Jane Lark - Just You

My cell buzzed, vibrating in my back pocket. I pulled it out. A message from Portia. Dillon kept talking.

It was a stupid picture of some weird dressed-up dog in a park. I laughed. Then another text came in.

‘Thought I would send you that to make you laugh. Did it?’

‘Yeah, it did.’

She could have punched me when she sent me her number. I hadn’t expected that, and I’d played it cool, just sending her my number back. But now she’d sent the first text too. What did that say?

The girl had my attention whether she wanted it or not.

“What did you laugh at?” Dillon’s brain finally caught up and overtook his mouth…

“Here.” I showed him the picture of the Jack Russell dog wearing a red and white wooly hat, sweater and scarf… He laughed too.

I slipped my phone back into my pocket, then rubbed a palm over Dillon’s hair as he started up with his eight-year-old bullshit again.

Jake was at the end of the block and about to turn, heading for home. I wished he’d wait. Our neighborhood was one of the worst in New York; kids ‘round here always claimed they didn’t have a choice about being in a gang. Gangs were what people did. But not me. I’d stayed in school, kept my head down, paid my way through College, working in a Mackie D’s, and now I was doing my best to keep my brothers out of all that shit.

My heart thumped steadily like it did every day when we walked back and Jake disappeared out of sight. Dillon kept talking, and I commented, laughed, and said all the things I was supposed to in reply, but my mind was on Jake.

There were loads of drive-by shootings in our neighborhood. Stabbings. Fights. For no better reason than people just wanted to show they were frickin’ tough. That wasn’t tough, that was cowardice. Tough was fighting against a life, and hood, that tried to hold you back.

My mom was tough. She’d escaped one of those guys. A guy who used to bring all sorts of crap back to our door and beat her up––and he’d slept around.

In a hood like this, she was bringing up four boys alone––working her ass off to do it.

Dad had thought himself tough. He’d grown up in a gang. He’d ended up leading it. But Mom was the tough one.

Maybe sometimes it made her seem like she didn’t care but she cared her heart out about us. Dad had just beaten all the softness out of her. Our mom cared with venom. She fought fiercely to do the best for us.

Respect.

I loved her.

We got as far as the street corner Jake had turned. When we turned it, there were a few kids in a car near him. My heart played an erratic base-beat against my ribs.

I settled a hand on Dillon’s shoulder, and drew him close against my hip as we walked on. He kept talking, oblivious to the tension that rattled about inside me. My eyes were on Jake. He kept moving, but the car slowed down near him. Shit. Come on… I was too far away to do anything. If the barrel of a gun appeared out the car window, Jake was a corpse, there was no way I could cover the two-hundred yards between us and do a single thing to stop him getting wiped out.

The car crawled along beside Jake, and a kid in the back seat wound down the window. I was walking faster without even thinking about it.

Dillon started half-running to keep up. “What is it?”, he said as he looked up at me, sensing my tension and realizing I hadn’t heard a word he’d said for five minutes.

I glanced down at him. “Nothing.” I kept my hand on his shoulder, so he couldn’t run off and get anywhere near the car.

Something was said to Jake, but as far as I could tell, he didn’t answer, just ignored them and kept walking. Good boy.

The car pulled away speeding up, and then the wheels screeched as the back window got wound up, and it accelerated away up the street.

This was our walk to and from school. It was like stepping through a field of landmines. We regularly past burned out cars some kids had crashed joy riding the night before, then torched. As well as kids standing on street corners with their hands inside their jackets or their jeans, like they had a knife to flick at you any moment… They just wanted us to be scared.

I wasn’t scared for me. I was beyond the reach of gangs. I had my education. I had my job. And I had a decent life. And, yeah, I stood out in this neighborhood like a beacon, ‘cause going to college had made me speak different and act different, but I kept my head down and my nose out of the gangs business and they left me alone.

But my brothers… It was my brothers I worried over.

Jake’s movement was a little stiffer and his stride a little longer. He was trying not to give away a single sign he had been rattled by whoever had been in that car, but he had been rattled.

I’d tell Robin and get Robin to ask him what was said. If I asked Jake, he wouldn’t answer. But then if I told Robin Jake would know the question had come from me anyway… Maybe I just had to leave it and trust him. He’d probably been just as scared as I was that the barrel of a gun was gonna come out of that rolled down window.

When Justin walked into the office my gaze got stuck on him. I had been looking at the door waiting for him to walk through it. I smiled, my cheeks heating as he caught my gaze and smiled too.

When he smiled he was actually pretty good-looking. I liked his smile. I liked his relaxed way of moving too. Justin was the antidote to me. He was soooo laid back he was horizontal, and he had New York swagger. Justin was the polar opposite of my last boyfriend Daniel. Daniel had been rich, upper-class and up-himself.

I realized I hadn’t looked away. I’d been staring at Justin, watching him walk along the office, probably with a dumb besotted look on my face. The more I looked at him, the more I liked the look of him, and of course in my subconscious, memories of a certain New Year’s Eve night in a pool still hovered. My opinions about Justin were shifting at a rapid pace.

When he got nearer, I turned to look at my screen, that was still a spinning wheel, with a message saying ‘Welcome.’

His fingers touched my neck, they skimmed over my skin, a light slide of his fingertips along the inside of the collar of my blouse. I shivered, and the sensation ripped right through my middle to my belly, making me ache between the legs.

Heat burned my cheeks. I picked up my cell, feeling the need to say something to him. Anything…

‘Did you have a good night?’ I sent the text and heard his cell buzzing in his back pocket as he hung up his coat.

He didn’t reply straight off, but he took his cell out just before he sat down, then smiled over at me, nodded a little and winked.

Shit. Even that stupid little gesture flipped my belly.

‘I did. Did you spot any more dumb dressed up dogs in the park? I fancy something to laugh at.’

‘:-) Sorry, no.’

‘:-) No matter then, but if you think of anything to make me laugh…’

‘I’ll text you :D’

‘Yeah.’

Why did it feel so good talking to him? I had this warm sensation in my belly.

Probably because I was sad––in the pathetic sense of the word––and I was heading toward becoming one of those old women with a cluttered house and a hundred cats. I was friendless and lonely. Yeah, I had Becky and Crystal at work, but we didn’t get together much outside work. We were not BFFs, we were just girls who got on okay in the office. I didn’t even know if they really liked me…

Whatever, I’d been on my own for a year, I could cope with being on my own.

‘What are you thinking about?’

I looked up and saw Justin standing, diagonally to me, on the other side of our block of desks. He lifted his phone a little. Probably to tell me to answer.