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heylittleriotact · 2 days ago

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𝐢 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐝𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐠𝐞𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐰𝐨

𝐄𝐦𝐦𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐱 𝐑𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐧 𝐅𝐮𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐇𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐀𝐔

𝐄𝐦𝐦𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐑𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐚 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐭 𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐬𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐦

4 Months Later

As luck would have it, snow started flying ten minutes before her shift ended. Flying. Not falling gently like in a Hallmark movie. No - this snow was heavy, wet, thick, and moved horizontal to the ground due to the beastly wind that bore it into the city.

It was dark too: by this time in November the sun was pretty much gone by 4:30, and by 5:00 when she was done it was completely black.

Rook learned early on that commuting to work in her uniform on public transit was uncomfortable at best, and self-inflicted psychological warfare at worst: riding the cramped bus into downtown and transferring to the train at rush-hour, packed in with dozens of other people and stuffed inside the damnable three piece suit was a nightmare.

Instead, she learned to just keep her uniform at work in her locker and get changed at the beginning and end of her shift.

It was one of a few tricks she’d picked up over the past few months to make certain things bearable. Leaving her uniform at work meant she had to wear it for as little time as possible each day. The uncomfortable pantyhose she had to wear (minimum 80 denier to conceal her tattoos which were to be hidden at all times) were swapped out about two months in when she discovered the joy of stay-up thigh high stockings, which alone made the uniform practically bearable. The shoes were still hideous, but she had been working on sourcing a pair of plain black pumps that fell within the dress code (no embellishment, glitter, or sequins; no platform; heel height maximum three inches).

She still hadn’t gotten around to tailoring her jacket, but it was the least of her worries these days. Standing in the middle of a fucking snow storm waiting for her bus that was surely going to be late was actually taking priority over everything else at the moment.

“Fuck!”

She’d flicked her cigarette, failing to notice it was wet, causing it to snap just under the filter.

“God… fucking… dammit…” she muttered, throwing the busted smoke in the garbage can nearby and digging out another one.

She’d given up on trying to find a practical way to smoke during the day: staff were forbidden from smoking on funeral home property, and if she wanted to leave the property to hack a dart, she was expected to remove her entire uniform, change into street clothes, and find somewhere acceptable to light up, then be back, changed, and ready to go before her break ended.

It wasn’t worth it.

It was fucking stupid.

She got it: the optics of having a bunch of funeral home staff gathered around like a murder of crows, issuing smoke from their mouths like miniature crematoriums by the side door wasn’t a great look to the public at large, especially given the amount of cancer patients that passed through the doors in body bags.

So she eventually conditioned herself to get through an eight hour shift without needing a cigarette. It actually wasn’t that hard, but there was no denying that at the end of her shift she was fucking jonesing for a puff in a bad way.

She lit the fresh smoke and inhaled deeply, exhaled heavily, and turned her back to the wind so this one wouldn’t get wrecked too.

Pulling the collar of her jacket up around her neck, she checked her transit app.

Your bus is 5 minutes late

Lovely.

In the gap between the tracks of her current playlist (she was currently having a Megadeth renaissance) she could hear the constant rush of tires on slick asphalt as cars sped down the main road next to her, and… honking?

Turning around and raising her arm to prevent getting a face full of wet, stinging snow, she squinted: some asshole in an Audi had pulled up alongside her. She was used to people honking at her when they drove by - this had to be the first time someone had actually stopped.

Yeah great idea, jackass, stop in the middle of traffic…

The passenger window rolled down and in the LED glow of the streetlights she could make out the distinct shape of Emmrich’s face.

Oh fuck me.

“Would you like a ride home?” He inquired.

Yeah right, like I want anyone I work with knowing where I live… especially you.

“Nah I’m good. Bus will be along any minute.” She took a drag, hoping her disinterest would hit home and he’d realize she wasn’t going to get in his fucking car.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” he remarked, sounding genuinely surprised by this revelation of her character - but not put off by it. Just intrigued.

“Not like we’re encouraged to stand around lighting up at work,” she retorted dryly. “It’s good you didn’t know: means my hands and hair don’t reek like stale smoke.”

She was forever paranoid of smelling bad: cigarette smoke, body odor, mildew… unwashed clunge - it made her cringe when people smelled like shit.

“I’ve never noticed anything like that,” he admitted like the idiot he was.

“Cool…” she drawled, her sardonic tone nearly drowned out by the cars speeding past. “Good to know that you make a habit of smelling me when you’re around. That’s fucking creepy, Emmrich.”

She couldn’t be sure due to the cold practical glow of the streetlight above them, but she was pretty sure she saw his sallow skin turn a splotchy red.

“I don’t— I never said I was smelling you,” he stated, trying to reclaim his dignity. His left hand tightened on the steering wheel, loosened, and slid down the curved surface a few inches. “Only that there isn’t a cloud of stale cigarette smoke following you around everywhere - people notice such things, you know.”

“Do they?” She queried facetiously. “I had no idea.”

