Along Came a Spider Ch. 06

Tabitha sat quietly as he spoke, almost mesmerized. She didn't think she had ever heard someone speak quite so passionately about something. "That sounds beautiful," she said after a moment, and he bowed his head, looking faintly amused.

"It's an experience. You should try it sometime."

The bus driver finally hobbled back into his seat, and the two of them sat in silence as the bus rumbled to life with the twist of his keys. James had slouched back against the seat again. Now that his story was over, exhaustion seeped its way back into his expression, his posture. Tabitha's hand, still half-buried in her purse, began to rummage in a slow sort of fidget, feeling around for nothing in particular. Then her fingers closed over a familiar cluster, and her face lit up with bright realization.

She caught him staring as she untangled the wires of her earbuds. Once the knots were all puzzled apart, she fit one into her ear and wordlessly offered the other one to him. He put it in his ear, looking faintly perplexed, and she glanced down to scroll through her playlists. She pressed play, and as the music started he stared off at nothing in the way that just about everyone does when they're struggling to identify a song.

"Who is this?" he finally asked, and she blinked at him.

"You've never heard the Arctic Monkeys?" she said incredulously. When he shrugged, she shook her head in amazement and turned up the volume.

The world outside slid past them sluggishly as the bus lurched into motion. The first song looped into the next, and Tabitha shifted in her seat so she was reclined in the cushions with her head in his lap. One of his hands was fiddling idly with a few strands of her hair, the interior of the bus was flickering with the light of passing streetlights, and in that long, serene stillness, what she was doing felt less like some sort of dangerous game and a lot more like something else.

--

Saturday, 8:33 pm

"You're sure this is okay?" Tabitha asked, following close behind James as he marched through a shabby little reception area. Some of the desks were mismatched and the carpet below their feet was lumpy in places, like it had been laid down as an afterthought and not a necessity. When they ascended an incline toward a pair of glass doors, her footsteps echoed hollow beneath the floor.

"It's not a problem, I promise. Here, you might want these," he said, lifting a plastic packet out of a nearby bin and tossing it to her. "I don't use them, but everyone's different."

Tabitha turned the packet in her hands. Inside were two little foam shapes, vividly pink and squashy to the touch. She frowned. "Earplugs? Why would I—" she began, but then James shoved open the glass doors and the world was swallowed up by noise.

The room in front of her was an ocean of metal, concrete, and complex-looking machines that were all wrapped up in black and off-white plastic. And all of them were making sounds. They spun and clicked and rattled, beeped and hummed. Somewhere in the distance, one of them bleated out a noise like an alarm in three quick notes.

"It's so loud," she shouted, and James turned to give her a quick smile.

"What did you expect? It's a factory." He turned back and cupped his hands around his mouth. "Martin!" he called. That word was muted by the incessant whirring of the presses.

"Hey," came the faint response from several feet away. Tabitha jogged behind James as he made a beeline for a particularly massive machine. It wasn't moving or blinking or whirring at all, and in the sparse silence, Tabitha could make out the faint sound of guitar chords.

As they drew closer, she saw a stocky man with olive skin and black hair perched in an office chair in front of the machine. He was clad in a violently yellow long-sleeved shirt and blue jeans that were marred with smudges of black and magenta, and his hair was slicked back into a tight bun at the nape of his neck. There was a wooden guitar propped up on his lap, and his fingers were lazily picking out notes on the strings. He looked up at their approach, and when he caught sight of Tabitha, he blinked.

"You brought a date?" he finally said. His voice had the faint cadence of a Hispanic accent. "What, am I supposed to cook you guys dinner or something?"

James put his hand on the small of her back and drew her forward, and Tabitha offered the man in the chair a shy smile as she shuffled towards him. "Martin, meet Tabitha."

The man set the guitar to the side, drew himself up to his feet, (he was, Tabitha noticed, quite a bit shorter than James), and then extended his hand. When she took it, he pulled her in and, to her surprise, kissed both of her cheeks. "Encantada," he said after pulling away. Then, with a wild grin in James's direction, "She's cute. Nice legs. Tantas curvas, y yo sin frenos!"

James burst out laughing. "Déjala en paz," he chuckled. "¿Aprobaría esto Rosie?"

"Ella sabe cómo soy."

