He took the twenty as if it bored him. The packet went into my pocket and sat there like a lie I would have to flush later.
“Get lost,” he said, and turned.
His back was a gift I had not earned. The hoodie rode up a little. The streetlamp threw his shadow long toward the weeds. I had come here for a feeling, not a conversation, and the park had taught me that waiting for the feeling to arrive on its own was how you ended up with elbows and a mouth saying please. Instinct had worked once in a driveway at noon. I told myself this was instinct wearing khaki.
I moved.
Arm under the chin. Weight. My chest against his back. Dirt came up to meet us and smelled like oil and old rain. Not cool. Elbows. His hands found my forearm and scraped. His hoodie filled my mouth with cotton. I tasted detergent and sweat and the sour of a man who had been standing under a lamp too long. He kicked. Gravel jumped. I did not want him dead here. I wanted the car, a room, the feeling the park had refused. Television had sold this as simple, a meal you already knew how to chew. It was not like chicken. It was heat and panic and a body that did not agree to be a scene.
I eased the pressure. He went slack too soon. Success arriving like a theft. His weight doubled in a way that felt unfair. I held him up because dropping him would make a sound, and sounds are how streets grow witnesses.
Headlights found us before I was ready to be found.
I dropped flat. He dropped with me, a sack of laundry that still had a pulse. A car slid past without braking, music from a window, a face that did not turn. Bass bumped once against my ribs through the dirt. The light found my trunk for a second, still shut, a sedan under a tree that suddenly looked like a confession. Then gone. Red tail lights shrank. He made a sound that was almost a word. I waited for reverse lights. I waited for the music to swell as the car thought better of leaving. The universe declined.
I counted breaths I did not own. Three. Four. A porch two houses down had a blue television flicker and no silhouette in it. The dog still did not bark. I hated the dog for its professionalism.