The Timeout
by Bobby Mathews
https://bwmathews.wordpress.com
He was good-looking. That was the first thing Sarah noticed about the man coming toward her across the lobby floor. It was the end of a long day. She was looking forward to getting home, kicking off the heels that were killing her, shrugging out of her bra. She glanced at the time on her computer screen, and then back up at the man. He wore a half-smile, and she imagined his eyes were kind. It was ten minutes until closing.
“Hi,” she said when he got to the counter, feeling her stomach tighten a little, the way it always did when the customer was a good-looking guy. She put on her brightest smile. “How can I help you?”
He leaned in toward her a little, keeping his voice low and pleasant. “You see the man over there talking to the branch manager? The guy with the hat and the briefcase?”
Sarah cut her eyes to Mr. Shipley, her boss. He was, indeed, talking with a man wearing a kind of tweed scally cap and carrying a worn brown leather briefcase. She could feel her smile shutting down, faltering, feeling like she knew what was coming.
“That man is my partner. If you give me any trouble, he’s going to take his gun out of his case and shoot your boss in the head. Understand?”
She nodded.
“Give me your hundreds, fifties, and twenties, please. And how ’bout we leave the dye packs and the alarm money alone, OK? Just nice neat stacks on the counter here.”
Sarah’s hands felt wooden as she opened the cash drawer. She didn’t count the money, just stacked it like the robber said. A part of her mind wanted to panic, to scream and hit the silent alarm just a few inches away from her right hand. But she couldn’t. For the most part, she was calm. Neither robber had shown a gun. No one was hurt, and Sarah wanted to keep it that way. She kept looking at the man in the brown suit over there talking to Mr. Shipley.
“You’re doing great,” the man in front of her said. He stuffed the sheaves of bills into his inner coat pocket. “Now do the other drawer.”
She shot him a look. He smiled at her. He knew everything. Sarah was the head teller at this branch, and she had access to a drawer full of cash that she used to buy larger bills from the other tellers. Here, at the end of the day, the drawer was filled with larger denominations. If the robbers had come earlier, the take would have been ones and fives and tens, and much harder to carry.
The money disappeared into the man’s jacket again, and after he’d salted the bundles away, he reached across the counter to give Sarah’s hand a squeeze. Her skin tingled where he touched her, and when he smiled at her, she couldn’t help smiling back.
“You did great. My partner’s going to be here for a couple more minutes, make sure everyone behaves.”
He walked away from Sarah, then, nodding to his accomplice as he headed for the door. Her hand still felt warm from his touch. Sarah raised her hand to her face, feeling the heat transfer from her hand to her cheek. When the feeling didn’t dissipate, she sat quietly on her swivel chair, wondering what would happen next.
What happened next was mostly a drag.
The robber’s “partner” turned out to be Larry Braxton, who owned a pipe-fitting business. While the bank was being robbed, he and Mr. Shipley were deciding on how many shots Shipley would get for their next round of golf, deciding whether to play the Robert Trent Jones Trail in Dothan or if Dothan National’s greens were in good enough shape to play yet, this being early March.
When the cops told Sarah that news, she put her head in her hands and cried. A guy off the street walks in and clears more than eight grand by bluffing the teller. Nobody told her so, but Sarah knew it was time for her to look for another job. The police were nice about the whole thing, though, telling her that of course she couldn’t have known the robber was bluffing. All the while they grinned at each other when they thought she wasn’t looking. They took her to the station to browse through the mug books. It took her three hours to find the robber.
Jake Campbell had robbed nearly forty banks over the past few years, walking in just as he’d done with Sarah today and waltzing away with anywhere from two grand to his all-time high score of twenty-five K, that one at a bank in suburban Atlanta. He’d taken one fall, done twenty-two months at a minimum security corrections facility, released early for good behavior.
Sarah kept tracing Campbell’s mug shot with one finger. It looked like him, and it didn’t. He looked harder in the photo. She couldn’t look in the photo’s eyes and see kindness and warmth. The worst part was that she knew Campbell’s photo would work its way into her memory of the robber and supplant the human touch that had passed between them. She thought about him touching her hand all the time.
“He was polite,” Sarah told one of the cops, a woman whose last name was Lawrence, that she thought she could trust a little bit. “And very good-looking. It’s hard to forget someone who looks like that.”
Lawrence said yes, it was. She’d seen Campbell a couple of times, picked up for questioning but never held. You could forget what he did for a living if you let yourself.
“He’s the kind of guy earns his money the old-fashioned way,” Lawrence told her. “Steals it.”
They shared a laugh at that, and then Sarah tried not to think about Jake Campbell again. She went back to her branch and turned in her notice. But Mr. Shipley wouldn’t hear of it.
“No, “ he said, waving her words away. “It wasn’t your fault. I want you to take a couple of weeks off, get your mind off of this. You didn’t do anything wrong. Go somewhere fun. Do something stupid. Get your mind right. Then come back and we’ll talk.”
