The Woman in the Trunk

Those eyes of hers, they were always looking for an exit, a way out.

Whether that was a dumbbell to the dome and a fire escape to run down, or a man to schmooze her way to freedom, she was not just sitting pretty like she wanted me to believe.

Not even after three days of finding no escape.

There was one, of course. You didn't get a pass for building codes just because your family took back control of most of the construction unions a decade before. There had to be several exits from the building, and each apartment in it.

My place was no exception.

But just because they existed didn't mean they were common knowledge, or that you could find them without knowing where to look.

Call it a safety measure.

Call me paranoid, even.

But the fire escape was behind a false storage case in my master closet. You reached in, grabbed a handle in the back, and the whole thing popped open. Then you pulled up the blackout shade, and there the window was. And right outside was the fire escape that went both up and down.

It didn't matter how much sneaking around she did—and I slept lightly enough to know she did her fair amount—she was never going to find it. She would give up and decide I had greased the right palms in the city to avoid having another entrance to my apartment. And because she'd never seen the outside of the building, she had no reason to doubt that.

Aside from the sneaking around, she hadn't been as much of an inconvenience as I had worried. She kicked around in the living room in the mornings, eating whatever I ordered, or one of the guards brought up. She watched TV. Or, rather, she put the TV on, then stared blankly out the window. When I had to run out, the guards said she went back into her room, locking the door. They had no idea what she did in there.

And she only seemed to come back out when she heard me return.

I didn't know if she distrusted my men, or trusted me. And I shouldn't have been pleased at the prospect of the latter.

When I got back, she came out dressed in one of the new outfits I'd had the men pick up for her, asked what we were ordering for dinner, then immediately told me what a shitty choice I'd made before suggesting something else.

When the food came, we tended to fall into some conversation while we ate.

Usually with her going off on a diatribe about the family, the mafia in general, and people stepping on the little guy; always managing to circle back to how kidnapping and false imprisonment were wrong.

She did all of this with a lifted chin and unnerving eye contact. Apparently, like her father, she had a temper on her, one that flared up unexpectedly and with vengeance. But she also seemed capable of dousing the flames without batting an eye, turning the conversation back to something more generic. About life. About the city. About the bakery she'd been working in since she was even younger.

It was in those moments that the reality seemed to slip away. She wasn't just some victim. I wasn't just her attacker.

And it was in those moments, too, that it got easier to forget that she was a kid. There were just ways she said things, observations about life, that she made that made her seem older, more mature.

And then, of course, I had to berate myself for thinking that shit because it was fucked. I refused to be that dickhead pedo who claimed "she was mature for her age." Or some other bullshit like that.

"Isn't Pearl Jam a little before your time?" I asked on the fourth night over Chinese that we were eating right out of the containers.

"And Frank Sinatra isn't before yours?" she shot back, referencing my knee-jerk response to the typical favorite singer question.

"Fair enough," I agreed. "Little emo of you too, no?"

"Please. Like Sinatra isn't the biggest cliché ever. Especially being who you are."

"And what am I, kid?" I shot back, daring her to say it. But she was too quick for her own good, refusing to be baited. When she wanted to dress me down with an observation about my lifestyle, she did so on her own, not because I goaded her to do it.

"Italian," she decided, giving me a saucy brow raise.

"Nice recovery."

"I do my best," she agreed, waving her chopsticks in the air. "So am I going to have to suffer through another of your awful movie choices, or can I pick this time?" she asked.

I hadn't been one for TV for a long time. In fact, I'd spent more time in my own apartment since she'd shown up than I had in months.