The Site Supervisor's Game

I was thirty-four years old and standing alone in my own lobby at eleven at night, and I want to tell you it felt like power, because it did. The Renwick Hotel was mine on paper, every arch and every sconce, three years of my life poured into a building that used to be a furniture warehouse, and now here I was walking the last walkthrough before the safety inspection, my boots crunching dust on plastic sheeting while the chandeliers hung overhead like wrapped presents nobody had opened yet.

Reggie had done his nine o'clock round already and waved at me from the loading door like he always does, a little two-fingered thing, and I'd told him I'd be out by eleven and he'd said have a good one, Ms. Smiths, and that was the last human interaction I had for almost an hour. That mattered later, believe me.

So I finished my lap of the lobby, ran my hand along the exposed brick where the old paint had been stripped back, and then I did the thing I'd been circling all night, which was checking the camera feeds one more time. The whole third-floor camera system was disconnected for the night, scheduled outage for the electrician's panel work on Friday, and I confirmed it twice on the site tablet before I let myself smile about it. A girl plans. A girl covers her tracks.

Then I stood there under the plastic-wrapped chandeliers with my phone in my hand and my pulse doing something unprofessional, and I texted Karl Dumas the address and four words after it. Penthouse, west stairwell, come alone. You won't regret it. I hit send and immediately felt like I was twenty-two again, except I was thirty-four and I'd earned every ounce of the nerve it took.

Here's the history, quickly, because you need it. Karl and I were in the same graduate cohort, both of us chewing through our masters at the same time, and nothing ever happened back then because he was with someone and I was stupid in other ways. Then three years ago, when I was thirty-one, we both showed up at the alumni mixer alone and bored, and by two in the morning we were in his car in the parking garage and I learned exactly how patient that man could be.

* * *

I had thought about that night more times than I'd ever admit to anyone, the way he'd backed me against the passenger door and asked me first, plain as anything, "Tell me you want this, Annabelle, because I'll drive you home right now if you don't." And I'd said yes, yes, obviously yes, and he'd gone to his knees right there in the garage with the engine ticking and pushed my dress up and put his mouth on my pussy like he was studying for an exam he intended to ace, and I'd come so hard I'd left handprints on the ceiling of a Honda.

Afterwards, back at his place, he'd fucked me slow and deliberate while I dug my heels into his back, his cock dragging against that spot until I was saying his name like a prayer with a stutter in it, and when he finally came he'd groaned into my neck and gone completely still, and I'd thought, this man is mine now. Except he wasn't, because six weeks later his firm transferred him to Denver and he called me about it like he was reading a change order off a blueprint. Cool. Reasonable. Gone.

So yes, I had a grudge, and the grudge had a body, and the body was arriving in forty minutes.

* * *

The penthouse suite on the fifth floor was nothing yet, just framing and a subfloor and two big openings where windows would eventually be, and the unfinished bathroom still had its rough plumbing stubbing out of the wall like sculpture. I set my leather briefcase on the drywall stack, and I took my time, because a girl plans.

Coat first, actually coat last, I decided, so I peeled off my blouse and folded it, then my slacks, folded again, then everything else went in after, all of it squared away and neat the way I do everything, until the only things I was wearing were my yellow hard hat and my steel-toed boots. The night air came through the window openings and raised every hair on my body, and I will not pretend I didn't check my own reflection in the dusty glass, hard hat, boots, nothing in between, and I laughed out loud at myself, one sharp bark in that empty shell of a room.

"This is insane," I told my reflection, and my reflection said, "Do it anyway," which is the arrangement we've always had.

Because here's what I wanted, and I'd had three years to refine it. I wanted a reaction out of Karl Dumas. I wanted to crack that cool, patient, reasonable surface the way you crack a tile to see if the substrate's any good, and I wanted him to be the one who broke first this time, not me, not the girl who cried into her phone while he explained distance and careers to her like a project schedule.

So I turned off the work lights on five, tucked my briefcase behind a drywall stack where I could grab it later, and I went to the west stairwell to wait for him to arrive in the lobby below, and I have never in my life been more aware of my own heartbeat, or more pleased about being aware of it.

