Taen

I awake suddenly as the Thameslink chutters and slows. We are coming into Bedford station. I had not meant to doze off in the barely 40 minute ride - I cannot afford to miss my stop - but after a fretful 18 hours of travel something in me must have just quit.

I stand and stretch, grateful for the jolting of the aging rail line, and move to an exit. As I step off onto the platform, a petite woman in a smartly tailored business suit asks me to help her with her bag.

I reach for it casually and am surprised to find I can barely budge it with one hand. Tiny woman, normal size bag, I had figured. But it really is a bitch to get it over the gap and onto the concrete pad of the platform, especially when it nearly tips over and I lunge to catch it and keep it upright on its wheeled bottom.

I look back to the woman and see that she has a purse, yoga mat, bulky tote spilling over with clothes - just like my technically-still-wife Hilary used to haul around when we were dating and she was ready to spend four nights a week in my bed but not to stash work clothes in the drawer I kept offering her.

This one looks nothing like my Hil, thank god, that would've been too much. Her dark hair is short, just off the ear, not red and curling down to her ass. Her eyes were a twinkling hazel, not the bland brown of my soon-to-be-ex wife. Her figure - I stop my eyes from scrolling south, but a split second too late and surely she has noticed me glance to her surprisingly full chest.

But she hasn't. She's fussing with the tote, the wound-up yoga mat, a latte in a cardboard Thameslink-branded cup dangling precariously from one hand.

"Why don't I just wheel this all the way to the cab stand for you, miss? I've only got the one myself," I say, tapping the thin brown leather over-the-shoulder bag hanging against my flank.

She says oh that's alright, she's going to the carpark anyway not the cab stand. She can manage, she says, looking flustered trying to arrange her objects to free up a hand.

"I really don't mind," I hear myself say.

It is an odd position to take. I've just taken an international flight to catch a grindingly slow hack cab across London to sprint down the King's Cross platform to catch a commuter train to be on time for a pitch meeting that will make or break my precarious financial situation back home. I have perhaps 30 minutes to orient myself to this smallish town, even less familiar to me than the capital, and get to the address on the card in my pocket, and find the charm, confidence and patter required to secure a new line of business. My boss had made clear that I would also be securing my own future as a person who receives paychecks. But it hasn't been my year for securing things. Quite the opposite. Which comes first, the pending divorce or the past-due notice?

Yet there I stand saying it: "I'm in no rush. It's no trouble at all."

Not yet three hours in country and I'm already lying. Lying for no real reason. Lying casually, as a sport, as I have for as long as I can remember. Lying to this charmingly out-of-sorts young woman. The accents have always gotten to me, true, but I convince myself it is more than that. She's pretty, sure. But she's struggling, and I can make things easier for her for a minute or two. Compulsive deceit machine though I may be, I have always taken pride in doing strangers a kindness where I can.

"Really, it's not out of my way or anything. I'm not going to the cabs either. I'm walking." Two truths and a lie.

A beat passes quietly as she considers the coffee cup in one hand, the overflowing tote in the other, the purse slipping from her shoulder to the crook of her elbow, the lanky mussy-haired American drawling out a solicitation. It's not a drawl. I'm from Connecticut. They just think we all sound like George Dubya Bush over here. Always chaps my ass - hey, there's a cowpoke phrase for ya! I feel a ripple of the old angry contempt rise in me before realizing she's said nothing of the sort, that I'm projecting as ever, inventing something to resent.

I can feel her waver, that too-familiar moment in a little white lie when I know it will work. That I will get what I want. As I always do - or used to, until the present business year.

I smile gently and turn my icy blue eyes to "harmless rake," and say: "If you want I'll take your tote with my other hand. That way you can hold your keys in your fist and have the drop on me if I do anything suspicious."

She just stares. Another beat as my mouth goes dry. My inner voices howl at me for making such an unpleasant attempt at humor.

You had her, you idiot, and now you've fucked it up by naming the fear women everywhere carry in their pockets at all times, the pockets men manufacture to be too small to carry anything useful but just the right size for terror of men's capacity for abrupt and greedy violence.

She sees me flushing and looking at the ground and clenching my teeth at myself.