“Your bus still hasn’t arrived.”

“How very astute of you to notice.”

She could keep this up all night, even if her toes were starting to tingle and hurt from standing in two inches of slush: she wore Chucks today and they were drenched through to her thin stockings.

“I’m more than happy to give you a lift home. I’m sure you’d do the same for me, if our positions were reversed.”

Oh fuck, sure, appeal to my compassion and humanity and imply that I wouldn’t leave your ass out here shivering in the snow. Wrong!

“The longer you hang around here pressuring me to get into your car, the faster you’re moving up in my list of creepy dudes.”

“A very good thing for both of us then that I’m not a ‘creepy dude’ - only a colleague extending the courtesy of a warm, dry trip home to another colleague in a less than ideal position.”

She puffed on the smoke again and exhaled through her teeth, rolling her eyes: her feet were going numb, her peacoat was covered in snow, and her hair was sticking to her head. She was miserable, and her bus - if it ever came - was going to be fucking packed with likewise miserable people.

“I’ll get my muddy feet all over your nice car and make it smell like cigarettes,” she argued.

“My car is subjected to my own muddy feet frequently enough when I’m scheduled on graveside services, and I really don’t care about the smell,” he said with far more nonchalance than he needed to.

“Fine,” she capitulated, reefing on the smoke one more time before stubbing it and dropping it in the bin. “But only on the condition that I never have to hear you say the word ‘position’ again.”

She was turning back towards him when she said it, and he moved his head out of the light before she could see his face, but she was pretty sure she heard him let out a short laugh.

“You have my word,” he said, and she shifted her backpack on her shoulder and opened the passenger side door, folding awkwardly into the seat, grateful she didn’t manage to slip and land on her ass.

The inside of the car was nice and warm, and it smelled like he’d just driven it off the lot. There wasn’t a speck of dust on the dashboard or console.

“Christ, don’t we listen to enough of this shit during the day?” She buckled up and nodded towards the screen in the middle of the console that indicated they were currently listening to ‘Violin Suite in E Minor: K.304: II. Tempo de Minuetto’ by the one and only Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

All seven locations of McDermott & Rafferty played the same eleven track CD on a loop over the sound system throughout the day, and all eleven tracks consisted of Mozart, Bach, Tchaikovsky, and a variety of lamentable instrumental covers of well-known songs like Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’. She’d only worked there for four months and already had nightmares featuring that music.

“I’ll need your address, please.”

Ugh. No going back now.

She could give him a fake one near her apartment, but he seemed like the kind of guy that would sit there and wait for you to get inside before leaving, so that wouldn’t work.

Fuck.

So she told him, because she had to.

And he entered it into the nav on the console.

And it was there forever now.

Satisfied that she was properly buckled in, Emmrich shifted into drive and signaled, looking over his shoulder before easing into traffic.

“This is what I enjoy listening to,” he stated plainly, returning to the topic of his shitty music. “What do you prefer?”

“You don’t have to change it.”

“I wasn’t offering to change it, I asked what music you enjoy listening to.” His right hand released the steering wheel to turn the heat up and returned to its place as soon as he was done.

She felt awkward as fuck, sitting next to Emmrich in his nice car, wearing his nice suit, listening to his nice music while her box-dyed black hair was plastered against her skull and she was dripping all over his nice leather seats.

“I dunno. Everything, I guess.”

“Except classical music.”

Hoooooly fuck, am I going to have to sit here and make bullshit small-talk with you the entire time? Can‘t you just be like an Uber driver and take me home and let me stare out the window in silence like a normal fucking person?

“Yeah, I guess so. I dunno. It’s fucking boring. It makes me want to go to sleep. It’s frankly a miracle that you haven’t driven into oncoming traffic if this is what you listen to on your way to and from work.”

“That’s not very nice—“

Oh good, he expects me to be nice.

“— you can’t very will sit here decrying my musical tastes while holding your own close to your chest.”

“Chest. That’s on the list with ‘position’ now as words I never want to hear you say again.”

“Rook.”

“Emmrich.”

He sighed and drove on, reflections of traffic lights and neon store signs skimming over the lenses of his glasses, as he seemed to finally take the hint and cease his attempts at getting to make idle chit-chat.

Astoundingly, this did absolutely nothing to diffuse the awkwardness. Now she felt guilty on top of it.

Unfortunately for Rook, as much as she liked to project an abrasive, rather unapproachable vibe into the world - especially around people she didn’t trust - she was actually a very nice person. A very compassionate person. A very empathetic person. It was why she’d been drawn to the funeral profession in the first place.

He didn’t have to give her a ride home, he didn’t have to spend ten minutes cajoling her soggy ass into his car, and he didn’t have to try - earnestly, it seemed - to assure her he wasn’t a pervert, which, if she was being honest with herself was what he was trying to accomplish with his attempts at harmless conversation.

