Moving On by H.J. Holt

Author:H.J. Holt [Holt, H.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press

DUE to their different work patterns, it was difficult for Paul and Luke to meet up during the week. Instead, they kept a steady stream of texts passing back and forth. At first Luke had been hesitant and guarded, carefully rehearsing his texts before sending them and weighing each word. As the exchanges became more frequent, he gradually let his guard down and was more spontaneous and relaxed. The short bursts of contact with Paul were something concrete and real that he could return to whenever he needed to. It wasn’t that he was going to save them all forever—he just hadn’t gotten around to deleting any of them yet.

Because of his shift pattern, Luke had two forty-five minute breaks—the first at 2:00 p.m. and the second at 5:15 p.m. When he went outside to the yard just after five thirty on Tuesday evening, he had planned to send Paul a text, but found himself dialing the number instead.

“Hi, Luke.” Paul knew his number by now.

Luke got a shot of warmth from the tone of his voice. Paul never played it cool. He was pleased to hear from Luke, and so he let Luke hear it in his voice. “Hey,” he answered. “Are you busy? I’m not interrupting or anything?”

“No, it’s good to hear your voice. Are you at work?”

A big sigh from Luke. “Yeah, only another five and a half hours to go. They’re building up to the six o’clock rush in there at the moment, and then it’ll go quiet until we start getting people on their way home from the bars at ten.” He sat down on the step and focused on the voice coming through the phone. “What are you doing?”

“I’m having a really exciting evening. We started converting decimals to percentages in math today, and marking the books is… quite emotional!” He gave a short laugh.

“They’ll get it. They have a really good teacher.”

“I hope so. How’s your day been?”

“Pretty ordinary. There was a screwup earlier that caused some excitement. All the fries are cooked from frozen, right? Well, Brian, the idiot I told you about, forgot to put the latches back on the freezer room doors properly when he took a couple of bags out. Turns out, there’s some automatic thing to save energy or something that stops the refrigeration when the door’s open, so it’s not pouring out freezing air. No one noticed for hours and all of the stock from that walk-in freezer has had to be thrown in the garbage.” Luke laughed, then stopped himself. “I know it’s not funny, but Brian’s been sulking all day. He’s too scared to even give anyone a dirty look, because he knows he’s totally in the shit. And yeah, I know it makes me a bad person, but I have kinda enjoyed that.”

“You’re not a bad person. It’s always good to see some universal karma in action.”

“What is karma?”

“Well, the way people use the word in an everyday sense kind of means what goes around comes around.

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