Page 21 of Ring Rust

“Is this pine?” Ryan asked, rubbing his hand over the boards on the ground. “You gonna come back and reinstall this fence in five years when it rots to shit again?”

“It’s cheap and it looks nice,” Logan said.

“This looks like shit. Everything you’ve touched here looks like shit. You look like shit,” Ryan said, flicking Logan’s shirt sleeve.

Logan huffed and crossed his arms. “It’s for a park. It doesn’t have to survive a hurricane.”

“Oh, is that the standard you work with?” Ryan asked, shoulders heaving from Logan’s negligence.

Jasper put his hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “Hey, relax.”

Ryan’s entire body erupted in goosebumps from that gentle touch. He wanted to lean into it, feel the shape of Jasper’s hand, the warmth of his bundled-up body, the lines of each individual finger, but Logan started talking again.

“Listen,” Logan said. “Jasper hired me to get the work done quick. I’m doing what I was asked.”

“Quick and lazy aren’t the same thing,” Ryan said.

“What are you doing here?” Jasper asked again.

Ryan wanted to kick himself for not responding, but now that the flood gates of rage had opened, he was strugglingto focus. Logan opened his mouth to say something else, but Ryan had already stopped listening. Something on the ground, unnaturally pale and covered by flecks of dirt, caught his eye. He squinted at it, moving closer until he could see it clearly. A thick tree root had been hacked clean through.

Ryan stared at it before finally looking up to Logan. “Did you cut this?”

“It was in the way of the fence line.”

“You can’t just cut through a structural root! Build the fence over it, you fucking tool!”

“It’s one root. Calm down.”

Ryan’s hands squeezed as he fought a vivid urge to pick up Logan by his tool belt and throw him down the hill. With no sturdy fence in the way, it would be easy.

“You need to leave.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Jasper said. His voice was stern now, earlier curiosity giving way to anger at Ryan’s presence.

“I’m not leaving. Jasper is paying me to get a job done.”

“You’re not getting the job done!” Ryan yelled. He glanced around them and frowned at the endless evidence. The broken tree root, the French drain his crew had destroyed, both ruining the trails Jasper had spent years trying to keep functional and pretty with no budget and nobody to help him. “You’re making everything worse. You’re going to destroy the park. That will destroy Jasper. And if that happens, I’ll destroy you.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Jasper said, pulling Ryan’s body away from Logan’s smaller one. “Calm down, John Wick.”

Ryan blew out a calming breath. It didn’t work. “Jasper, listen to me?—”

“No.”

Logan grinned at them.

“You stop that, too,” Jasper said to Logan. “You’re both idiots.”

“But—” Ryan started.

“Ryan, you can’t stalk people through the woods and leap out to yell at them.” He turned to Logan. “Logan, you should have about five hundred more years of experience before you sell yourself as someone who can handle this level of work.”

“I’m—”

“I already paid you, so I want you to finish. But you clearly can’t do it alone, so Ryan, you now work with Logan. Warren, I’m sorry, but you’re fired. Don’t touch anything on your way out, please.”

A wide-eyed Warren nodded and scampered down the trail, not even stopping to say goodbye to Logan.