Gold Digger – Story 13 – EMERGENCY CONTACT

1:14am.

I would like to formally apologize to whoever invented emergency contacts.

I don’t fully remember sending it.

That’s the honest version.

I was in the corner near the bar and I had my phone open and I was looking at my contacts and I was trying to decide between get an Uber and go home and find Noah and explain calmly that his ten minutes had become fifty-five and I was leaving and apparently what I actually did was neither of those things.

What I actually did was send two words to a contact I didn’t remember adding.

Wrong place.

That was it.

Two words.

Lowercase.

No punctuation.

Very on brand for 1am in a leather dress in a corner of a club where I was furniture.

I didn’t expect a response.

I didn’t expect anything.

I’d forgotten he was in my phone that way.

He arrived in twenty-three minutes.

I know because I was watching the door by then – not for D specifically, just watching the door the way you watch doors when you’re waiting for something to change – and he came through it in a jacket I recognized and found me without looking anywhere else first.

That should not have been as disorienting as it was.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

“You came,” I said.

“You sent your location.”

“I didn’t know I did that.”

Something moved across his face.

Gone before I could name it.

“Jacket,” he said.

I put it on.

He led me out.

The cold air hit immediately.

Better.

Everything was slightly better with cold air and the specific relief of no longer being in a room where the music was too loud and I was furniture.

D didn’t say anything.

That was the first thing I noticed.

D is not a talker – not the way Noah talks, not the constant forward momentum of someone filling space with ideas. But D has a specific quiet that is warm. Comfortable. The quiet of someone who doesn’t need to fill space because he’s already present in it.

This wasn’t that quiet.

This was different.

I tried to work out the difference while we walked to his bike.

“How did you get here so fast?” I asked.

“I wasn’t far.”

“Where were you?”

“Out.”

One word. Flat. Not rude – just closed in a way D is never closed.

I tried again.

“I didn’t know you were in my phone like that.”

“I know.”

“When did you -“

“Six months ago.” A pause. “You thought it was funny.”

I had absolutely no memory of this.

Which meant I had apparently found it funny and filed it away and forgotten it entirely and D had been in my phone as an emergency contact for six months and tonight was the first time the information had been relevant.

He handed me the helmet and got on.

I got on behind him.

Which meant my arms around D’s waist in a leather dress at 1am outside a nightclub, which was not how I had expected this evening to go.

He started the bike and said nothing.

I said nothing into the back of his jacket for approximately two minutes.

Then:

“Are you angry?”

“No.”

Which meant yes.

“You’re angry.”

His jaw tightened.

I felt it before I saw it.

That’s the thing about being on the back of someone’s bike.

You feel everything.

“You were there for an hour.”

I tightened my arms without meaning to.

“What?”

“I got there forty minutes before you texted.”

The bike suddenly felt smaller.

“You were there?”

He kept staring at the road.

The city moved past us and I was holding onto D in a leather dress with his helmet on my head and my excellent hair completely destroyed and I was trying to process the specific information that D had been in that club for forty minutes before I sent two lowercase words into the dark and expected nothing back.

“You should’ve called earlier.”

I opened my mouth.

Closed it again.

Because the problem was I didn’t have a good answer.

And D knew it.

The rest of the ride was quiet.

His kind of quiet.

But different.

For the first time since I’d met him, it felt like there was something D wanted to say and was choosing not to.

That was significantly more alarming than the nightclub.

Spreadsheet status:
Noah → location: unknown. ten minutes: still counting.
D → [row does not exist] apparently arrived forty minutes before I asked for help.

I have several questions about that and absolutely no intention of asking them tonight.
Emergency contact → unfortunately functional.
Operator status → extracted. helmet: not my color. – Mila