“BEEP BEEP,” goes the van, and she jumps and spins in surprise. Before she looks over, she’s already guessed that it’s Kareem, but she glances up through the windshield anyway. She likes looking at his face, even when he’s laughing at her, and she laughs along as she carries on as gracefully as she can.
“Did I scare you?” he calls to her.
She glances back as she reaches to opposite curb, “No way,” she says. “It takes a lot more than that to scare me.”
“I’ll have to keep trying,” he replies with a laugh.
She can’t think of a sufficiently welcoming response before the light changes and he drives off, so the Letter Carrier just stands there grinning like a dummy until she remembers abruptly that she is at work and still has work to do. She takes the mail she needs from the relay box and goes on with her next carry, delivering a few letters to a few businesses on her way toward Main Street.
Kareem is a CUS driver, a contract employee that drops relay bags and delivers parcels. It’s obviously an acronym, The Corporation loves its acronyms, but she doesn’t know what it stands for. As far as she’s concerned, Kareem is a CUSS driver because every time he walks by, she’s like, ‘Daaaaaaamn’. If she wasn’t way too old to be having crushes, that’s how she would have to describe it; he’s a charming guy, handsome, smooth Arabic-accented voice, and that butt… He’s the only person that she doesn’t mind when he walks too slow in front of her.
When some random passerby going up the hill, he greets her merrily and she realizes that she’s still smiling. Thinking about Kareem has that effect on her. She says ‘hi’ back with a friendly nod; he doesn’t know what she’s thinking about, after all. She keeps smiling and her strides get longer, hiking up the biggest hill on her walk. She’s smiling more as she imagines Kareem complimenting her legs; he does that sometimes. He touches her sometimes, on the shoulder when she’s squeezing past his bag cart, friendly Friday fist-bumps, he even deigned to caress her ankle once, when she was standing on the dock. Well, he brushed against it while reaching for a parcel, but it isn’t hard to extrapolate that into a caress, and in her imagination, he doesn’t stop there. She has wondered a million times what she might do if their little flirtations went further, and while she does, she walks with a big smile.
“BEEEEEEEEP!”
When she spins in surprise this time, the heel of her right shoe catches the edge of the curb where it meets the slightly lower sidewalk. Her hand goes up, involuntarily releasing the loose flyers that catch a gust of wind and almost all are blown right off the side, into the backyard of the housing project below; delivered enough, she decides. The rest of her goes down, twisting into the cement guardrail that pushes her hat off, sticking on her hair, and she falls to land on her hands and knees.
The white cube van screeches to a halt ahead of her, the four-ways on and Kareem running back to her side, apologizing. She’s already back on her feet, hat back on her head, waving away his concern, but then he reaches her, puts an arm around her. She had no idea swooning was a real, literal thing until just that second, and he scoops her into his arms before she has a chance to fall again.
“Are you okay?” he asks her softly.
“You… you picked me up,” she says.
“I thought you were going to faint,” he says as he carries her toward the van. “I shouldn’t have done that, I’m sorry.”
“Picked me up? I guess I’ll allow it.”
“No, no, the horn.” He chances a grin at her and she smiles back woozily. That smile. “I guess I scared you, though.”
“No, no,” she shakes her head. “In fact, I just fell down so that you would have to come back here and pick me up, so really, you played right into my hands.” This Letter Carrier sometimes says stupid things when she’s nervous. “I mean, obviously it looks like I’m literally in your hands, but in a figurative sense, I have you right where I want you.”
He shifts her in his arms so he can open the van’s rear door and push a large box back to make a space to set her down. He crouches before her, looking into her face with concern, “Are you okay? Did you hit your head?”
“Nah, man, I’m just awkward…”
He laughs, and she laughs along; it seems better than crying. He moves his hand up slowly, slower when she side-eyes it, and touches her forehead. “You have a scrape here. And down here.” His hand falls to her knee, his thumb on the inside, fingers cupping it gently as though to push her legs apart.
Her face is burning, her body shaking with tension. “How would I get a scrape down there?” she asks before chancing a glance down and seeing the red flare between his brown fingers and thumb. The stupidity continues. “Oh, my knee. I mean, obviously my knee got scraped when I fell. That’s exactly what both of us were talking about the whole time.”
Kareem glances up at her, then back to her injury, his hand moving down beneath her knee, and gently straightens her leg. “Does that hurt?”