Then she grins wide, too, and says that actually that sounds lovely. Before I know it she has dumped the heavy tote over my other shoulder and wedged the yoga mat under my elbow to boot, leaning almost close enough for her shoulder to brush my chest. She looks into my eyes as she positions the tote, twinkling a bit herself now.

"A bit impudent, that, wouldn't you say?" Her tone is suddenly serious. "Perhaps I ought to slip my purse between your teeth as well and spare myself any more jokes."

And then she hoists the purse strap back to her shoulder and starts off, quite briskly, while my knees almost collapse under me.

She's a full 10 yards ahead of me when she realizes I'm frozen, and just glances over her shoulder. "Well? Come along then!" And grins the same mild, playful, oh-it-was-nothing grin at me, and starts off again just as briskly the second she sees me begin to follow. I hustle to catch up, and am just beginning to sweat and feel my breathe quicken by the time I reach her and sync my stride with hers.

She chatters the rest of the walk, pausing occasionally for some response. I manage only single syllables -- "oh yes" and "I'm sure," but mostly "oh?" and "mm." I am by now near to panting, and if she notices that her pace is a hardship on the man carrying, well, everything except her coffee and her purse, she does not acknowledge it nor slow herself an iota. I notice again how damnably heavy the case is, hard to shift even on its smooth casters.

We wind through the midday foot traffic of the station and out into the sunshine of a cloudless and unseasonably hot early-spring day. She does not so much as pause. I am beginning to sweat through my white Oxford and can feel my socks clamming a bit.

I really ought to start jogging again

, I think, as I hurry to keep up with her down the blazing pavement. I realize I will need to stop and buy another shirt on my way to my meeting, especially as the woman who had called to schedule it had a somewhat severe tenor to her voice that gave me the impression of a quite formal workplace. Can't sing for your supper if your pits look like a bowl of soup.

The petite woman -- I realize I have not asked her name, and berate myself silently again without noticing she has not offered it nor asked for mine -- rounds another corner, seeming almost to speed up. I can see the beckoning shadow of the entry to the garage -

GARE-idge

, she'd probably say it -- now about 300 more feet up on the left. I am ecstatic at the prospect of shade. We enter, and she turns toward the lift and begins to extend a hand toward the buttons.

"Oh,

piss it,

" she says, suddenly quite exasperated. "The lift is out of service. And we can't take the stairs, not with you having to wheel my case around behind you like that. We'll have to walk up the ramps. I'm on the fifth level, I'm afraid."

She eyes me coolly, taking in my growing sweat marks, my glistening brow, my now fully heaving shoulders. Whatever prior effort I'd made to hide my struggling is long over. I'm a mule in full lather, and she knows it, and knows that I know that she knows it.

"You don't mind," she says, staring directly into my eyes. Her voice does not flick up a half-note. It is not a question. Panting, I attempt a rakish shrug. She does not smile, but simply turns on her heel and begins to walk up the ramp. Her thin, sharp blue-velvet heels clack along beneath her, and I realize for the first time that she must be simply tiny in flat feet. On the platform she was barely up to my collarbone, despite what must be at least 3 or even 4 inch pumps.

I tell myself I'm taking a moment to catch my breath, but really I'm watching her swish up ahead of me, her ass just the right mix of bouncily plump and yoga-before-work toned. Suddenly I'm visualizing my pending triumph in the pitch room, the night of pub generosity I'll allow myself afterward -

out on the lash

, isn't that what they say? - and the moment I'll dial her number from my hotel to invite her to join me in celebrating, and the moment hours after that when I'll undo the little buckles on her strappy heels and push her ankles up to the headboard of my hotel bed, and--

She's gotten so far ahead of me again that she actually notices, like on the platform. Unlike on the platform, she gets my attention with a shrill, appallingly loud whistle. The kind of sound you learn to make if your dad takes you to a baseball game every weekend, or if you grew up in a house with too many rowdy dogs.

Up the incline ahead of me, arms akimbo and hands on hips, she taps her foot. Literally taps her foot impatiently, at the friendly stranger who's volunteered to truck her badly-packed bags around for her. I feel the anger again, push it down again.

Her voice echoes down to me in the concrete vehicular tomb.

"Look, I really am in a hurry even if you aren't. Please at least

try

to keep up, Mister Oh-So-Helpful." The anger is much harder to push down this time, so I decide to let it power me up that god-damned concrete hill. She once again starts off the second she sees my feet begin to plod. She never slows her pace, but does pause at the tops of ramps where the ground flattens to let me catch up. Just when I do, she starts off again, so that I must either take no breaks or fall dramatically behind.

