Page 9 of Rebel

She murmured, “Thank you, Storm, for bringing us together to talk this out.”

Storm gestured to me and sighed. “I got him here. It’s up to you to convince him to make a deal with you.”

Lacey pivoted her body so she was facing me. “It’s my understanding from talking to Zoe and Storm that you’re a decent electrician.”

“I’m an out-fucking-standing electrician,” I told her a little too vehemently. “Who do you think your customers get to fix the shit your team fucks up?”

Her eyes flashed to Storm and then back to me. “I didn’t realize our customers were coming to you.”

“There aren’t many electricians in the area with a Master Electrician license. I’ve been doing this for a few years now. I got eight thousand hours of supervised work experience when I did my apprenticeship in the military and sat for the licensing exam. Since I got out of the military, I’ve gotten experience working on commercial as well as residential jobs. Once word got out that I know my shit, of course they started calling me to call me to fix what’s broken.”

“You’re new to this area, right?” she asked.

“I don’t know if you consider me new. I grew up in Griffinsford and like many men from this area, I served in the US Marines until I got sectioned out for medical reasons.”

“What kind of medical issues do you have?”

I glanced at Storm. “With all due respect, ma’am. That’s none of your damn business.”

Her expression registered shock and she immediately rephrased the question. “Is it anything that could impact your ability to perform your job duties.”

“No.” I said, tight-lipped all of a sudden, because she was digging for information, information I considered personal.

“How would you describe your work style?”

I huffed out a laugh. “What the hell? Is that a real question?”

“Yes, there’s no wrong answer. The more I know about your work style, the more I can adapt mine to support you while you’re in the field.”

Nothing she just said made a lick of sense to me, so I deadpanned back, “My work style is I get shit done. Every morning I go through my work orders and do the most important one first then move on to the next until I clear all my work orders for the day. If it takes a couple of hours, that’s fine. If it takes sixteen hours, that’s fine too. Whatever it takes, I get the job done.”

“How do you handle complaints?”

“Don’t know. I’ve never gotten one yet.” Pride surged in my chest as I said that out loud.

“You’ve never had a complaint? None at all?”

“Of fucking course not. If you know how to wire shit and talk with your customers when problems pop up, there shouldn’t be any surprises after the job’s done.”

“What’s your biggest worry about coming to work for me?”

“Lady, I ain’t interested in working for you and if I was, you couldn’t afford me.”

Storm cleared his throat and interjected, “What Benny means to say is that he might accept a collaboration of sorts. He’s having the opposite problem that you’re having, in that he’s good at wiring shit up but not at keeping track of the paperwork, getting his business taxes paid on time, and stuff like that. He needs an office, and you need an electrician. It doesn’t take a fucking rocket scientist to figure out that you two could help each other and in doing so, help yourselves. Does that make sense?”

Lacey nodded like a bobblehead doll. “I’m sure we could work something out.”

“For me, this isn’t anywhere near a done deal,” I told her. “We’d have to work out issues like how to keep you from poaching my clients, what’s the pay gonna look like, whether I’m responsible for sourcing all my supplies and a bunch of other details about how to keep our businesses separate but ensure they’re still functional.”

“Yes, of course. We can work all that out. If we can come to an agreement, when is the soonest you can start?”

“As long as I can still service my own clients, maybe as soon as tomorrow.” Sighing, I told her, “If you want, I could even show up at the office tomorrow to make sure things don’t get out of control when you do those terminations.”

“That would be amazing. Maybe you could come at eight in the morning, and we could hash out the details, take care of the terminations, and grab some lunch.”

“That sounds good. I have a job already scheduled for late afternoon tomorrow. And I probably should tell you that I don’t normally work on the weekends unless it’s an emergency.”

“I understand completely,” she murmured, looking way more hopeful than I felt about us working out a mutual compromise.

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