4. Hugo
Hugo
The drive back from the south bridge is quiet, too damn quiet, so much so, I’m pulled into my own thoughts and right now, I can’t stop thinking about her waist, how soft her body felt beneath my touch.
Christ. I turn my thoughts to the notebook and the way she closed it too fast, the way she said Probably not, when I asked if I was in it.
You shouldn't use me for a hero.
I meant it as a fact, not because of modesty. I fix roads, I keep people from driving off mountains. That’s useful; it’s not heroic, whatever she thinks she saw out there. Writers romanticize things; that’s their job, taking ordinary men and making them into something else on the page.
"For the record," Elsie says, breaking the silence, "I had that slip completely under control."
I inwardly scoff. "No, you didn't."
She releases a harsh breath. "I was recalibrating."
I snort. "You were falling."
"Strategically."
I glance at her and see that she has her chin up, daring me to argue further, and there’s a small, stubborn satisfaction on her face like she’s already decided she has won this regardless of what I say next.
"You need proper boots," I say. "If you're coming to sites again."
"I didn't realize that temporary admin assistants came with a wardrobe critique."
Christ, she’s a riot. "It comes with not breaking your ankle."
"I can buy my own boots, Hugo."
"I didn't say you couldn't."
She looks at me for a second like she is deciding whether to push it further. Thankfully she doesn’t.
"Whitfield and Sons has decent ones," I say. "Doris will set you up, tell her what you need them for, she'll know the right grip."
I see her gape at me out of the corner of my eye. "Are you sending me to the hardware store like I'm a problem you're delegating?"
"I'm sending you to the hardware store because you need boots."
She makes a small sound that sounds as though she's being strangled. I don’t comment, I keep my eyes on the road.
Back at the office, she gets to work fast. She uploads the new bridge photos, cross-references them against the SB-1 log, writes a clean note explaining the supplementary documentation and why the timestamp matters.
She does it all without asking me anything, which means either she understood everything I told her at the site, or she’s better at this than she is letting on.
Probably both.
I watch her work for longer than I should, standing near my own desk, pretending to look at a weather report, one that I’ve already read twice this morning.
She has taken over half the desk with sticky notes and labelled folders and a system of color coding that I don’t fully understand, but that appears to be working. The chaos that has lived in this office for two years is getting smaller, piece by piece, under her hands.
I don’t like how impressed I am by it all. I especially don’t like that some part of me wants to ask her to stay late tonight and keep going, not because the grant needs it, even though it does, but because I’m not ready for the office to go quiet again.
"You've got a visitor," Corey says, putting his head through the door. He’s looking at the desk, not at Elsie, with something like awe on his face. "Did she actually finish the south bridge folder?"
"Working on it," Elsie says without looking up.
"Boss, this is a miracle." His face bright with joy.
"Corey," I say.
"What? I said miracle."
"Shoulder readings," I instruct him.
"Going." He disappears.
Elsie’s smiling slightly when I look back at her and I don’t like that Corey was the one that made her smile. God, that's an unreasonable thing to feel and I’ve no idea why I’m affected by her like this.
"Hugo."
I look up to see that she’s frowning at the screen, scrolling between two windows. "The crew hours on SB-1 don't match the invoice dates," she says. "Your log shows work completed across four days in March. The materials invoice shows delivery on a fifth day that isn't logged anywhere."
I come around to look and see that she’s right. There is a gap, a full day of invoiced material with no corresponding crew hours.
"That'll get flagged," she says. "An inspector’s going to ask why you paid for materials on a day nobody was recorded as working."
"There's an explanation. Storm delay, the crew got rerouted to an emergency culvert repair, and the south bridge materials sat at the site an extra day before we used them."
"Okay. So, we note that. Materials delivered ahead of scheduled work due to weather rerouting, crew hours logged starting the following day." She is already typing. "That's not a problem if it's explained. It's only a problem if it looks like nobody's watching the money."
I look at the screen, then at her. "Good catch," I say.
"Careful," she says, not looking up, "that almost sounded like approval."
"It was."
She stops typing for half a second. "Oh," she says.
I go find out who the visitor is before I can watch what her face does next. I need to put some distance between us.
Her phone buzzes on the desk; she glances at it, flips it face down without reading it, and keeps typing.
It buzzes again, but this time her hands go still on the keyboard for one beat too long and then she picks the phone up, looks at it, and sets it back down, face up this time, like it doesn’t matter.
