He Called Me His Plaything in Front of His Men, So I Left Carrying His Heir novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Night Shift

Aurelio comes alone to the tortilla factory dock; she takes his tie in her fist and orders him to say the true thing, and he cannot; he leaves a key.

I went to work Monday night because rent was rent.

The factory is a long low building off Southwest Boulevard that smells all night of hot corn and lime.

I work the third shift on the tortilla line, in a hairnet and a plastic apron, counting stacks of twelve into the wrappers as they come off the cooling belt.

It pays $14.50 an hour, and I had a baby coming.

I did not intend to be anywhere else.

At ten past three, the foreman stuck his head in and said someone was asking for me on the loading dock.

He said it like a man who did not want to know who.

I pulled off my gloves and walked out through the cold room and the swinging plastic strips.

The dock was dark except for one caged bulb over the roll-up door.

Aurelio stood at the far end of it with his hands in his coat pockets.

There was no car in the lot that I knew.

There were no men.

It was the first time in five months I had seen him with nobody behind him.

He wore the same good dark coat, and he looked as if he hadn't slept, with gray under his eyes and a shadow of beard on his jaw.

He had come to this dock first in September, to talk to the night crew about a failed vending contract.

He had stayed to eat a hot tortilla standing up, and asked me what I was studying.

I had told him accounting, at Metropolitan, one class a night.

He had said, "That's a good thing to know."

I stopped six feet from him.

"You shouldn't be here," I said.

"I know."

His voice was hoarse.

"On the phone you said my name twice," I said. "You said nothing else."

"I didn't have anything else."

"You had a whole table of things on Sunday."

He flinched.

It was a small movement at the corner of his mouth, and I watched it and did not feel sorry.

I walked the six feet.

I came in so close that he had to tip his head down to look at me, and I took the knot of his tie in my fist.

It was dark blue silk.

I could feel his pulse going in his throat against my knuckles.

"Say the plain thing," I said.

"Ximena."

"No. The plain thing. Why you said it."

He looked at me for a long time.

His eyes went over my face, my hairnet, the scar through my left eyebrow, and back to my eyes.

His whole jaw moved, as if he were chewing a stone.

"I can't," he said. "Not here. Not like this."

I let go of his tie.

I was angry, and under the anger was something worse.

I had wanted him to say it so badly that my knees hurt.

"That's what I thought," I said.

I turned and went back toward the plastic strips.

I was almost through them when his hand came around the edge of the dock door and found my wrist.

He did not pull.

He held it.

His fingers were warm and a little rough, and they covered the whole width of the bone.

I could have taken my arm back.

I stood in the strips with my back to him, listening to the forklift beep in the cold room and the belt run, and I let his hand stay.

It stayed as long as the forklift beeped.

When the beeping stopped, he let go.

I did not turn around.

I heard him set something small on the wooden bench by the door.

Then I heard his shoes on the dock, going away.

When I looked, he was walking out across the lot in the dark, on foot, toward the bus stop on the boulevard.

He had no driver.

He did not look back.

On the bench lay a plain brass key on a paper tag.

The tag said, in square black print, Room 2, above the laundromat, 4200 Southwest Boulevard.

Underneath, in the same hand, he had written: You shouldn't be on your mother's step with a baby coming.

I stood there reading it again.

I had said the word pregnant to one person on this earth, to my mother, on the back step, with nobody else near.

I had not told him.

I had not told Cosima.

The test had been in my coat, and Cosima had handed me the coat.

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