Page 9 of Working for Keeps

I kiss him back, three years of Chicago coming apart in my mouth, until⁠—

High in the rafters, a steam valve lets out a pneumatic hiss.

The sound cuts through the fog in my brain like a siren.

We’re on the floor of a union factory, and I’m an executive auditor and he’s the steward. If anyone comes through those doors, the restructuring is dead, his credibility is shot, and my career is ash.

I tear my mouth away from his.

“Mick, stop.” My hands press against his collarbones, forcing an inch of space between us. “We can’t.”

He doesn’t back off. He stays crowded against me, his forehead on mine, his breath scalding my lips. His pupils are blown out, and the silver union pin on his chest is cold against my collarbone, a reminder of the lines we’ve drawn.

“Tell me you don’t want me, Vera.” His hand is still on my hip, his thumb moving against the bone. “Look at me and tell me that was an inefficiency.”

“It’s a conflict of interest.” My voice gains its edge as the armor knits itself back together. “It’s a textbook violation of every professional boundary we have. Get off me.”

His jaw goes tight and for a second I think he’s going to refuse.

Then he takes a single, deliberate step back.

I smooth down my blouse, my fingers brushing the greasy handprint he’s left across my shoulder, and my hair is down in tangles. I’m a mess.

“Six o’clock Monday, Mr. Hayes,” I say in the coldest register I own, refusing his eyes. “Have the third-shift logs organized.”

I turn and walk away, spine rigid, and I don’t look back, even though every instinct I have is screaming at me to turn around and let him finish what he started.

Twenty-four hours later, the taste of him is still on my tongue.

As I sit on the edge of the bed in the company duplex, I take the crumpled yellow paper out of my coat pocket and turn it over in my hands, the way I have every night since Tuesday, before putting it back where it lives.

Paid in Full. M. Hayes.

Four days.

I carried it through time-motion studies and safety walkthroughs and a plant floor full of men who won’t meet my eyes. I carried it up onto the catwalk last night. It was in my pocket when I came down that spiral staircase, and it was in my pocket when he caught me. It was in my pocket the whole time his mouth was on mine, and I didn’t say one word about it.

Because there’s no version of thank you for feeding my grandmother that I can say out loud without also saying I didn’t know. And there’s no version of I didn’t know that isn’t a confession: that I called her every Sunday for three years and never heard her, and that a man I threw away heard her anyway, through a diner ledger and a leaking roof, from a valley I’d written off as the place I escaped.

The guilt sits under my sternum like a swallowed stone, and it’s matched by an anger I can’t put anywhere.

I’m furious at myself. I’m furious at Nana for her pride. I’m furious at this town for tracking my every move and not one soul in it picking up a phone to tell me.

But mostly I’m furious at Mick Hayes for being so damn good underneath all that granite, for taking care of what’s mine while I was a thousand miles away pretending I didn’t have anything here left to lose.

I need a drink. I need noise.

The Foundry is a two-story brick pile that used to be a locomotive repair shop, all exposed brick and raw steel beams thirty feet up, packed with workers and road crews shouting over the jukebox.

The room turns cold about four steps in.

Two off-shift welding leads from Halvorsen turn their backs, and farther down the rail a knot of out-of-town contractors slides their glasses down the bar to open a five-foot gap around me. One of them says Vantor to another, the way you say the name of a disease, looking straight at me while he does it.

I keep my spine straight, claim the empty space, and order a double Jameson from Kayla Brooks, who doesn’t give me the cold shoulder and doesn’t ask me anything either.

She pours the double, sets it down square in front of me, and then she tips the bottle back up and puts another finger in it without ever looking at my face. She caps the bottle and goes back down the rail.

I take the glass to a booth at the back under a steel pillar and try to disappear.