Neat

by Steiner, Kandi

  “The reason we don’t allow photos or videos is because they may know that we make our own barrels, but they don’t know how. They don’t know the products we use, the methods, the charring. This barrel process and our natural spring are the only things setting our whiskey apart from the competition — and you just gave one piece of that secret recipe away.”

  I had to clench my jaw to keep my mouth shut — mostly because Logan was giving me a warning look from behind Mac.

  “It won’t happen again, sir,” Logan said, drawing Mac’s attention back to him. “I’ll make sure of it.”

  “Your damn straight it won’t happen again, because until further notice, you’re both suspended from giving tours.”

  “What?!” we both exclaimed, Logan taking a step toward Mac with the word.

  Mac put his hand up, both as a note to Logan to stop where he stood and to signal that he was done with the conversation.

  “I don’t want to hear another word,” he said, still fuming as he eyed us both down. “Now, I’m going to go do as much damage control as I can do and try to get this little fucker’s video down before someone who actually matters sees it. In the meantime, you two are excused.” He turned toward the office door, pausing at the frame. “And tomorrow, I’ll have a new assignment for you.”

  “Assignment?” I asked.

  “We’re cleaning out the big storage closet, archiving what we need to keep and trashing the rest so we can make room for this year’s files once the New Year passes.” He gave us both a condescending grin. “I’m sure a little time in that dusty closet will be punishment enough for the two of you while I clean up your mess.”

  He turned and left at that, leaving Logan and me alone again, and I closed my eyes on a sigh.

  Fuck.

  It was my fault that video had been taken. Mac was right — I’d forgotten to tell them no photos or videos were allowed in that room, and I hadn’t seen anyone filming — but they had. And now, I’d gotten Logan in trouble.

  Again.

  Here he was trying to get promoted, and was doing a fine job of getting himself there before I showed up and ruined it all. I’d landed him at the top of Mac’s shit list.

  And worse, I’d gotten him suspended from giving tours.

  I turned, opening my eyes but keeping my gaze on my shoes. “Logan, I am so—”

  But before I could get the words out, Logan zipped past me, shoving one arm in the sleeve of his coat before the other.

  “Where are you going?”

  “You heard Mac,” he said, not looking at me. “We’re excused for the day.”

  “So, where are you going?”

  “Buck’s.”

  He was already out the door, but I chased after him, offering awkward smiles to the other tour guides who watched us like hawks on our way out. When we were in the hallway, I grabbed his sleeve, forcing him to stop.

  “Logan, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ll talk to him, I’ll—”

  “It’s fine, Mallory,” he bit out, his gaze hard. “Please, just leave it alone. Mac isn’t going to change his mind.”

  I swallowed, nodding as I released his sleeve.

  “I really am sorry,” I whispered.

  Logan nodded, but didn’t say a word before he turned, making his way toward the door at the end of the hall that led to the employee parking lot. I watched him go, feet glued to the floor, knowing that a glass of whiskey and a game of pool wouldn’t fix what I’d done this time.

  When the metal door slammed behind him, I let out a long sigh.

  So much for starting over.

  Logan

  The hot coffee in my left hand did little to sooth the pounding of my head as I walked through the distillery halls the next morning. I sipped it anyway, hoping it could somehow erase the absurd amount of whiskey I’d consumed the night before. Going to Buck’s to drown out what had happened with Mac seemed logical when I’d decided to do it, but hindsight reminded me that a Thursday night was not a Friday night, and reporting for work the day after drinking wasn’t as easy as it had been when I was twenty-two.

  The hot coffee in my right hand was for Mallory, but just like the one in my left, it did little to soothe my anxiety as I made my way toward the office. I knew she’d be there — even though I was early and she wasn’t expected to be in for another hour. I knew, because I saw it on her face when I’d stormed out the day before.

  She was sorry, and she felt bad for what had happened.

