Conrad
I couldn’t focus on the sound of my name coming through her lips. Shouldn’t.
But ignoring that left me with the obvious reality that she was half frozen.
Lili sat in the cab shivering. Her coat was soaked and her hands were tucked under her arms. The next words from her mouth, after my name, made me feel like a horse’s ass.
“Is there anywhere to get something warm? The coffee didn’t cut it… ”
I fought the urge to suggest my house, the whiskey I could pour for us…the whiskey I was now imagining drizzling on her chest as she moaned. What the actual fuck was wrong with me?
I cleared my throat. “Well, assuming you don’t want to turn around and head right back to the Foundry, Kincaid's is still open. Diner across from the airfield."
"The one Diaz was telling me about?"
"Yeah."
"Let's go there."
I should have said the inn probably had something, but I drove her to the place where half the town gathered, where Marlene Kincaid would see me walk in with a woman and remember it for the next thirty years.
"All right," I said, because apparently I couldn't deny this woman a thing.
The diner was a long low brick building with foggy windows and the type of light that made everything inside look warm and amber from the parking lot. I'd been coming here on Saturday mornings for two years. Marlene knew my order. She knew when I wanted to talk, which was never.
We dashed through the downpour to the covered awning to the diner.
I held the door for Lili. The bell above it rang and the smell hit us both — bacon grease and coffee and the vinyl of the booths that hadn't been replaced since Marlene's parents ran the place.
The lady herself was behind the counter with a pot in her hand and a towel over one shoulder.
She had her silver-streaked brown hair pulled back and her reading glasses on a chain.
She looked up when we came in, looked at Lili, looked at me, and her eyebrows rose about a quarter of an inch. That was all she gave it.
"Holt. Booth in the back's open."
"Thanks, Marlene."
"Who's your friend?"
"Ms. Lillianne Ashford. New regional manager at the airfield."
Marlene looked at Lili — soaked coat, damp hair — and said, "You look like you need soup."
"I really do," Lili said, and something in her voice — grateful, tired, honest — made Marlene nod in a way that meant she'd already decided to like her.
"Chicken and wild rice today. Sit down. I'll bring it."
We took the back booth. Lili slid into one side, I slid into the other. The vinyl was cracked and warm. The tabletop was worn smooth from decades of elbows and coffee cups. Through the foggy window I could see the airfield across the road, the hangar lights on their timer.
Marlene made her way over, gestured with the coffee pot.
I shook my head and Lili frowned. “I’d take some just to hold onto, but I can’t drink any more this late or I’ll never sleep.
” Marlene shrugged and poured Lili a mug of the Joe, didn’t ask questions, and went back to her station at the counter.
Lili wrapped her hands around the mug and sighed, then she looked at me. "How long have you been at Forge Creek?"
"Two years."
A nod. ”Where before?"
"West Virginia."
"Doing the same work?"
"Similar."
She frowned. "You don't give much away, do you."
"No, ma'am."
"Lili."
I didn't say it back. Not here. Not in Marlene's diner where half of Forge Creek could walk in.
Marlene showed up with a steaming bowl of soup, and Lili picked up the spoon immediately.
I watched her fingers curl around the handle — the calluses on her thumb, nails trimmed short, no polish.
She brought the spoon to her mouth and blew on it and her lips pursed and I …
was barely holding my shit together thinking about those lips.
She ate and in between bites, she asked me about what kind of contracts we dealt with, the repair schedule for the fleet — and the questions had a quality to them I couldn't quite place. Like she already knew what the answers should be and was checking them against what I'd say.
I was watching her mouth close around the spoon when the door opened and a familiar voice carried across the diner.
“Ah! Holt. This’ll save me a trip.”
Hank Mullins wore a reflective vest over the flannel jacket spanning his broad shoulders.
His thick gray mustache puffed out from weathered skin.
The public works foreman knew every road, pipe, and bridge in this town, and he'd been coordinating with the airfield on equipment lifts since before I was born.
