Page 122 of Left on Read

Both Noah and Zane stopped what they were doing and exchanged a look.

Gray had a temper, and it wasn’t unheard of for him to have outbursts when he was angry, but he wasn’t the type to throw things.

What had pissed him off? It was almost thirty minutes past our usual clock-out time, and we were all in sour moods. It really could be anything at this point.

On Monday, our boss had informed us that the suits behind the job we were working on had tightened their deadlines, which meant they’d chopped two weeks off the original deadline we’d been contracted to get the house built by. The original timeline had been unrealistic. Finishing by the new one was impossible.

Everything about the job was a clusterfuck. We were the only crew working on building this house from the ground up. A job like this needed multiple subcontractors to finish. We had crews coming in to do the electric, plumbing, HVAC, and masonry, but we’d been tasked to do everything else, even though none of us specialized in foundation, roofing, or framing.

The most efficient way to build a house was to have small crews focus on one job, like drywall or flooring, and work together, moving from room to room in a sort of assembly line.

That method wasn’t the most cost-effective, and with developers cutting corners to increase profits, we’d gotten more and more jobs over the past year that required us to be jacks of all trades and do the work of multiple crews on the same timeline. These unrealistic expectations just set us up for failure and forced us to scramble to make up lost time.

Most builds ran past their targeted deadlines for various reasons that were beyond the crew’s control, but we were still the ones who got blamed when things didn’t go according to the plans of people who had no idea what it was like to actually do the dirty work and only looked at the bottom line.

Our current job had been delayed multiple times because of weather. Life in the Pacific Northwest was wet and rainy and everyone knew it, but the brains of this project refused to accept that as a valid reason for delay.

Because of this bullshit, we’d had to put in extra time all week, staying almost two hours late every night and pushing pretty much health and safety rule out there. The extra time on site, paired with the stupidly long commute, added almost five hours to our already long-ass days.

Zane calculated that for the next three weeks, we’d be putting in over ten hours a day of physical labor, giving us a fifty-hour work week, and another fifteen to twenty hours a week of commuting time, depending on traffic.

The only thing that kept all of us from losing our shit every time we had to stay until it was too dark to work, then start an hour-plus long drive home was that we got overtime for the extra hours on site and a per diem to help offset all the extra gas we had to buy to get to work. The per diem wasn’t enough to actually cover the extra costs from the commute, but it was better than nothing.

We hated it, but we needed our jobs to survive, so our boss kinda had our balls over the fire when it came to our hours.

“Have any of you checked your emails?” Gray waved his phone angrily.

Zane, Noah, and I put what we were doing aside and got our phones out. I had an email from Jerry, our boss, another from some company with a bunch of numbers in the name, and a newsletter for a clothing company I kept unsubscribing to but still got near daily emails from.

I glanced around at my friends. It would be easier to get the info from them and not try to decipher whatever was in the email. Our boss wrote his emails like he was tripping on acid, and they were convoluted as hell on a good day.

“No fucking way.” Zane’s tone was dark and even. He wasn’t just mad, he was pissed.

“What?” I asked, tucking my phone away.

“Jerry’s fucking us over again.” Gray kicked an empty bucket hard enough that it flew through the air and bounced off the far wall with a hollow crash.

“Did you read the other one?” Noah gritted out, his hand shaking from how angry he was.

Damn. What the fuck was going on?

Noah wasn’t the type to get ragey like Zane, Gray, and me. He was the one calming us down when we were on the brink of losing our shit.

This was bad.

I was just about to open the email to get some answers when Zane turned to me.

“Jerry isn’t paying us overtime for this week, or for the rest of the job.”

“What?” I gaped at him. “Why not?”

“Because he’s a lying asshole.” Noah shoved his phone into his pocket.

“The official reason is some bullshit about an audit on the project books. They’re claiming some accountant found a bunch of extra hours they paid out to us, but we didn’t actually work.”

“That’s a big fat lie. We’ve never been paid for time we weren’t here,” I snapped, my voice shaking with anger.

“This line is ambiguous.” Gray squinted at his phone. “But I think they’re saying the days we came in to dry the place out after the last storm were improperly credited to us. Like we were here the whole day but weren’t working.” His emphasis was the verbal equivalent of air quotes. “Because we had to do all the cleanup. They’re saying we’re the reason the build is behind schedule.”

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