“You’re going to pull your stitches.” I worried, trying to shift my weight to the side that wasn’t injured.
“My shoulder’s fine.” He dismissed my concern and stepped out onto the sidewalk and back into the city.
“I can walk.”
“No,” he declared while raising his arm to hail a cab.
I scoffed because getting a cab in this city was not as easy as that. The scoff turned into a gasp when a yellow and black car swerved from the middle lane and drifted to the curb. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“There a problem back there, Pip?” he asked over his shoulder.
It made me want to poke him in the eye. I said nothing. If I opened my mouth, I might bite him.
He swung me into the back of the cab like it was easy and then slid in beside me, not even out of breath.
The driver barely glanced in the back. “Where to?”
Hiro rattled off my address like he had it memorized, and I gaped.
The cab swerved out into traffic, and Hiro slid me a smuglook. “Weren’t going home?”
“You know my address?”
“It’s the same as Haz’s.”
Right. Of course. The cabbie braked hard, and I went flying forward, only to be stopped by an iron band that pushed me back into my seat. Startled, I looked up only for a wall of muscle to be blocking my view.
Hiro glanced around as if making sure I was unharmed, then leaned toward the front. “My guy, there are two kinds of drivers in this city. Alive and dead. You want to keep being the first, I suggest you drive like you know how.”
The driver’s eyes flew up to the rearview, and whatever biting reply he was about to deliver died the second he caught sight of Hiro. “S-sure,” he stuttered before turning back to the road.
Hiro leaned back into the seat, crowding me so close his shoulder pinned mine. I started to complain, but he cut me a look—likely the same look he’d just given the driver—and I decided this seating arrangement was just fine.
Seconds later, Hiro was patting his pockets. “You got any snacks, Pip?”
“Snacks?” I wondered.
“I’m feeling snacky.”
Shoving my hand into my coat pocket, I pulled out a couple spare cups of hazelnut creamer and held them out in offering.
The interior of the cab dropped about ten degrees. “What the hell did I tell you about creamer?” he growled, the muscles in his jaw protruding.
Clearly, he wasn’t actually hungry because beggars were not choosers. And listen, there was just enough fat and sugar in these tiny cups to take the edge off any kind of hunger.
His loss.Curling my fingers around them, I started to put them back when he caught my arm, pried my fingers open, scooped them from my palm, and chucked them out of the moving car.
“Hey!” I bellowed, looking out the back window as if I could see where the tiny cups of my sip insurance landed.
“Fucking coping mechanism in liquid form,” he spat. Turning smoldering eyes on me, he demanded, “Why do you still have those?”
“For emergencies.”
“Flashlights are for emergencies, not creamer cups.”
My heart was pounding heavily, anger making my blood run hot. How dare he throw something that didn’t belong to him out on the street? Those were mine, whether he liked them or not, and he’d just tossed them away as though they didn’t matter. But theydidmatter. To me.
How was I supposed to explain to him what he probably would never understand? Being homeless, surviving on the streets, leaves a mark that never fades. It’s a change that stays with you even after you make it out. Once a man’s been homeless, there is always that possibility. That fear that it could happen again. I constantly worried I was one disaster from losing it all. I couldn’t trust myself enough to believe I’d never be in that place again. So I existed in the shadow ofwhat if, the lurking fear that everything I had wasn’t really mine and could be ripped away at a moment’s notice.
