Page 4 of Rent an Enforcer

“What?” I have to ask.

“Eight is a good number,” she explains patiently. “I can handle eight.”

“Eight what?”

“Eight miles per hour. The wind.” The way she says it; it’s clear she expects me to understand.

Around three blocks in, she asks, “So what do you do? I mean, no offense, but you don’t strike me as an accountant.”

“I am not an accountant,” I confirm.

“And the way you threatened to remove that guy’s eyes tells me you might have done it before.” The way she says it; she’s not afraid. She’s afraid of a gust of wind and a pigeon, but she isn’t afraid of me.

“I’m in personal security,” I tell her. It’s not a lie. More like a clean version of the truth, glossing over the ugly parts. I keep a man and the things that belong to him from being taken. That’s the whole job when you strip the ugliness away. She doesn’t need the rest because the rest would end this walk, and I’ve decided somewhere between the dumpster and here that I don’t want this walk to end.

“That makes sense,” she says, nodding. “You have a very bodyguard energy about you. That’s a compliment, I think. It’s meant as one.”

“I’ll take it.”

Her building is a four-story walkup with a lock on the front door I could open with a hairpin. I don’t love the thought of her living somewhere so easily broken into. I don’t say a word, though, following her up two flights of stairs. She gets her keys out and holds them in her fist, and I know what’s coming next. This is the part where she thanks me again, and I tell her it’s nothing, then I go outside and never see her again.

My heart sinks. It actually sinks. I am not a man whose heart sinks. If I was, it wouldn’t sink over the prospect of escaping a stairwell that reeks of rodent piss. I should be glad for the opportunity to get out of here.

“Do you... want to come in?” she asks instead of saying goodbye.

Everything inside me goes still. People don’t invite me in. They invite me out—of buildings, of their business, of their lives. I’ve stood in a lot of doorways. I’ve never once been asked to cross one like this, by a girl who looks at me like I’m a person and not a problem she’s trying to survive.

“Are you sure?” I ask. “You don’t know me.”

“You could’ve let that guy have me, and you didn’t.” She shrugs one shoulder and pushes the door open. “That’s more of a reference than most people come with. Also, I have to feed my rabbit. I feel weird just leaving you in the hall. Come in. Just don’t touch the wet paintings.”

Small. That’s the first word that comes to mind. Her apartment is small, but it’s full of color—canvases stacked against every wall, most of them covered in oceans and waves in dozens of shades of blue and green. There’s one on an easel by the window that isn’t finished.

There’s also a rabbit. It’s gray with enormous ears and is sitting in a corner on a cushion like it pays the rent. It looks up at me with an expression of profound, personal disappointment. I’ve been looked at by made men who wanted me dead, but somehow, the rabbit’s contempt is worse.

“This is Socks,” she says, crouching by it and pouring a scoop of pellets into a small bowl. “He’s my emotional support animal.”

“Your what?”

“Emotional support animal. He’s... okay, so.” She sets the food down, and the rabbit deigns to eat it. “I have some anxiety. Okay, a lot of anxiety. It’s a whole ecosystem. Socks helps with that. When it gets bad, and I hold him, it kind of resets my whole system. He’s saved my life a bunch of times.”

“He’s... a rabbit, though.” As if she needs to be reminded.

“He’s my lifeline,” she informs me, completely serious.

I look at the rabbit. The rabbit looks at me. Neither of us gives ground.

“Anxiety about what?” I ask. I want to know what a girl like this is anxious about.

She sits cross-legged by the cushion and ticks items off on her fingers like she’s done it a hundred times. She probably has. “Wind. I don’t leave the apartment if the wind is over fifteen miles an hour. Birds, all of them, but especially the ones that get too close. Straws.”

“Straws? Drinking straws?”

She nods. “You suck just a little too hard and they collapse and then they jab you. Turtles. Don’t even get me started about turtles. Scissors, which is why I have so much of this.” She points to the enormous knot of hair on top of her head. “Mullets. Escalators sometimes, depending on the day. Balloons, because of the—” She mimes a pop, then actually winces at it.

I’m waiting for the part where she laughs. Where she tells me she’s messing with me. This is a bit; it has to be. No one is afraid of straws, for fuck’s sake. This is a woman who stood next to me in an alley after I just promised to blind someone, and she looked relaxed and invited me into her apartment minutes later.

Only she’s not laughing. She means every word of it. She’s giving me the honest, embarrassing inventory of a brain that fires an alarm at the existence of a straw. Meanwhile, here I am, the only genuinely dangerous thing in her apartment. She’s told the most terrifying man she’s ever met that she’s afraid of balloons.