Driving Her Wild

“No offense, but you ought to be fired.”

“Listen...” He dredged his memory for her name, but the image of her naked body seemed to have crowded it out. “Sorry—what’s your name again?”

“Steph.”

“Right, right. Listen, Steph, I’ve got a mortgage to pay and—” The flashlight beam had dropped to her chest again. He raised it enough to register the murder in her eyes. “Sorry. I can’t lose this job.”

“You can’t perform this job.” She snatched the flashlight from him, illuminating her chin ghost-story style, the more seductive parts of her mercifully lost in the shadows.

“Let me call my cousin. He owns the company and he’s a way better electrician than me. I’ll get him to help me figure out what I messed up, and maybe you, me and him are the only people who’ll ever need to know about any of this...?” He let her see how desperate he felt, gave her the shifty hound-dog eyebrows and everything.

“Do you have any concept of how unprofessional this is?”

He ignored the temptation to suggest that flashing strange men in your place of work wasn’t exactly Employee of the Year material, either. “I do.”

“If there was a fire, we would die in here. And given how great my evening’s going so far, that’s the obvious next step.”

“Please. Let me call my cousin, and if he can’t walk me through it...” What, then? He didn’t have the first clue, but he really couldn’t lose this job. If he did, his house would go next, an idea too awful to contemplate. “Lemme call him, okay? Please, Steph?”

Her shoulders dropped. “Fine. I’m going to finish my shower, and if you still don’t have a clue by the time I’m dressed, I will call 9-1-1. I’m not sleeping in here all night.”

“Great. I’ll need my flashlight back, though.”

She slapped it onto his palm, hard enough to sting, and relit her phone, illuminating her way into the locker room.

3

STEPH TOWELED OFF by her phone’s scant glow and pulled on her date clothes.

Any second now, she chanted in her head. Any second now, the lights would come back on. Please, let them come back on. She didn’t want to spend the night here. Her evening had sucked hard enough already.

But she also didn’t want to get Patrick fired. Technically he probably deserved it, but he reminded her too much of her younger brother, Tim. Sweet guy, but so clueless. She’d be angry to hear about anybody getting Tim fired for screwing something up—which he probably did every single day at the auto shop where he worked—and it made the idea of doing the same to Patrick feel gross. Though she would firmly suggest he look into a third vocation.

She found him in the back corner of the gym before the open fuse box, talking on his phone, flashlight gripped between his arm and ribs.

“No,” he was saying, “it doesn’t have one. This thing’s practically made of mammoth tusks. Half of it’s still K and T.”

Steph tugged the flashlight free, aiming it at the panel as he poked and fussed.

“Thanks,” he mouthed.

The fuse box was a massive thing, with rows and rows of toggle switches and several dead, frayed wires leading nowhere. This building was easily over a hundred years old, and not well maintained. Perhaps this would be a tricky puzzle for even a decent electrician to solve. Maybe he was a decent electrician. Maybe his evening was proving even more frustrating than hers. She felt embarrassed for bitching him out.

“Yeah,” he said. “I think so. Hang on.” He set his phone down and pulled on a pair of gloves from his tool belt. Steph stepped away a pace, watching his back flex as he messed with something or other. She could see the shapes of his lats and traps and the swell of his deltoid, and wondered how he’d gotten those. She’d always had a weakness for a man with a nice back. She pondered what he might look like, doing push-ups with his shirt off—

Suddenly, a miracle.

She gasped as the overhead lights flickered to life with buzzes and ticks. Patrick whooped and picked up his phone. “You hear that? You are a lifesaver. I owe you. Again. Okay, go back to sleep. Oh—who won tonight? Nice. Later, man.”

He turned to Steph, beaming and incredulous. Smiling this way, he made her forget how annoying he was in light of how handsome he was. Nothing flashy, just an honest sort of face, but that smile lit him up. It lit her up, too, in ways she’d sworn she was done feeling toward guys like Patrick Doherty.

“Okay,” he said. “Now all I have to do is make sure the security system’s working and we can get the hell out of here.”

They walked to the front of the gym.

“Green light!” he said as the panel came into view. But his smile drooped as they got closer. Not green—yellow.

“What does yellow mean?” Steph asked, pushing on the bar of the door. Still locked.

“I dunno.”

They peered at the little digital screen. Custom settings lost. Enter access PIN to reactivate default settings.

“That’s okay,” Patrick said. “It’ll only take a minute to re-program the hours.” He crouched for the manual, finding the label printed with the device’s serial number and code.

“Four nine four, zero two two...” He hit Enter. The light turned red. PIN not recognized.

“Hmm.” He entered the digits again. PIN not recognized. 5 incorrect PINs will result in system lockdown. Two chances blown.

“Let me see.” Steph gave it a try, but he hadn’t misread the numbers. PIN not recognized. 5 incorrect PINs will result in system lockdown. “What the hell?”

“It worked earlier. Maybe there’s some other code in here, for this situation...” He flipped through the booklet. “Or I could look up troubleshooting tips on my phone.”

Dear God, the so-called expert they’d hired was going to Google his way out of this? Wilinski’s really did need all the help it could get.

“This is still an improvement,” he said.

“How?”

“We’ve got power again. And lucky for you, I got that new flat-screen all wired up. Why don’t you watch a movie or something? I’m sure I’ll figure this out in no time.”

Steph wished she believed him, but nothing he’d yet done had instilled her with even the tiniest speck of confidence. “Fine.”

She dried her hair in the locker room then grabbed a sports drink from the fridge in the office, jotting it on the lengthy I.O.U. list Mercer kept taped to the wall.

In the screening room there was a shelf lined with VHS tapes and DVDs—old boxing matches and MMA footage, plus a nice library of fight flicks. She picked The Karate Kid, her favorite from kindergarten. The movie had probably shaped the entire course of her life. She hit Play. Two recliners sat side by side, and she plopped into one with a weary huff.

She was supposed to be at a bar, nursing a vodka and tonic and hitting it off with Dr. Dylan. Yet here she was, drinking Powerade at work well after closing time. Story of her life. The past couple years, she’d often lamented feeling trapped in the gym. This was just sick—the first week of her fight retirement and here she was, literally trapped in one.

She was just nodding off, mouthing along with the movie dialogue, when a knock on the doorframe jerked her wide awake.

Patrick was smiling in a way she didn’t trust one bit.

“So?”

“Yeah, so...”

She groaned. “Seriously?”