have the time to get caught up in this kind of bullshit.”
She smiled.
“I… that’s right.”
I realized, with no small measure of relief, that I was telling the truth. She excused me. Just as I got to the door, she called to me. I turned around.
“The board will probably ask me a bunch of stupid questions again, but I’ve decided to give you Mitchell’s accounts. It’s a tremendous amount of clean up, but if you’re up for it, you’ll be making more money than you ever have before. Are you interested?”
She seemed to be studying me, as though looking for any signs of fear or trepidation. I was back in my element; there was no scaring me away from work.
“I am indeed, ma’am. I’ll get started on Monday.”
She slapped the file and gave a modest little war whoop.
“Hot damn, I knew I was right about you. Happy trails, Murphy, see you on Monday.”
She placed the file back into a drawer in her desk and spun around happily in her chair. She’d gone out on a limb for me. I made my way out of the office. Although my career had taken another great leap forward, work was the last thing on my mind.
Chapter Twelve
Elena. The only person, the only word on my mind as I walked out of the office as though it had been imploding all around me. I knew that the people on my floor would be clamoring for news, so I purposely avoided everyone, taking the stairs all the way down to the street. By the time I got out onto the sizzling sidewalk, my legs were trembling, but I couldn’t tell if it was entirely from the exertion, or if it was my fervent, bone-deep desire to find Elena. I had the odd urge to give her the money I knew was coming to me from the new contracts, but I also had an inkling that that would just make it worse. As I began my search, I decided that that would be one of the things I would need to work on.
And it was at that moment that I realized I loved her. I was already making such ostentatious plans as realizing a problem I needed to fix in myself, all for a person who had just kicked me out of her apartment that morning. A new problem had arisen, one that I couldn’t throw money at. I had to find Elena, and I had to convince her that I wasn’t the tourist she had come to believe I was.
But, that raised another question: who, what, was I? Was I gay? Did I need to be able to answer that before I could expect her to talk to me? Was it, could it ever be, enough to know that she was all I wanted, that in a life-changing moment, all I wanted in the world was to see her face?
I decided that I didn’t have time to answer all those questions; I needed to see her. I headed toward the dive bar. It seemed impossible that less than twenty-four hours ago, we’d had our first conversation. The place seemed to have lost some of its magic. In that moment, it looked like just another dingy place in the center of a city full of other dingy places. There was a whole different crowd there, blue-collar types who all seemed to be drinking a shot and a beer. It was like the bar I’d seen the day before had been some kind of mirage. One thing looked familiar, though: the shuffling bartender.
He saw me and there was an amused light in his eyes. I prayed that he would take pity on me and approached the bar.
“Can’t get enough of us, eh, lady?”, he said.
I didn’t know what to say. Could I really ask if he knew where Elena might be? I looked around. He seemed to read my mind.
“Those kids who were here yesterday? They only come around on Wednesdays and Fridays. It’s like they adopted us.”
“How did you know?”, I asked.
He leaned against the bar and looked almost sympathetic.
“I know that look in your eye. You don’t stand on this side of a bar for forty years and not know when someone comes in looking for a girl.”
I’m pretty sure I blushed. If I’d been close to giving up, I would have kept ordering drinks and pouring out my heart to him. He’d known me all of a day and already treated me with more respect than Mitchell ever had. As it was, however, I was only getting started. If she wasn’t here, I had no idea where to look. The thought of giving up crossed my mind, until he said,
“Try messenger alley down on ninth.”
“Messenger alley?”
“Sure, it’s where they all work. Lemmee guess: you’ve never been down there… “
I hadn’t been below sixth street in over twelve years. Twenty years ago, that area was nothing but low-lifes and criminals. I would brave that again if it meant I could see Elena. I thanked him and headed out, making the turn southward before I had a chance to talk myself out of it.
Slowly, the terrain of downtown changed. As I hurried down the street, the buildings went from the shining towers that I was used to, to old bank buildings repurposed into high-end lofts, to small, hip bars housed inside tiny spaces. Although there was no official signage, I knew I’d arrived in Messenger Alley when I saw hip young people lounging at the tiny sidewalk cafes, one foot or hand draped protectively over their scarred and battered bikes. It was as though I’d passed through different levels of a world and had finally arrived at the secret society within.
However, I also knew that I was something of an interloper there; I was one of the people that treated them like office equipment, one of those who saw them as nothing more than a delivery device who summoned them up from the depths when I needed them. Whatever I was going to do here, needed to be done fast. I stopped and assessed the situation. I wasn’t leaving without some kind of lead.
I spotted a familiar girl at one of the cafes. Although she was dressed in a nondescript grey sweatshirt and worn, faded jeans, she was still ultra feminine and very beautiful. She was the girl Elena had kissed in the park that day. I might have been projecting, but to me she looked like she was pining for her, just as I was. Mustering up all my nerve, I approached her.
“Uh… excuse me”, I stammered.
She looked up from her worn paperback novel and looked surprised, as though she thought she might be in trouble for messing up a delivery.
“Yeah?”, she said, wary.
“I’m looking for someone, maybe you know her?” I wanted to add, “She kissed you in the dog park the other day and you looked like you were about to explode in to a million tiny pieces”, but I restrained myself. She just tilted her head as though she couldn’t believe that someone would ask such a stupid question.
“Her name’s Elena. She’s a messenger. She has short black hair, a tattoo of stars on her left hand… “
Her eyebrows shot up.
“Elena?”
“Yes”, I said.
“That’s her name? I only know her as Rabbit.”
She looked sad that she hadn’t already known that. I felt bad for exposing that hole in whatever connection they had, but I was also soaring inside. Apparently her real name was a secret. In my head, I wa
s saying her name over and over again. Elena, Elena, Elena.
“Yeah, well. I need to see her.”
“Is she in trouble?”
“No, I just need her, I mean… “ I decided against correcting myself. It was the truth, after all.
“I don’t know where she hangs out. I haven’t seen her in like, days.”
The girl shuffled her feet and looked stricken, as though she’d just realized she didn’t mean to Elena what she thought she did. I turned around, close to tears. I felt like I’d misplaced a winning lottery ticket. The girl called out to me. When I returned to her, she looked down, but I could tell she had tears in her eyes.
“Are you… that lady from tower on Grand?”
My heart beat in my chest like the speakers at the bar. Elena had talked about me. I could only nod. The girl seemed to take it like she admitted defeat. She put her hands in her pocket and seemed to shrink into herself.
“She’s probably at the shops. Down that alley.” She gestured to and alley around the corner. I felt for her, but I needed to find Elena.
The alley was narrow; if I hadn’t been directed here, I would never have known it existed. It was lined with messenger headquarters and bike repair shops. As I passed each one, conversations between the messengers momentarily came to a halt. In my expensive suit and watch that cost more than most of them made in a few months, it was obvious that I didn’t belong there. I got to the end of the alley. No Elena. I stood there for a moment, wrapping my fingers around the grimy chain link fence. It might be time to give up, I thought.
I made the trek all the way back to my car in a haze, with no idea what I’d do with the rest of my day, or my life, for that matter. Every thought or plan that presented itself left my mind as quickly as it had appeared. Stalling for time before I had to face whatever would come next, I looked up at the shining towers where I’d learned to become something that was no longer familiar to me.
Suddenly, though, I began to feel grateful. Grateful for all the turmoil I’d been in recently. It reminded me of the life still thrumming through my veins. Even if I never got to see Elena again, or feel her plump lips against mine, every tiny moment of excitement was a gift. I had to be thankful for at least that. As I was getting into my car, Elena came to a skidding halt on her bike mere feet away. She was out of breath. She’d come after me.
