Page 57 of Not Safe For Work

Chapter 15

My line of work could be easily summarized using two words: feast or famine. Some weeks, I was bored off my ass, taking my sweet time on simple mock-ups for proposed renovations. In a matter of hours, though, I could go from boredom to sucking down coffee between catnaps while working on complex superstructures that had to be done yesterday.

For the first couple of weeks I was seeing Rick, things were quiet enough. I’d put in my eight hours, exchanging glances in meetings and in the halls, and then we’d go back to his place or mine. Evenings left us both bleary-eyed and aching the next day. Weekends were a blur of ropes and sex.

And then, like a tornado dropping from a clear blue sky, several major projects tumbled into my department’s lap. They were all impossibly urgent, of course. The higher they piled—and my God, they piled up fast—the deeper my heart sank. So much for those ridiculously hot nights.

But it had to be done. Teagan and I had been through this before, and we knew how it went—working upwards of twenty hours at a stretch until there wasn’t a legal substance on the planet that could keep us awake.

Takeout. Coffee. Catnaps. Coffee. Glue fumes. Coffee. Such was our existence when the firm demanded it. This time, I just tried to focus on the work, and not let myself get caught up in what I could have been doing during those late-night overtime hours and endless weekends.

Legally, the company was required to allow us to go home for at least eight hours at a time. And had we asked, they’d have let us. But there was an unspoken assumption that we would see this through, work our fingers to the bone and be rewarded with a few days off at the end. So we showered when we could, power-napped on a couple of cots in an empty office down the hall and subsisted on vending-machine food or offerings brought to us from the outside world by saintly coworkers. Contact with the outside world was reduced to e-mails and text messages, which wasn’t nearly enough contact with Rick.

It took its toll. By the ninth day, tempers flared. Between fatigue and additional demands sent down from on high, neither Teagan nor I were the most pleasant people to be around. The drafters wisely kept their distance and didn’t hassle us. No one spoke to us unless they absolutely had to, though she and I still spoke to each other. A little banter went a long way toward keeping us awake after umpteen hours, and we both knew how not to piss each other off.

The fact that our building had showers had become a double-edged sword; that was one less reason for us to leave the building. We both desperately wanted to go outdoors in daylight again, but we simply didn’t have time. At least we could shower. We just didn’t have an excuse to leave.

As we always did, Teagan and I muscled through, and by the twelfth day, we were down to one nearly completed model apiece. There was a light at the end of the tunnel, thank God.

“I need sleep,” she declared around eleven thirty on day twelve. “Any more of this, and I’m going to glue my own face to the platform.”

I laughed, something that took considerable effort. “Go home and get some sleep, then.”

“What about you?”

“I crashed for a bit a few hours ago.” I stood and rubbed my stiff neck. “If I can finish this sucker tomorrow, I can spend all day Sunday getting reacquainted with sleep.”

“Well, you’re a better man than I.” She yawned as she picked up her purse and coffee. “I’m crying uncle.”

“I don’t blame you.”

She started for the door, pausing to look over her shoulder. “Are you sure you don’t need to go home?”

“Oh, I do.” I looked up from pressing one of several pillars into place. “But I need to finish this first.”

“Well, don’t kill yourself.”

“I won’t. I’ll be fine.”

“All right. I’ll see you in a few hours.”

“I’ll be here.”

Teagan probably hadn’t even reached her car by the time the anesthetic effect of silence kicked in. I didn’t bother turning on music; at this point, it would either irritate me or knock me out, and I was well on my way to the latter without the help of any music. My eyes grew heavier, my fingers less agile. I probably would have nodded off right there at the table had I not slipped with an X-ACTO knife and sliced my finger open. Cursing and muttering, I held a tissue against the cut for a moment while I searched for my coffee cup. I couldn’t even decide if the cut hurt or not. It just irritated me because it kept me from my damned work and meant staying here that much longer. The only reason it even kept me from my work was that my bosses wouldn’t be thrilled about me getting blood on a model again.

Once my finger had stopped bleeding and I’d drained another cup of coffee, I went back to the model. The very sight of it made me groan.

Almost done. It’s almost done. Then I can sleep. And I will probably dream about this stupid thing.

Sighing, I picked up the piece I’d been trimming when I cut myself.

At some point between finishing the northwest quadrant of the roof and tweaking a few spots on the mezzanine, I glanced at the clock. It was a little after two in the morning. Not that it really mattered. Time didn’t mean anything during these periods. Afternoon felt like the middle of the night. Midnight felt like noon. It was like having an unshakable case of jetlag.

I blinked a few times and forced myself to focus. Just needed to finish this, then I could get back to my normal life. Normal passage of time. Regular sleep. Rick.

His face flickered through my mind, and had I had the energy to do so, I’d have shivered.

My chest tightened. Hell, it even ached a little. This flurry of overtime had been so relentless, I didn’t realize until just then that I hadn’t seen him in almost two solid weeks.