Sarah jumped at the chance. She packed a bag and headed for the beach—didn’t even book a hotel, she’d find one when she got down there. She couldn’t figure out how she felt about Jake Campbell. She hadn’t been scared when he robbed the bank. He hadn’t flashed a gun. No one got hurt. And he had a certain style, confident and easy, that she liked. He seemed different from the men she met in her day-to-day life, the ones who were always on the make, always grasping, always in a hurry. Even with his pockets full of stolen money, Jake Campbell hadn’t seemed in any kind of rush as he approached the bank doors.
The sun was high, and the smell of glistening coconut oil filled Sarah’s nostrils. She was lying on a chaise lounge under a clear blue sky, letting the heat bake into her. It was one of the first really good days, right on the cusp of Spring. It was a little too early for the college kids, so the beach was sprinkled with other adults, some small families out for a day trip.
Sarah would rotate onto her stomach every fifteen minutes or so, trying to get her tan to even out. When it got too hot, she’d sit up, wrap a sarong around her waist, and wade through the burning sand to the open-air bar for a daiquiri. She was on her third daiquiri of the day when she felt someone slide onto the stool beside her.
“Buy your next one?”
The music in the bar hadn’t gone dead. It just felt like it—as if time had stopped and an eternal stillness taken over. The air was too hot, and the drink in her hand was too cold. If she concentrated, Sarah knew she could count the number of bubbles in the froth atop her daiquiri, or name all of the angels who danced on the head of a pin.
He didn’t touch her hand this time, but it didn’t matter. Sarah could feel the quiet buzz of his confidence. The muscles in her abdomen tightened involuntarily. She still hadn’t looked at him—never would have believed she would recognize his voice. But there was no doubt.
Jake Campbell.
And he knew her. Of course he did. Sarah turned her head to look at him, and he flashed that same self-deprecating grin that hooked her at the bank. The music began, and the world began to turn again. She sipped her drink, let some of the liquor ease into h
er system. He was everything she remembered him to be, the quick flash of his white teeth nearly erasing the image of his mug shot in her mind.
Jake wore dark blue swim trunks, a pair of rubber flip-flops, and nothing else. A multicolored beach towel hung from one shoulder. A dark, curly tangle of hair narrowed down from his broad chest to his navel. His abs made Sarah conscious of the flaws in her own body. She was glad she’d chosen to wear the sarong.
Jake signaled the bartender, pointed at Sarah’s drink. “One of those,” he said. “Looks delicious. And hey, her next one’s on me, too.” He paid with a crisp fifty. Sarah didn’t say anything, just watched a little bit of the bank’s stolen green change hands.
“You shouldn’t—you didn’t have to do that,” she said. Her daiquiri was already nearly gone. She didn’t remember drinking that much of it. The bartender brought Jake’s drink and moved away, out of earshot.
“I know. But I’ve been watching you for three days, trying to figure out a way to break the ice.”
“Oh, that’s just the creepy kind of thing a girl likes to hear,” Sarah said. She put her empty glass onto the bar and tried to slide off the stool. His hand touched hers—the first time since that afternoon at the bank—and electrified her again. She didn’t want to move. Didn’t know if she could.
“I had to make sure you weren’t followed,” he said. “My line of work, you have to be cautious.”
Sarah nodded. She didn’t know if she could speak. She wouldn’t have moved her hand for anything in the world. It was a warm sensation, their skin together, just short of burning. Even when Sarah settled back onto the barstool, he still didn’t move his hand. The bartender brought her a new daiquiri, and somehow she managed to drink some without spilling it or getting the straw up her nose.
“You feel it too,” he said. It wasn’t a question, so Sarah didn’t feel like she had to answer. She wanted this moment to last, to spin out forever into the infinite. If she thought about it too much, she didn’t know what she’d do. Ruin it, probably. So she didn’t think. She wove her fingers between his, feeling his body interlock with hers, sending shivers down her spine and tingling into her thighs.
Sarah leaned her head against his shoulder, felt the rough scratch of day-old beard as his chin nestled against the top of her head. Jake smelled faintly of bay rum and Dentyne gum.
“We ought to get a table.”
Sarah shook her head. “Why? I have a room at the Calypso.”
And that was all it took to get them moving. Sarah left everything on the beach—her book, her sunscreen, her beach bag. All she could think of was Jake Campbell and the way his touch burned through her like a flame that couldn’t be extinguished. Jake led her up the beach and through a break in the dunes. The Calypso rose above them as they used the outdoor showers to spray sand from their feet and legs. They padded into the lobby; the wait for the elevator was interminable, and Sarah began thinking of all the things they could do to one another on the way up to the eighteenth floor, where her room waited for them two levels from the very top.
Sarah swam back toward coherence from a long way away. The sweat-damp sheets below them were a reality, but a distant one. In the warm semi-dark, they could have been any two people, anywhere in the world. She didn’t want to think of herself as the kind of girl who would just fall into bed with a complete stranger—even though she was, obviously. But she felt like she was somewhere in a time-out from her real life, as if the decisions she made in the here and now couldn’t affect the Sarah she would be tomorrow.
