Trapped (Caged 2)

“Don’t worry about her,” I said. “She’s all…well, she’s mostly bark.”

“You’re not very convincing.” Tria lay her head on my shoulder and yawned. “She’ll probably still be mad you haven’t been working out.”

“I’ll get in the gym before Friday,” I said. “You’re going to have school shit to catch up on, right?”

“Exams next week,” she confirmed. “Hoffman keeps all the lectures on video, so at least I don’t have to borrow someone’s notes. It should have been mostly review, but you never know.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “That’s kind of cool.”

“You didn’t know they did that?”

I shrugged.

“Must be new,” I replied. “I didn’t spend a lot of time at Hoffman as a kid or anything. I was there occasionally, but it’s not like I paid any attention to shit like that when I was ten, ya know?”

“I guess not,” she said. “I mean, I agree. A ten-year-old probably wouldn’t be too interested in that.”

“Not so much,” I said.

Tria yawned again, which made me yawn. Without much talking, we settled into the pillow-topped mattress and closed our eyes to the night. The dawn came far too quickly, though, and I was still tired when we got up in the morning.

With both of us anxious to get home, we left the hotel early after a quick breakfast in the room and took to the motorcycle again. I wrapped my arms around Tria’s waist and held on as we cruised down the highway and finally through the streets of the city. As we rolled through the north side of town in the early evening, we passed the expensive cars and houses, and I tried not to think about the times I had traveled the same streets with no thought of what life was like on the south side of the city.

As we traveled, the cars went from Ferraris and Lamborghinis to BMWs and the occasional Lexus. Then the medium priced sedans and SUVs became more prevalent as the size of the houses shrank. Before long, the houses turned to red brick apartments and the cars to buses and bicycles. The people in suits and dresses changed to dingy flannel and unkempt hair.

Tria pulled into the back of Feet First, and I stopped in to let Dordy know the bike was back. He was pretty busy with a delivery guy, so he just had us leave it inside the chain link fence behind the bar before we walked the rest of the way home.

Right after we walked in the door, Tria took some things from the travel bag and put them in her suitcase. I stood behind her with my arms crossed until she turned around. As soon as she saw my face, she knew, and her cheeks flushed.

“I guess I should find a better place for all this, huh?”

“That would be good,” I agreed.

In the bathroom, I moved a bunch of shit over to one side, and Tria put all her bathroom stuff in one side of the medicine cabinet. We found places for her towels in the linen closet, her shoes in the closet, and then I took a break to smoke on the windowsill while she went through the rest of her suitcase.

Krazy Katie wasn’t on the fire escape for once, and I wondered where she might have gone. Every once in a while, she actually made her appointment with the social worker, but that would have been a couple days ago.

“So…um…where should I put all this?” Tria asked. I looked up from the windowsill and saw her with a pile of clothes in her arms.

“In here,” I said as I tossed the half smoked cigarette down to the ground and crawled back inside. The window shut with a bang, and I knelt down to the bottom two drawers of the four drawer dresser. “I cleaned them out for you when you first moved in.”

I swallowed and glanced at her nervously as I remembered removing what had been in the bottom drawer. There had been some slightly holey socks and a pair of sweats, but there had also been a small box shoved behind the clothes. I never looked at the contents, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away, either. I’d moved it to the drawer containing my jeans.

“I remember you saying that,” she responded quietly. Tentatively, she knelt down beside me and placed two pairs of jeans on one side and half a dozen shirts on the other.

“That’s better,” I said when she was done, and Tria grinned up at me.

“That’s pretty much it,” she said.

I couldn’t seem to stop smiling.

“You really like that, don’t you?” she commented.

I gave her a noncommittal grunt.

“I just want you to be comfortable here,” I told her. “This is your apartment, too.”

“It’s weird to share a place with someone else,” she said. “I’ve only ever lived with people in my family, you know?”