Keegan narrows her eyes with an amused smile. “Thanks?”
“Yeah, I’ll be done in ten,” I say, then close the door on her.
I hold the dildo at arm’s length, but brush my thumb up the side, smearing it through the lube. There’s a lot. A lump forms in my throat as I lock the door. Keegan can’t walk in on me with the door shut. I could do it again . . .
No, I tell myself firmly, and I don’t.
But it’s the thought that drives me crazy when I drive to Benny’s cafe.
The thought that I wanted that thing back inside me so soon after using it once, and how in the bathroom, with a lock on the door, I could take my time. I could experiment more.
No.
I can’t.
By some miracle I manage to order at the counter without blurting out my secret.
I’m on the way back to my car when someone shouts my name.
It’s Andy. He’s wearing a baggy hoodie and blue jeans. He cocks his head, staring me up and down, and stops a metre in front of me. I’m expecting him to hold his hand out in greeting, but he doesn’t.
“I thought that was you,” Andy says. “How’s it going?”
“All right, you?”
I don’t tell him about my recent engagement, we’re only colleagues—correction, wewerecolleagues. My boss Stephen recently fired Andy, the fifth firing in six months, which is one of the reasons my workload has doubled.
“Not bad,” Andy says. He doesn’t smile. He gives me another look that makes my skin itch. I hope we’ve concluded our awkward small talk and can wish each other a good day, but Andy comes back with another question. “Stephen still taking the piss with the breaks?”
It’s a familiar complaint at the company, and I relax a little.
“Break? What break?”
Andy laughs. “You know, I’m relieved to be out of there. I still can’t believe he fired me.”
Neither could I. Andy was a solid worker. It didn’t make sense to me or anyone else.
Andy’s friendly demeanour changes, and I realise I let my guard down too soon—or more actually, he had me lower it. “Especially when I was following your lead . . .”
There’s a cooling sensation in my chest. I recognise it as dread. “What?”
“You trained me up, remember?”
I furrow my brow. “Yeah, I remember.”
“Stephen fired me because I wrote the wrong time in the logbook. Which is what you taught me to do.”
“I never taught you to write the wrong time—”
“The SOP dictates we fill the time of each process into the logbook when we complete it. But you told me that’s impossible—“Not unless we have four arms,”you said—so you filled in the logbook first, said all the things you weregoingto do with realistic predictions.”
My cheeks warm. What Andy is saying is accurate. Technically I lie and don’t follow the SOPs to the letter, but that’s because they were written for when two technicians worked the machine together. One did the processes, and the other checked and noted down the times in the logbook while both were being recorded on camera.
“I did exactly asyoutaught me,” Andy continues. “And guess what? The times in the logbook didn’t match the times on the recording. Stephen realised what I was doing, took me into the office, and fired me for skipping steps and not following procedure.”
I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. He lost his job doing something I told him to do, something I do myself.
If I didn’t, the batch would never be completed in time. We’d never get any orders out. And all parts of the process are completed, just not at the exact time I write in the logbook.
