Page 3 of Base Block

“No, don’t,” I said immediately. Damian would have gotten so mad about that. “I’ll go.”

I stood and scooted around him, but as soon as I moved, I felt the injury to my foot. It must have happened as I ran from that dog…I looked around the street because I bet that it hadn’t gone far. I took another step and stopped, since putting weight on it hurt enough that I had to pause for a moment to breathe through the pain.

“You should come inside to wash that out,” he said. “I’ll give you a bandage.” I saw him beckon to me. “Come on.” He slammed shut the liftgate and walked toward the building.

It wasn’t very long before the lights in the car went out, leaving me in darkness again. I looked back at the street and I thought I heard clicking, so I limped toward the house.

The man waited until I joined him. Then he went around the side and I followed him to a door that led into his garage. “Watch yourself,” he directed as he opened it. I could see the outlines of shapes inside, dark hulks of machines, and I avoided all of those. I stepped in something that squished between my toes but I kept following him.

He stopped when he got to the next door, the one that went inside. “Wait here,” he told me. He held up a hand and I quickly moved back, slipping a little. But he was only signaling me to stop. “Wait here,” he repeated slowly. “I’ll come to you.”

He flicked on the light in what looked like a kitchen, and then he sized me up. He rubbed his face again and shook his head, and I looked down at myself, too. I was barefoot and I had lost my shoes as I’d run, so there was no hope of fixing that problem. But I was still wearing the rest of my outfit for the club: a gold dress that went just under my butt in length, with two strips for a top that covered my breasts and tied at the nape of my neck. It left most of my front bare and all of my back.

As I had escaped from the dog, the dress had shifted around. The skirt part had hiked up to my waist and the pieces over my chest had pulled to the sides, so now one of my boobs had popped free. I pushed it back under the gold fabric and tugged the skirt down.

“Sorry,” I said again. I felt like I should tell him that because I’d noticed the way he was looking at me, like he was kind of disgusted. Funny, because a lot of guys would have been happy to get an eyeful of my tit and crotch, even with the thin strip of my thong covering the actual porno bits down there. But not him.

He went inside and I stayed in the garage, waiting. With the yellow glow that streamed in from the kitchen, I could see that I was surrounded by little cars. No, what was the name? These were ATVs, or something similar. Many of them were partially deconstructed, with pieces lying on the cement floor, and that must have led to the greasy puddle that I’d stepped in. I didn’t look at the mess on my foot because that was also the one I had cut. I didn’t want to know if the liquid I was feeling was oil or blood, or a really gross mix of both.

The man came back. He had a bucket in one hand and some cloths in the other. “Sit on the step and put your foot in here,” he told me, and I did, submerging the injury in the soapy water. It stung pretty badly, and I could feel that there was something wedged under my skin. Maybe glass, I decided. I kept my expression neutral.

He was watching me. “Is it bothering you?” he asked, and I nodded. “Let me see.” When I picked up my leg, he poured clean water over the wound and studied it to confirm that there was crap buried in there. “I’ll get something to help you. Wait here,” he told me again. I did, since he was acting nice. So far.

When he returned the second time, he had on doctor-type gloves and he carried a pair of tweezers. “It looks like there’s glass in your foot. I’m going to pull it out,” he said. He knelt in front of me and grasped my ankle. I let him rest my heel on his knee and start probing around with those tweezers.

“Doesn’t this hurt?” he asked.

I nodded.

“You’re not saying anything,” he pointed out.

“What difference would it make?” I wondered. He didn’t have an answer but he did respond to my next question. “What’s your name?”

“Callum.”

I had never heard of that name before. “I’m Rox—I’m Rainey,” I told him and he nodded. But he was focused on my foot.

I got an up-close view of him now. I had thought that the shadows surrounding him had made him seem so giant—but no, he really was that size, as big as Damian’s largest bodyguard, Matheus. Mat was tall and wide but hard as a rock, and it seemed like this guy was the same. He wore a T-shirt with no sleeves, so I could see the muscles in his arms. There were a lot of those and I could feel the strength of his thigh beneath my leg as it rested there. A big, dark beard covered the bottom half of his face. A baseball hat concealed the top half of it and he bent over my cut, so I couldn’t really tell what the rest of him looked like.

“Hell.” Callum frowned at my foot. “This is deep in there. Ready? One, two—”

He yanked it out on two and I jumped. “Ok?” he asked. He had looked up and I saw that his eyes were a warm brown. I nodded, so he poured water over where the wound was now bleeding harder. He used one of his cloths to staunch that and then wrapped a bandage around and around, turning my foot into a giant burrito-shaped object.

“It should heal,” he said. He didn’t sound certain. His deep voice had gone up slightly at the end of his sentence. “Yeah, you’re good to go.” That had sounded definite. He moved my leg off his, and stood.

“Thank you,” I told him. I used the wooden handrail to pull myself up and he stepped out of the way, squeezing between two of the ATVs so I could get past him. I walked to the door, avoiding the puddle of oil this time. It was still so dark and somewhere, there was that dog. I bet it hadn’t gone very far. But somewhere out there was better stuff, too, like the hotel where we’d stayed with clothes strewn around our rooms. Somewhere out there was my purse, and I wondered who had it. I really had liked that lipstick.

“Where are you headed?” Callum asked.

“The hotel,” I answered. I opened the door. “I’ll go to the hotel. Bye.”

I walked to the driveway, slowly so that I could listen for the dog, but mostly because my foot hurt. I glanced around the street, wondering where my shoes had gone, but it was too dark to see. I couldn’t have fit them over the bandage anyway.

I had made it to the curb when he came back out to his car. “Still here?” he called.

“I’m leaving,” I promised. I turned toward the tall buildings again and started walking. Limping.

I heard his motor start but it didn’t sound anything like Damian’s car. That was more like purring, but really loud. Callum’s rasped like metal scraping across a rock but it ran a lot quieter after that. The headlights flashed over me and showed the empty street ahead, so he was coming my way.