The Forklift and the Heiress

For the record, I did not plan any of this. What happened was my coworker Dee found my phone on the break room table and saw the app on it, and instead of minding her business like a normal human being she swiped through my matches and read them out loud like she was doing a radio show. Most of them were fine. Boring, even. Then she got to the one that said, and I quote, "I like women who drive big machines and take orders badly. Tuesday. The Rusty Spigot. Wear something you can kneel in."

Dee laughed so hard she had to sit down on the grease barrel. "Kneel in? Sam, what kind of freak show are you running on your phone?"

"None of your kind of freak show," I said, grabbing for it, but she held it over her head and kept reading.

"Her name is Agatha. Agatha! Who names their kid Agatha after age ninety?"

"Rich people," I said, and then I wanted to bite my own tongue off, because that gave Dee the whole game, that I'd gone looking for something specific after my breakup, something I couldn't put words to at the time. Something about handing the wheel over for a night and finding out what happened.

So anyway. Tuesday came, and I went, because I'm thirty-four years old and I told Dee I wasn't scared of a woman on an app, and once you say a thing like that out loud in a break room you either show up or you live with it forever. Dee drove me halfway and then made me get out two blocks early so nobody could testify she'd been involved.

The Rusty Spigot is not the kind of place rich people go. It's got a sign where the S flickers, and the coffee tastes like it was brewed during the previous administration, and the waitress has been there so long she doesn't write anything down anymore. I sat in a booth by the window at seven sharp, wearing jeans and a soft old flannel, because nobody was going to catch me in a dress at a diner called the Spigot, and I watched the door like I was the one running the trap.

She walked in at 7:02 looking like she'd taken a wrong turn off a yacht. Tall, silver hair cut short and sharp, a coat that probably cost more than my truck. Forty-two, the profile said, divorced, and the picture hadn't lied about the mouth. That mouth looked like it had ended board meetings and marriages with the same sentence.

She slid into the booth across from me without a hello. Looked me over the way you check a used car, top to bottom, lingering at the hands.

"Samira," she said. Not a question.

"Sam," I said.

"I didn't ask for the cheap version. Samira." She turned and caught the waitress without raising her hand. "Coffee for her. Black, no sugar. Nothing else."

"Hey, I can order for myself," I said, and even I could hear how it came out, thin and late.

"I'm sure you can." She folded her hands on the table. Her nails were short and unpolished, which surprised me more than the coat did. "But you won't. Not tonight. We're going to find out a lot of things about you, and that's the first one."

The waitress brought my coffee. I stared at it like it might be wired. I didn't touch it.

"So," Agatha said. "Forklifts."

"Forklifts," I agreed.

"You like it?"

"Best job I ever had. Warehouse pays the bills and the machine does what I tell it. Three thousand pounds goes where I point it. There's worse things than that."

"Than being obeyed by three thousand pounds." Something moved at the corner of her mouth, not quite a smile. "You would know, I suppose. Tell me about your body. What's strong on you and what isn't."

I nearly choked on nothing. "That's a hell of an opener."

"It's not an opener. It's question two. Your shoulders and forearms are strong, obviously. I'm asking about the rest. Lower back? Knees? Anything that hurts by Friday?"

And the stupid thing is I answered her. Straight, no games, like she was the company doctor. "Back's fine. Left knee clicks if I kneel too long on concrete. Wrists are good. I stretch, I'm not an idiot."

"Kneel too long," she repeated, writing nothing down, remembering everything. "Good to know. Now the real questions. You've done this before, some of it. Your messages were half brave and half bluff, which I enjoy. So. Limits. Say them out loud, here, where it counts."

"I don't..." I looked at the window. A guy outside was arguing with a parking meter. "I don't do marks where my shirt doesn't cover them. I don't do anything with, you know, bodily fluids beyond the usual. And I don't do being ignored. If you want to be cold to me, be cold, but be looking at me while you do it."

Silence for a second. Then she said, "That last one is interesting. Say more."

"I had a partner who stopped looking at me around year six. You learn what that does to a person." I picked up the coffee and drank it, black, no sugar, like I'd been ordered to, and hated that my hand was almost steady. "Anyway. Your turn. What do you want out of a warehouse girl in a diner on a Tuesday?"

"Something I'm not going to tell you yet." She leaned back. "But I'll tell you this. I've spent twenty years being handled by men who thought money made them interesting. I'm done being careful with people who bore me. You don't bore me yet. That's the compliment."

"Wow. Frame that!"

"There it is. The mouth." She looked pleased, actually pleased, and I didn't know what to do with that. "Keep it. I'll want it later."

Under the table, something touched my ankle. Soft, pointed, her shoe, resting there light as a fly landing. I didn't move. She pressed, a little firmer, not hard, just there, a question with a shoe for an answer.

I kept my eyes on her face and didn't pull my foot back. Didn't push into it either. Just held still and let her run the test, and watched her watch me not flinch.

"Good," she said quietly. "Very good."

"You could've just asked."

"Asked what. Whether you flinch? Anybody can answer that. This way I know." She signaled the waitress again. "We're leaving. You can finish that in the car."

"I haven't agreed to a car."

"No," she said, standing, putting money on the table without counting it. "But you will. That's the second thing we're going to find out about you."

I sat there a second with the coffee, thinking about Dee sitting in her car two blocks away like a terrible guardian angel, thinking about my knee that clicks on concrete, thinking about the fact that I had never in my life followed a rich woman out of a diner and also never once in my life done the smart boring thing when a door like this opened.

"Samira," she said from the door, without turning around.

I got up. I finished the coffee first, though. Somebody had to hold the line somewhere.

She had a car, of course. Black, cold as a bank vault inside, and she drove the way she did everything, like the road was lucky to be involved. I watched the warehouses go by from the passenger seat, wondering what Dee would say if she could see me. Dee would say I was an idiot. Dee would be right, probably, but there's a certain kind of night where being right doesn't help anybody.

"Winthrop Tower," she said, turning into a lot. "The hotel, not the office. Same building, different door."

"Fancy."

"It pays for itself." She parked and looked at me across the dark. "Here's the part where you decide. Not upstairs. Here." She took something out of her coat pocket and set it in my palm. A key card, warm from riding against her body. "Room 1408. Come up, or don't. But if you do, you follow the rules. My rules, my pace, my word on everything. You keep your mouth until I ask for it. And if it gets to be too much, you say Winthrop."

"That's your name."

"It's a better word than red. Harder to say by accident." She unlocked the doors. "Taxi company's number is in your phone. The diner's ten minutes back the way we came. Nobody would think less of you."

"That's the sales pitch? Nobody would think less of me?"

"It's the truth, and I don't sell." She got out and stood by the hood, waiting, not looking at me, which I figured was the point. Sit in the vault or walk through the door.

I got out. My knee clicked on the parking lot asphalt, not even concrete yet, and I took that as a joke aimed at me personally.

The elevator was mirrored and I didn't like what it showed, a big woman in a warehouse jacket following a rich lady like a