  Which in turn made me feel like a bag of shit, because it wasn’t her fault. What happened could have happened to any new tour guide, and in reality, it was more a reflection of me than it was of her. I’d been giving tours for years. I was the Lead Tour Guide. If anyone should have realized we didn’t tell that group that there were no photos allowed, it should have been me.

  And I didn’t.

  Because I was distracted.

  I sighed, shaking my head at my own stupidity as I pushed through the door that led to the guide lobby. No one was in yet, not even Mac, so the lobby was empty.

  But there was a blonde mess of hair in my office.

  Her back was to me as she waited in the same chair she’d been in yesterday when Mac rushed into the office, her attention fixed on the swinging Newton’s Cradle on my desk. I wondered if she’d left at all, if she’d slept, if she’d let go of what happened or if she’d simmered on it all night like I did.

  When I rounded my desk and saw the bags under her eyes, I got my answer.

  Mallory looked up at me like a little girl who got caught eating a cookie before dinner. She sat on her hands, her brows furrowed, eyes watching mine as I took a seat in my chair across from her. I could tell she wanted to speak, she wanted to apologize again, but I spoke before she had the chance.

  “Mallory, I’m sorry for how I acted yesterday.”

  “No,” she said, immediately shaking her head. “It was my fault. And you had every right to be pissed — to still be pissed. I am so sorry I fucked up… again.”

  I smirked. “You didn’t fuck up. It could have happened to any new guide, and truthfully, it was on me to point that out if you missed it. I knew better — you didn’t.”

  “But I did,” she argued, shaking her head. “I asked you to start over last week, and then the first chance I get to show you that I’m serious now, that I care, I go and make the worst mistake I possibly could have.”

  I chuckled at that. “Mallory, it was a video of some stupid barrels being made — not a terrorist attack.”

  She smiled as much as she could, but it fell quickly, her eyes on my desk.

  “It’s okay — really. Mac made a bigger deal out of it than necessary. The video is down, and nothing proprietary was leaked. If it was really that top secret, they wouldn’t let us take tours through there at all. Right?”

  She tilted her head a bit at that. “I guess that’s a good point.”

  I nodded, sliding the coffee I’d brought for her across the desk. “Here. A peace offering. So we can stop arguing about who was wrong and whose fault it is and focus on today’s tasks. Deal?”

  Mallory sighed, like she wanted to keep arguing and apologizing rather than accept my offer. It was kind of adorable, seeing the woman who’d given me so much hell look so upset that she’d let me down. And truthfully — she hadn’t. It’d been my own damn self that had let me down.

  Regardless of whose fault it was, the whole thing was in our past — and that’s where I wanted to keep it. The sooner we got the storage closet cleaned out, the sooner we could both get back to tours.

  I edged the coffee a little closer, waggling my brows. “It’s mochaaa,” I sang.

  After a long pause, she reached forward for the cup with a long sigh, wrapping her hands around it. She nodded once, smiling a little more genuinely now, her shoulders visibly relaxing.

  “Okay,” she finally said. “Deal.”

  “Where do we even start?” Mallory asked, squinting through the dusty fluo
rescent light of the oversized storage closet. She hung her hands on her hips, surveying the mountainous stacks of file boxes and plastic storage containers that lined every single wall and filled three rows in the middle.

  I followed her gaze with my own sigh. “I guess we pick a corner and go from there.”

  “And we’re supposed to decide what’s worth keeping and archiving, and what we can pitch?” She wrinkled her nose. “I feel like this is a job for a secretary who’s been here for a long time and knows more about this stuff.”

  I tapped the printed list on top of my clipboard. “Lucy gave us a guide to go by, with a list of what to keep and what to pitch,” I said, referencing the closest thing to a secretary the distillery had. Lucy sat in the front lobby, greeting guests and getting them ready for their tours, as well as handling all the admin tasks for our officers in her down time. “She said if we had any questions to call her or stop by the front desk.”

