Hell, if pie will make her cry, I wonder what something truly romantic would do to her. This is a girl that deserves flowers and candy. And all the good shit I can’t afford. But she likes to talk to me. I can tell that much, so she’s not with me simply because I wouldn’t give her bag back.

She asks me a question but her mouth is full of pie, so I wait a minute for her to swallow. She gulps, smiles shyly at me and says, “Were you born deaf?” She points to my ear.

I point to my ear and then my cheek, showing her the sign for deaf. I shake my head.

“How old were you when it happened?” Her brows scrunch together, and she’s so damn cute I want to kiss her.

I make a three and flick it at her.

“Three?” she asks.

I shake my head and do it again. She still doesn’t get it. So, I put one finger in front of the three and she says, “Thirteen?”

I nod.

“What happened when you were thirteen?”

“High fever one night,” I say, wiping my brow like I’m sweating, hoping she’ll understand.

She opens her mouth to ask me another question, but I hold up a finger. I motion back and forth between the two of us, telling her it’s my turn.

I can’t figure out how to mime this one so that she’ll understand, so I say very carefully, “Where are you from?”

She shakes her head and says, “No.”

I put my hands together as though in prayer.

She laughs and says, “No,” again. I don’t doubt she’s serious. She’s not telling me. I have a feeling I could drop to my knees and beg her and she still wouldn’t tell me.

“So, Kit from nowhere,” I say. “Thanks for having dinner with me.”

“How do I say thank you?” she asks. “Show me.”

She looks at me, her eyes bright with excitement. I show her the sign and she repeats it. “Thank you,” she says. And my heart expands. Then she looks at her bag beside me and says, “I should go.”

I nod and stand up, and then I put my backpack on, and throw her bag over my shoulder.

“I’ll take that,” she says as she picks up her guitar case.

But I throw some bills on the table and wave at Annie, the waitress. She throws me a kiss. Kit is following me, but Annie doesn’t throw her a kiss. I laugh at the thought of it. Annie loves me. And she’s known my family since before our mom died and our dad left.

I stop when we get out to the street and light a cigarette. Kit scrunches up her nose, but I do it anyway. I take one drag from it, show it to her, pinch the fire off the end, letting the embers fall to the ground, and throw it in a nearby trash can. What a waste. But I can tell she doesn’t like it. My brothers don’t like it either. At least now they’re in good company.

She holds her hand out for her bag, and I position her under a street light so I can see her mouth.

“Where do you live?” I ask. “I’ll walk you home.”

She looks confused for a minute. She glances up and down the street. Cars are rushing by and she’s looking at me like she’s suddenly lost.

“I live around the block,” she says. “Give me my bag.” This time, she stomps that black boot of hers and gives me a rotten look. She shakes her hand at me like that’ll matter.

I lean close to her, because I’m kind of scared someone I know will see me talking to her. My brothers would be hurt if they thought I could talk and just chose not to. I let them think it’s a skill I unlearned, instead. “You can’t walk home alone. It’s not safe.”

She glares at me. “I’m not taking you home with me, you perv,” she says, and she tries to take the bag from me. But I don’t let her. She’s tiny. And I’m not. I win. She balls up her fist, and I know I’m in trouble.

I lean close to her. “I don’t want to sleep with you,” I say. “I just want to make sure you get home safe.” I hold up my hands like I’m surrendering. I draw a cross in the center of my chest like she did before and say, “Promise.”

It’s pretty late. It was already dark when we left the subway tunnel. Now it’s really late. Later than she should be on the streets by herself. Particularly in this neighborhood. This is my neighborhood. I’m perfectly safe here. But she’s not from here. This I can tell without ever hearing her voice. She’s not my kind of people.

I put my fingers down, and pretend they’re someone walking. “Let’s go,” I say.

She stands there, and crosses her arms in front of her. “No.”

There’s one thing I’m already sure of and it’s that this chick means no when she says no.

Suddenly, the guy from the diner, the one she called Bone, walks up beside us. “Need some help, Kit?” he asks.

His lips are dark in the night, and I can barely see them. But I can see hers. She smiles what I know to be a phony smile at him, because her real smile will drop a man to his f**king knees, and she says, “Fine.”

“This your guy for the night?” he asks.

She looks at me and steps forward, running the tips of her fingers down my chest. I go hard immediately, and I catch her hand in mine. She startles for a second, but then I cover her hand with mine, pressing it against my heart, tight and secure. She looks up at me and bats those brown eyes. I hadn’t realized how dark they are. But they’re almost black in the darkness of the night. “This is my guy,” she says. But I can tell she’s talking to him, and not to me.

The hair on her arms is standing up, and so is mine. But it’s probably for very different reasons.

Bone walks away, looking over his shoulder at her ass. I want more than anything to punch him in the face. But I have a feeling that wouldn’t be a good idea. “I’m your guy?” I say to her.

She deflates, and lifts her hand from my chest. “He’s gone,” she says. She slips her bag off my shoulder and puts it on her own. She stands up on tiptoe and kisses my cheek, her lips lingering ever so briefly. I want to turn my head and catch her lips with mine, but she’d run if I did that. I’m sure of it. Thank you, she signs. My heart leaps when I realize she’s speaking my language. I just taught it to her, but still.

“Where are you going?” I ask.

“Home,” she says with a shrug. Then she turns on her heel and leaves me standing there. I shake out a new cigarette and light it, and I watch her walk away. She doesn’t look back. Her black bag is bouncing against her leg, and her guitar case is in her other hand. She hunches down against the wind. Does she own a coat? I wish I’d given her mine.

