by Elle Casey
I sit on the cushioned black mini-bench and wait for Ozzie to do his next thing. He puts a pin in some weights I’ll be moving. In front of me I notice the picture he mentioned that describes how to do the exercise. It’s a drawing of a person pulling the bar down to the back of his neck, just like he said. I nod. It looks easy enough.
“Grab that bar over your head and pull it down behind your neck. Slow, controlled movements, do as many as you can with your hands spread apart wide.” He leans over and presses a button on a timer that’s been stuck to the machine with sticky tape. “Timer’s set.” He presses another button. “Go.” Seconds tick down from sixty.
I pull the bar down and smile when I see that the weight he’s selected for me is manageable. I can do this. I won’t even need to cheat on the seconds.
Ozzie stares at the bar coming down. Then he watches me, focusing on my face.
“You didn’t eat your omelet,” he says in a lower voice, designed not to carry across the warehouse.
“I know.” I wait while I pull the bar down again before continuing. “I didn’t want everyone to see.” Air hisses out of me as I try to keep the bar from flying back up above my head. Okay, so it’s not as easy as I thought.
“Did I embarrass you by making it?”
The weights clang together when I accidentally lose control of the bar.
“Easy,” he says.
I hold the bar better and go for another repetition. “No, you didn’t embarrass me at all. I like that you did it. I just . . . don’t want anyone to know anything you don’t want them to know.”
“And what would that be?” he asks.
I struggle letting the bar go back up slowly. I think the weights are getting heavier somehow, even though I can see Ozzie hasn’t touched them.
“You know.” My face turns red, partially from the exertion, but also from his questions. “Don’t make me say it.”
“You don’t want anyone to know we slept together.”
I let the bar race back up to its position above me. The weights bang together. “I didn’t say that.” I have to rub my hands on my shorts to dry them off. I’m already sweating. I’m not sure if it’s the workout or our conversation at the root of it.
“If you want to keep everything on the down low, we can do that.” Ozzie shrugs.
“I just think that if people know, they’ll think badly of me.”
“And then they’d have me to deal with,” he says. I’m not sure he realizes it, but his chest puffs out a little when he says that.
I smile, seeing that protective instinct coming to the front again. It really is one of his most attractive qualities. “I can fight my own battles, if you don’t mind.”
“Fine. But you tell me if anyone gives you a hard time.”
I shake my head. “No, I’m not going to do that.”
“Cheating!” yells a voice from the other side of the warehouse, making me jump.
Ozzie waves the clipboard at me. “Come on, next exercise.” He walks over to another machine and points at the seat. “Set the timer. One minute. Then rest for fifteen seconds before you start it.”
I push the buttons on this new timer like Ozzie did on the one before and then rest my hands on my legs. I’m actually a little breathless already. How lame.
“Set your weight at sixty pounds.”
“Do I do that on all of them?” I lean forward and pull a metal pin from the stack of weights, sliding into the number sixty.
“No. Dev gives us a list of what we should be lifting. Here’s yours.” Ozzie points to a chart on the top page where everyone’s weights for each machine are listed. Ozzie’s are big numbers, of course. Huge compared to mine. He’s supposed to do one hundred and seventy five pounds on this one. Is that even possible? I look down and see that the weights only go to one-fifty.
“Wow. Is he anal about his workouts or what?”
Ozzie talks in a near whisper. “Let’s just say he takes his job seriously.”
“I see you cheating over there!” Dev yells. “Fifteen-second rest periods! Not fifteen minutes!”
I press the button on the timer and start the exercise, lacking half the strength I need because I’m trying so hard not to laugh.
Ozzie has to turn away from me to not laugh too.
“So what’s Toni’s deal?” I ask, feeling stronger now that my mind is focused on her being mad at me for some mysterious reason. The weights practically fly off the stack.
“About what?”
“About you. Did you sleep together?”
Ozzie’s face scrunches up. “Toni? And me?”
“Yeah.” I pretend not to care, staring at the weights slowly going up and down at my command.
“No. Never.”
“Then why is she mad about me being with you overnight?”
“I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “Maybe she’s overprotective.”
“Of you?” I snort. “That’s funny.”
“Toni’s loyal. She takes it personally when an outsider messes with her family.”
“And I’m the outsider.” It makes me sad to hear myself referred to in that sense. I want to belong here more than anything. I haven’t thought about wedding portraits in, like, forty-eight hours, when for the past seven years that’s all I ever thought about. Freedom! . . . I don’t want it taken from me when I’ve finally gotten a taste for it. I can admit to myself now that I hated what I was doing before. It took Bourbon Street Boys to show me that, to make me be honest with myself.
“I wouldn’t say you’re an outsider, exactly. You’re just on probation in her mind. Don’t worry, though. She’ll accept you eventually.”
“If I measure up.”
“You will.”
I push the handles in front of me for the tenth time as the beep goes off on the timer. I grunt, pushing the weights that now feel four times heavier than they did when I started. “Eeerrrgh!”
