"What's her major?" If it was something other than early childhood education, she probably was in trouble.
"Crap."
Now I did burst into laugher. I kept my eye on Eric and Angie in the Beamer across the lot and hoped they'd think I was having another coughing fit.
"Bitchy crap," John added.
There was no disguising the laughter now, and even John was grinning at me. Gasping, I said, "She's majoring in bitchy crap? Well, that's just silly."
John straightened his shoulders and his face. "You can't make a living if you major in bitchy crap."
That was it. We both let go. Angie's punishment was the knowledge people were laughing at her.
I couldn't leave it alone, could I? Into the laughter, I asked, "Why'd you start dating her in the first place? Because she'd do you?"
Dimples still showing, John sniffed and rubbed the tears away from his eyes. He nodded toward Eric. "You would know. It goes a long way when you're seventeen. Obviously."
"Speaking of which," I said.
He rubbed his thumb back and forth slowly across his soft bottom lip. "Where were we? 6:01 a.m. on Thursday, huh?"
I grinned.
He swallowed. "What exactly are we talking about?"
"Oh, no. You're not entrapping me. I've watched prostitution stings on Cops. I won't be the first one to mention the sex act."
Under his dark blue uniform, his chest rose and fell rapidly. I wished I dared put my hand there to feel how his heartbeat sped up. It was nothing compared with mine. I could hardly believe my luck. I had a crush on a cop, and for some unknown reason, he crushed on me right back. I, blue-haired girl-felon, was seducing Officer After.
"I've been through this before with Angie, remember?" he said. "She left town and dumped me. This would be the same. Wouldn't it?"
"Not if there were no strings attached," I said.
Oh, the gentle lip-biting. "I'm not sure I can function with no strings attached."
"Try it. You'll like it. Just once. Get it out of your system."
He sat back against the vinyl seat and gazed across the parking lot at the Beamer. "I think it might be a disaster."
"I think it would be perfect," I said truthfully.
He passed his fist across his clean-shaven jaw, then picked up his pen and busied himself scribbling on the clipboard. "6:01 a.m. on Thursday, then. Write that down in your notebook, and we'll call it a plan."
Chapter 11
He let me drive! It took him until night four, but he let me drive!
Well, only for a few minutes. And only a few feet. And not the police car.
A March storm had blown up, soaking the cold night with rain. A car skidded off the slick road at the Birmingham Junction and got stuck in the muddy shoulder.
While the driver pressed on the gas, John threw his weight onto the back bumper. The tires spun, and the car didn't budge.
I got out of the cop car to help, despite the rain. Not that I really expected to be of assistance. But it was better than waiting around for John, making him fruit cobbler in my mind. He signaled the driver, and we both pressed our weight against the back bumper.
At least, that's what I thought. I pushed as hard as I could, and the tires spun. Then I looked over at John.
He was standing up. Staring at my ass. Now that he called my attention to it, I did feel a draft where my jacket rode up as I bent over. He was staring at the tattoo on my lower back of a bird escaping from a cage. That tattoo had cost me months of tips. The artist charged me extra because getting a tattoo at under eighteen was illegal without my parents' consent.
I straightened and put my hand on my back. I hoped John wasn't considering a sting operation on a Birmingham tattoo studio. It was out of his jurisdiction.
No...he was considering 6:01 a.m. Thursday. He focused on my hand where he'd seen my tattoo a moment before. Slowly his eyes moved up my body to meet my eyes. He blinked against the rain and remembered he was On Duty.
Then he squinted at the driver. "This is too distracting. Go trade places with that guy. It's his Goddamn car."
So I slipped into the driver's seat and watched in the rearview mirror for John's signal. When he pointed at me, I stomped the gas. The tires spun, then caught. The car shot forward. I checked the mirror again. The driver was wet with rain but otherwise spotless. John, plastered with mud, wiped dirt from his mouth with his sleeve.
The driver happily skidded away. Back in the cop car, John blew mud out of his nose with a Kleenex from the trunk. "I hate to go home and change with less than two hours left in the shift. What do you think?" He sneezed.
"If I were a criminal—and I am not—I wouldn't find you very intimidating right now. I would find you bedraggled."
"'Nuff said."
His apartment was in one of those complexes with twenty buildings, all the same, that had sprung up along the interstate. They housed people who worked at the car factory here in town but didn't want to commute from Birmingham. That is, people with no life.
It was only a minute's drive from the Birmingham Junction. Why, he could probably hear the car crashes from his patio. He definitely could hear the drone of the interstate. I heard it as soon as he pulled into a space and turned off the engine.
We sat there in silence, except for that hum of distant eighteen-wheelers, for ten seconds.
"Should you come in?" he asked.
"Why not? You don't want me to see your apartment?"
"It's not that. Somehow it just doesn't seem appropriate."
"I'm going to see it at 6:01 a.m. Thursday anyway. Unless you want to do it behind the storage buildings."
In the dim lights of the parking lot, I couldn't see him blushing. But I could hear him blushing as his breaths came more quickly.
"Yeah," he said, "but that's twenty-four hours from now."
I looked at my watch. "Twenty-five."
He pulled my wrist toward him and looked at my watch himself. Which sent sparks shooting down my arm, because he could have looked at his own watch. He chose to touch me instead.
"And forty-seven minutes," he said so close to my shoulder that I felt the low notes of his voice vibrate through me. "But if you stay in the car, I'll have to leave the keys so you can keep the heat on. And now that I've let you behind a steering wheel once tonight, I'm afraid you'll go for a joyride."
I smiled and winked at him.
"Come on in."
I expected his apartment to have walls, carpet, and kitchen tile the color of masking tape, as virgin as the day he moved in. Or little touches of homeyness, calico curtains and cookie-scented candles, left by the cobbler-baking phantom wife. This is not what I got. The living room was a gallery. Bold drawings crowded the walls, some framed, most tacked up bare.