It suddenly dawns on me how much has changed in this interaction since it began, with her insisting I'd no need to help her further. If she is grateful for the now-quite-substantial assistance, she makes no indication of it. Indeed, if anything I begin to detect a faint trace of annoyance at the corners of her mouth with each sequential stop, with my pace. My previous fantasy of a loving-but-lurid tryst after buying her a few drinks turns a bit nastier. Maybe I'll pull her hair. Smack her ass a little harder than any of them like, hard enough to leave a handprint she'll feel when she sits down at work the next morning. Nothing wrong with that. Lot of them like it, in my experience. I'd never do anything she didn't like - But right now I feel like doing it all a bit

more

than she might like. That'd show her.

At the third landing -- one and one-half levels up of the five we must climb in this fashion -- she stops again. Her own forehead is just gone dewy, the vaguest trace of sweat sticking one stray strand of hair across her cheek. She pulls it back into the tidy, shining fall of her dark hair, sighs, and grins at me.

"I really can't start sweating. I haven't time to change before my appointment. For which, thanks to the

bloody

lift, I am now running late." At least she's not blaming me this time, I think, my dark mood lightening a bit again. That's good - I'll need the full suite of aw-shucks harmlessness when I ask for her number in a few minutes. I haven't checked my watch since the train jolted me awake, and now my arms are too full to be able to reassure myself I still have time to reach my meeting with a pause at a shirt shop. This doesn't occur to me, for some reason.

She unbuttons her smart dark blazer and pulls her arms back through its sleeves. She folds it once, neatly, and then drapes it over my shoulder. She blows out one crisp, hard breath as she cuffs up the loose chiffon sleeves of her expensive-looking blouse, smooths the front of the dark pencil skirt which has failed to restrain her stride even as my energy withers, and eyes me again.

"Well. The lift, and you -- You won't be much help to me at all if you can't keep up. I could have paid a porter, you know," she says, her sudden disapproval landing like ball lightning in my stomach.

A beat while my mouth opens and closes. Even if I were not parched, I cannot think of anything to say to this. Anything, that is, that wouldn't get me slapped and shatter my hopes of finding out what kind of panties she's wearing under that racy little "business" skirt.

And then she laughs.

"Only kidding! You Americans. You're a dear, truly." This time she smiles fully, a dazzling smile I never would have seen coming from her earlier wry grins, and pats me gently on the forearm. The ball lightning is replaced by something quite different, the depths of me just as convulsed but in an entirely different manner.

"Oh, I know. Here. You just walk up this next ramp" -- pointing with a glossy, crimson, perfectly manicured nail toward the landing above us, this one in full shadow unlike the sun-dappled spot where we are standing -- "and I'll trot up the stairs and bring my car down to meet you." She catches the quizzical tilt of my eyebrow - hadn't she just been worried about sweating? - and shakes her head. The air vents are strong in the car, she says.

"Anyhow, everyone tells me my sweat smells like honey."

And she's off again before I can process that odd remark, again not waiting for reply or input. I heave a moment for air, wipe awkwardly at my brow with my forearm as best I can without dropping the tote.

I feel her blazer start to slip off my shoulder and tense up instinctively to pin it with my chin.

(Years later, looking back on it all, this moment sticks with me perhaps more than any other from my brief interaction with this still-nameless-to-me young professional woman. It was a moment of utter panic: If I dropped her work clothes into the dust of the parking garage floor, she might well have turned livid again as she had a moment earlier when joking about my failure to actually assist her. I sometimes tell myself it wasn't her anger I feared, so much as the lost shot at playing out my confidence-boosting fantasy about getting my cock in her drunken mouth before I had to fly back home in the morning.

I know much more now about that day than I did in the moment. One such insight: My real panic was not about horny frat-boy bullshit. I could never have acknowledged it then, but the truth is that the idea of failing her laced a deep terror in my gut.)

I begin climbing the ramp -- suddenly the last of four instead of the fourth of 10 -- in an even more awkward physical position than before. Left hand gripping the still-unbelievably-heavy large roll-aboard suitcase. Right hand and arm holding the loops of the tote taut for stability and pinning the yoga mat against my own shoulder bag. Head cocked absurdly right, chin down to pinch the corner of the blazer to my shoulder and prevent it slipping further.

