What Love Breeds

Chapter 15

"Sorry, sorry, sorry." Devon Lewis throws himself into the passenger seat, his water bottle and backpack in tow. "Alarms didn't go off."

Aileen Holiday huffs behind the wheel. "You're three minutes late."

"I know," Devon says, clicking his seat belt into place. He straightens his pink scrubs and lodges his belongings between his grey sneakers, sneakers that were once white when he started this position last year. "But I'm ready to go."

The car continues to idle just in front of Devon's building, its headlights beaming directly into his first-floor neighbor's window. If it were anyone else but Alec Perez from quality control, Devon might ask Aileen to leave her lights off until they were on the road. But Devon can still feel the thump of Alec's stereo and its bass blaring way past quiet hours, and he can still feel the pillow he hugged to his ear while he tried to get even a couple hours of rest. Let Alec Perez from quality control try and sleep through Aileen's LEDs, he thought with bitter triumph.

But then, they didn't pull out of the lot.

"Are we waiting for someone?" Devon asks, skeptical. They hadn't had a third for their carpool since Gardner was let go, and it had been nearly five months since.

Aileen winces. "Yes, but promise you won't freak out. She needed a ride for the mandatory assembly, and I want to be friendly with her."

All the moisture in Devon's mouth evaporates, while his palms are about to leave wet prints on his pants. "Who?"

"Yashri. From fulfillment."

"Yeah, okay, cool," Devon hisses. His stomach performs backflips off his large intestine. "Cool, cool, cool."

"You've been staring at her since we started." Aileen scowls. "And you've barely spoken. If anything, I'm doing you a favor, so you have no right to be upset with me."

"What? I didn't say–"

"I haven't done anything wrong by simply inviting her to come in with us!"

"I know!" Devon looks to her with wide eyes. "I know, Aileen. I'm not mad at you. I just don't know how to talk to her."

"Well, make a decision, and fast," Aileen says, a quick nod out Devon's window.

Yashri's black bob sways in the streetlamp glow as she emerges from the complex courtyard like a backlit angel. She wears light jeans and a pink wool sweater, the fabric squished by the tight straps of her bag. Devon makes a conscious effort not to look at her boobs, which really only happens because he can't look her in the eye. She pops her door open and swings inside, her dark brown eyes sparkling in the rear view mirror.

"Good morning!" she says. Aileen and Devon greet her, and she settles into her seat.

As Aileen pulls onto the road, the silence in the car blares in Devon's ears. His heartbeat is crashing through his entire body, and he's fisting his pantlegs so tightly they might never recover.

After what feels like an hour of unending silence, Yashri asks, "So, you guys are lab interns. What's that like?"

Aileen snorts. "Grunt work. We do a lot of data entry, a lot of proof-reading. Sometimes we get to have an opinion. You know, low-level."

Devon laughs. He laughs robotically, in a way that doesn't sound like a laugh a person could produce without trying. He wishes he were dead.

The car lets that rest for a beat before Aileen returns the favor. "What about fulfillment? Do they really give you just two twenty-minute breaks?"

Yashri groans and smacks her head against the seat rest. "Yeah. Forty minutes for a ten-hour shift. I've developed muscles in my legs I didn't know existed."