One of Us Is Next(32)
“Don’t you have to work?”
“Not till five.”
My phone sits on the table in front of me, mocking me with its silence. Maybe if I call again, I’ll get a different person and a different answer. “I don’t know…”
“Come on. What do you have to lose?”
Luis gives one of his megawatt smiles, and what do you know, I’m on my feet. Like I said: I have no defense against his particular demographic. “What did you have in mind, in this alleged outdoors?”
“I’ll show you,” Luis says, holding open the door. I look left and right when we hit the sidewalk, wondering which way we’re going to walk, but Luis pauses at a parking meter and starts unchaining a bicycle leaning against it.
“Um. Is that yours?” I ask.
“No. I pick locks on random bikes for fun,” Luis says, detaching the chain and looping it beneath the bike’s seat. He flashes me a grin when he’s finished. “Of course it’s mine. We’re about a mile from where I want to take you.”
“Okay, but—” I gesture at the empty space around us. “I don’t have a bike. I drove here.”
“You can ride with me.” He straddles the bike so he’s standing in front of the seat, hands on the outer edge of the bars to hold the frame steady. “Hop on.”
“Hop—where?” He just looks at me, expectant. “You mean the handlebars?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you do that when you were a kid?” Luis asks. Like he’s not talking to somebody who spent most of their childhood in and out of hospitals. It’s sort of refreshing, especially now, but the fact remains that I don’t even know how to ride a bike the normal way.
“We’re not kids,” I hedge. “I won’t fit.”
“Sure you will. I do this all the time with my brothers, and they’re bigger than you are.”
“With Manny?” I ask, unable to keep a straight face at the mental image.
Luis laughs, too. “I meant the younger ones, but sure. I could haul Manny’s ass if I had to.” I keep hesitating, unable to picture how any of this is supposed to work, and his confident smile fades a little. “Or we could just walk somewhere.”
“No, this is great,” I say, because Luis with a disappointed face is just too weird. People who never get told no are so bad at hearing it. Anyway, how hard can it be, right? The saying It’s as easy as riding a bike must exist for a reason. “I’ll just…hop on.” I gaze uneasily at the handlebars, which don’t strike me as having any seatlike properties, and decide there’s no way I can bluff my way through this. “How do I do that, exactly?”
Luis slips into coaching mode without missing a beat. “Face away from me and step over the front wheel, with one leg on either side,” he instructs. It’s a little awkward, but I do it. “Put your hands behind you and grab hold of the handlebars. Brace yourself, like this.” His hands, warm and rough, close briefly over mine. “Now push down to lift yourself up and—yeah!” He laughs, startled, when I rise in one fluid motion to perch on the handlebars. Even I’m not sure how I did that. “You got it. Pro skills.”
It’s not the most comfortable thing I’ve ever done, and it feels more than a little precarious. Especially when Luis starts pedaling. “Oh my God, we’re going to die,” I gasp involuntarily, squeezing my eyes shut. But then Luis’s chin is on my shoulder as a cool breeze hits my face and honestly, there are much worse ways to go.
He’s a fast and assured cyclist, navigating a nonstop route to the bike path behind Bayview Center. The path is wide and almost empty, but every once in a while a speck appears ahead of us and then, before I know it, Luis has passed whoever it is. When he finally slows and says “Hang on tight, we’re about to stop,” I see a wrought-iron gate and a wooden sign beside it that reads BAYVIEW ARBORETUM.
My descent is a lot less graceful, but Luis doesn’t seem to notice as he chains the bike to a post. “This okay?” he asks, pulling a water bottle from the bike’s holder and drinking half of it in a few gulps. “I thought we could walk around for a while.”
“It’s perfect. I don’t come here often enough.”
We start down a smooth gravel path lined with cherry blossom trees that are just starting to bloom. “I love it here,” Luis says, shading his eyes against the afternoon sun. “It’s so peaceful. I come here whenever I need to think.”
I sneak a glance at him, all bronzed skin and broad shoulders and that quick, easy smile. I never imagined that Luis was the sort of person who would go somewhere because he wanted a quiet place to think. “What do you think about?”
“Oh, you know,” Luis says seriously. “Deep, profound things about humanity and the state of the universe. I have those kind of thoughts all the time.” I tilt my head at him, eyebrows raised in a go on gesture, and he meets my eyes with a grin. “I’m not having any right now, though. Give me a minute.”
I smile back. It’s impossible not to. “How about when you’re not pondering existential crises? What sort of ordinary things do you worry about?”
“Staying on top of everything,” he says instantly. “Like, I have a full load of classes this semester plus extra practicum because I’m trying to graduate early. I work twenty to thirty hours a week at Contigo, depending on how much my parents need me. And I still play baseball every once in a while. Just pickup games with guys from school, nothing like the schedule I was on when I played at Bayview with Cooper, but we’re trying to get a league together. Oh, and I help out with my brothers’ Little League team sometimes. It’s all good, but it’s a lot. Sometimes I forget where I’m supposed to be, you know?”