Lewis frowned, glaring at the white numbers at the top right of his phone.
2:47 AM
It was almost teasing him, screaming at him to get in bed and shut his eyes. And by god did he want to follow through with it. But he couldn’t.
For one, he was nowhere near home. Two, his shift wasn’t over. Three, he couldn’t risk his job, even if it was just a cashier; one with notably high turnover rates.
He was sitting in the employees’ break room, dark brown hair disheveled and haphazardly styled to give some semblance of tidiness despite him not seeing a comb for over four hours. His posture sagged, head reclined back due to the lack of a headrest in an attempt to rest.
The location was staffed by maybe six or seven people at any given time after eleven, so thankfully that meant he had the room to himself for the moment.
His eyes wandered up to the numbers again, a barely audible groan escaping his lips as he read the time.
2:49 AM
Crawling didn’t even begin to describe it. Half-frozen seemed more apt to Lewis, just wanting to the clock to hit three so he could leave.
The brunet found himself staring at the window that let him look out onto the street, at all the cars passing by. All he wanted was to shatter it and leap out, crowing the word freedom. It was all rather ironic, really.
He’d come to the big city for jobs, to come cash in on all the opportunities he’d been promised by university. Three years and a lot of money wasted later, Lewis found himself more caged in the sprawling concrete jungle than he had in his rural Massachusetts hometown.
College never turned out to be the golden ticket he’d been lead to believe it was, and he’d just been hemorrhaging money to pay for ultimately useless coding classes, ultimately leading to him dropping out with a bachelor’s instead of his planned master’s.
It’d gotten to the point where he’d taken up gigs as a freelance article writer online for the extra pay to keep him afloat.
“Hello,” the word snapped him out of his thoughts, his head whipping to the door to see who had entered.
Unsurprisingly, it was just one of his coworkers. He had never learned her name, and with the business not having nametags, he simply referred to her as the readheaded girl.
Lewis just gave a polite nod as acknowledgement of her presence. They were on the same terms Lewis was with all his coworkers; borderline strangers. One or two words of greeting were usually all they said to each other.
He simply let his gaze fall back down to his phone as she did whatever she did, Lewis not really bothering to look.
2:51 AM
He honestly wanted to scream. It was taking way too long for the minutes to pass by. The brunet rubbed his heavy eyelids, having half a mind to just pass out on the spot. It wouldn’t be that bad, right? The alarm on his phone would wake up him at 3; just a few minutes of shuteye.
His thoughts began drifting to recent events, mostly his hitpiece on a local cult paid for by some publication site called the Rooster Tribune. It’d only reinforced the fact that he really shouldn’t have moved there.
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Apparently, they’d be worshiping the Greek gods for nearing a decade now, and had gotten a bit more violent over that time. The Tribune actually didn’t want to use one of their own writers for the article since it was so dangerous, but Lewis needed the money, so danger be damned, he wrote it anyways.
The pay was decent, but Lewis was always left with a lingering sense of dread, more so than usual.
He was brought out of his thoughts as he was being tapped awake. He’d fallen into that odd twilight zone between awake and asleep, where he was still conscious and nominally aware of his surroundings but still sleepy enough to imagine things. He blinked his eyes clear of blurriness, looking around. Lewis pulled the vibrating phone out of his pocket, the ghost of a smile forming when it he saw the big 3:01 AM on the lock screen.
He glanced back at the person who had been tapping him, finding the redheaded girl. She’d stopped, standing over at the counter and drinking some coffee. It did little to hide the exhausted dullness of her eyes.
“Thanks for waking me up,” he said, pulling himself out of his chair.
“No problem. My shift’s ending, so I thought yours would be too. Especially after your phone started vibrating,” she replied.
An awkward silence filled the room, Lewis not really knowing what to say. He had to pay her back somehow. If she hadn’t woken him up, there was a good chance he’d would’ve probably slept through the night.
Well, she said her shift was over. An idea quickly formed in his sleep-deprived brain, Lewis blurting it out, “Want me to walk you home? If it’s in walking distance, that is.”
His brain then immediately caught up, panicking. It was only made worse when she gave him a curious glance.
“Two sleep-deprived cashiers are harder to mug than one,” he shrugged, trying to play it off. If only his mind had been more awake.
To be fair, the city was pretty dangerous. Bars over windows and people carrying impromptu weapons weren’t a rare sight, especially the closer to the outskirts you got. Regardless of occupation, you learned to be careful on the streets.
That was especially true when you moonlit as a freelance writer; gangs and the like didn’t appreciate having a lot of their activities exposed.
She gave a small, thoughtful hum, with Lewis only blinking in surprise. He was expecting an immediate rebuff, especially since that’d be the standard answer to a borderline stranger dressed in a coworker’s clothes.
“Sure, why not,” she replied, Lewis’s eyes widening a little.
“Oh, okay,” was all he could manage, not trusting himself with anything more.
The next few minutes passed by in a blur, changing into his clothes and leaving the establishment with his coworker. Now, both on the street in the middle of the night, the fact that he barely knew anything about her was being hammered in hard.
They walked in semi-awkward silence for a while, Lewis jamming both his hands in his hoodie’s front pocket and his coworker checking her phone.
She abruptly broke the silence, apparently trying to start a conversation, “My name’s Sara, if you were wondering.”
He blinked for a moment, caught off-guard, but quickly replied, “Lewis.”
“Nice name.”
“Yours too.”
Again, they fell into an awkward silence. It wasn’t a long walk, either. About ten minutes of moving and they were already getting close, according to Sara.
The city itself could be quite peaceful if you weren’t constantly checking behind your back for anyone trying to steal something. If you were lucky, they’d only get away with a few bucks instead of your life.
The constant sounds of cars passing by, or the distant honking that seemed to echo and bounce off the building’s, just soothed Lewis’s nerves. Even at such a late hour, activity could be found in every crevice of the city.
He’d never really paid attention to the city’s nightlife, oftentimes too preoccupied with staying safe or too tired to care on his way back from work.
It was a night of firsts, it seemed. First proper glance at the city after dark, and first time he ever went out with anyone (even just walking them home after work) after leaving college.
“We’re here.”
Lewis hadn’t even noticed that they’d walked into one of the more secluded spots of the city, onto one of the smaller streets. He glanced in front of him, seeing a fairly respectable-looking apartment building. Nothing looked too out of the ordinary apart from the place having seen better days.
A few plants in the front hadn’t been cut in a while, the bottom-floor windows hadn’t been cleaned since god-knows-when, and the carpet that lead to the doors was stained with substances he didn’t even want to know about.
“Well, see ya,” he turned around, saying his goodbyes, “When we see each other at work tomorrow night. Like usual.”
He totally wasn’t giving a cringe-induced smile.
Instead of finding a similarly out-of-her-depth woman, he found himself looking down a burlap sack that she held.
Her voice was eerily calm as she spoke, Lewis too shocked to even move a muscle, “I’ll see you too.”