Page 18 of Blue Collar Hotties

Riley is everything, and Luis brought us together.

Maybe that was the plan all along.

II

I Spy

Description

Our eyes meet through an office window… and my life turns upside down.

Stuck in this beige prison of photocopiers and keyboards, I think nothing can cheer me up.

Then I seehim.The man working on the scaffolding outside, sweating and laughing and bossing everyone around. The man in charge. The man with big muscles and scarred hands.

He notices me too.Staresat me too, until suddenly we’re playing our own private game, with only the glass keeping us apart.

Don’t look away. Don’t blink. Let the rest of the world melt away.

And when we finally get a stolen moment alone? Don’t waste a single second…

Lenore

Iwas sent to work in my uncle’s office as punishment. That’s all you really need to know about this eighth floor nightmare: to my family, this is as good as time served.

Oh, from the outside, this building is pretty. Romantic, even. It’s all carved pale stone and ivy; wrought iron balconies and sparkling glass windows. Historic. A fancy address, because the Hattworths are successful, even if we are criminally boring.

Once you get inside, though… yeah, it’s as beige as you’d expect from my blustering uncle. He runs a stationery company, for god’s sake—the most boring entry in our family’s portfolio. Riding up the floors each morning on the ancient elevator, watching identical beige rooms drift past through the glass, I canfeelmy life force draining away.

It’s cruel and unusual punishment, my being sent here. Meant to stamp out the last flickers of my spirit.

Because there’s no color in this office. No signs of life. Sad, thirsty house plants wilt in their pots, their leaves curling and browned, while a laminated poster hangs crooked by the staff break room on the third floor, showing the correct way to align your desk chair for lumbar support.

The employees are all dead-eyed and sharp-tongued, bickering among themselves about vacation days and email chains.

Prison. That’s what this is.

All for a tiny misunderstanding.

My saving grace—the only thing keeping me sane while I serve out my sentence—is the scaffolding clinging to the building. Or rather, themenon the scaffolding, sweating and working and laughing out there, their voices seeping through the glass.

They heave building supplies up and down those eight floors like they’re lifting nothing more than feather pillows. They make rowdy jokes, and they eat their lunches out of tin boxes and paper bags, like they’re dock workers from the fifties. It’s awesome. Compared to this sad, hushed office, they’re out there in vivid technicolor.

But I know, I know. I sound like a perv, staring at them like this. Believe me, as I settle behind the assistant’s desk outside my uncle’s office on the top floor, Ifeellike a grade A perv. My eyes are glued to the office windows, watching the men out there for signs of a dark blond head. I barely blink as I log on to the computer by feel, fingertips jabbing at the clunky keyboard.

See, I’m perving alright, but it’s notallof them that do it for me. I’m not an equal opportunity creeper. There’s one man in particular out there who makes me squirm on my creaky desk chair.

One man I desperately want to see again.

Eight floors is a long way up. I shouldn’t want to distract him, shouldn’t want to distractanyof them, and yet I can’t blink, can’t relax, can’t even breathe right until I see him each day.

Dark blond hair and broad shoulders make their way up the scaffolding ladder, and I melt back with a relieved sigh. Today, he’s in a thick navy work shirt, rolled to the elbows and streaked with brick dust, and dark, clinging jeans above tan work boots.

Good. It’s cold out there, and whenever the subject of my obsession wears nothing but a t-shirt in the autumn chill, I get sympathy shivers behind this desk.

The man says something, his voice muffled by the thick glass. He’s pointing at where the carved stonework meets the roof, two workers standing by his shoulder and nodding.

I swallow, but my throat is dry.

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