I follow her. I can’t help it. I need to see where she’s going, or I won’t be able to find her again. Not to mention that her being alone in the night in the city scares the shit out of me. She’s not hard enough for this place or for these people. If I let her get away from me, I might not ever find out what that tattoo means to her. And I sort of need to know now that it’s on my arm. I might be able to find her in the subway tunnel. I realized when I saw her today that must be why she looked so familiar. I’ve seen her in the tunnel, busking for change.

She crosses the street and goes toward the old bank building, the one that was turned into a shelter for the homeless a few years ago. There are people in a line outside, and she gets in line with them. She doesn’t have anywhere to stay. She’s going to a f**king homeless shelter? But before she can go inside, they close and lock the doors. The people in line stand and protest. But they’re full.

The throws her head back, her long dark hair falling even longer, reaching her ass. She’s frustrated, I can tell. But she doesn’t complain. She picks up her case, and starts down the street. There’s another shelter a few blocks over, but my guess is that it’s full, too. The shelters sprung up around here like fast food restaurants when the city began to change. But there are too many homeless and not enough places for them to stay.

I follow her, finishing my cigarette while I do. But instead of going to the next shelter, she stops and sits down on a bench, dropping her face into her hands. She’s tired. And I feel weighed down by her burden, too. I approach her and sit down beside her. She looks up, her brown eyes blinking in confusion.

“You followed me,” she says, looking up and down the street like she’s not sure where I came from.

I nod.

Her chest bellows with air, and I’m guessing that was a heavy sigh. “You don’t have to sit with me,” she says.

I look at her, and I make sure to use my voice. “Come home with me,” I say.

She looks into my eyes, hesitates for a moment, and then says, “Yes.”

Emily

He’s going to expect me to sleep with him. They usually think they can get in my pants if they give me a bed and a meal. He’s given me food, and now the bed is the next part of it. He wouldn’t be hard to sleep with. He has those dreamy blue eyes and curly locks of blond curls spring about in wild disarray all over his head.

I retrieve the money he gave me earlier from my pocket and try to give it to him. “For the place to sleep,” I say. So he’ll know I don’t plan to sleep with him.

He shakes his head, looking at me like I have lost my mind. He slides my canvas bag off my shoulder again and puts it on his. His building is surprisingly close. All this time, I’ve been staying at shelters right around the corner from this guy. And I didn’t even know he was there.

He opens the door and motions for me to step inside. “Do you live alone?” I ask.

He shakes his head no.

I stop him and press on his shoulder. “Who do you live with?”

He does that thing again where he shows me two people taller than him and two shorter than him. He lives with his brothers. Shoot. I’m not going to an apartment filled with men I don’t know. “I can’t,” I say, but he rolls his eyes at me. Then he bends at the waist and drives his shoulder very gently into my midsection. He hefts me over his back like I’m a sack of potatoes. I’m still holding on to my guitar, and I knock him against the backs of his legs with it, because I know I could be screaming at him right now and he would have no idea. I can’t talk to him. I can’t tell him to put me down.

He carries me like that up four flights of stairs, and he’s huffing a little when we get to the fourth floor. I expect him to keep climbing, but he doesn’t. He stops and opens a door, and we’re suddenly in a hallway.

My struggling has ceased, because it’s no good. He can’t hear me. He can’t respond. So, I brush my hair out of my face with one hand and hold on tightly to my guitar with the other. He opens a door and steps inside, closing it behind him.

Four men turn to look at me, flopped there like a sack of potatoes over his shoulder. I’m turned to face them as he closes the door, so I wave. What else can I do? The one I met at the tattoo parlor gets to his feet. “Who’s that?” he asks.

The tattoo guy bends over to look in my face. “Shit, Logan, that’s the girl who clocked you.”

The other men get up and walk over, too.

One of them says, “Dude, she’s got Betty Boop on her panties.” I can’t even reach back to cover my ass.

Logan lowers me to my feet. I stumble as he sets me upright, when all the blood rushes back to my head. He reaches out to steady me, and he smiles. I realize that they could all see my panties when he had me upside down, not just the one of them. The rest were just nice enough that they pretended not to look.

Logan points to each of his brothers in turn,

and motions for them to talk. “Paul,” the biggest one says, as he extends his hand.

“I remember you,” I say.

“I’ll never forget you,” he says, with a laugh as he smacks Logan on the shoulder. “And neither will his nose.” He feints as Logan makes like he’s going to punch him. But he doesn’t. He stops right before he gets to his face.

The second to largest one, and they’re all big boys, sticks out his hand and says, “Matthew.” Matthew looks tired and a little green. I look at Logan and he nods subtly. This is the one who has cancer and is going through chemo. Paul slaps Matthew’s hand away and says, “You’re not supposed to be sharing any germs right now.”

“Fuck you,” Matthew says, and then he walks toward the hallway and goes in his bedroom and closes the door. He doesn’t look back at me, but I don’t mind.

The last two brothers have to be twins. They’re younger than Logan, and they look identical. “Sam and Pete,” Paul says.

They huddle around me, and I end up sandwiched between them, which they think is hilarious. They jiggle me around for a minute, until Paul barks at them. “Let her go,” he says. He pops them both on the backs of their heads and says, “They don’t know how to act when company comes over.”

Company? That’s what I am? “Nice to meet you,” I say. I’m a bit overwhelmed. This is a lot of testosterone in one room. There’s shooting and fighting blasting from the television and I look over at it. I know Logan can’t hear it, but there are subtitles playing at the bottom of the screen. I don’t know why, but that makes me smile.

Logan motions for me to follow him and I do, presumably toward his bedroom.

One of the twins (I can’t tell them apart) calls out for us to wait. But Logan can’t hear him. I follow him down the hallway, and the other of the twins is standing at the end of the corridor laughing like hell. Something is up, but I don’t know what. Logan opens his bedroom door, and steps inside. I follow him. And that’s when I see a form move in the bed.