Page 24 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

I drive deep and hold there and empty into her with my face in her hair, growling something that isn’t English and isn’t anything. Her hair smells like vanilla sugar, and I want to devour her all over again.

Sadly, there’s no time for that.

After, we stay propped against the wrecked shelf, breathing, her forehead on my collarbone, my trousers around my knees, one of her shoes somewhere under aisle four.

“So,” she says, muffled. “Same pact?”

“Same pact.”

“Great. It’s working beautifully.”

“Never happened.”

She snorts. “You’re still inside of me.”

“No, I’m not.”

When she giggles this time, her body squeezes on me.

“Okay, maybe I am.”

11

THEA

It’s almost two in the morning, and I’m carrying a banker’s box of archive files through the parking garage, wearing one heel reunited with its owner. My hair has given up—dangling tendrils tickle my neck. Two floors above me, the CEO of this company is presumably back at his desk, as if half the receipts from 2019 aren’t on the floor because of us.

Some pact. It’s working great.

The garage at this hour is empty the way garages get, where the emptiness has a hum to it. Concrete, sodium light, cold rubber. My Honda is in the far corner because the good spots belong to people with titles. I’m—what the hell was that?

A shout. Short, male, cut off in the middle.

Then the meat-and-fabric sounds of a fight. Not a movie fight. A real one, which sounds like furniture being moved by people who hate each other. Grunts. A bark of Russian, too fast for me. The wet crack of knuckles, and a body hitting a car panel hard enough to set off, for one whoop, an alarm that dies like even the car thought better of it.

I’m halfway turned to leave when the part of me that has never once let a phone ring unanswered makes me look first, around the concrete pillar, just to know what I’m running from.

Five men stand between me and my car.

Four of them are security, the ones who order espresso in Russian and think I’m furniture. Two hold flashlights. One holds his own ribs. They’re in a loose circle around the fifth man, who is getting up off the hood of a Mercedes with blood on his mouth and a smile underneath it.

Cold water down skates on every nerve. Big. The bare scalp a map of ridged scars under the sodium light. The seam down one cheek pulling his mouth toward his ear.

I know that smile.

The man from the hotel. The four a.m. hallway man. The one who breathed in when he looked at me and hummed his creepy two-note tune, who I was never going to see again. Who I told myself was a guest, a drunk, a nobody, because at four a.m. in a hotel hallway you tell yourself whatever gets you to the elevator.

He’s here. In my parking garage. Fighting my company’s security, and by the state of the two men picking themselves up off the concrete, fighting them well.

I drop behind the nearest car, a dusty Audi. The box goes down with me, silent. I crouch with my back against the door panel and my pulse doing something wrong.

The fight ends fast. A scuffle-surge, a grunt of real pain, an order snapped in Russian, it means hold, or hold him. Then heavy breathing and the shuffling of men repositioning. Metal doors roll open. An engine turns over, diesel, a van by the depth of it, idling.

I ease up over the Audi’s window line instead, one inch, two, because I’d rather see it coming if I’m about to die.

My phone is in my coat pocket, and my hand finds it and grips it and does nothing else, because who would I call? Security? Security is winning. The police? Officer, the men who guard my building are loading a scarred stranger into an unmarked van, and I think I’m the only witness.

I crane my neck and see they’re loading him into a gray cargo van backed into the service bay. No plates that I can see, interior lit by one dome light. It takes three of them. He’s heavy. His hands are zip-tied in front and his mouth is bleeding.