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Get your arse in gear, Iris!
“Wait,” she called as he turned to leave. “Don’t you want to put your jacket back on?”
He shook his head.
“No point, I’m soaked through already. And it’ll only slow me down.”
He was gone before she could reply and she rolled her eyes at the tough-guy routine before getting to work.
She managed to get a good rhythm going and had the second wheelbarrow almost half-filled by the time he returned with his now-empty one.
He stood glowering at her hard work for a second.
“It’s half-empty,” he said. The impatience snapping around the edges of his words curled her hands into tight fists.
“It’s half-full,” she corrected. “And I’m going as fast as I can.”
“Knew you’d be useless at this.”
The unfair words snatched her breath from her chest as anger heated her from the inside out.
“I’m doing the best I can, you-you prick! You’re twice my size. You can’t expect me to have the same strength and speed as you.”
“I get the feeling you’ve spent most of your life whining about how unfair life is and how you just can’t seem to catch a break. Complaining seems to be your natural state.”
“Nothing about these last few days has been normal, so excuse me for being vocal about how shit it’s all been.”
“Nobody to blame but yourself,” he said with an unconcerned shrug, bypassing her to grab a couple of sandbags.
“And y’know…” she said, huffing and groaning as she lifted another bag herself. “You. And your clearly incompetent manager.”
“Lift with your knees,” he instructed, as he watched her bend at the waist to grab the corners of a bag and drag it to the wheelbarrow, where she lifted it the short distance into the barrow bed. “You’ll fuck up your back if you keep doing it that way.”
“This is the easiest way for me to do it,” she argued, even though she was starting to feel the burn in her lower back already and her arms were in the process of turning to jelly.
“Try squatting when you grab the bag and then pushing up with your knees.”
“I’m fine,” she insisted stubbornly. She’d been lifting with her knees until the last few bags when her thighs had started to tremble with each squat. After nearly falling just before he’d returned, she’d started in on this less-practical method. It was getting the job done. She’d worry about the pain later.
She could feel disapproval oozing from his very pores, but refused to look at him. He struck her as the type of man who was used to being deferred to and obeyed. He wouldn’t appreciate being blatantly ignored.
But she didn’t care. It was clear the interview was a no-go, so she didn’t have to suck up to him. She was his unwilling prisoner and she wasn’t about to be pleasant to her jailer.
She deliberately avoided eye contact as she dragged bag after bag to the wheelbarrow, refusing to acknowledge her shaking arms and thighs, or the burning sensation in her back and chest.
He left with the filled wheelbarrow and she started on the empty one. When he next returned it was three-quarters full. He didn’t say anything, merely filled the rest of it, while she switched her focus to the empty wheelbarrow. They worked silently, side by side, for another hour.
Iris’s entire body was one massive ache by then and she was going through the motions, moving like an unthinking automaton and barely registering his comings and goings while she worked.
When he returned with the wheelbarrow for the umpteenth time, Iris jerkily moved to retrieve another bag, but his hand on her elbow stayed the movement.
“We’re out of bags,” he said, and she blinked, gazing at the empty corner uncomprehendingly. “Why don’t you sit over here while I stack these last few? I’ll be right back.”
He led her to a rickety wooden bench, probably stored in the shed because it had seen better days. She had zero control over her movements and was grateful to him for leading her to the bench as she wouldn’t have been able to make it there under her own steam.
When she sat down, a silent scream of agony reverberated through her brain as her muscles protested the new movement after more than an hour of the same repetitive motions. Iris watched him disappear into the gloom and rain and knew that if he didn’t return, she would be wholly incapable of going in search of him.
