Between Fares
The Uber smells like lemon and the ghost of someone’s cologne. She sits behind the driver, not diagonal—less intimate this way, more map than confession. Out the window the city moves like a film she’s already seen: storefront lights practicing their lines, a bus sighing, a couple arguing with their hands and then remembering to hold them.
Her regular lives in a building that learned to mimic luxury: brass that is mostly shine, a lobby plant that changes shape but not species. He has a gentle voice that doesn’t know what to say when it’s not renting time. She knows the script. She also knows where to let silence do its small, good work. They’re kind to each other as if kindness were a neutral room.
Now the meter of the night resets to distance. She rests her head against the glass and lets the city draft a diagnosis: tired, capable, unlonely in a technical sense. Work has taught her how to fold hours into precise rectangles. Tonight, the rectangle stayed neat. That matters.
A notification blooms and fades. She doesn’t open it. Her rules have softened into habits: no autobiographies in the ride home; no decisions after midnight; eat something even if it’s only the crust of a plan. She inventories the evening like a cashier counting breath: small talk, water refilled, a laugh that cost nothing, the moment she felt herself step a half-inch to the left to make room for both of them.
“They treat you okay?” the driver asks at a red light, meaning the city, meaning the world.
“Some days,” she says, and watches their reflection tremble in the windshield. It’s true. It is also incomplete, which is how truth survives the trip.
She thinks of the regular’s apartment after she leaves: the air cooling back into itself, a glass on the counter like a punctuation mark. She thinks of her own place—soft lamp, the good soap, a robe that is only a robe. Between the two is this moving capsule, this lemon space where she is no one’s idea but hers.
A song from three summers ago spills from the speakers, the kind people claim as a phase. She lets it be a bridge. Outside, a delivery rider flies past like a note in the wrong margin. A man walks a dog that understands stop better than he does. She catalogues these living proofs that the city doesn’t need anyone to carry it.
She considers the word regular. It sounds like a heartbeat when you don’t put a stethoscope to it. She wonders when kindness becomes routine and whether there’s mercy in that. There is. There is also a ledger. She doesn’t pretend otherwise.
The driver takes a street that knows her building and she is briefly grateful to be known by geography. Upstairs there will be a bowl for keys, a glass of water, one square of chocolate because ritual is a kind of spine. There will be a message from her sister with a photo of a nephew losing a tooth like a magic trick he almost believes in.
They hit a stretch of green lights that feel like permission. She lets herself think of a future version of tonight when she won’t need to fold the hours so carefully. She does not interrogate it. She lets it ride in the seat beside her like luggage that fits.
When they stop, the total is clean. She tips more than the math suggests and thanks the driver by name because names are what make a night less blunt. On the sidewalk, the city keeps flowing past her ankles. Upstairs, she’ll wash, change, and return to being the person no job can borrow: the one who waters the plant every Thursday and opens the window to let the traffic prove it’s morning.
She stands there a second longer than necessary to feel the difference between moving and being moved. Then she goes in, lemon still in her throat, and the door closes like a page that has learned how to turn itself.
