“No, really!” the thin brunette with her said, the blonde turning to give Mike a fine look at a luscious ass that went on and on and –
Hey.
Hold on.
He knew that ass.
“Let's go out tonight,” the brunette begged, her tone making it clear she expected the blonde to say no.
“Not tonight. Too busy.”
“Busy dreaming your hot sex dreams?” The brunette elbow-nudged her friend, who shushed her.
“Crazy,” he muttered to himself, because how in the hell would he know an ass he'd never touched?
“Fuck you. I'm not crazy, you shithead. Just down on my luck,” hissed a very disgruntled voice.
Mike looked down toward the sound of the voice, a street person sitting on a spread-out sleeping bag looking back up, eyes narrow and angry, her hand clenching a frayed nylon leash attached to a very bored tabby cat.
“Huh?” Mike choked out, eyes cutting between the woman and the blonde across the street.
“You called me crazy!”
“No, ma'am, I didn't.” The woman relaxed at his use of “ma'am.”
“That's more like it.” She picked up an old coffee to-go cup with a pink logo and shook it at him. “Got something to help me feed my cat?”
Mike always tucked a few bills in the little mesh pocket on the inside of his running shorts, along with his driver's license and a credit card. He knew the bills would be soaked with sweat, but he pulled the money out anyway.
Three twenties and a five.
Her eyes lit up.
“Sorry about that 'fuck you.' I'm too sensitive. You seem like a nice guy. You like pussy?”
“Excuse me?”
“Pussy cats.” He realized she'd said both words, but all he'd heard was the first, eyes glued to the blonde, who was now crossing with her friend, but –
Not in his direction.
He began peeling one of the three twenties off the wet pile, but changed his mind at the last second, bending down to hand all of it to the woman.
“Here,” he said, beginning to walk away, trying to chase down the blonde.
But a hand wrapped around his ankle, the woman's weight holding him back from leaving.
“What do you want for this?” she rasped, giving him a wary-eyed look, but one that said she wasn't unwilling to give a lot of sexual favors in exchange for the money.
“What? No! Nothing! It's for you. Enjoy.” Mike could barely see the blonde as the crowd swallowed her. He jiggled his ankle.
That made the woman grab harder.
“This is sixty-five bucks, mister! I don't make that across three days!”
“I'm paying it forward. Someday, you can help someone else.”
Finally, the hand relented. When he looked at her, he saw tears, shiny and fresh. His impulse to run and track down the blonde faded fast as he bent down and gave the street woman his full attention.
She needed it more.
“Thank you,” she whispered. Her hair was shoulder-length, streaked with gray and matted in a couple of places, but it looked like she tried to braid it. Smart, but tired, eyes met his, ringed with dark circles, the eyelids puffy. Dark brown eyes, the whites dotted with broken blood vessels, alarmed him. The woman needed the basics.
The true basics.
“You're welcome. I'm Mike. What's your name?”
“Louise.”
“Pleased to meet you, Louise. And who is this?” He gestured toward the cat, who ignored him, as cats often did.
“Tabasco.”
“Like the sauce?”
She nodded, staring at the wet money, then shoving it in her breasts, right down the middle as she looked around furiously. “This'll get me a private room down at the youth hostel, long as I can make it there without getting mugged.”
“I'll make sure you don't.”
“How?”
“I'll be your escort.”
Her eyes raked over Mike, from shoes to crown, as her eyebrows shot up. “Ain't nobody tackling you, mister. I'll take you up on that offer.”
As Louise collected her stuff and they headed toward the hostel she described, he made two firm commitments to himself:
1. He would call the hostel later and pay for Louise's stay for a month, and
2. He was the crazy one, staring at a blonde stranger, ready to chase her.
Who had he become?
A stranger to himself.
A stranger created by Jill.
This wasn't a rough part of town, so Mike wasn't sure why Louise was so worried.
“You really think you'll get mugged? Here?”
His question startled her, as if she didn't expect to be talked to. Looking down, she answered with a gruff, “Someone must've seen you give me that bill. People are sharp. They'll do whatever they need to.”
“You've been on the streets for a long time.”
She snorted. “Not that long, Seven months.”
“May I ask how?”
“You're awfully formal.”
“Just curious.”
As they walked, people stared at Tabasco, the leash standing out. Who walks a cat on a leash?
Louise did. And then it hit Mike:
She was worried someone would steal her pet. The leash was a form of security.
“I had a place. Nothing fancy. Shared it with a roommate who made herself nothing but a warm hole for the wrong guys. One of them cleaned us out one day.”
“Stole from you?”
“Worse. Stole everything from the apartment and my identity. Got my disability check. Used my social security number to open up accounts and commit fraud.”
“That's horrible! But you have consumer protections, right? You were able to undo it all.”
“Don't you blame me like that,” she growled, stopping and finally looking up at him. “I did everything right. It wasn't my fault.”
“Louise.” Before he could stop himself, he reached out to touch her shoulder. She flinched, but didn't pull away. He got the sense she wasn't used to being touched.
At least, non-violently touched.
“I'm not blaming you. At all. I'm just trying to understand.”
“You – you don't strike me as the kind of guy who gets overwhelmed easily, you know? It all becomes a tornado in my head. When I went to my bank to get my disability payments back, they made me go to the Social Security office. When I went there, they gave me all these forms and told me to do this and do that. Then there's the police report and identity theft and man... that's a lot to keep track of in my head.”
The full picture was starting to fill in for him.
“You lost your apartment? Evicted when you couldn't pay rent?”
“Yeah.”
“And you never got the disability check thing figured out.”
“I TRIED!” she thundered, rage replacing the tears he knew she was close to.
“I hear you. I get being overwhelmed.”
“You?” She made a puffing sound with her mouth, the noise making Tabasco look up. “Guy like you doesn't have troubles.”
“Different ones, Louise. Different ones.”
She slowed down in front of a nondescript building with a rainbow flag on it that made Mike smile.