It’s close enough that I can see part of the screen from where I am standing; just a name, Daniel.
I can also make out a line of a message that I shouldn’t be reading, but I am anyway.
Heard you're playing mountain girl now.
I look away because it’s not mine to see. "Problem?" I ask anyway.
"No."
I don’t believe her.
"It's personal," she says. "I have it handled."
I should leave it there. It’s not my business who’s texting her or why her face just drained of color. I have no claim on her, no right to ask, and no good reason to care beyond the basic fact that she works in my office. I don’t like watching someone get hurt and pretend they’re not.
"If someone's bothering you," I say, "you can say that."
Her head comes up fast. "I don't need you to rescue me, Hugo."
"I didn't say you did."
"Your face said it."
My lips twitch at her words, even upset she’s hilarious. "My face does a lot of things, apparently, that I'm not aware of."
"It does." She is still gripping the phone. "I don't need rescuing. I need to finish this folder."
"Fine."
She goes back to typing, harder than necessary. I let it sit for a minute. Then I say, because I cannot quite leave it alone, "Whoever it is, they don't get to keep doing that from a distance."
She laughs, short and not happy. "My ex has a hobby. It's making me feel stupid from a distance. He's very good at it. Lots of practice."
"Doesn't make you stupid."
"You don't know that. Maybe I'm extremely pathetic and very committed to the brand."
"No." I say it flat, the same way I tell a crew member a guardrail will not hold. My tone is a way of letting them know what I’ve said isn’t up for debate.
She looks at me for a second. Something in her face softens, just slightly, before she catches it and pulls it back into something lighter.
"Anyway," she says, "the south bridge folder isn't going to finish itself."
She goes back to work, and I recognize the distraction because I do the same thing, stay busy, keep moving, give nobody room to ask follow-up questions. I’ve spent twenty years doing exactly that, since I was old enough to be the one people called instead of the one who got to be looked after.
By six, the office has mostly emptied out, Darnell left twenty minutes ago; Corey clocked out an hour before that.
After I told him twice, the shoulder readings weren’t optional.
The radios have gone quiet and the light outside the window has dropped to that flat grey that means it will be dark soon and colder than it already is.
Elsie is still at the desk.
"You can go," I say.
"I want to finish uploading the rest of these. Half-organized systems offend me on a personal level."
"It's getting dark."
"I have headlights, Hugo. They're very advanced, in fact they came as standard."
"The shoulder near your cabin road is still soft. I don't want you driving it after dark if you don't have to."
She finally looks up. "Is there anything in Forge Creek you don't personally worry about?"
"No."
She blinks like she expected a longer answer and did not get one.
I come around the desk to check the final bridge folder before she closes it out for the night, and that is when I end up standing closer to her than I meant to.
She has a streak of ink on the side of her finger, and a piece of hair has come loose from the knot at the back of her head and is sitting against her jaw.
My hand moves before I tell it to, intending to push that piece of hair back, I stop myself before I reach it.
She notices, of course she notices, she notices everything, it turns out, including things I would rather she did not.
"Do you always stop yourself," she says quietly, "from doing things you want to do?"
I look at her. "Yes," I say.
"Why?"
"Because wanting something doesn't make it right."
The words sit there between us. She doesn’t look away, her eyes are steady on mine, hazel, tired, not backing down, and I am aware of exactly how little distance there is between us and how easy it would be to close it.
I do not. I step back instead. "I'll follow you down to the cabin road," I say. "Make sure the shoulder's holding."
"I don't need an escort."
"I know." I grab my jacket off the hook. "You're getting one anyway."
She doesn’t argue further, which surprises me more than it should.
I follow her taillights the whole way down, the shoulder is holding fine, better than I expected given the temperature, but I watch it anyway, watch the soft patch near the bend, watch her brake lights flash once and then steady as she takes it slow like I told her to.
She turns onto the cabin road, and I stop at the junction to watch her lights disappear into the trees.
I sit here with both hands on the wheel for longer than I need to.
I’ve spent most of my life saying no to things I wanted.
It’s easier that way; cleaner and safer for everyone involved, including the people who never had to find out what I would have done if I had let myself want something out loud.
Then her taillights vanish completely into the dark, and I sit here in this cold truck knowing there’s nothing clean or safe about the way I want her.