Page 54 of Work with Me

The house wasdark when I pulled up outside. Shit. I checked my watch. After eleven. I turned off the truck and sat in the silent blackness for a minute.

Maybe she wasn’t asleep yet. I typed out,You up?

After a minute, she texted back,No.

Fine. I hovered a finger over the ignition button. But my phone buzzed with another text.

Alicia: Need to talk?

Me: Can you meet me on your porch?

The curtain twitched at an upstairs window, and a few seconds later, the porchlight flicked on. I scrambled out of the truck and sprinted up the walk and the front steps.

Alicia stood behind the screen door, her arms crossed over a tank top. She wore a pair of sleep shorts even shorter than the cutoff sweatpants she’d worn the last time. “What are you doing here?”

“I needed to talk. And we’re friends, right? Friends talk.”

She hesitated for a moment before she pushed open the screen door and stepped outside. She headed toward the swing on one side of the porch, and I followed. It creaked when I sat on the other side of the bench.

Alicia tucked her knees up under her chin and circled them with her arms.

“You cold?”

“No, I—”

Her arms were covered in goosebumps. I lifted my sweater over my head and handed it to her. She stared at it for a second and then, reluctantly, took it and slipped it over her head. She tucked her nose inside the neck.

“Sorry, it probably smells like the bar.”

“No. It’s perfect. Thank you. What did you need to talk about?”

I tugged down my T-shirt that had ridden up when I took off my sweater. “Cooper says I can go home at the end of the project.”

I couldn’t see her mouth, hidden by the sweater. Her voice was muffled when she said, “That’s good news.”

“Is it? It’s what I’ve wanted for a long time. But when he said it, I felt… I don’t know what I felt.”

“Vindicated? Relieved?”

“Disappointed.”

She tugged down the neck of the sweater so I could see her face again. “Why disappointed?”

“I think I’ll miss it here. I’ll miss the team. I’ll miss you.”

Her lips lifted in a smile, but her eyes seemed sad. “The team will still be here. Maybe you could collaborate with them remotely. Or ask some of them to transfer to headquarters.”

“But—but not you.” She’d be off to her next consulting job at the hospital.

“I was always going to leave you. This is just a gig for me.”

A sharp sting, like a papercut, zigged across my chest. “Would you ever consider making this gig…permanent?” What would it be like to work alongside her every day? To have her encouragement even when no one else believed I could do it? Heaven.

“Been there, done that, have the emotional scars to prove it.” Her eyes glittered in the porchlight.

“But Synergy’s not like that. We value our female employees. Hell, our trans and nonbinary ones, too. We have employee resource groups—”

She reached across and laid a hand on my arm. A thrill rose all the way into my chest, making my heart beat faster.

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