* * *

I heard the side door before I saw anything, the heavy fire-bar rattling, and then footsteps and then his voice, and God, his voice. "Annabelle?" Karl called, once, then again, louder. "Annabelle, I got your text. Hello?"

No answer from me, obviously. That was the game. He texted me instead, I felt the buzz against the concrete where I'd set my phone, and I looked down at it in the dark. I'm here. Where are you? No question mark anxiety in it, no exclamation, just Karl being Karl, flat and patient, and it made me grind my teeth and grin at the same time.

Then the door three floors up swung and clicked shut, and the echo rolled down the stairwell like a drum note, and I heard him stop moving entirely. Listening. Good, Karl, I thought, you're already playing.

I started down.

The west stairwell in that building is raw concrete, nothing finished, and every footstep I took came back at me doubled and tripled, so I took them slow, heel first, letting the sound announce me a full floor before I ever appeared. My boots on the concrete were the loudest thing in the building, and each step echoed off the walls and down the open middle of the stairwell to where he stood, and I could feel him listening the way you feel rain coming.

I knew what he'd see, too, because I'd planned it to the inch. The mezzanine landing on three sits right at the open edge of the atrium, and the lobby below has no ceiling glass yet over the west bay, just the framing, so the moon comes straight in and lays a strip of silver across the floor at about ten past eleven in October. I'd checked. A girl plans.

So when I reached the mezzanine I stepped out of the stairwell door and into that strip of moonlight, hard hat and boots and absolutely nothing else, and I stopped, right in the middle of it, and looked down through the open risers at the top of Karl Dumas's head.

He went still. Completely still, in a way that told me he'd seen me, because a man who hadn't seen me would have kept moving.

"Annabelle," he said, and it wasn't loud, but the stairwell gave it back to me twice.

"Careful," I called down, my voice bouncing off all that raw concrete, "it's a construction site. Safety first. Where's your hard hat, consultant?"

Silence for a second, then a sound I can only describe as a laugh with the safety off. "You're going to explain this," he said, "or you're going to come down here."

"Oh, I don't think so," I said, and leaned one hand on the rail where he could see the whole silhouette of me in the moonlight, every inch, and I swear the night air on my skin felt like applause. "You came to my building, Karl. My rules. You remember how my rules work, don't you?"

I heard him set his bag down on the lobby floor, slowly, and I smiled in the dark.

I stayed there at the rail long enough for him to get a good long look, and then I stepped back into the dark and found the sheet of plywood I'd laid flat across the mezzanine floor earlier that evening, because I have core samples of dust on every surface up there and I was not getting splinters out of my ass at one in the morning, professional pride matters. I heard him climb the stairs behind me, slow, each step deliberate, and I didn't turn around, I just watched the moonlight stripe slide across the plywood and waited until his shadow reached the edge of it and stopped.

"You're late," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect. "Now you watch. Don't move. Don't speak."

And God bless him, the man actually obeyed, because I heard nothing from him, not a footstep, not a word, just the sound of his breathing changing, going shallow, and that alone was worth the price of admission. I stood there on the plywood with dust motes swirling around me in the moonlight like the whole mezzanine was snowing indoors, and I started to walk the perimeter of the railing, slow, one hand trailing along the cold steel, and the metal was so cold it bit my palm every few feet and raised gooseflesh all the way up my arms, and I could feel every inch of my own skin for the first time in what felt like years. Three circuits, I told myself. Do three circuits. Do not look at him. Make him come to you, or don't come to him at all, either way he's the one on the clock now.

"The Renwick opens in the spring," I said, on the second circuit, because silence was going to make me laugh and I couldn't laugh, laughing would end everything. "Three years. Every beam, every window opening, every damn switch plate, mine. And you waltz in for a two-week safety review like the building invited you." I ran my hand along the rail and it sang a little, steel humming under my fingers. "The building didn't invite you, Karl. I did."

Still nothing from him. I could feel him at the edge of the moonlight the way you feel a draft under a door, and it was maddening and wonderful, because Karl Dumas had once explained a breakup to me in the calm voice he probably used for change orders, and now he was standing in my building in the dark, mute, watching me parade my naked ass