“Get it, girl!” Dev yells from across the room.
I laugh and drop the handles before the rep is finished.
Ozzie rests his hand on my shoulder. “Fifteen seconds. Rest up. You’re going to need it.”
I look up at him, sweat pouring down my face. “Is the next one hard?”
He grins and drops his voice to a whisper. “No, but I have plans for you tonight.”
I cannot for the life of me remember any more of the exercises I did during that workout. I was too distracted, wondering what he was going to do to me and how many orgasms it was going to involve.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
It’s called data mining,” Toni says, booting up a computer I hadn’t realized existed before, located in a set of cubicles in another part of the warehouse we reached after going through a maze of doors and corridors. “We get all the raw feed in, drop it into folders, and sift through it when we can. Sometimes we use computer programs to help, and sometimes it’s just a matter of watching the stuff on fast forward until something interesting pops up.”
She opens a folder and clicks on a file. “This is what we got from the Parrot yesterday. This feed file covers through nine this morning.” She stands and moves to a cubicle next to the one I’m sitting in. “I’ll start with the dragonfly; you start with the Parrot. We’ll pick up the Go-Pro action we got after.” She sits down at a second computer and clicks on another folder, picking up some earphones from the desk and sliding them onto her head.
I tap her on the shoulder, and she looks over.
“Sooo, what exactly am I supposed to do?”
She grabs her headphones and pulls them off with a sigh. “Watch the video. Write down the time stamp of anything interesting. Screenshot faces if you see any.”
She’s about to put the headphones back on, but I stop her with another question.
“Talk to me about interesting.”
She rolls her eyes. “Jesus, Bo Peep, you want me to spoon-feed you lunch too?”
I sit back in my chair and cross my arms. I’m too tired f
rom my workout to have patience for this. Lifting weights drains my body and my brain, I guess. “Maybe before you do that, you could tell me what the hell your problem is with me.”
Her expression is mutinous. “I don’t have a problem with you.”
“Of course you do.”
She shrugs, going all cool on me. “Paranoid much? Jesus, Bo Peep. Relax. You’ll get your minivan later today.”
I reach over and knock the headphones out of her hands as she’s about to put them on again. Minivan, my butt. I’m not driving a stupid minivan anywhere.
She spins around and glares at me. “You better watch yourself, Bo Peep. Nobody’s here to protect you from that smart mouth of yours.”
I raise an eyebrow. “And that’s supposed to scare me?” Maybe yesterday it would have, but today, knowing Ozzie has my back, not so much. Obviously she has issues, and if I’m ever going to work here permanently, I feel like we’re going to need to get them out on the table. It’s also possible my workout used up all my fear factor juice and I have none of that chemical left to respond appropriately to Toni’s threat. I should probably be scared crapless, but instead I’m antagonizing her.
“If you were smart, it would.”
I rest my hands on the arms of the chair. “Let’s just say I’m not smart. What are you going to do? Hit me? Tackle me here in the computer room? Teach me a lesson?”
She frowns at me like I’m crazy. “No.”
“Then what?” I shrug. “What’s your problem? Why are you acting nice to me one second and kicking Thibault under the table the next?”
There. It’s out there in the air between us. I pray this isn’t a mistake bringing it up.
“What are you talking about?”
“You kicked Thibault in the leg under the table when he suggested I stay overnight with Ozzie.”
“I did not.”
“Yes, you did. I saw it.”
“My foot just slipped. It was an accident.”
“Please. Just move on from that BS, and tell me why you did it. Are you in love with Ozzie or something? Are you jealous?”
Her jaw drops open.
“No one would blame you, you know. He’s handsome, strong, single, the boss of his own successful business. He’s a great catch.”
“He’s not my type.” Toni turns her head away and picks up the headphones.
“I don’t believe you.”
She shrugs, putting the headphones on her cheeks. “Believe whatever you want. It doesn’t matter either way to me.” She pushes the ear pads over her ears and presses a button on her computer.
It’s on the tip of my tongue to call her the b-word, but I refrain. Instead, I pick up the pen on the desk and slide the legal pad over to the left side of the desk, so I can take notes.
Toni doesn’t want to discuss her crush on Ozzie, and neither do I. She’s just going to have to accept the fact that he’s mine. Mine, all mine, all mine. I feel like a greedy Daffy Duck, hoarding a huge pile of gold and freaking out thinking someone’s about to steal it. Man, I’ve got it bad for that man.
I sigh and press the “Start” button on the video, watching as the trees around the house begin to move with the wind. Nothing and nobody is doing anything in this movie except the greenery.
After the first ten minutes of seeing absolutely nothing, I realize what a crap job this data-mining thing is. No wonder everyone seemed happy when we volunteered. I throw my pen down on the table and lean back in the chair, rocking it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth . . .
“Would you quit doing that?” Toni says, pulling her headphones off.
“Doing what?” I keep rocking.
“Moving around.” She grabs the arm of my chair and tries to stop me.
