Darkness
Darkness. I open my eyes to see nothing. Where the hell am I? Fuck, my head hurts.
The last thing I remember was the clerk about to show me the bracelet. But she suddenly got this awful pained expression. Before I could even start to ask her what was going on, I felt a sudden impact on my head. Yeah, right back there where it hurts now.
Let me see if I can feel anything here. Oh my god, someone else is lying next to me. Are you dead? Oh, you’re a she, I can feel that. And you’re moving.
“What the fuck?” asks the not dead body next to me, speaking groggily.
“I’m trying to figure that out myself.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Adam Jacobs, not that I think that’s what you meant. Are you the clerk in the jewelry store?”
“Yeah, Rebecca DuBois. Were you just buying a bracelet from me?”
“That’s me. I guess your store just got robbed.”
“Oh shit. I bet they fire me for this. Jesus, everything in me hurts right now.”
“One of the last things I was remembering was your face all contorted.”
“The last thing I remember was something stinging me. It hurt like hell, but I couldn’t move. Ouch, I think I may have a burn on my neck. Can you look at it?”
“Not in the dark, I can’t.”
“I guess that’s true. Did I get tased?”
“That would make sense. They must have tased you and hit me over the head. Maybe hit you over the head, too. I know exactly where they got me. The spot right here that hurts like a son of a bitch. And I have a splitting headache.”
“What did you say your name was?”
“Adam. And you said you were Rebecca, right?”
“Yeah. Where are we?”
“I have no idea. I came to just before you did. I haven’t tried to get up and explore yet.”
I start to stand up and my head reels. I sit back down with a thud.
“On second thought, I think I’ll stay seated for a while. Does your store have a supply closet or something?”
“Not really. We have the break room and - ”
“What?”
“We have a vault.”
I hear her rattling some racks.
“Oh, shit. We’re locked in the vault. Are we going to die?”
“To be honest, I don’t know. I hope not. I assume there’s not a way out from inside here?”
“Nope. There’s supposed to be, but the release broke and the manager was too cheap to fix it. We’re going to die.”
She starts to cry. I put an arm around where I think her shoulders are. “Let’s see if we can figure out a way out of here,” I say, hopefully reassuringly.
I reach for my phone, but it’s not in my pocket. Damnit. My phone had just buzzed. I think it’s sitting on the jewelry case.
“Do you have your phone?” I ask.
“No, it’s in the break room. We’re not allowed to carry it with us on the floor. Boss’s rule number one. Instant dismissal.”
“Well, that’s unfortunate. How big is the vault we’re in?”
“About the size of a large supply closet. maybe six feet wide and five feet deep. What’s your name?”
“Adam. That should be big enough to give us a good while,” I say, trying to sound more convinced than I am.
“A good while until what? And I asked you your name already, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, tasing can play havoc with your short term memory for about an hour. I was wondering about the oxygen.”
“Are we going to suffocate?”
“Hopefully we’ll be found before that. I think we have a couple of days of air in here.”
“How do you know all this stuff? The tasing and the air and everything.”
“I’m a lawyer. I have defended a few clients who have been tased, so I’m aware of the side effects. The air, I tried to do some rough math. I’m expecting my wife to call me in as a missing person and hopefully they can locate my phone, which I think is still on the counter out there. So someone will come looking for us soon. Well before we run out of air. But we probably want to try to stay calm and breathe slowly until then.”
“How can we stay calm when we’re going to die?”
She’s starting to cry again.
“Well, talking to each other is calming and keeps our breathing regular. And holding on to each other. I’m not trying to get friendly, that would be a bad idea, air wise, but knowing someone else is here in the dark is calming.”
She leans against me, still sniffling a bit.
“So Rebecca, what do you do when you’re not working at the jewelry store?”
My first instinct was to say when you’re not being robbed at the jewelry store as a joke, but that would have been a bad idea. I want her to think about normal, everyday life right now.
“I share an apartment about two miles from here with Sandy. We’ve known each other for years, but we only moved in together last year. Neither of us could afford an apartment on our own. They’ve gotten so expensive. This store pays like shit. I was really hoping you were going to buy the bracelet. That would have been a four hundred dollar commission for me.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“More or less. Dave and I are supposed to be exclusive, but I think he’s cheating on me. I suspect he’s just stringing me along so I will keep letting him fuck me, until he can find someone with bigger boobs. And maybe who makes more money. I really should dump him. If we get out of here, I think I will.”