Tabitha felt her cheeks blaze. "I'm right here," she muttered. James looked a bit apologetic, but Martin only barked out a laugh.

"Look how red she is! Keep her away from the rest of the crew; they'll have way too much fun with her."

James seemed to notice Tabitha's distress, because he quickly changed the subject. "What are you doing here so early?"

Martin shrugged. "Sitting here with my thumb up my ass. Not much else I can do, since Caroline's being such a bitch. I didn't want to call you in, but the job's shipping out first thing in the morning and I know you have a way with her."

"Caroline?" Tabitha asked, and Martin jerked a thumb toward the machine behind him.

"That's her name. When there's an error, she sort of makes that noise—you know, the one from the song." He picked up his guitar and shrugged into the shoulder strap, then plucked out three familiar notes. Ba-ba-baaaaa.

"Is she jammed?" James asked.

"Probably. But I can't find the fucking thing anywhere." He paused, looking thoughtful. "How long can you stay?"

"Not long." He put an arm around Tabitha's waist. "I have to get this one home."

Martin heaved a sigh. "If you want to turn down free money, I can't stop you..."

"We can stay," Tabitha said quickly. "I really don't mind—"

"I'm not keeping you here all night for time and a half," James said wryly.

"Whatever. Your loss." Martin's brown eyes slid back to Tabitha. "Hey, you like coffee?"

Tabitha blinked. "Sure."

"Cool. I'll get you a cup." And with that, he slung his guitar over his shoulder and stalked away into the jungle of clattering machines.

"He seems...nice," Tabitha said after a moment. James laughed when he saw her bewildered expression.

"I meant it when I said everyone here was crazy. It's hard work, and I think that attracts a certain type."

"Wouldn't that make you crazy too?" she wondered innocently, and the corner of his lip lifted into a lopsided smile.

"I never said I wasn't."

She watched him in silence as he shrugged out of his jacket. When he caught her staring, he lifted his eyebrows in query. "So...you know Spanish?" she asked after a pause.

He tossed his jacket onto Martin's office chair. "Yo sé lo suficiente."

Tabitha rolled her eyes and bit back a grin. "Fancy. Where'd you pick that up?"

"I got into linguistics when I was a kid; thought I was going to go off and see the world. I wanted to learn Italian and French, too, but only Spanish really stuck. I could teach you some, if you want." When she shrugged, he knelt close enough to kiss. "Tus ojos me matan," he purred.

"...What does that mean?"

He brushed a strand of hair away from her face. "Your eyes make me weak."

Tabitha's knees wobbled.

"Wrong," Martin said, and she jumped as he appeared with a disconcerting suddenness behind James. "You said her eyes were killing you. That's good, too, but it kind of sounds like she has laser vision or something." James winced, and Martin's eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Are you on the clock right now? Am I paying you to practice sweet nothings? Do I look like Latino Shakespeare to you? That printer's still not printing, and without printers that print, we're just some assholes with too much paper." He strummed a threatening chord on his guitar. "¡Muévete!"

James gave Tabitha a reassuring smile. "He's harmless, I promise," he said. Then he strode away and vanished behind that hulking machine.

Martin thought for a moment, then plucked out a few notes and closed his eyes. "Tabitha," he sang, long and low and rich with vibrato.

"You have a really nice voice," Tabitha said—partially because it was true, and partially because she didn't know what else to say to someone who was singing at her.

"I do weddings. Tell your friends." He extended his left arm with a flourish, and she carefully plucked the steaming styrofoam cup from his hand. "If you want a tour, I can give you one. The queue is full up for the next twenty minutes."

Tabitha glanced at James, who had rolled up his sleeves and slung himself up onto a rather rickety-looking yellow platform next to Caroline, and then back at Martin, who was watching her with a blank sort of expectancy. "I don't want to bother you," she began uncertainly, but he cut her off with a dismissive noise. It sounded like "pah."

"You think I would have offered if it was a problem? We don't have time to be that polite around here," he chided, and then he turned and motioned for her to follow with a jerk of his head. "Come on. I know I'm not James, but I'll try and make it as romantic as I can."

Tabitha stayed rooted in place as he began to march forward, and then, after one last look in James's direction, fell into step behind him.

