“Excuse me,” he said, his voice a dry rasp. “Do you have the time?”
The silence was wrong. Not the peaceful silence of sleeping families, but a hollow, waiting silence. The kind that held its breath. a girl walks home alone at night
She kept walking, her gaze fixed on the dim glow of her apartment building’s entrance, four blocks away. But her peripheral vision was a hawk’s. A figure detached itself from the alley’s mouth. Male. Tall. Hood pulled low. “Excuse me,” he said, his voice a dry rasp
She didn’t cry. Crying was for later.
He held her gaze for a long, ugly moment. Then something in his shoulders collapsed. He muttered something—a curse, a prayer, she couldn’t tell—and shoved his hands deeper into his pockets. He turned and walked back toward the alley, his new white sneakers scuffing the asphalt. The kind that held its breath
She walked the remaining four blocks at the same steady pace. She climbed the three flights of stairs. She unlocked her door, stepped inside, and slid the deadbolt home. Only then did she lean her forehead against the cool wood and exhale—a long, shuddering breath that tasted like relief and rage and the faint ghost of jasmine.