Goddammit…

“I dunno, I guess I like everything? Like… if I like the way it sounds, I like it, I don’t care who it is or what genre it is.” She shifted her sodden backpack on her thighs. “Weird stuff mostly that you’ve probably never heard of, like uh… Dead Meadow, Le Tigre… Nine Inch Nails, y’know?”

He did not know. This man had never been to a rock concert in his life.

“Classic rock is good too - Zeppelin, Queen, Sabbath. I spin them a lot too.”

“I’m of the mind that one can never go wrong with the classics, as I’m sure you can tell by my own tastes.” He signaled and changed lanes, fastidious in his mirror and shoulder checks once again. “If they bring you joy, you should enjoy them.”

“What, so you’re not gonna dump on my music?”

“No, why would I?”

“I dunno. I assumed because I ragged on yours you’d rag on mine: my shitty, un-nuanced tastes.”

“Did you?” His eyebrows raised, his eyes stayed on the road. “Do you take the bus to work every day?”

“Yeah, I don’t have a car.”

“But you drive?”

“Don’t have a license either.”

Emmrich frowned slightly. “But you need—“

“— a driver’s license to work as a funeral director at McDermott & Rafferty - yeah, I’m aware. They made that abundantly clear when I was hired. Numerous times.”

She didn’t want to get into this: being in her mid-twenties and not being able to drive wasn’t exactly something she was proud of.

He might have been creepy, but he wasn’t dumb: Emmrich seemed to pick up on her reluctance to discuss the topic further and changed the subject again.

“You’ve settled in nicely at the chapel. I hear nothing but good things about you from families, and the turnaround when I give you an obituary to work on when I’m meeting with a family is unmatched by any other admin - with no sacrificing accuracy or quality either. You’re a very talented writer.”

He also seemed to know that the best way to pick someone up after accidentally blundering into one of their more embarrassing personal shortcomings was to make up for it with a compliment.

“Thanks.”

The rest of the drive passed by without incident. Emmrich would occasionally ask her questions: what she did before she decided to pursue the funeral profession, if she’d always lived in the city, etc. It was a decently long drive - Rook lived on the far west side of the city and the Hildwell chapel was central. By the time Emmrich turned into her street, her hair was mostly dry and she wasn’t shivering anymore.

“Uh, yeah, just… just up there on the right. The building with the white stucco.” She pointed, her fingernail plain and unpainted: no ‘unnatural or bright’ nail polish allowed - including black.

She quite liked her little one bedroom walk-up: it was hers. Well… not really, because she rented, but it was hers because it was only hers. No family, no ambitionless sponge of a boyfriend, no loud messy roommates: just her own space, her own air, and her ever-growing collection of houseplants. She’d scratched and fought for 720 square feet of freedom, and she was never going back to anything less.

Despite her deep affection for her home, she couldn’t help but feel somewhat embarrassed as Emmrich pulled up to the curb to let her out as close to the front doors as he could.

It wasn’t the nicest place. It wasn’t a shithole either, but it was an older building, and it was clearly a rental property. Emmrich probably lived on the bougie side of town in a fancy condo or townhouse. She knew he wasn’t married and he had never mentioned having any children, but that didn’t mean he didn’t live in a place that was four times the size of her apartment, furnished with top-of-the-line everything.

“Thanks for the lift,” she said, unbuckling and practically scrambling to get out of the car: the less time he had to stare at her building, the better. “I hope this didn’t take you too far out of the way - whereabouts do you live?”

Emmrich was staring intently over her shoulder at the warm light of the apartment lobby. “Hm? Oh, I live in Darrowley,” he said absently, seemingly fascinated with the square, four storey building looming in the dark.

“Darrowley?!” She repeated, hand pausing on the door handle. “That’s clear on the other side of town!”

It definitely qualified as bougie too.

“I enjoy driving. I find it relaxing,” He smiled at her as effortlessly as he smiled at everybody.

“Right… you find driving across town through insane rush hour traffic in a city of over a million people relaxing.”

What a fucking weirdo.

She opened the door at last and got out before he could take it upon himself to open it for her. “Uh… seriously though - thanks, Emmrich. I’d probably still be waiting for the bus. Sorry for… for being so stubborn about it.”

“I’m just glad that you’re home safe.” The pleasant expression on his face lingered, and the light spilling out from the apartment lobby made him look rather nice, she thought. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Rook. Take care.”

“For sure. Uh… have a good night, Emmrich.”

She closed the door and swung her backpack over her shoulder, carefully navigating the slushy walkway up to her building lest she slip and eat shit - the last thing she needed.

Withdrawing her keys from her pocket, she unlocked the lobby door and as it closed behind her she looked through the glass.

As it turned out, he absolutely was the sort to sit and wait until she got inside safely.

She flicked on the entryway light when she entered her suite on the fourth floor, crossing over to the window in time to see him pulling away at last, the red glow of his brake lights getting smaller until she could no longer see them.

She put her nose against the damp sleeve of her coat. It smelled like new car.

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