“Who the hell are you?”
“Doesn’t matter who I am. If you keep beating on this wall, it’s gonna come down. And you need to move all the shit leaning against it until you’ve shored it up.”
He frowns like I’ve escaped an asylum, looking beyond me for someone to save him.
Too bad there’s no one else around. Maybe if there was, this idiot wouldn’t be dropkicking himself into an early grave.
“I’m serious,” I say when he doesn’t speak. I point at the cracks in the wall above us. At the obvious weak spots that could be concealing frailties far worse. “You keep kicking that pipe and the whole thing is coming down.”
The contractor darts his gaze between me and the wall. There’s no doubt in my mind he thinks I’m batshit, but at least he’s stopped his stomping.
“You need to move the lumber,” I press. “Now. I’ll help you.”
“I need to talk to my boss.”
“Fine. Call him. I’ll wait.”
The guy pulls out his phone and steps away from me.
I roll my eyes and back up to a point where I’m less certain I’ll die if my premonition comes true before he’s done. Across the street, Jax is leaning on his truck. He shakes his head and gives me awhat the fuck are you doinglook, but I don’t care. This shit has pissed me off long enough. Lazy contractors deserve all they get, but what about the people who’ll be in the building after they’re gone? They don’t deserve risks they didn’t choose.
No one does.
The worker takes a while on his call. I fish my own phone from my pocket and open a message from Joss.
Joss:miss your pretty face
There’s a mouse emoji I still don’t understand. And I miss him too. I don’t want to think about the London call he ignored this morning. Or what it might feel like to miss him for real. So I don’t. Head in sand, yo. It’s a thing.
I hear movement behind me. I spin around, expecting the worker to come up behind me.
He doesn’t. He goes back to the downpipe with a conciliatory shrug. “Boss said you’re an asshole and to get off his site before he calls the cops. Sorry, dude.”
It’s almost funny. The slapstick nature of someone not knowing or understanding that their next action might kill them. I dart forward to stop this buffoon, but I’m a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race kind of guy.
I’m not fast enough. He kicks the pipe again.
And the wall comes tumbling down.
25
JOSS
Tanner’s all over me. For real. He’s like white on rice, following me around the kitchen, peering over my shoulder, asking a thousand questions. If I didn’t like him, I’d punch him.
Or push his face in the slaw mix that currently holds his fascination.
Is he testing me? Seeing if I can keep my temper after losing my shit last week?
Heh. If that’s it, he’ll be waiting a while. It’s hard to be angry at anything when I rolled out of Kai’s bed this morning.
My bed.
Whatever. He was in it. We both were.
Together.
Yeah, you really fixed that situation, didn’t you?