  Mallory shook her head, still not convinced, before pulling the highest box she could reach from the corner stack. “This sucks.”

  I chuckled. “It does, but hey,” I offered, pulling my Bluetooth speaker from my backpack and propping it on one of the middle rows of boxes. “At least we have music.”

  I hit play on one of my go-to playlists on my phone, the familiar sound of “Fever” by The Black Keys filling the closet. Mallory paused where she was opening the first box, brows popping up into her hairline as she assessed me.

  “You listen to The Black Keys?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Why is that hard to believe?”

  “I don’t know, I just took you for more of a country boy… you know, George Strait and the like.”

  “George Strait is the fucking man,” I said, grabbing a box of my own off the stack she’d started on. “But so is Dan Auerbach.”

  She smirked, amusement dancing in her eyes as she assessed me. She took a step toward me, then another, and I hadn’t noticed how small that closet felt until her chest was nearly touching mine.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” she said, reaching behind me and turning up the volume on the speaker.

  She backed away then, mouthing the words and moving her hips to the beat. My gaze fell to those hips, watching them sway like a hypnotizing pendulum. With her arms up over her head, a sliver of her toned stomach peeked out from under the Scooter Whiskey polo she wore, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that stripe of bronze skin.

  Not until her arms dropped, the sliver disappearing, and when I looked up, she was watching me with an even more amused smile.

  “Let’s get started, shall we?”

  I swallowed, murmuring something close to a yeah before I turned and opened the box I’d pulled down from the stack. Mallory chuckled from behind me, but I didn’t dare look back — not with my cheeks as hot as they were. I just bobbed my head along to the music, pulling the first file from the box.

  And then we got to work.

  As the morning stretched between us, it became overtly clear to me just how different Mallory and I were. Where she was huffing with each new box she opened, and sighing with each file she slapped down on the archive pile, and groaning when she came across something she couldn’t decipher easily whether to keep or toss — I was in my own version of organizational heaven. The music helped me zone out, and I hummed or sang along to each new song as I filtered through the boxes, making neat piles, labeling anything that didn’t already have an identifier, organizing by color and size so I could figure out the exact best way to re-pack it all in the end.

  It was definitely a punishment for her, but as much as I wanted to be outside giving a tour, our task was something close to therapy for me.

  I was still in the zone, flipping through some photographs from the Scooter Whiskey Single Barrel Soirée of 2004 when Mallory let out a larger sigh than usual, turning the music down a little and flopping down on the floor. She leaned her back against a stack of boxes, looking up at me with a pout.

  “Can we take a break?”

  I chuckled. “You can. I’m in a rhythm.”

  I wrote on a lime green label with Sharpie, sticking it to the folder of photos and placing it on top of the other files of photos I’d found that morning. I glanced at Mallory before I grabbed the next file in the box, and she smiled.

  “God, you love this, don’t you?” She shook her head. “I’m over here watching the minutes tick by like years and you’re geeking out over putting everything in its place.”

  I smiled, peeking down at her before I flipped the new file open in my hands. “I can’t help it. I’ve always been this way,” I said. “There’s just something so satisfying about putting things in order, giving them a place.”

  “You’d freak out if you saw the shop right now,” she said, crossing one leg over the other. “There’s not a corner of that previously empty space that’s not covered with shit right now. I’m trying to set everything up, separate the room like I told you I envisioned. And Chris tried to help, but…”

  “Chris has a different vision, I’d wager?”

  She made a noise. “That’s one way to put it. I mean, you know Chris — he’d have that place covered in glitter if I let him have his way.”

  I chuckled, because I did know Chris — at least, I knew him back when we were younger. He was the first person I’d ever known to come out, and the only one in our high school at the time. I didn’t hang out with him, and didn’t know him personally, but I remembered talking to Dad about it the day Chris told everyone he was gay.

