He shrugged. “I can’t do a cartwheel.”
“I can’t unpack that with you right now.” Lainey tapped her phone’s screen to start the ride, only to have more notifications pop up in its place. “Dude, you seriously picked the ‘shared ride’ option? It’s sending me to pick up someone else now.” Noperson of sound mind enjoyed being the second hostage in a shared ride, and although her forty-five-year-old coupetechnicallyhad a back seat, it was best reserved for children and especially forgiving friends.
He lowered his hood, exposing his warm brown skin and the wide, goofy smile she was convinced was permanently fixed to his face. “I like meeting new people,” he replied. Then he plugged his phone into the charger cable running from the cigarette lighter, because apparently thrusting his rideshare driver into an involuntary social experiment in human suffering for upward of twelve miles required no explanation.
Without responding, Lainey glanced at her mirrors, reversed out of the spot, and drove off in the direction of the next ride. Forty-four minutes were left on the meter. What a waste of perfectly good nail glue.
•••
The second rideron the route requested a pickup from the alley door of Norman’s Coffee and Meats Shop. Most businesses in Timber Creek could be categorized as either “for us” or “for them,” with “them” being tourists seeking a woodsy lakeside respite. Businesses directed toward year-round residents tended to stay afloat by catering to two distinct yet curiously overlapping customer bases within the local economy.
Timber Creek Golf Course and Country Club. Them.
Curly’s Motorcycles and Exotic Pets. Us.
Caribou Coffee. Them, and sometimes us.
But Norman’s Coffee and Meats Shop was solidly an “us” spot, so Lainey was surprised to see a complete stranger in an expensive-looking olive-colored rain jacket jogging up to her car.
“Sorry, the passenger door is broken,” she yelled to the manthrough the downpour. “You have to climb into the back through the driver’s side.”
He nodded, but once at the door, he seemed to debate whether to follow her instructions. “Does it fold down?”
She shook her head. “ ’Fraid not.”
“I don’t want to get your seat wet.”
“Just me, then?” she asked, as she stood in the rain beside her car. Her voice was dry, but her hair was soaked and her teeth were chattering. He looked down at her, his eyes taking stock of her shivering frame. Or at least she assumed they were. She couldn’t quite make out his eyes under his foggy, rain-splattered glasses. With his hood covering his face, he was all lips, stubbly jaw, and not much else. They were handsome, though, those two elements. He reminded her of a portrait by René Magritte that obscured the face of his subject as a statement on hidden identities. Or maybe it was a statement on memory. She couldn’t recall.
“Sorry. Let me just…” He grabbed the headrest and stretched his leg onto the console, pulling himself up and over in one smooth movement.
“Perfect. You made that look easy!” Lainey had on the voice she used for visitors. Friendly and jovial, with a little extra something on hera’s ando’s to give the out-of-town folks something to marvel over.You should’ve heard the way this girl said “bag”!
The man did his level best to stuff his long legs into the back seat. Once he was settled into the only position that didn’t make him look like a giant bursting from a doll house, he lowered his hood to reveal brown hair with a gentle wave. Lainey wasn’t sure whether he wore it that way intentionally or if it had curled up in the rain in a fit of rebellion.
He wiped the water off his thin, wire-framed glasses with his jacket.
“Hey! Just getting into town?” Isaac greeted the man as though he were the cohost to her rideshare cocktail party. “Tough time of year to visit, huh?”
Olive Rain Jacket Guy’s eyes darted between her and Isaac as his torso sunk deeper into the back seat. Lainey’s attention drifted to her phone to verify whether her passenger had requested a silent ride.
“Thisisan Uber, right?” Unease pierced in his otherwise warm, baritone voice.
“Yes,” Lainey answered, just as Isaac said, “She’s not allowed on Uber anymore.”
If a side-eye could melt a person, Isaac would be a pool of humanoid sludge on her WeatherTech mats.
“It was more mutual than he’s making it sound.” Uber had a supremely unjust, zero-tolerance policy against drivers of forty-five-year-old vehicles with nonfunctional passenger doors who’d repeatedly lied to Uber Support about both the model of the car and her intention to get said door fixed. Gaslighting an app into believing her well-loved 1981 two-door Mercedes was a 2023 S-Class worthy of Uber Black was a grift she’d known she could only run for so long.
In protest of Uber’s policies, she currently drove for Ridr, a rideshare app that was more lax with car requirements for reasons she suspected were notunrelated to the increasing number of phishing scam texts her phone received per day.
“This is basically the same thing.” She stopped at the intersection, seizing the opportunity to squeeze some water from the ends of her hair. “I promise I’m not kidnapping you.”
“But that’s exactly what a kidnapper would say.”
He smiled at her in the rearview mirror. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling back.
He cleared his throat. “I was a little worried when I saw a QR code above the urinals next to an ad for male-enhancement supplements.”
