Heart Bones(10)

I try to take a step around him to get to the exit door, but he sidesteps and remains in front of me.

His eyes (they’re light blue and striking, sadly) scroll over my face and I hate that he’s this close to me. He glances over his shoulder as if to ensure our privacy, then he discreetly slips something into the palm of my hand. I look down and see a folded up twenty-dollar bill.

I look from the money, back up to him, realizing what he’s offering. We’re near a bathroom. He knows I’m poor.

He assumes I’m desperate enough to hopefully drag him into the bathroom and earn the twenty bucks he just slipped into my hand.

What is it about me that makes guys think this? What vibe am I putting off?

It infuriates me so much, I wad up the money and throw it toward him. I was aiming for his face, but he’s graceful and leans out of the way.

I grab his camera out of his hand. I flip it over until I find the slot for the memory card. I open it and pull out the card, then toss the camera back at him. He doesn’t catch it. It falls to the floor with a crash and a piece of it breaks off and flies at my feet.

“What the hell?” he says, bending to pick it up.

I turn around, prepared to rush away from him, but I bump into someone else. As if being trapped in a tiny corridor with a guy who just offered me twenty bucks for a blow job wasn’t bad enough, now I’m trapped by two guys. This new guy isn’t quite as tall as the guy with the camera, but they smell the same. Like golf. Is golf a smell? It should be. I could bottle it up and sell it to pricks like these.

This second guy is wearing a black shirt with the word Hispanic on it, but his and panic are in two separate fonts. I take a moment to respect the shirt because it really is clever, but then I attempt to step out of the way.

“Sorry, Marcos,” the guy with the camera says as he tries to piece it back together.

“What happened?” the guy named Marcos asks.

For a fleeting moment, I thought maybe this Marcos guy might have seen our interaction and came to my rescue, but he looks more concerned about the camera than me. I feel a little bad about tossing the camera now that I know it didn’t belong to the guy who was using it.

I press my back against the wall, hoping to squeeze past them unnoticed.

The guy holding the camera waves a flippant hand in my direction. “I accidentally bumped into her and dropped it.”

Marcos looks at me and then back at Douchebag Blue Eyes. There’s something in the way they look at each other—something unspoken. It’s as if they’re communicating in a silent language I don’t understand.

Marcos squeezes past us and opens the bathroom door. “I’ll meet you in the car, we’re about to dock.”

I find myself alone with camera guy again, but all I want to do is escape and go back to my father’s car. The guy is focusing on Marcos’s camera, attempting to piece it back together when he says, “I wasn’t propositioning you. I saw you take the bread and thought you could use the help.”

I tilt my head when he makes eye contact with me, studying his expression as I search for the telling lie. I don’t know what’s worse—him propositioning me, or him feeling sorry for me.

I want to respond with something clever, or anything at all really, but I just stand frozen as we stare at each other. Something about this guy is digging into me, like his aura has claws.

There’s a heaviness behind his reflective eyes that I assumed only people like me were familiar with. What could possibly be so terrible about this guy’s life that would lead me to believe he’s damaged?

But I can tell he is. Damaged people recognize other damaged people. It’s like a club you don’t want a membership to.

“Can I have my memory card back?” he asks, holding out his hand.

I’m not returning every picture he just took of me without my permission. I bend down and retrieve the twenty from the floor. I put it in his hand. “Here’s twenty bucks. Buy yourself a new one.”

With that, I spin and escape out the door. I grip the memory card in my hand while I make my way back through the rows of cars, toward my father’s.

I climb into the passenger seat and close the door quietly because my father is on the phone. It sounds like a business call. I reach into the back seat and slip the memory card into my backpack. When I face forward again, the two guys are exiting the indoor section of the ferry.

Marcos is on his phone and the other guy is staring down at the camera, still trying to put it back together as they make their way over to a car near ours. I sink into my seat, hoping they don’t see me.

They climb into a BMW two rows over, on my father’s side of the car.

My father ends his phone call and starts the car, just as the ferry begins to dock. Only half of the sun remains dangling in the sky. The other half is swallowed by earth and sea, and I kind of wish the sea could do the same to me right about now.

“Sara is so excited to meet you,” my father says, starting the car. “Other than her boyfriend, there aren’t a lot of regulars on the peninsula. It’s mostly vacation homes. Airbnb, Vrbo, things like that. It’s a lot of new people coming and going every few days, so it’s good she’ll have a friend.”

The cars begin exiting the ferry by row. I don’t know why, but I glance past my father at the BMW as it crawls past us. Camera guy is looking out his window now.