--

The tour took much longer than she expected. James hadn't been exaggerating when he told her the place was huge—on the outside, the building seemed innocuous enough, but the interior was a labyrinth crowded with machines and wires and pipes. They passed massive vats that were taller than Tabitha and striped with colorful dribbles of ink that leaked from the top, peered over a catwalk at a row of machines that were spewing out ropes of newsprint in a winding loop, and walked carefully across the shipping station; a wide expanse of concrete over which stern-faced employees were driving electronic lifts at worryingly high speeds.

By the time the tour ended, Tabitha's ears were ringing from the perpetual clattering of various machines and her nerves were shot from coffee, which Martin managed to conjure up out of nowhere whenever her cup was low. Apparently every station had its own pot.

"You like to read, right?" he called from over his shoulder, and Tabitha's caffeine-wracked limbs twitched at his words. "I thought he said something about books."

"Well, yes," she said. Martin made a noise of acceptance and knelt over a large plastic bin. "But, wait—does he he talk about me?" she sputtered.

"Yeah, he mentions you sometimes." Martin's voice came out muffled from the bin. When he surfaced and saw her face, he cackled. "Not that much. Here," he said, thrusting a handful of smaller magazines towards her. "Something to read while your man's working. Hot off the press."

Tabitha clutched the pages, (which were indeed very warm), to her chest and scurried after him as he began to march forward again. Martin might not have been the tallest person, but he moved with a stride like a basketball player's. "What does he say?" she asked over the whirring of the machinery.

"He told me yesterday he wants you to have his babies."

Tabitha looked towards the ceiling in exasperation. "That's not funny."

"Sure it is," Martin chuckled. They had finally come full circle, and he paused beneath the concrete doorway. "Seriously, though: he likes you. He likes you a lot." Tabitha's lips parted in surprise, and he prodded her shoulder with his index finger. "Be nice to him, okay?"

"Of course," she said softly.

Martin nodded, then ducked into a tiny cubicle space by the doorway. When he emerged, Tabitha was horrified to see that he was clutching another pot of coffee. "Want a top off?"

"I'm fine," she said quickly. Martin shrugged and took a long swig from the pot before replacing it. She looked distrustfully down into the depths of her coffee. She hoped the other employees used cups.

Martin flitted away once they entered the printing room, leaving Tabitha to wander curiously towards the moody machine dubbed Caroline. Apparently, James had completed his task. Her clicks and whirrs joined the cacophony of the other printers, and a happy little green light was blazing near her keyboard. James, however, was nowhere to be seen. He was probably off fixing something else, she thought, or smoking, or drinking copious amounts of coffee like everyone else in the building.

She came to a stop at the side of the machine and leafed through the magazines in her hand. They were all different issues of the same magazine: some strange little publication called Fxtion. The guts were all packed with tiny photographs of people and words. Lots of words. Poems, short stories, even a small anthology. Curiosity piqued, she lifted her coffee to her lips and began to read.

Then she shrieked as a dark shape swooped down from the ceiling.

Tabitha stared furiously at James and shook her arms to dislodge drops of coffee from her sopping-wet sweater sleeves. He was hanging upside down in front of her, grinning so broadly that just looking at him made her jaw hurt. The hem of his black shirt dangled loosely around his chest, exposing several inches of flat, pale stomach.

"Got you," he whispered.

Tabitha let out a huff of breath. Her heart was still hammering in her chest. "You scared me half to death!" she hissed. "And...and you ruined my sweater!" she added, with a forlorn glance at the coffee stains all over her white sweater dress. But when she looked up to scold him further, he captured her face firmly in his hands and leaned in to kiss her. The moment he crushed his lips against hers, the words caught in her throat melted down and trickled away. "Mmnnf," she said instead, in the most irritable tone she could muster. He pulled away and opened his mouth over hers, bathing her in the heat of his breath with his soft laugh.

"You should have seen your face," he said. He smelled like sweat and detergent and cigarettes.

She raked her eyes over him, up and up until she caught sight of his ankles trapped in between two ladder rungs high above them. "That doesn't look very comfortable."

"It isn't," he agreed cheerfully, crossing his arms over his chest. "But it was worth it. How was the tour?"

"I liked it. It's nice here." She held up her mostly-empty coffee cup with a wide, exaggerated smile. "Lots of coffee."