Even after the break to catch my breath, I am panting again at the top of the last ascent. I level out the roller bag, repositioning it for stability when it seems to wiggle off-balance of its own accord, and carefully place the tote atop it.

I start to drape the blazer over the extended handle of the suitcase as I might my own, but something stops me. She folded it this way. She put it on my shoulder. That is where it goes, and I will leave it there as I wait for her -- But that seems absurd, now my hands are free. I settle on draping it carefully over my right forearm, and heave the cool shaded air into my lungs.

Just as it occurs to me that I've adopted the peculiar posture of a formal 19th-century valet, I hear a squeal of tyres (

oh god I've started spelling things like they do

) from above me. A shining black Mercedes with thickly tinted windows pulls around next to me and stops. The passenger window rolls down and I see her, leaning across the gearbox, her hair dancing alluringly in the blast of the air vents. A bottle of water in her hand is so cold it is beaded with moisture, and suddenly I am thirstier than I've ever been in my life.

"Go on then. I'll pop the boot. Go easy with that suitcase, mind -- Fragile cargo, that." The smile again, the full megawatt version, and I hear the trunk release, with a dignified little hiss rather than the ka-CHUNK typical to non-luxury automobiles.

Whoever this little sprite is, I think as I trundle her belongings back toward the rear of the Mercedes, she's done quite well for herself. An S-Class with full leather trim and dark tints is not generally in the budget of an early-20s woman, at least not one whose work meetings happen this far outside the City.

The tote I tuck neatly into a corner, noting that it is a much larger trunk than I'd have guessed from a glance at the car. I start to heft the suitcase but remember the blazer draped across my forearm. It wouldn't do to crease it. Oh god I hope I haven't sweat into it - I don't know what I smell like but it sure as hell ain't honey. I really am drenching, and wondering if there might be some way to take a proper shower as well as popping into a menswear store for a fresh shirt. I stride up to the driver's side window, and as she rolls it down she looks perplexed.

"What's the delay--" she begins to ask, the icy tone back in her voice again, then sees I am holding the blazer out to her, delicately and with both hands, as though delivering the Shroud of Turin to a particularly meticulous archivist. She lets me see the smaller grin that brings one dimple out on her left cheek, and mirrors my strange formality back at me as she reaches to take it.

"Oh

thank

you, professor, most delicately handled." Then tips her head back and laughs once, a sharp and almost mean bark of a laugh, before turning back to me.

"The bags now. I really am running late. Be quick about it, Alan." And up goes the window again.

If the bag was heavy to roll, it is murder to lift. Careful to get my hips low and heft it with my legs, I manage to wrestle it up into a balanced position at the edge of the boot (

god damnit-- sorry, Uncle Sam)

.

One little shove and it will be inside

, I think, as my ears begin to register the sudden clicking of high heeled shoes somewhere behind me.

She hasn't gotten out of the car, has she?

And -- wait-- how did she know my name?

And that is all I have time to think. Something hard and heavy snaps against the side of my skull, just above my ear, and I collapse forward in a heap. My vision is blurring and browning out as the woman with the blackjack scoops me bodily into the trunk of the Mercedes in one fluid, easy, strong maneuver, then bumps the suitcase with her hip so that it tumbles in next to me. I catch only the blurriest partial glance at this new, much taller woman's face as she swings the lid closed.

----

I awake some time later to road sounds. The Mercedes rides so smoothly that I am not bounced or jostled hardly at all, curled in a fetal ball in the trunk of a stranger's car.

Abducted

. The word pierces through the cotton wadding fogging my brain, and I notice the brutal ache in my right temple. My hand drifts to the spot and finds a large raised welt, damp and hot and throbbing. I try to look at my fingers to see if there is blood. In the perfect dark of the trunk, I see nothing.

Pitch black, and hot -- hotter somehow than when I'd stood in the full sun trying to catch my breath moments (hours? days?) earlier. The air conditioning I saw riffling in her hair --

she never said her name!

-- must not reach the trunk. The air is stale and smells of my own sweat.

Honey? Something about honey, or-- or syrup?

I am clammy, my earlier exertions combined with the odd feeling of being knocked out.