The Rideshare Driver Drove Me Home Four Nights in a Row novel · Chapter 13 of 24
Chapter 13: Basement Light
Mateo's POV
I parked in front of my mother's rented house in Westwood and turned the engine off.
Neither of us moved.
It was two in the morning, and the only light on the block was the yellow bulb over the neighbor's carport.
"The front is hers," I said. "I'm in the basement. There's a side door."
"Is she home?"
"She's at work. She gets in around seven."
Paulina looked at the house, one story of tan siding with a chain-link fence and a Guadalupe candle burning in the front window.
"Okay," she said.
My hands were sweating on the wheel.
I had never brought anyone down there, not even in high school, not even once.
I took her down the side steps by the light of my phone.
The key stuck, the way it always stuck, and I put my shoulder to the door.
The room was one room and a bathroom, with a window well at the top of the wall where the streetlight came in through a dead tree.
The bed was a single, pushed up under that window.
On the shelf over the desk sat my meter, my conduit bender, two coils of wire and the binder from my pre-apprenticeship class.
Over the bed hung a poster of the Riverwalk in Pueblo that my mother had bought at a church sale.
I saw all of it through her eyes, and I wanted to apologize for every inch.
"It's very clean," Paulina said.
"My mother checks."
She laughed and picked the wire stripper off the shelf and turned it over in her fingers.
"You can use this?"
"I can use that."
"It's the most attractive thing in the room," she said.
I turned on the desk lamp and then the overhead too, and the whole room went flat and yellow.
"Leave them on," I said. "I want to see you."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of The Rideshare Driver Drove Me Home Four Nights in a Row are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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