Mixed Signals by Alyssa Cole

Author:Alyssa Cole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2015-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

The last weeks of September and first week of October were...pretty awesome. At the farm job, Devon and I were still in compost hell, but the work got easier and less vomit-inducing as students and staff alike began to get the hang of composting and not just throwing their garbage away mindlessly. The fact that I would stop mid-conversation to loudly shame people in the dining hall probably helped spread the word. Or perhaps it was the cute and amazingly rendered posters Danielle drew and hung at each trash can station. I held only a middling interest in comic books and that world, but even I was captivated by her work. She had to keep replacing posters as people stole them to hang in their dorm rooms. She took it all in stride, as she did with seemingly everything.

“If I can contribute to every inch of these ugly dorm walls being covered, it would be my pleasure,” she’d said with an exaggerated shudder.

At my maintenance job, the tool belt Edwin had bequeathed to me gave me the confidence to push to do some real work besides reading at my desk, and Joe finally assigned me to a job replacing the floors in a faculty house that had been destroyed by the bursting and thawing of pipes over the last couple of years. I wasn’t surprised he’d assigned me to the same team as Edwin and Felix, in addition to three other people I knew in passing, but I was shocked at how fun it was. I was no stranger to the kind of work we were doing, but doing the same things with my parents had been stressful. My dad was chill—as long as you did everything exactly the way he wanted it. I appreciated the results of his perfectionism, but helping him achieve it was another thing entirely. People often thought Gabriel had inherited his exactitude from my mom, but underneath her prodding she was easygoing. It was Dad who lured you in with that twinkle in his eye and then disowned you for not placing nails exactly two inches apart down the entire length of a two-by-four.

Working with Edwin was different. He would tell me how he wanted the floorboards laid out, show me once and then go about his business. He didn’t hover, simply trusted me to get the job done. Perhaps more than he should have, since I had to rip up a board or two, but making mistakes without disappointing him meant I could focus on what I did wrong and how not to repeat the mistake instead of fuming over being yelled at. And on the job, with his fellow contractors, he was in his element. He’d never been shy, but my family was hard to outshine, as I knew all too well. Here, he was the lead contractor, and he took his leadership responsibilities seriously, including making sure his team had fun while they worked.

“Larry, you just flashed me more ass than I’ve seen in a year.

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