The Rideshare Driver Drove Me Home Four Nights in a Row novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Night Two

The app matches them again and his hand rests on her knee at a red light; he drives her to the top of a parking garage.

I answered my ex-husband at noon, standing in the walk-in with the door shut.

It was the one room where my phone had no signal.

I had to step out to the loading dock to send it.

"Take your card off the account. I'll pay my own way."

He wrote back before I had put the phone in my apron.

"Not until the house sells. We're still married on paper where it counts. Be reasonable."

We were not still married on paper anywhere.

The decree had come in March, and I had it in a folder at home.

I put the phone face down on a case of lemons and finished the prep for dinner.

All day, between tickets, the back seat of the Camry came and went in my head.

His mouth on my thigh, the buckle under my knee, his voice breaking on a name he wasn't allowed.

I burned a tray of shallots at six, which I had not done in years.

One of the cooks looked at me and said nothing.

At 12:50 I stood under the awning with my knife roll, in a dry night with a sharp wind, and opened the app.

I ordered a car.

I told myself I did it because my feet hurt.

The screen said, "Your driver Mateo is 2 minutes away."

I read it twice.

Then I looked up, and the gray Camry was already at the curb with its hazards blinking.

I had not even seen it turn the corner.

He did not get out this time.

He rolled the window down and looked at me across the passenger seat.

He had the same small, steady smile as the night before.

"Evening," he said.

"What are the odds."

"Pretty good, apparently."

I opened the back door, and stopped with my hand on it.

"Do I sit back there?"

"It's not a rule," he said. "You made the rules."

I shut that door and opened the front one and got in.

The seat was warm.

The heat was on, and the console had a fresh stack of napkins in it.

The rosary swung once on the mirror and was still.

He pulled out with both hands on the wheel.

"Colfax," I said. "Go up Colfax."

"It's out of the way."

"I know."

He drove up Broadway, and turned east.

The street opened up in front of us in a long strip of neon and red lights.

He was driving well under the limit.

A bus passed us and a man on a bicycle passed us, and I turned my head to look at him.

"You can go faster," I said.

"I know."

"Then why aren't you?"

He flexed his hands on the wheel.

"I'd like it to take longer," Mateo said.

My stomach turned over slowly, warm and low.

We were stopped at the third red light when his right hand left the wheel.

It came down on my knee, over my work pants, and settled there, big and warm and still.

He didn't look at me.

He kept his eyes on the light, and his jaw tightened, and a muscle jumped in it.

I looked at his hand.

I put my own hand over his.

Neither of us moved.

I could feel his pulse in his wrist, going hard, much faster than a man sitting at a red light should have had.

Beside us, in the next lane, a pickup idled with its window cracked.

A woman in the passenger seat was scrolling her phone, lit blue from below, and the light was long, and nobody looked over.

I leaned across the console.

I put my mouth near his ear, and my voice came out low and flat and entirely mine.

"There's a garage in Cherry Creek with a roof deck nobody uses," I said. "You're going to drive up to the top and park with the hood facing the city."

His hand tightened on my knee.

"Then I'm going to get out and put my hands on the hood, and you are going to pull my pants down and fuck me over it."

The light changed.

The pickup pulled away.

Mateo did not move.

"The light's green," I said.

"I know."

"Then drive."

He drove.

He went up through Cherry Creek with his knuckles pale on the wheel and said nothing for two blocks.

I sat with my hand on top of his, which was back on my thigh now, a little higher.

I listened to him breathe.

I was thirty-five years old.

I ran a kitchen that fed three hundred people on a Saturday, and I was saying filthy things out loud on a main street.

I had not felt this awake since I was twenty.

For seven months I had been a stop on somebody else's way, and tonight I was the one who had said where to go.

"Tell me what you're thinking," I said.

"I'm thinking you're going to ruin me."

"Good."

He pulled into the parking structure off Third, and took a ticket from the machine.

The arm lifted.

He went up the first ramp, and the second.

He went past the third floor, where a few cars sat under flickering light.

He went past the fourth.

The ramp spiraled up, and the concrete walls gave way to open sky and a hard wind.

He drove all the way to the roof.

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