Erasing Faith(7)

When the seconds dragged on into minutes, I knew it was time to walk away — even if I didn’t want to.

“I have to go, now,” I murmured, my gaze steady on his. “Things to do, people to kill. You know the drill.”

Something flashed in his eyes. “I do, actually.”

I smiled, taking a few steps backward until nearly ten feet separated us. Several tourists filtered through the gap between our bodies, but our gazes still held.

“Goodbye, stranger,” I called. “And as a parting gift, from one serial killer to another, remember — always have an alibi, never talk to the police without your attorney present. ”

He laughed and his whole face lit up. “You watch a little too much Law & Order. You know that, right?” he called back.

I contorted my features into a look of disgust. “Law & Order? Psh. Never. I’m a Criminal Minds kind of girl, any day of the week.”

His shoulders shook with repressed mirth. “You are a weird girl, any day of the week.”

“I know,” I agreed happily, winking at him before I finally forced myself to turn on my heel and walk away. If I didn’t leave now, I never would.

As I weaved a path into the crowd, I heard his voice yell out one last time at my back.

“Weird is good!”

My smile grew even wider.

***

The rest of my day was spent rushing between classes, my apartment, and the Hermes Courier office. I kept purposefully busy, which helped push thoughts of my collision with the handsome stranger to the back of my mind, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to keep my attention from straying to him.

Sitting in my medieval history class, my note-taking on the Ottoman-Hungarian Wars was abruptly interrupted by a startlingly vivid memory of that megawatt, crooked smile.

Dashing toward my apartment for a quick lunch break between lectures, I was nearly run over by a blue van when a flash of those intense dark eyes involuntarily popped into my mind.

I knew I was romanticizing the encounter in retrospect. But could you blame me? I mean, it had all the makings of a whirlwind Hollywood romance: girl, literally swept off her feet by a mysterious, handsome stranger in a fabulous, fairy-tale city. Walking down the avenues, I could practically hear Celine Dion belting out the soundtrack to the romantic drama that was my life overseas.

Wait, no… It wasn’t the sweet refrain of “My Heart Will Go On” that I was hearing…

I was just nuts.

All I could do was laugh at myself as I walked through the doors to the Hermes office. I’d always been a daydreamer, but this fantasy was rapidly spiraling toward the realm of ridiculous, even by my standards. I giggled as I made my way through the atrium. The space was serene — large windows let the mid-afternoon sun flood the white room, making it seem even more airy. Unfortunately, the heavenly atmosphere was darkened significantly by the presence of the woman sitting at the long, pale marble desk directly across from the entrance.

Irenka.

Secretary, schedule-master, time-keeper.

Which essentially translated to: judge, jury, executioner.

She ruled with an iron fist, guarding the entrance to the Hermes offices like a monstrous, mythological chimera, accepting parcels from customers, and depositing them onto the revolving conveyer-belt that whisked them into the back room for disbursement. As a side gig, she made it her business to manage each and every worker who came in for a shift, and was all too fond of letting us know whenever we were running so much as thirty seconds tardy.

“Late,” she growled at me as I skirted the long, shiny counter she was perched behind and headed for the revolving door to the back.

“I still have at least thirty seconds, Irenka!” I protested, glancing at the large clock on the wall over her desk. “That clock runs fast.”

“You move slow,” she countered icily.

After rolling my eyes so hard I was momentarily worried they’d become lodged upside-down in my skull, they landed on the novel in her hands. The front cover depicted a half-naked man in a pirate costume, and I was sure she was reading about his prominent sword at this very moment.

“Good book?” I teased sweetly, a knowing smirk on my face.

Marko, the security guard stationed at the front doors, burst into choked laughter but quickly managed to suppress it into a low cough. Irenka narrowed her eyes at him, harrumphed, and turned back to her romance. Shaking my head back and forth, I smiled merrily at Marko before pushing my way into the back room.

I navigated down a short hallway, bypassing the bike-rack and loading rooms on either side and hurrying for the end of the passage, where the employee locker room was located. Each worker here was assigned a small, wooden cubby to store their street clothes and other personal belongings while they were on shift. When I walked inside, several other girls were already there, changing into uniforms and lacing up their tennis shoes.

I spotted Margot in the back. As my roommate, workmate, and classmate, Margot had become a fixture in my life in Budapest during the month we’d been here. The petite, pixie-like blonde’s angelic exterior was no match for the amount of sass and snark she managed to pack inside her short frame, but I loved her all the more for it.

I’d known her mere weeks, but we’d connected on a level I never had with my biological siblings. In a way, Margot had become the sister I’d always dreamed of. A Colorado native and language-studies major, she’d applied to learn Hungarian abroad through her Denver-based university. We’d ended up with several overlapping general-ed classes at Corvintas as well as identical housing assignments, sharing a small apartment just off campus. It was lucky we got along so well — there wasn’t a whole lot of room for drama in our tiny loft.