Hank didn't wait for an invitation. He slid into the booth next to me, nodded at Lili, and said, "Ms. Ashford. I haven’t had a chance to introduce myself. But I know exactly who you are.”
"Word travels fast."
"Small town." He flagged Marlene, who was already bringing him a bowl of oatmeal. "Holt, I need to talk to you about the Ridgeline gig. County's pushing the road crew schedule up two weeks. They want the bridge inspection equipment on-site by the twentieth."
"The twentieth's tight," I said. "The Bell's on the Pinedale rotation through the end of the month."
"Can you make it work?"
"Depends on Pinedale."
Lili set her spoon down. "What's the maintenance window for that aircraft?"
Hank looked at her. I clenched my stomach muscles, wondering where this question came from, wondering if that was why she was walking in the rain after dark. "November," I said.
"The hours are close," she said. "If Pinedale runs long and you add a Ridgeline lift on top of it, you'll be over interval before the maintenance cycle opens."
Hank looked at me. The kind of look a man gives when somebody's just said the thing he was thinking.
"She's right about the hours," Hank said. Plainspoken. Not picking sides. Just saying what was true.
"I know the bird," I said. "We'll make it."
"I'd like to focus on the maintenance,” Lili said. "Start mid-October. I’d rather have safe machines than squeeze in additional flights.”
It was the right call. Hank knew it. I knew it. Marlene, wiping down the counter fifteen feet away, probably knew it.
"I've been running that rotation for two years," I said. "November works."
Lili looked at me. I watched her weigh her options— push back or let it go.
I knew my equipment, and I knew that locals did not just say no to Hank Mullins.
But Lili had a choice to make about how she was going to manage her father’s company.
"Okay," she said after another bite of soup. "I trust your judgement.”
She picked her spoon back up.
Hank slurped at his oatmeal and didn't say a word. After a minute he talked to me about the weather and I gave him the answers he needed and he finished his mush and stood up.
"Ms. Ashford." He tipped his chin at her. "Nice to meet you. Glad we can work this out, Holt."
He left with the tinkle of the bell above the door and Marlene whooshed in to clear his plate.
Lili finished the soup in silence. I watched her tear a piece of bread in half and I thought about her hands and her mouth.
I thought about taking her to my house. I thought about making her something warm and watching her eat it at my table and I shut that down so hard I felt the slam of it in my joints.
"We should go," I said. “Rain’s getting worse."
She put cash on the table before I could. I didn't fight her on it. Marlene caught my eye as we passed the counter and gave me a look that said nothing and everything. By morning, every man in my hangar would know I was here with the boss.
The drive to the inn was both silent and too loud. The rain hammered the roof, but Lili was finally warm enough that she stopped shivering. I pulled up as close to the door as I could so she wouldn’t get wet again.
She didn't get out immediately. "Thank you," she said. "For the soup. And the ride."
"You're welcome."
"Conrad."
She said it quietly. Just my name. No question attached. The same way she'd said it in the truck before, except now she was looking at me.
"Good night, Ms. Ashford."
She smiled, a small, pinched expression. She got out and shut the door and I watched her perfect ass sway as she walked. I didn't pull away until the light came on in one of the windows upstairs.
My house was dark. The motorcycle in the garage was where I'd left it, half-rebuilt, going nowhere. I stood in the kitchen and drank one finger of whiskey and looked at the chair across the table where nobody sat.
Two years of this. Empty rooms and careful distance and the belief that I deserved this solitude.
She'd let me win at the diner, override her, and the grace of that had settled somewhere in my chest I couldn't reach to pull it out. Was it grace? A test? I thought back to her questions about our flight schedules and the way she wanted to give up easy money with Hank’s contract. I couldn’t make sense of it and my thoughts were clouded with the lust I felt surging through my body.
I rinsed my glass and went to bed. I lay in the dark and listened to the rain on the roof and I willed myself not to think of Lili alone in her room at the inn.
I did not succeed.