Page 2 of The Trap by Catherine
And if heisn’ta monster, well, then...
It’s perfectly safe to get in the car.
She gets in the car.
* * *
She pulls the passenger door closed.Clunk. The ceiling light switches off, leaving only the dashboard’s eerie glow and whatever’s managed to reach them from this wrong end of the headlights. Her window is ascending. Then, as the engine revs and he pulls off, she hears another sound.
Click.
The central locking system.
“So,” he starts. “Was it a good night, at least?”
Now the seatbelt sensor sounds and she fumbles in the shadows, first for the belt itself and then for its buckle, both of which feel vaguely sticky.
“It was all right,” she says. “If I’d known how much trouble I’d have getting home, I might have just stayed there. How about you?”
Why are you out driving around at four in the morning?
“I was fast asleep,” he says, “when I got an elbow to the ribs. I’m on an Alka-Seltzer run. My wife is expecting our first, and she can’t eat a thing now without getting heartburn. You got kids?”
She says, “Godno,” before she can think to be a bit less aghast at the idea of doing the thing this man and his wife have already done.
He laughs. “There’s plenty of time for all that.”
In front of them, the surface of the road is dashing beneath the wheels. The wipers slash furiously across the windscreen, back and forth, back and forth. There are no lights visible in the distance.
They don’t pass any other cars.
He asks her where she’s living and she provides the name of the townland, purposefully avoiding specifics.
A sideways glance. “You there by yourself, or...?”
She wants to say no and leave it at that, but saying that risks coming across as unfriendly, mistrustful, suspicious. But telling him she lives with her boyfriend is telling him that shehasa boyfriend, and that could sound pointed, like she’s trying to stop him from getting any ideas, which would also be accusing him ofhavingideas, and offending him might anger him, this man she doesn’t know who’s driving the locked car she’s in. But then, saying yes would be telling him that the young woman with the dead phone he just plucked off a country road has no one waiting up for her, no one wondering where she is, and if she doesn’t come home tonight it could be hours or even days before anyone realizes—
“I live with my sister,” she lies.
“That’s who’ll come and get you?”
“If I can find a way to call her, yeah.”
“They’re a curse, those bloody phones. Always dead when you need them.”
And yet, he’s come out without his.
Would you, with a pregnant wife at home?
Maybe you would, she concedes,if you’re only on a quick run to the shop.
“You know, you look really familiar to me,” he says, and then he turns his head to look at her some more, for a fraction longer than she’d like on this road at this speed and in these conditions. “Have we met before?”
“Don’t think so.” She’s sure she’s never seen this man before in her life.
“Where do you work?”
She tells him that she works for a foreign bank, in an office block near the airport, and he makes ahmmnoise.
