The Electrician's Confession

The Church Street Barbershop had no business being open at ten on a Tuesday night. It wasn't open. The sign said CLOSED and the lights were off in the front. But in the back room, where the dusty mirror wall and the two vintage chairs had been shoved aside to make room, a flashlight was on, and a man in a gray work shirt was crawling around a fuse box with his sleeves rolled up.

Jolene Harrington watched him from the doorway for a full minute. He was twenty-eight, give or take, thin, with glasses that kept sliding down his nose. He had a voltage tester in one hand and a screwdriver in his teeth. He looked as though he had never once been crawled on by anybody.

She uncapped her flask and stepped inside.

"Hey, sparky!"

Franklin Fong jumped and cracked his head on the fuse box. "Ow. Oh. Hello!" He pulled the screwdriver out of his mouth. "The door was locked."

"Key under the mat." She held up the flask. "Whiskey. You look like you could use some."

"No, thank you!" He turned back to the box. "I'm working."

"So work and drink. Multitask."

He shook his head. She noticed he didn't shake it much. Small no. A polite little no. Jolene leaned against the doorframe and took a swig herself.

"So here's a question," she said. "You ever been seduced before?"

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Seduced. Courted. Hit on. Pick a word."

"No. I mean, no, not... I'm rewiring this building." He checked the tester against a wire. "The owner wants the back room on its own circuit before Friday."

"Sure he does." She sat down on one of the vintage chairs. The leather creaked. "That's the problem with you Fong men. All circuit, no spark."

He looked at her then. Actually looked. "Do I know you?"

"You're Benny Tanner's nephew."

Something went out of his face. "Unfortunately, yes."

"Jolene Harrington." She raised the flask like a toast. "Used to be his girl. Used to be his bartender. Then he dumped me and fired me in the same week."

Franklin winced. "He's married."

"Yep."

"That's..."

"Say it."

"Bad," he said. "That's bad."

"He's forty-six, Franklin. I'm twenty-four. I was twenty-two when he started with me, and I was stupid, and now I'm less stupid and very bored." She took another drink. "So here's my plan."

"I don't want to hear your plan."

"My plan is I seduce you, you're his nephew, it gets back to him, he finds out his brother's barbershop hosted the whole thing, and Benny Tanner has a very bad month."

Franklin stood up. His flashlight rolled off the workbench and he caught it. "That's... no. That's a revenge thing. I'm not a revenge thing. I'm an electrician."

"You're a revenge thing with a nice jaw."

"Please stop."

"Okay. Fair." She held up her free hand. "No touching, only talking. You tell me when the talking is too much, too."

He turned back to the fuse box with the determined posture of a man building a wall out of his own spine. Jolene got up and drifted over to watch his hands, a polite four feet back, which was still close enough that he could probably smell the whiskey, which she figured was the point of whiskey.

"Franklin. Fong. Humor me."

"Nope."

"One question. Have you ever been kissed?"

"Once," he said, too fast. "In college. It was fine."

"Fine."

"Fine," he confirmed. He reached into the box. "I was twenty-one, her name was Jada, she transferred schools, end of story. Can you hold the flashlight?"

"Gladly." She took it from him and pointed it at the box. Their fingers touched on the handle. He flinched so hard the tester clattered to the floor.

"Sorry," he said.

"You're shaking."

"I'm not shaking. I'm concentrating."

"You're shaking."

"I'm concentrating AND shaking," he admitted, and for the first time he laughed, just a little. Jolene decided she liked the sound of it and hated herself a little for deciding that.

He got the tester back and went back in. "Okay, this wire here is loose, the lug never got torqued down, that's your flicker. If I just..."

And then he touched the wrong thing, because of course he did, because his hands were shaking, because a twenty-four-year-old woman in a leather jacket was breathing whiskey two feet behind him.

The pop was small. The yell was not.

"Ah. Ah, god, that's..." He yanked his hand back and stood there holding it like a crab had it. "Son of a. That's a hundred and twenty volts. That's a hundred and twenty stupid volts."

"Oh my god." Jolene grabbed his wrist. "Let me see. Let me see."

"It's fine. It's fine, it just..."

"It is not fine, your finger is already doing that white thing, sit down."

She pushed him into the second vintage chair. He went, because his knees had gone. She grabbed a roll of paper towels off the workbench, wet one under the little sink in the corner, and wrapped his hand in a clean dry towel, tight, like she'd seen done at the bar when a bottle broke.

He flinched at everything. Her thumb on his wrist. Her knuckles brushing his palm. When she tied the towel off he made a small noise like a kicked puppy.

"You're ticklish," she said.

"I'm electrical," he said. "It's different."

"Your hand is burned."

"It's a little burned. First degree. I've had worse. I once wired a hot tub wrong."

