“That’s the trouble,” I say, and turn my head to look at him properly. His eyes are the blank brown of cheap chocolate, melted and reset. There’s a nick across his jawline where he tried to shave too fast. His throat is thick. There is a damp patch underone arm he doesn’t know about. I store everything. I could take him apart in three motions if they’d let me.
I want to see if anyone will stop me.
He touches my hip.
Doctor Callaway says my name mildly, once. “Kayla.”
I stop smiling. That’s all. The world keeps doing everything it was doing; a bee lands on the rosemary again; the gate creaks as the wind decides to be unhelpful. But inside my head, someone turns off the lights and flips a breaker. The hum becomes a line of pure noise. I put the shears down on the path very gently so nobody loses a finger by accident.
“You really shouldn’t have done that,” I tell him.
He thinks I’m flirting. He knows nothing about the native predators in this habitat.
He winks.
Winks.
Christ.
I move.
There’s this myth men tell themselves about women like me – that we enjoy the dance, the back-and-forth, the flirt and flinch. We don’t. Dance implies we agreed on music.
No.
This is carpentry. I measure once, cut clean, sand the edges if I’m in a generous mood.
I’m not in a generous mood.
My left hand gets his collar. My right hand takes the back of his belt. He’s heavier than me but leverage is a kind of love and I always knew how to make gravity cheat on its principles. He yelps when his feet leave the earth and forgets how to pretend he’s in charge. I walk him three quick steps to the chipper and it’s all forward momentum and his animal noise. He scrabbles at my wrists. Boys always forget you can’t peel hands off you if they’ve decided you’re furniture and the room is already on fire.
“Kayla,” Doctor Callaway says, louder this time. “Stop.”
“I warned him,” I say pleasantly. The machine is off. It’s off. We made a show of turning it off and wrapping the safety strap because of rules. Those rules are just waiting to be broken because that’s what they were built for. “He’s a flight risk.”
“Kayla.”
“He is,” I insist, cheerful as a nursery rhyme. “He’s going to run. He’s going totalk.”
New boy stops yelping and starts pleading. It’s a good progression. Means he’s not completely stupid. He half-turns, tries to twist away from my hands, then makes the survival choice and locks eyes with the doctor instead. He thinks she’s the adult in the room. Well, thesaneone anyway. He thinks she’ll save him. He thinks we are bound to some shared sanctity that would make this obscene.
“I— I didn’t—” He’s crying already. It’s messy. “Doc— Doctor, she’s?—”
Doctor Callaway has taken two steps forward. Her pen is still in her hand, point pressed into paper hard enough that if she looks later there’ll be a small tear where this moment tried to exit the page. She meets my eyes over his shoulder. There’s a great deal written on her face. None of it issurprise.
“Let him go,” she says. Calm, practiced. The kind of voice you use on the edge of an outburst, on the lip of a cliff, in a house where someone has just thrown the first glass.
“He’s a liability,” I say. I lift my chin so the sunlight catches; I want it on my face. “He put his hands on a patient. Twice.”
“Kayla,” she says softly, and my name is a string she plays on a cello. “This will set us back weeks.”
“You think we’re going somewhere.” I laugh, delighted. “That’s adorable.”
He sobs. It’s wet. Doctor Callaway’s jaw twitches. There is a little silence where the metal fence ticks as it heats. I can hear thesea. It is close and uncaring and happy to take what we throw at it.
Finally she sighs. A long, precise exhale that sounds like surrender broken into syllables and offered ostentatiously as practicality. She looks at the man and then at me and then at the machine. When she speaks, her voice has sand in it.
“Very well,” she says. “Finish it.”
