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“Don’t try any funny business,” Dunkins says, doing that foot roll thing again. “I’ve seen your license plate, now. Wouldn’t be a hard thing to get you stopped and sorted.”
Danny gives him an incredulous look. “You think I’d leave my girlfriend in your car so I can make a break for it?”
“I’ve seen stranger things, son,” he says. “Why, the stories I could tell you would make your hair curl…”
A weird feeling unfurls in me as I watch them. I can’t tell whether I’m freaked out or pleased that Danny called me that.My girlfriend.He said it so easily, without hesitation. Danny’s like that, though—when he decides on something, he’s resolute. Thorough.
Just like the way he thoroughly made me come on that bed of leaves…and against that tree…and in that elevator.
I’m both freaked outandpleased that he called me that, I decide. I….
Danny gets the crutches and lays them across the floor at my feet. Then he climbs in next to me, his nose twitching. With a deep sigh, he closes the door. Our thighs are pressed together, and I’m surprised by a sudden burst of happiness, which has no place in the back of a squad car that smells like death after my arrest for indecent exposure.
“I have an excellent sense of smell,” he mutters for my ears only. Laughter bubbles out of me, but I’m able to disguise it as a cough by the time Dunkins gets in.
“You don’t have a cold, do you?” Dunkins asks with concern. “I don’t want to get sick.”
“If I say yes, will you let us go with a warning?”
He laughs as if I made a joke, then says, “Buckle up, my friends, it’s the law.”
We do, and he starts the car, the radio blasting a Top 40 song written and sung by a teenage pop star.
Danny has a pained expression, as if the music and the smell are pushing him over the edge.
“So, tell us some of those stories, officer,” I say. “You’ll be saving me the money for a perm.”
He laughs and starts chattering away happily as he weaves his way down the mountain. He’s not as good of a driver as Danny, and it feels like I’m in the back of a Mario cart car being directed by a toddler jamming the keys on a controller. Danny doesn’t say a word, but he lowers his big hand to my leg, and the feeling of it there grounds me.
If I was hoping befriending Dunkins would get him to go easy on us, I was wrong, because twenty minutes later, he parks in a space behind the station. As soon as I get my crutches sorted, he leads us inside, chipper as could fucking be, and says, “Now, let’s get you booked, my friends. Don’t worry. Might be we’ll let you go with a warning, but we’ve been trying to crack down on this sort of thing. Not great metrics for tourism if we have people fornicating everywhere, left, right, and center. Did you know they’ve already taken to calling Asheville the city of sin?”
“Cesspool of sin,” I correct.
“Quite right, quite right,” Dunkins says. “You know, we’ve got some people here that take pride in that distinction, can you imagine?”
I have a bumper sticker on my car saying that very thing, but it doesn’t seem prudent to tell him so.
“I’d like to call my lawyer,” Danny says.
Dunkins rests a hand on his belly, frowning. “Always with the lawyers. What have you done wrong that you got yourself a stand-by lawyer, son?”
“He’s my best friend,” he says.
Dunkins whistles. “You see him enough that he’s your best friend?”
As Danny patiently explains that he and Shane have known each other since childhood, and he is not, in fact, a serial wrongdoer or woods fornicator, I look around. There’s a bunch of cubicles, and the whole place smells like stale coffee, which is a big improvement on Dunkins’s squad car. Uniformed cops are sitting at their desks, most of them looking bored. One of them is openly playing Minesweeper, which is impressive because I wasn’t aware computers were programmed with it anymore.
“Can I use the bathroom?” I ask.
Dunkins shifts his gaze to me, and his cheeks turn a brighter shade of red.
“Oh, of course. You’ll need to clean up. Very important. Yes, my—”
“Where is it?” I ask, to put Danny out of his misery. He looks like he’d like to burrow into the floor and disappear.
I half expect Dunkins to insist on escorting me, or to say he’ll only send me in if I consent to handcuffs, but he settles for giving me instructions. I use the bathroom, then stare at myself in the mirror for a moment. My eye makeup is smudged, and there’s a leaf in my hair. Laughter gushes out of me as I clean up—laughter with an edge of hysteria because, honestly, we’ve gotten ourselves into quite the situation.
It’s when I’m leaving that I see him.