She shakes her head. “That feels amazing.” She becomes flustered again as his golden-brown eyes fix on hers. “I mean, scrape… Ow.”
He chuckles, his grip shifting to the top and squeezing slightly as he stands. “Are you going to call Jeff?”
She shakes her head at the mention of the supervisor, hopping off the gate. “I’m fine, see? Totally normal.”
“Well,” he says, smirking, “Normal for you.”
She shrugs, “That’s as normal as I get. Don’t worry about the honking; I won’t tell Jeff about it.”
He favors her with another of those smiles, but her strong legs defy his charms this time. She hitches up her satchel and keeps on up the hill. Fortunately, her walk is mostly downhill from there; she meant it when she said it didn’t hurt, but the movement and sweat soon has her knees stinging. She sits in a mailroom, her next relay, and pulls her first aid kit out of her satchel. She hums to herself as she selects an alcohol swab and a bandage large enough to cover the deeper, slightly oozing scrape on her left knee. Hissing at the swab and then focusing on placing the bandage, she glances up as she registers the movement of light and shadow across her.
An imposing silhouette looms in the mailroom’s doorway and she does one of those jerking-in-shock sort of spasm things. Oh, that’s never happened to you? Congratulations on being less clumsy than our poor Letter Carrier. She slides off the bench, taking the full relay bag with her to the floor when she inadvisably uses it to steady herself. She recognizes the disbelieving laugh immediately.
“Okay,” she says, shrieking embarrassed laughter, too. “Okay, okay. You scared me that time. A little.”
Kareem’s still laughing as he takes her hand and her arm, lifting her back to the bench, then sitting next to her. He checks the status of her knee. “I didn’t mean to scare you that time.”
“Well, I guess you must be naturally scary, then! What are you even doing here? You’re not even my bag driver.”
“I just felt bad about before, I don’t want you to worry about getting me into trouble or anything. If you’re hurt…”
“It’s super not a big deal,” she assures him. “I fall down all the time. I probably would have fallen there even if you didn’t honk at me, so don’t worry about it.”
His smile is softer, softer than she’s seen it, the humorous edge gone. His hand is just as soft as it comes to rest on her thigh. “Is there any way I can make it up to you?” he asks.
It would no doubt surprise many of her friends and co-workers that this Letter Carrier has a go to head-only answer for when someone asks things like ‘Do you need anything?’ ‘Can I get you anything?’ or ‘Is there any way I can make this up to you?’ Nervous as she is beneath his gaze, an exciting sort of nervous that ramps the stupidity up to eleven, she says, “Diiiiiiiick?”
“Dick?” he repeats.
“Mm,” she says. She likes the way he says it.
“You are suggesting that to make amends for scaring you, you would like… dick,” he says. She really likes how he says dick. “My dick?”
She clears her throat nervously. “That was the thought, but now that you mention it, it’s kind of presumptuous on my part, like blackmail almost. I certainly don’t want to make it seem like you need to buy my silence with, you know…” He looks baffled, so she says it again, “Dick.”
“Your face is very red right now.”
“I bet,” she says, her voice kind of squeaky.
He puts his hand on her shoulder blade and chills skate up her back. “Are you suggesting that having sex with you would be an appropriate thing to do to make up for the honking?”
“No, I just said I wasn’t suggesting that,” she says, feeling her face get redder still. “Because it would be…”
He kisses her and her nerves keep her from responding until he’s drawing back uncertainly. She stands and walks to the open door, to push it shut. It can’t be locked from inside, but she leans against it as she turns back. This leaves only a tiny crack of light from where the bolt holds it out of the frame, and that spilling in from the apartment building’s lobby from the little windows in the mailboxes.
He stands, too, approaching her slowly. “It would be like… robbing a bank, and when I get caught the police hand me all the money I left behind.”
She bites her lip, glad it’s dark because her face is on fire. On second thought, she begins to worry it could be glowing. “So you want to…?”
He gives her that smile, and she’s glad that she has the heavy metal door to prop her up as he leans toward her. He touches her face as his mouth comes against hers again, gently, and this time she has the wherewithal to part her lips, tilting her head up to meet him more fully. Another step forward, and his body is pressed to hers. His hand slips back, beneath her thick braid, cupping her neck. His other is at her waist, his thumb resting inside the belt of her satchel. She opens the large buckle, then the other smaller buckles, so she can push the thick padded straps off her shoulders and let the satchel fall to the floor.