Page 5 of Harbor Me

Marcus points helpfully at the spots along the fence. She thanks him by name.

How does she know his name? I wonder suspiciously. Then I catch the embroidered patch on his shirt a second after she obviously did, and now I’m standing here feeling slow.

“Two weeks,” I say. “Trial period. Full weeks. I'm not counting the end of one you're arriving on. You quit before that, the agency eats the fee.”

“I won’t quit.”

“They all say that.”

“I’m sure they do.”

She snaps her fingers once, low by her hip, and Diesel, my dog, falls in at her heel like he came bolted to the undercarriage of her truck. She’s taken three steps toward the office before she pauses and looks back at me over her shoulder, and there’s something in it I can’t file anywhere. Not flirting. Not fear. Almost like she knows me.

“Nice to finally meet you, Mr. Cole,” she says.

Finally.

She’s through the screen door before I can decide whether I heard the word right. It bangs shut behind her. Marcus claps me on the shoulder like a man standing at a graveside.

“Two weeks,” he says. “I think you mentioned something about falling over dead from shock?”

“Go home, Marcus.”

“It’s three thirty.”

“Then go work.”

He heads for the workshop whistling. Tommy, though, doesn’t have the sense God gave a bucket. He drifts over, eyes glued to the office window, wearing the exact face of a man about to ask something dumb.

“So is she-”

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I was gonna-”

“Whatever it was. The answer’s no.” I point him at the workshop. “She’s here to do paperwork, not to enliven your summer. Go help Marcus dig the rubber out of that engine.”

He goes. Slow. Takes one more long look at the office window on the way, and I decide none of these people are paid well enough to be this invested in a woman they’ve never met before who won’t be here two weeks.

I stand in the gravel lot with the sun on my neck watching the office window go yellow when she turns on the desk lamp.

Through the dirty glass I watch her take the room in. She doesn’t touch anything yet. Just stands there with her hands on her hips, reading the disaster the way she read the yard, and then she picks up the first envelope off the stack and turns it over.

Something about the way she holds it with both hands, like it might be load-bearing, puts my teeth on edge in a way I can’t explain.

Fitted blazer. Manicure. Reads a business in one pass, learns my crew’s names off their shirts, and doesn’t blink when a man twice her size tells her no.

I know exactly what she is. Seen the breed up close. They come in polished and smiling, they document everything, and when they’re done, somebody who built something with his own two hands gets a letter explaining why he probably won’t get to keep it.

Getting rid of her is going to be a pleasure.

It’d help if my body would get on board with that. My cock’s been running its own campaign since she stepped down out of that truck. Simple platform. Filthy. Involves that charcoal blazer on the floor of my office.

That’s what I fight the whole walk back to the workshop. Right up until I catch myself checking the office window one more time before I get back to work, and Diesel, curled on the office porch like he’s taken a new post, has the nerve to look back at me like I’m the problem.

Fourteen years of feeding him and he changes loyalty in a single afternoon.

She didn’t even offer him anything in exchange for his betrayal.