I shove her off with my elbow and rock harder. “I can rock if I want to. It’s a free country.” She doesn’t want to talk to me about anything real, but she’s going to bitch and whine when I try to stay comfortable in this hard chair? No. I don’t think so. I reject that nonsense.
I stare at the computer screen, pretending like it needs all of my concentration. Adrenaline pumps into my bloodstream. I have a very strong suspicion that Toni’s going to jump me any second now. If I had my Taser on me, the safety would be off. As it is, I’m thinking about our little area here and anything that might function as a self-defensive-type weapon. Dev would be proud, even though the only thing that comes to mind is her headphones. What am I going to do with those? Bap her about the head and shoulders with the ear pads?
“Do you even hear yourself?” she asks. “It’s a free country? Seriously, what are you? Ten years old?”
“Old enough to recognize jealousy when I see it.” I roll my eyes, purposely taunting her. Maybe if she gets mad enough she’ll admit what her problem is.
“Jealous? Me? You think I’m jealous of you?”
“Of course you are. Why else would you be acting like a bitch toward me all the time?”
I have no time to prepare. One second she’s sitting in the chair next to me, and the next, she’s leaping on top of me.
I’m in headlock a half second later, and my chair has flown out from under me. I’m halfway crouching under her and most of the way to my knees on the floor.
“How dare you call me a bitch!” she yells.
My hands are reaching out for something . . . anything to make her stop.
“You’re hurting me!” I yell, grabbing her leg.
She squeezes me harder. “Let go of my leg, Bo Fucking Peep!”
“Stop calling me Bo Peep!”
“Make me!”
“Now who’s ten years old!”
“Shut up!”
My fingers scrabble for the headphone cord and I grab onto it, yanking for all I’m worth. I hit her in the shin just as I’m getting my legs under me.
She won’t let me go, though. I reach up as high as I can with my free hand and find some of her hair. I latch onto it and yank hard.
“Owwwww!” she screeches. “Let go of my hair!”
“Let go of my neck,” I grunt out. My vision is dimming.
“You first.” She’s breathing like an angry bull.
Screw that. She started this thing, so I’m going to end it. Closing the cord in my fist, I punch her in the thigh.
Her leg collapses as she screams in pain.
Yeah, let me introduce you to a charley horse, bitch. I have an older sister, and I know how to stop a headlock like nobody’s business.
Her grip on me falls away, and I stand, shoving her as hard as I can. The adrenaline gives me superpowers, which combined with her featherweight status, send her flying. She lands on her back over the side of her chair. It tips over and dumps her on the floor.
I land next to her ribs on my knees, grabbing one of her hands and wrapping the cord around it super fast. She’s like a calf in one of those rodeos. Before she can recover from her charley horse pains, I grab her other hand and tie it up too. The headphones hit my hand as I reach the end of their tether.
“What are you doing?!” she yells, panting after. I think I punched her a little too hard or something. She sounds like she’s in serious pain.
“Tying you up until you can settle down.”
“You’d better run,” she growls, struggling against my lame tying job. I have no way to knot the cord, so it’s only a matter of time before she escapes and tries to kill me.
I search the immediate area for a solution. The only things there are the two chairs.
I grab one and flip it over, dropping it over her, the back of the chair on her right side, the arms on her left. It makes a bridge over her tied hands. Leaning over it, using my weight to keep it there, I hang over her beet-red face.
“Say uncle and I’ll let you up.”
“I’ll say uncle when I have a knife to your throat, not before.” She’s practically spitting, she’s so mad.
I blink a few times, trying to figure out if she’s serious. She sure looks like she is.
She doesn’t answer. She just glares at me while she continues to struggle. She’s probably pretty close to getting the cord off, but with me on top of this chair, she’s not going to get very far.
“Let me out,” she says, her voice calmer. It’s kind of a deadly calm, though, so I don’t trust it at all.
“Can’t. I don’t want to die today.” I grin at her. This whole thing is too ridiculous. We’re two grown women and we’re fighting like children. At work! I pray none of the guys comes back here and catches us.
“Then you shouldn’t have attacked me.”
I frown. “Hey, that’s not fair. You moved first. I just defended myself.”
“You asked for it.”
I shake my head. “Huh-uh. I asked you to explain why you were acting jealous about me being here with Ozzie. It was a fair question.”
She stares at me for so long, I’m starting to think she’s suffering from lack of oxygen or something.
“Are you going to say anything?” I finally ask.
“I’m not sure I should.” Her chin goes up a fraction.
“Why not?”
“Because. You probably won’t even be here next week.”
“Says who?”
“Says me.”
“Wow. Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“You don’t belong here.”
“Ow.” I rub my chest with one hand. “That actually kind of hurt.”
“Shut up.”
“No, I’m serious.”
“See? You’re too sensitive. You don’t belong here. Why don’t you do everyone a favor and just bow out gracefully?”
“Is that what you’d do?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then I’m not going to do it either.”
“You’re not me. We’re nothing alike.”