"I hope you didn't drink too much," he said, his expression grave. "You'll join the legion of night crew workers and never see the sun again."

"Perish the thought." She looked up at his ankles again. "I don't suppose you figured out how you're getting down from there?"

"I didn't think that far ahead," he admitted. He held up a hand to excuse himself, then curled upward and inward to grip the handles of the ladder with his hands. Tabitha, who had failed the rope-climbing section of her high school gym class, watched with thinly-veiled amazement. With a calculated bend of his knees his feet were freed, and he brought his legs down as he released his hold on the ladder rungs. He landed gracefully on his feet with his back to her, giving Tabitha just enough time to change her awed expression into a look of cool indifference before he turned to face her.

"Not bad for an old man," she teased. He gave her a fierce look of amusement.

"You keep that up, and I'll string you up by your ankles, too," he said. "Leave you here 'til morning."

"Martin would help me down."

James let out a bark of a laugh. "Don't count on it. He'd probably just keep you around and talk your ear off."

"I heard that," Martin called. He was seated in front of a computer now, guitar in his lap, thumbing at the strings with one hand while he browsed the screen. "Get on out of here, then, if you're just sticking around to hurt my feelings," he said. James bowed his head apologetically.

"Don't stay up too late," he said, and Martin waved him away with that same dismissive noise. Tabitha glanced at him from over her shoulder as she followed James toward the doorway.

"It was nice to meet you," she shouted.

Martin looked up from the screen and kissed at her. "Catch you around, cutie."

--

Saturday, 11:15 pm

James leaned against the wall as Tabitha searched for her keys, his fingers tucked into his jeans pockets. That scarf was still wound tightly around his throat. The vividness of the red did nothing to hide the near-sickly pallor of his skin—rather, it seemed to emphasize it, like red lipstick highlights yellow teeth—but it still looked good on him. Maybe red was just his color. "Thanks for keeping me company tonight."

"Thanks for taking me. I had a good time," said Tabitha. She finally pulled the door open and rubbed her eyes. "I shouldn't have had so much coffee. I have to try to sleep—I work early tomorrow."

James knelt closer. Mischief glittered in those dark irises. "Or I could throw you onto the bed and ravage you," he said. Tabitha scowled up at him.

"No. I have to get up at five," she said sternly.

"Just a little, then."

"No."

James shrugged as Tabitha slipped her keys back into her purse, but before she could turn to kiss him goodnight, he had seized her and flung her over his shoulder as easily as if she were a stuffed animal. "Maybe you don't get a choice," he said over her shrieking, marching her into the apartment. He paused at the doorway and glanced at her from over his shoulder. "Close the door," he added. Dangling from his shoulder, she stretched out the tips of her fingers to push it shut.

He stumbled into her bedroom and, true to his word, tossed her right onto the mattress. Giggling, she backed up hastily towards the headboard, but he lunged onto the bed and dragged her back down to him by her ankles. She caught a flash of a painfully wide grin on his face, and then he was kissing her and she closed her eyes and saw nothing; glorious, warm, soft nothing.

"What should I do to you first?" he slurred against her mouth, and she reached up to grip his shoulders—half pushing him away, half pulling him in. When he surfaced from her lips he was still wearing that teasing smile, but his gaze was hazy and disoriented. He rolled off of her and onto his side, and she wriggled around so she was facing him. "Let's go somewhere tomorrow," he said as she kissed the hollow of his throat. He said it so suddenly, like it had been on the tip of his tongue all night.

"Don't you work?"

"Not until ten, and you're off early."

"Where do you want to go?"

"I don't know," he said, and she glanced up at him over the folds of his shirt. "I just want to take you somewhere."

"I'll have you know that I don't leave my apartment two nights in a row for just anyone," she told him solemnly, and he smirked. She looked shyly back down at his shirt. "We could go see a movie. There's a little theater a few blocks away from here."

"I can meet you there at six."

"I'd like that."

She felt him nod, heard him exhale a weary sigh. That sound surrounded her, enveloped her in the warmth of his breath. She felt...comfortable. More comfortable than she had felt in a long time. Her eyes travelled up his neck, traced the line of his jawbone, lingered on the bow of his upper lip. When they fixed themselves on his eyes, she caught him staring back at her. "What?"