  I was confused, mostly because all the other guys in our school were being dicks to him suddenly — although he was the same guy he’d been the day before, when everyone adored him. Chris was the captain of the JV soccer team. He was on student council. He was hilarious, and was always surrounded by a huge group of friends who loved to watch him, to let him entertain them.

  And it all changed overnight.

  I could still remember Dad’s furrowed brows as he listened to me, the calmness in his voice as he explained to me that people didn’t understand people who weren’t like them, and so they lashed out, afraid of the unknown. He told me not to be like them, not to run from what I don’t understand, but to embrace it, instead.

  And the last, most important thing, he told me was that I needed to be ready to stand up to those guys at school should they pull any shit with Chris.

  Luckily, Chris proved that he could hold his own over the years, but he had a silent ally who watched his back from a far — just in case.

  “It’s my own fault,” Mallory continued on a sigh. “I shouldn’t have ordered everything at once. I don’t even know where to start.”

  “Maybe I could help you,” I offered — a little too quickly. My eyes darted to hers before I turned my attention back to the file in my hands, aiming for nonchalant as I shrugged. “I mean, if you want an extra hand. I could come by sometime this weekend, help you sort through it all.”

  “You’d give up your weekend to sort through the pile of crap in my art studio?” she questioned. “Come on now, I can’t take you away from your hot dates.”

  I scoffed. “The only hot date I have this weekend is with a Nat Geo documentary on Sunday night.”

  She hummed a soft laugh. “That so? I’ve been wondering what you do outside of this place,” she said, motioning to the closet around us. Her eyes skated over the mountain of boxes we had yet to get to before they found mine. “What’s the documentary about?”

  I scratched the back of my neck, murmuring a reply into my chest before tossing the file in my hand in the trash box and picking up the next.

  “What was that?”

  I sighed. “It’s called Creatures of Light Underwater,” I said, loud enough that she could actually hear this time. “And I know what you’re thinking, but it actually looks really cool. It’s all this new footage put together by deep sea scientists who are finally able to get deep enough to capture some of the wildest displays of light from sp
ecies that live in pitch black water. No external light reaches that far down, yet they create light — to mate, to capture their prey, whatever.”

  Mallory bit back a smirk, shrugging and putting her hands up. “Hey, I didn’t say a word.”

  “You were thinking of some, I’m sure.”

  “No, seriously. Zero judgment. If anything, I’m excited to see you so excited about something.” She tilted her head. “So, you get off on biology, huh?”

  I shrugged. “I guess. I just love learning, in general. That’s why I like to read — to learn something new that I didn’t know before. And I love watching documentaries, mostly because there’s no acting or anything fake about it. There are so many fascinating stories that are true, that have real footage. It’s incredible.” I laughed through my nose. “Plus, I’ve lived in the same town my entire life and never traveled out of the state. It’s nice to go places — to learn about other people, other cultures, other ways of life.”

  Mallory watched me for a long time without saying anything — so long that I peered down at her, and another shade of embarrassment tinged my cheeks when I found curiosity dancing in those blue eyes of hers.

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. You just surprise me, that’s all.”

  “Because I’m a nerd who listens to rock music?”

  “No,” she said easily. “Because you’re smarter than you let on. And you’re cool.”

  I snorted, deciding to make a joke rather than admit what her words did to my stomach. “If me geeking out over glowing fish is cool, don’t get me started about my love for space.”

  Mallory laughed, tucking her feet closer and balancing her chin on her knees as she hummed along to the new song that had just come on. I eyed her from my peripheral, still flipping through the old training documents in the box I was working on, even though my attention was on her. I traced the black lines shaping her eyes, the long wisps of her lashes, the platinum strands of hair that had fallen from her ponytail and lined the edges of her jaw. I had the sudden urge to see her without makeup, to study the curves of her cheeks without them being covered with blush, or to look into her eyes without the tips of them being painted black, or to see the color of her nude lips, to feel them without smudging a line of lipstick…