“We’ll get out of here. And making plans for what to do when we do is probably a good idea for now.”
“How about you? Was the bracelet for your wife? You said you had a wife, right?”
“Yeah, it’s her birthday in two weeks. She always wanted a bracelet like that and I figured it was time.”
“You sound less than enthused. I would have thought you would be buying your wife expensive jewelry because you loved her.”
“I think I do love her, but it’s not going real well recently. I think maybe I was buying it to convince myself I still loved her.”
“Well, if we die, at least we aren’t leaving great love lives behind,” she says, half laughing.
That’s a bit of gallows humor, I think. At least she can laugh about this. It’s better than crying.
“So what do you do when Dave’s not around?” I ask, to keep her talking. And calm.
“I do the crossword puzzle every day. I have an app on my iPad. I’m up over seven hundred straight days. I wonder if this will break my streak. Oh, and I read. I read a lot.”
“The New York Times app? I use that too. I just went over five hundred days last week. I was happy when I broke that. What’s your favorite day of the week?”
“If it is a good theme, I like Thursdays. I like the clever themes. But I hate the damned quotes.”
“I hate the quotes, too,” I agree,
“I know, does anyone want to solve one with a quote? Some of the Sunday themes are fun. Unless it’s a really dumb theme, or one I can’t figure out, I like Sundays. If the themes are all bad, I guess Friday. Saturdays make me work too hard.”
“I like the Saturdays and Sundays. They give me a longer escape.”
“You’re probably really smart, being a lawyer and all,” Rebecca asserts.
“Well, I did go to lots of years of school. You said you like to read. Mostly all I get to read right now are legal rulings and briefs and contracts. What kinds of things do you read?”
“Lots of different kinds of things, depending on my mood. When I’m down about Dave being a shit, I’ll read a romance and imagine I’m riding off into the sunset with my true love.”
“They do kind of all end like that, don’t they?” I ask.
“Well, if an author ever dared to not write the happy ending, I think a million women would descend upon them and string them up. That’s the whole point of reading one. To cry happy tears at the end.”
“Some men read them, too. I’ve read a couple over the years. What else do you read?”
“I had a period of reading a lot of detective stories, but I’ve kind of cooled on them. And I have read lots of fantasy, but not so much recently of that either.”
“So what are you reading, then?” I ask.
“Mostly romances and um..”
I can feel her squirming a bit.
“I’ve been enjoying a lot of erotica, recently,” she says, finishing her sentence in a dimmed voice.
I chuckle.
“It’s not nice to laugh at me about it. That was hard for me to admit!” she says, somewhat sulkily.
“I’m not laughing at you. My hobby is writing erotica. What kinds of erotica do you read? And where?”
“Oh, just hot guy rescuing the shy girl kinds of things. I read in my bedroom, but that seems like a rather personal question.”
“I meant where do you get your erotica, not where are you when you read it,” I clarify. “But now that you brought it up, I do enjoy the thought.”
“Oh, I usually get it from the Apple bookstore. Mostly collections of short stories. Do you publish anything there?”
“I haven’t progressed to actually selling anything yet. I do post stories on a few web sites.”
“Oh, I’ve read stuff on some, too. Free is always nice. Some of it’s really good, but it’s hard to know what you’re getting and the quality is inconsistent. Who do you write as?” she asks me.
“AllRise. I started writing it when I was in law school, hoping to become a judge.”
“I think I read one of yours last week! About two MIT nerds who fall in love on some remote island. It was really well written, but I wanted some actual sex. And they fell in love way too quickly to be believable.”
“Yeah, I get that,” I say agreeing with her. “I’m actually trying to write a sequel about them struggling after the world’s fastest romance. With some actual sex. I hopefully would have been writing more of it this evening if we weren’t stuck in here. Although with how poorly that one’s been going, being stuck in here is almost a nice break.”
I’m starting to get an erection, talking about erotica and thinking about her lying on her bed reading it. And where her hand is sure to go while she reads.
