The Dryad’s Trap (Bathhouse Beasts #14)

The Dryad’s Trap Hudson

The Dryad’s Trap: Hudson

The welding torch in my hand was the only thing that had felt good and steady and dependable for the past few years.

It sounded dramatic. It wasn’t supposed to be dramatic.

It was just the truth. Me and a stick of arc and a length of three-quarter steel laid out on the table.

Behind the hood the whole rest of the world was simplified down to a single bright bead of molten metal and the steady pulse of my own breath in the dark.

Everything that wasn’t the weld stopped existing.

The shop noise, like the grinder over in Espinoza’s bay, the country station somebody had left on, and the diesel rattle of a forklift outside, all of it went somewhere else.

Here there was just me, the torch, and the bead.

I’d been welding for almost fifteen years.

Started at eighteen, the summer after I graduated, when my uncle pulled me into his shop because my mother had threatened to throw me out if I didn’t stop sleeping until noon.

He’d handed me a hood and a stinger and said, Don’t look at the arc without the hood, don’t touch the metal after you’ve welded it, and don’t ask me any questions until you’ve tried it yourself for at least an hour.

That was the entirety of my training. I’d burned a hole through the first piece of steel he gave me, sweated through my shirt, and somewhere in the second hour I’d laid down a bead that looked, if you squinted, like it might hold in a strong breeze.

By the end of that summer I knew this was what I was going to do.

By the end of that fall I was getting paid for it.

Fifteen years later I was still doing it, in a different shop, for different money, and that was one of maybe four things in my life that had stayed consistent.

I finished the seam, set the stinger in its cradle, pushed the hood up, and looked at my work.

Clean. Even. The kind of weld you could photograph for a brochure if anyone in fabrication ever bothered with brochures.

I ran my gloved knuckle along the cooled section just to feel the small steady ridge of it.

Fifteen years in and that little proof that I could do something right still got me, every time.

“Hudson.” Espinoza called over from his bay. “We’re going to the bar after work. You in?”

“Not tonight, man.”

“It’s Friday.”

“I know what day it is.”

“You said that last Friday.”

“I’ll say it next Friday too. Saves us both the conversation.”

He laughed and shook his head and went back to grinding.

We’d been doing this for three years, ever since I’d started at the shop.

Espinoza was a good guy with two kids and a wife who liked him.

And he had a habit of inviting me out for beers I never accepted.

He’d given up on me a long time ago in any meaningful sense.

The invitation was a ritual at this point, a way of saying I know you’re alive, I see you over there.

I appreciated it. I just wasn’t going to the bar.

I cleaned my station the way I cleaned it every Friday.

The slag was chipped off, my stinger coiled, the rod stubs went in the bucket, and my hood hung on the hook beside the table where it would be Monday morning when I came in.

The shop wasn’t going to be empty for long though.

A couple of the other guys ran weekend hours.

But for me, Friday at four was a hard stop.

I’d negotiated that into my offer letter and I held to it like a man holding to a religion.

Friday at four I walked out of the shop, and whatever happened between then and Monday morning at seven was nobody’s business but mine.

I peeled off my jacket and hood, hung the apron, and grabbed my leather jacket off the hook by the side door.

The October air outside was cold enough to feel good on my face that had been behind a hood all afternoon.

I let the door bang shut behind me, lit a cigarette I didn’t really want, and stood there for a second watching my breath and the cigarette smoke do the same thing in the late-afternoon light.

Then I got in my truck and drove home.

Home was a one-bedroom on the second floor of a brown brick building on Washington, eight blocks from the shop.

I’d lived there for the last couple years.

Before that I’d lived in a slightly bigger one-bedroom on Lincoln for five years, and before that I’d lived with David in a nice apartment that I now refused to think about.

The Washington apartment had a small kitchen, a smaller bathroom, a living room with a couch and a TV and one good lamp, and a bedroom with a king bed I bought when I moved in and didn’t share with anybody.

There was a window in the bedroom that faced an alley and let in a square of sun for about forty minutes a day.

There were no plants. There were no framed pictures.

There was one decent armchair I’d inherited from my uncle when he’d died, and a bookshelf with maybe thirty books on it that I’d actually read.

And I had a small collection of vinyl I played sometimes when I was cooking.

It wasn’t much, but it was enough. It had always been enough since everything with David went tits up.

I dropped my keys in the bowl by the door, pulled off my boots, and went straight to the shower the way I did every Friday.

Welding dust, scaled smoke, and the particular grimy film of a forty-hour week.

All of it down the drain. I stood under the hot water with my forehead pressed to the tile and let the heat work into my shoulders, which were always knotted on Fridays from a week of being hunched over a table.

My right shoulder more than the left. The price of nearly two decades of one-handed work.

When I came out of the shower I wrapped a towel around my waist and walked to the bedroom and looked, for a long minute, at the duffel bag sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed.

The duffel was already half-packed. It had been half-packed since last weekend.

I rarely bothered to empty it completely since I knew exactly what I’d be doing the following weekend.

That was part of the ritual. Sweatpants, a couple of t-shirts, two pairs of clean underwear I wouldn’t end up using, my toothbrush, a comb, a pair of sandals, my membership card in the inside zip pocket where I’d kept it for the last four years.

I dropped my phone charger in. I added a paperback I was halfway through, knowing I wouldn’t read it and I zipped the bag shut.

I looked at myself in the mirror over the dresser.

Hudson Marsh, thirty-three years old, six-foot-two, two hundred and ten pounds of a man who’d spent most of his adult life lifting heavy things and was starting to feel that in his lower back.

Sandy blond hair I cut myself when it got annoying.

Stubble I rarely paid any attention to. Hazel eyes that my second boyfriend had once called cold, which I’d taken as a compliment at the time because I thought it made me a badass.

But, in retrospect, it had probably signalled the start of the end of our relationship.

A jaw that had been broken in a bar fight when I was twenty-three and had healed slightly crooked, which I liked.

A scar on my left eyebrow from a flying piece of slag that hadn’t quite cleared my hood five years ago, which I also liked.

All in all, a body that wasn’t exactly pretty, but worked nonetheless.

I’d been told, more than once, that I was handsome in a way that was difficult to be around. I’d never figured out what that meant. I’d stopped trying to. But considering my lack of lasting relationships, they were right.

I got dressed. Jeans, a clean black t-shirt, the same beat-up brown leather jacket I’d been wearing since 2009. I grabbed the duffel, killed the lights, and locked the apartment behind me.

For the past few years I’d been a lone wolf, following my schedule like clockwork.

But you don’t decide to be a lone wolf. Nobody does.

Nobody sits down at twenty-five and thinks I would like to spend the next dozen years of my life sleeping diagonally across a king mattress alone.

You arrive at it the way you arrive at any other shape your life ends up taking.

Slowly and through a series of small adjustments to the things that have hurt you, until one day you look up and realize the adjustments have congealed into a person who, now, is detached from everything and everyone.

The first hurt had been Caleb. We’d been twenty when we met, twenty-two when we moved in together, twenty-four when I came home a day early from a job in Indiana and found him in our bed with a guy from his office.

I don’t remember being angry about it, exactly.

What I remember is the strange, clinical calm of standing in the bedroom doorway watching the two of them scramble for the sheets and thinking oh, so that’s what this is.

I packed a bag, went to my uncle’s for a week, and never went back to that apartment.

Caleb called for three months. I never answered.

He sent a letter eventually, a long one, full of the kind of careful regret you can only manufacture on paper.

I threw it away without opening it. People who fuck their coworkers in your bed don’t get to write you letters.