When Size Matters. Carly Laine

Commercial construction.”

      The part of my brain that was still working thought about that. Construction. Hard work. Hence the tan, the hands, those strong arms inside the rolled up sleeves. The long, tight legs.

      He pulled away again, let his arm fall down on my waist.

      Okay. I get it. We’re playing the old game of Restraint. The most nonchalant one wins. I was good at this, had been playing all my life. I cranked myself in and croaked out, “Why’d you need e-Boost?”

      He pulled away some more. “We put our project plans on the ‘Net,” he said, all business now. If I wasn’t careful, he was gonna win this game. “Time lines, permits—they all go up.”

      But I was world-class at Restraint. Or at least at being repressed. I pulled back, too. So now only our hands were touching. My breathing was back to normal. Almost.

      “Who’d you use instead of e-Boost?” I asked. If they had sent me up to Dallas, I would have sold him. Winning Restraint game strategy: Think about work not about his hands, strong and smooth, holding mine.

      “Just us. I used to work for a couple of start-ups,” he said. Mr. Easy Cool. Man, he’s good.

      And then I thought, This is all right. Talking like this. Getting to know each other. It’s nice. It’s good. I just wished he would kiss me again. His hands on my face. His mouth…

      “So, I still had some contacts from that, around the metro-plex,” he went on. His voice was becoming animated—about work! No restraint now. “I put together a team. Formed a new company. Man, we had a rough time, starting out. Worked every night and all weekends ’cause my partners had day jobs and I had real buildings to put up. We got it figured out, though. The slickest way to do the pages. And we started offering the service to the big guys, contractors and subs, first in Dallas and Fort Worth, and then all over the state.”

      “Are you technical?” I asked. I knew he wasn’t. I could always sniff out the techie guys. Sometimes literally. But I needed to show him how casual I was. Casual and brain dead.

      “Are you asking if I’m a geek?” He smiled, teeth glowing in the moonlight. “Naw. I understand it all on some level, but I’m mostly the idea guy. My partners have to do the dirty work. They like it though. I think a couple of them have those brain lobes you were talking about. The ones that are permanently shut off.”

      I liked how he’d heard what I said, even when I was babbling. And I really liked the way his voice sounded in the dark—soft and rumbley. Maybe this was turning out okay. The electric storm had simmered down to a kind of background turbulence. We looked at each other, glanced out over the water, then looked back. It wasn’t fireworks and shivers now. It was…what? And then one of my mom’s words popped up. Mellow.

      “What services do you offer?” I asked, letting myself get into it, learning about him.

      “You name it. We’re just getting started. Six whole customers. But they’re big. The coordination they need on a job can be staggering. So they contract with us to solve that.” As he talked, he forgot to sound as though he’d only made it through a third-grade panhandle education. He still stretched out some of the words and cut other ones short—but that’s like any good Texan.

      “The ‘Net gives you a control center.” He kept holding on to my hand and, as he explained, he’d lift and motion with it as if it was his own. Up our two hands would go, two beats for emphasis, then down again. He seemed happy to have someone to talk to. Someone outside of work who could understand what the hell he was talking about.

      “Our stuff isn’t flashy—it’s workhorse, B-to-B comm. We give ’em fast, easy, intuitive access to all the critical information. Did I say intuitive? Make that bombproof. The users are construction guys, not your average computer wonk.” He took a breath and cocked a smile at me. “No offense.” Then he got right back into his pitch. “It’s all about coordination. Coordination, collaboration and control.”

      Our clasped hands beat the air three times. “Coordination, collaboration and control, oh my!” he chanted.

      “Oh, my!” I echoed, lifting our hands up together and dropping them again in my lap.

      He grinned. “Sorry about that.” He let go of my hand. No! “We’re pushing so hard right now. It seems like that’s all I do. Plug our stuff. I can’t seem to talk about anything else.”

      How about we talk about us! “I know,” I said, serene as could be, as though I didn’t want to reach up and touch his hair, and curl into those sturdy arms. “It’s the curse of sales. Everything’s a pitch. Man, but you should hear my roommate, Andie. She sells on a turntable…” I stopped. I saw Andie in my head, with her incredible red hair and those freckles on her satin-brown skin. I turned toward our apartment and waited.

      “Turntable?” he asked.

      I put up a wait-a-minute finger.

      “What is it? Dylan?” he asked after a couple of beats.

      “Andie’s coming out,” I whispered. And one long minute later, counted out by a few breezy sighs from Silence, we saw Andie and Guinness appear in the door and step into the night.

      “Guinness,” I called. “Here, boy.”

      Brad looked at me, looked at the dark missile streaking toward us and braced for the impact.

      But Guinness is a classy dog. He’s been trained. He knows not to be ordinary and obnoxious and jump up on people. He shot over to my side of the car, threw his front paws in my lap and did a little half hop up so he could give me a huge, wet, chin kiss. Sometimes Guinness forgets, but he’s still classy.

      “Down,” I said, wiping my chin with my sweater sleeve. He obeyed. I pointed my finger at him. He sat.

      “I thought that was you when I drove up,” Andie said when she reached the car. “I’m sorry I didn’t stop. But I was going to get real ugly if I didn’t get out of that damn dress.” She looked at Brad and showed him her dimple. “Hi, I’m Andie.”

      His hands were free. Unfortunately. He reached for her tiny hand and engulfed it. “Brad.”

      “Don’t I know,” she said, rolling her eyes at me. “No one’s been talking about anything else. Nice rescue.”

      I watched Brad to see how’d he’d react. Andie was a petite porcelain doll from the piney woods down in East Texas. Except don’t think Hummel figurine. Andie was black porcelain with incongruous red hair and freckles. That hair had caused Andie no end of hurt when she was growing up. Her father never did believe she was his. There was something breakable about Andie—probably from that beat-down childhood in those piney woods—and it made guys get all mushy inside, made them want to scoop her up and take her home to mama. Especially big guys.

      But there was no sign of scooping from Brad.

      “Where you going?” I asked her. She was all dressed up for going out. Red, red and more red—to match her hair—with a few shots of gold. All of it tight and short, except the shoes. They were high and strappy.

      “What did you do to your hair?” she asked reaching over and ploinking one of the curls by the side of my face. It brushed my cheek as it snapped back up. “This isn’t Dallas, honey. ‘Member? We don’t do big hair down here. We have class.” She flipped her eyes over to Brad, to let him know she was teasing about Dallas, even though she wasn’t. He just showed her his lopsided grin.