Jake’s arm was underneath her, his body warm and loose against her on the bed. Sarah trailed her hands along his chest, imagined she could still feel the crackle of their combined energies. There was something there, something she couldn’t explain. Maybe it was like the magician doing his tricks. It was better when no one explained how it worked—you just understood that it did work, and accepted that as fact.
They suites at the Calypso were large. They ran from the entry door on the street side to the iron-railed beach-view balcony on the beach side. Bedroom, kitchenette, bathroom, and a truncated sitting room—it had seemed too large a space to Sarah when she got the room. But now with Jake’s presence filling the suite, the place felt cozy.
“We’re wasting sunlight,” Jake said, squeezing her with the arm that served as a pillow.
“I don’t know that I’d call it wasting.”
He laughed. “That’s not how I meant it.”
“I know.” Sarah marveled at this new being she had become, here in this time that wouldn’t—couldn’t—be allowed to mean anything. She hadn’t worried once about her body since Jake approached her in the bar. In bed, she had been confident. Aggressive, even. She didn’t worry about his reactions, or her own. They just let it happen, and it seemed to work out fine. Sarah wasn’t sure if she didn’t feel like herself, or whether her true self was being revealed a bit at a time, working its way out of the cocoon of boring nothing-ness her day-to-day life had become.
Jake slithered his arm from underneath her head and sat up, partially turned away. He stretched, and Sarah reached for him, her hands warm on the long, hard muscles in his back. He found his swimsuit, slipped into it, and padded around the suite, examining everything.
“Nice place,” he said. He opened the fridge and helped himself to a beer. He brought a can back for Sarah, too, the condensation beading slick and making it feel as slippery as he was. Sarah sat up, scooting her butt underneath herself, leaning with her back against the headboard. The sheet covered her lap, but she wasn’t concerned. Jake had already seen everything anyway. As far as Sarah was concerned, he could see whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.
“You do this often?” She asked. “Pick up girls after you rob them?”
Jake’s grin flashed on and off like a caution light. “Honey, I didn’t rob you. I robbed the bank. That’s different, isn’t it?”
“That’s a pretty fine distinction.”
“Hey,” he said, and put his hand on her thigh. “What’s going on here? I do something wrong?”
Sarah shook her head. “No, of course not. I just—how long do you think this can last? I mean, really?”
Jake shrugged, the gesture making him look like a little boy in the dimmed lights of the hotel suite. “I don’t know, Sarah. You know what I am, what I do for a living. We meet, and there’s an energy there that I don’t ever really feel—”
“I felt it too.”
He grinned for real this time. “I know you did. But I don’t get that feeling much with anyone, not ever. And then one day there you are at the beach, lying around in the sand, reading a book. You’re not doing anything, not looking for anybody, so I ask myself, ‘Is someone looking at her?’ And when I know you’re clear, absolutely clear, I wait for you to go to the bar.”
Sarah shook her head. “Unbelievable.”
“I don’t know if it was fate, or accident, or God, or whatever,” Jake said. “But when I saw you, I knew this was going to happen.”
Sarah drew her knees up to her chin and folded her arms around her bare shins. “I knew it when I heard your voice.”
Sadness traveled across his face, a stitch of clouds drowning an otherwise bright day. “You know this can’t be anything more than what it is.”
Tears welled up in Sarah’s eyes, and she bit down hard on the inside of her cheeks, focused on the pain to keep them from spilling down her face. For a long time, neither one of them spoke in the growing darkness.
“I know,” she said. “I knew when I brought you up here.”
He seemed ready to tell her about himself, about who he was and why he did what he did. Sarah didn’t care to know. There was no reason, here in the bubble of here and now, why she should know. He was a thief. She knew that. He could walk into any bank in the country and walk out again with his pockets stuffed full of cash. He had a pleasant manner and stunning good looks.
And that was all. Everything else was an empt
y shell. Outside of this moment, she would never know him, and he would never know her. And yet here they were, naked together in her hotel suite because some biological phenomenon attracted them as surely as magnets attract iron fillings.
Sarah led him by the hand through the sitting room and opened the sliding-glass door to the balcony. They put towels down on the little balcony, and before long she had the swimsuit off of him again. When she threw a leg over and rolled on top of him, Jake murmured his pleasure from deep in his chest. Her tongue found his, her body searching, longing for a way to extend its time of need and desire.
Sarah left him sleeping and spent, nude in the sun. She took his swimsuit with along, her legs shaky as she slid the glass door closed and locked it quietly. She dressed in jeans and an old T-shirt, then padded to the phone next to the big hotel bed and dialed 911. She kept her voice low while she talked, then stayed on the line as she heard Jake begin to bang against the balcony door, trying to get in. He was eighteen floors up and naked, no way to go anywhere except through that door. After a while, the banging stopped.
It didn’t take the cops long to get there, but every second of the wait was excruciating. She almost felt bad for Jake. Their timeout had ended, and he hadn’t even known the game was still being played.
THE END