Chapter 3: Chapter 03: Enthusiastic Consent

CARTER

He swept up the prep room with far less concern for its cleanliness than he’d had on prior nights. He had a little more on his mind tonight than ensuring the morning crew came in to find a clean prep room. Like what he was going to do with the unconscious but visibly breathing woman collapsed behind his sandwich counter.

Every moment he expected to hear the MIB once more pounding on the door, this time with friends, yet only the quiet tick of the old analog clock on the wall behind the counter filled the empty shop. As he worked, Carter once again went back over the cop shows he’d watched with his parents for any clues as to what to do. He remained a fugitive, and so did she.

Allison. It probably wasn’t her real name, but she hadn’t given him another one.

To anyone hunting them, acting any way other than normal would be a red flag. He needed to close up shop at the pace he always did and head out at the time he always did, about forty-five minutes after locking the front door. As filled as he still was with fear and adrenaline, Carter finished his closing routine in record time. It wasn’t even twelve-thirty yet, and he had fifteen full minutes before he’d normally leave.

He couldn’t risk breaking routine. He couldn’t discount the fact that Agent Holloway might be waiting right outside with a bunch of his MIB or FBI buddies, waiting for Carter to incriminate himself as he carried a visibly unconscious redhead out the back. He certainly couldn’t leave her here to be discovered by the morning shift, but what else could he do?

It wasn’t like he could just cart this woman back to his one-bedroom apartment and toss her on his couch... could he? Wouldn’t that be kidnapping? Could he even kidnap a wanted fugitive? If he took her back to his apartment after this, she might even be grateful, and then...

Carter viciously kicked that thought out of his mind. He was lonely, and horny, and hadn’t gotten laid in six months, but he knew one thing for certain. He wasn’t about to take an unconscious woman somewhere she didn’t fully intend to go. He needed her talking, and he needed her to help him decide what they should do next.

He knelt once more at her side, then leaned close. “Hey, Allison. Can you hear me?”

Her chest rose and fell. Her body remained unmoved. She didn’t open her eyes. Carter wrapped one hand gently around her shoulder and shook her, once.

No response. He’d encountered a couple of women this passed at parties, but they’d been one-hundred percent drunk and obviously in no shape for anything. Once, in high school, he’d bloodied the nose of some jerk back who’d taken an unconscious girl’s drooling incapacity as an invitation to grope. High school seemed so long ago.

Slapping Allison in hopes of snapping her awake didn’t feel right. Carter simply couldn’t imagine ever hitting a woman, especially given all that back happened in Texas. He didn’t know what this woman had been through to get to his shop tonight, but it had obviously been a lot.

He pondered a moment, then rose and walked back to the prep room. “Be right back.”

Working quickly, Carter mixed pepper, salt, and several noxious flavors of salad dressing into a plastic to-go cup. Rick, the asshole who had once again called in sick for his shift tonight, had shoved this same mixture under Carter’s nose two days after he took the job.

He had almost lost his lunch when he smelled it, and almost decked Rick before he remembered the man was the son of the franchise owner. You didn’t deck the boss’s son, but oh, Carter had wanted to so many times. Once the mix was done, he sniffed it... cautiously.

Even a glancing whiff of the resulting mixture curdled his stomach. If having this shoved under her nose didn’t wake her up, he doubted anything short of a tornado landing would do it... or the bullet-like report of the truck he’d left in Texas backfiring. As much as a rolling piece of shit as that old rustbucket had been, he still missed his truck.

Carter walked back out the counter and knelt once more by Allison. “Real sorry about this.” He waved the cup beneath her nostrils. Each widened dangerously.

With a gasp, she thrashed where she had collapsed. Her eyes popped open. She coughed so hard he instinctively steadied her with a firm hand on one shoulder.

“Sorry. Just breathe. Had to wake you up.”

“Why?” she rasped.

“Need somewhere to take you,” Carter said evenly. “You got somewhere to go?”

She looked as confused as if he’d asked her to recite the square root of pi. “Go?”

“Home,” he clarified. “Or somewhere you can hide. You can’t hide here. The morning shift will find you, and the guy who opens up this shop isn’t near as understanding as me. Can I like... drop you off somewhere?”

“Home,” she agreed quietly. “Take me to your home, please.”

Carter took a moment to make sure he’d heard her right. He had absolutely no problem taking an attractive redhead back to his apartment despite the fact that it had almost no furniture, but he needed to be sure this is what she wanted. “You sure?”

“Yes,” she repeated quietly. “I need to... I must rest. Take me back to your home.”

“Right,” he agreed cautiously. “To rest.”

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“Please,” she confirmed. “I won’t stay long.”

Her eyelids fluttered closed as her head rolled to the side. Once more, she visibly slept like a passed out drunk. Carter considered her in silence and then ruefully shook his head. She might be an attractive woman, but other than that, this was no different than any other time he’d let a football buddy too drunk to drive crash on his basement couch.