"You wired a hot tub wrong?"

"I was twenty-three and confident," he said. "Confidence is the enemy of electricians. That's in the code book somewhere."

Jolene sat back on her heels and looked at him. His hand was wrapped. His glasses were crooked. His ears were red. He was, she had to admit, not what she'd expected. She'd expected a smug little version of Benny. She'd gotten a guy who laughed at his own code book jokes and flinched when she touched his wrist.

It was going to be a problem. Or a project.

"So," she said. "You want to know a fun fact?"

"I really don't."

"This barbershop belongs to Ray Tanner. Benny's brother. I picked it on purpose."

Franklin stared at her. "You picked it."

"Well. I heard Ray needed a rewire and I heard who the contractor was sending. I made some calls. I told the property manager the back room had a smell."

"There is no smell."

"There's a mild smell. Old choir robes and lavender sachet. Some church group practices in here. But I upgraded it to a smell."

He sat there with his wrapped hand in his lap. "So the whole job is..."

"Bait, Franklin. You're the bait. I'm the fisherman. Benny is the... whatever a fisherman does to bait after."

"That metaphor fell apart."

"I know. I'm a bartender, not a poet."

He looked down at the towel. Then back up. "Okay. Look. I understand being mad at Benny. He sounds like garbage. Genuinely. But I'm not him. I've met him maybe six times in my life. He sent a fruit basket when my dad's shop closed and no card."

"Then this hurts you exactly zero," she said. "And it hurts him a lot."

"How? How does me being in a room with you hurt him?"

Jolene capped the flask and smiled at him. "Oh, sparky. The plan was that it wouldn't stay at 'being in a room.' I'm reconsidering. Slowly."

Franklin went red from the collar up. He stood up so fast the towel dropped off his hand. "I need to check the panel," he said, very loud, and dove back under the workbench light.

"You're gonna burn your other hand," she called after him.

"That's the risk I'm taking," he said, and Jolene laughed so hard she had to sit down in the barber chair again.

Outside, the street was dead quiet. The conference next door at the community center had been cancelled at the last minute, so the parking lot sat empty and the whole block felt unnervingly still. Somewhere a block over, a car door shut.

And about four blocks away, in a house on Maple, Janice Stevenson, forty-five, choir director, was standing in her bathroom staring at the shelf where her hot water bottle was supposed to be.

Back in the barbershop, Jolene stayed in the chair a while, listening to him mutter at the panel. He was good at it. That was the annoying part. Every time she checked him out he was doing something competent with a screwdriver and saying something like "neutral, neutral, where did they put the neutral."

She got up and drifted over. He didn't notice until she was right at his shoulder.

"You're hovering," he said.

"I'm supervising."

"You're breathing on my neck."

"That too."

He sat back on his heels and pushed his glasses up. They slid right back down. She reached out and pushed them up for him, slow, and held there a second longer than the job required. He went still the way a squirrel goes still.

"Thanks," he said. "That's. Thanks."

"Uh huh."

Then she popped the top button of her blouse.

It wasn't even a dramatic button. Just the little one at the collar. But Franklin made a sound like she'd fired a gun and stood up straight into the workbench. His tool belt caught the edge of it and the whole thing went over. Pliers. Wire strippers. A tape measure that unspooled across the floor like it was fleeing the scene.

"Oh no," he said.

"Oh no," she agreed, and then she stepped backward into the path of the flying tape measure, caught her heel on his fallen tool belt, and went down into the stack of hymn books the choir group had left by the door.

It was a good stack. Forty books, maybe fifty. She took out most of them.

"Are you okay?" Franklin was over her in two steps, hands out but not touching, like she was a downed power line.

"I'm fine." She was on her back in a nest of hymn books, blouse button undone, one boot in the air. "This is not how I pictured tonight going, honestly."

"How did you picture it going?"

She thought about lying. She didn't bother.

"Not like this."

He picked up the tool belt and cinched it back on, and then he offered her his good hand and hauled her up like she weighed nothing, which was its own small problem, because now she knew he could do that.

They picked up the hymn books in silence. He stacked. She handed. Halfway through the stack she found something wedged under the bottom row. Pink. Rubber. Faintly warm, like it had been sitting near a radiator.

"Franklin. What is this."

He looked. His face did three things fast.

"That's a hot water bottle," he said.

"I can see it's a hot water bottle. Why is it in a pile of hymn books?"

"The choir ladies. They practice in the back room. One of them probably..." He shrugged. "People bring their comfort items to choir. It's a whole thing."

Jolene turned it over in her hands. It had a dent in one side like a face. It was, objectively, the least sexy object ever manufactured. And something about it, the pink rubber, the little screw cap, the fact that some choir director had left