She obviously wasn’t up to sprinting around the block, but she’d been coherent. He also had nowhere else to take her, and given he now had her consent, the only reason he wouldn’t take her home was if he didn’t want to risk being arrested for aiding a fugitive. Which he’d already done. So fuck it. He was finally taking a girl back to his place.

In the six months since he’d ridden out of Texas in the back of a moving truck to hide as a Sandwich Artist in the middle of Pennsylvania, a number of young and attractive women had come into his sandwich shop. Several had even slipped him their numbers, but he’d never followed up. Dating as a fugitive wasn’t something he felt like he could manage.

As lonely as it was to come home to an empty apartment every night, getting some innocent girl caught up in his personal bullshit had never been an option for him. Yet this girl... she wasn’t innocent. Or at least, she was already being pursued by the police.

He glanced at the clock. Almost 12:45. He usually finished closing up shop around this time. It was time to take this attractive redhead back to his place. But how to do that without being spotted shoving an unconscious woman in his car?

He would, he supposed, simply have to sneak her out the back. That was how he usually left anyway, and the area immediately behind the back door was blocked in by a fence and a big Dumpster. He’d just pull his old blue Acura around and park it in the opening.

He’d opened the back door and stepped out into the chilly morning before he was fully aware of doing so. Each step he took toward the only car in the parking lot out back felt like a step taken in a dream. He expected the parking lot to erupt in red and blue lights as cops swarmed him from all sides, but crickets continued to chirp and wind continued to blow.

He started his car, pulled it so the passenger door was facing the opening between the fence and Dumpster, and then crawled across the shifter to slide out the open passenger door. He walked back inside. There he found Allison, breathing and asleep.

When he carefully picked her up, she weighed far less than he expected. She was very warm, very soft, and very pretty as he carried her back to his car. Her red hair hung down and tickled his wrist, and her chest rose and fell. Better not to focus on her chest.

Only once he had her in his passenger seat and strapped in with a seatbelt did he realize he had another problem. The store security cameras. They’d been rolling this whole time!

Tape had been rolling since long before he locked the door and been rolling ever since, recording every moment he spent with this woman and her hunter from the Men in Black. Subway John didn’t review the tapes every day, but he certainly would review them once he heard about the visit Carter had from a member of the FBI. Or the MIB. Whatever.

He had to steal and destroy that tape. He could even say he’d forgotten to change the tape at the start of his shift and accept any punishment that followed. What he could not do was have his boss replaying everything that happened tonight. He realized then how lucky he was that Agent Holloway hadn’t asked to see the security tape.

After one more check on Allison—who remained passed out in the passenger seat of his Acura, wearing the uniform of his people—Carter shut the door and rushed back into the shop. The tapes were in the boss’s office. Carter had the keys. His hands shook as he unlocked the tiny office, one he belatedly realized the MIB hadn’t searched.

Why hadn’t that man asked to search the office? Maybe he wasn’t a very good investigator, or maybe he’d been in a hurry. Either way, lucky for them.

Carter stepped inside and had no sooner reached for the eject button on a VCR that was older than he was before he realized the four monitors showing camera feeds from the shop were blank. Not filled with static. Just blank. Empty. Off.

As he looked around, he realized every last piece of machinery in the boss’s office was now off, including a payroll computer that was almost as old as the VCR. Carter experimentally flipped the light switch off, then on. Old style lights buzzed and glowed.

Frowning, Carter pushed the power button on the VCR. Clicks sounded from inside as the ancient machine woke up. Then, one after another, he clicked the power buttons on the monitors showing feeds from throughout the store. They, too, powered back on to reveal an empty and clean store. How long had the cameras been off?

Carter rewound the tape and watched the timestamp flicker. It lost almost an hour in a moment, and he realized then the tapes had snapped off just before the then blonde woman entered his shop. Until he’d just restarted them, the whole system had been off.

A power failure. He’d tell anyone who’d asked there’d been a power failure and just... trust them to believe him. At least now he didn’t need to steal and burn the tape. This was actually good news. After the night he’d just had, Carter could use some good news.

He left the shop, hopped and slid across the slanted hood of his Acura like one of those good old boys from the Dukes of Hazzard, and opened his driver’s side door. As he hopped inside, he half expected Allison to have freed herself and disappeared into the night, but she slumbered in his passenger seat, held upright by the seatbelt alone. And damn, even in spare light of the overheads, she remained absolutely gorgeous.

Home. He was taking  her home. That was a thing he was going to do now. And once there, he’d place her on his couch, put a spare blanket on her, and try to get some sleep without thinking about just how long it had been since he actually got laid.

That, at least, obviously wasn’t happening tonight.

 

Author's Note: Next time, we find out just how wrong Carter is about that.

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