“Did I embarrass you by making it?”
The weights clang together when I accidentally lose control of the bar.
“Easy,” he says.
I hold the bar better and go for another repetition. “No, you didn’t embarrass me at all. I like that you did it. I just . . . don’t want anyone to know anything you don’t want them to know.”
“And what would that be?” he asks.
I struggle letting the bar go back up slowly. I think the weights are getting heavier somehow, even though I can see Ozzie hasn’t touched them.
“You know.” My face turns red, partially from the exertion, but also from his questions. “Don’t make me say it.”
“You don’t want anyone to know we slept together.”
I let the bar race back up to its position above me. The weights bang together. “I didn’t say that.” I have to rub my hands on my shorts to dry them off. I’m already sweating. I’m not sure if it’s the workout or our conversation at the root of it.
“If you want to keep everything on the down low, we can do that.” Ozzie shrugs.
“I just think that if people know, they’ll think badly of me.”
“And then they’d have me to deal with,” he says. I’m not sure he realizes it, but his chest puffs out a little when he says that.
I smile, seeing that protective instinct coming to the front again. It really is one of his most attractive qualities. “I can fight my own battles, if you don’t mind.”
“Fine. But you tell me if anyone gives you a hard time.”
I shake my head. “No, I’m not going to do that.”
“Cheating!” yells a voice from the other side of the warehouse, making me jump.
Ozzie waves the clipboard at me. “Come on, next exercise.” He walks over to another machine and points at the seat. “Set the timer. One minute. Then rest for fifteen seconds before you start it.”
I push the buttons on this new timer like Ozzie did on the one before and then rest my hands on my legs. I’m actually a little breathless already. How lame.
“Set your weight at sixty pounds.”
“Do I do that on all of them?” I lean forward and pull a metal pin from the stack of weights, sliding into the number sixty.
“No. Dev gives us a list of what we should be lifting. Here’s yours.” Ozzie points to a chart on the top page where everyone’s weights for each machine are listed. Ozzie’s are big numbers, of course. Huge compared to mine. He’s supposed to do one hundred and seventy five pounds on this one. Is that even possible? I look down and see that the weights only go to one-fifty.
“Wow. Is he anal about his workouts or what?”
Ozzie talks in a near whisper. “Let’s just say he takes his job seriously.”
“I see you cheating over there!” Dev yells. “Fifteen-second rest periods! Not fifteen minutes!”
I press the button on the timer and start the exercise, lacking half the strength I need because I’m trying so hard not to laugh.
Ozzie has to turn away from me to not laugh too.
“So what’s Toni’s deal?” I ask, feeling stronger now that my mind is focused on her being mad at me for some mysterious reason. The weights practically fly off the stack.
“About what?”
“About you. Did you sleep together?”
Ozzie’s face scrunches up. “Toni? And me?”
“Yeah.” I pretend not to care, staring at the weights slowly going up and down at my command.
“No. Never.”
“Then why is she mad about me being with you overnight?”
“I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “Maybe she’s overprotective.”
“Of you?” I snort. “That’s funny.”
“Toni’s loyal. She takes it personally when an outsider messes with her family.”
“And I’m the outsider.” It makes me sad to hear myself referred to in that sense. I want to belong here more than anything. I haven’t thought about wedding portraits in, like, forty-eight hours, when for the past seven years that’s all I ever thought about. Freedom! . . . I don’t want it taken from me when I’ve finally gotten a taste for it. I can admit to myself now that I hated what I was doing before. It took Bourbon Street Boys to show me that, to make me be honest with myself.
“I wouldn’t say you’re an outsider, exactly. You’re just on probation in her mind. Don’t worry, though. She’ll accept you eventually.”
“If I measure up.”
“You will.”
I push the handles in front of me for the tenth time as the beep goes off on the timer. I grunt, pushing the weights that now feel four times heavier than they did when I started. “Eeerrrgh!”
“Get it, girl!” Dev yells from across the room.
I laugh and drop the handles before the rep is finished.
Ozzie rests his hand on my shoulder. “Fifteen seconds. Rest up. You’re going to need it.”
I look up at him, sweat pouring down my face. “Is the next one hard?”
He grins and drops his voice to a whisper. “No, but I have plans for you tonight.”
I cannot for the life of me remember any more of the exercises I did during that workout. I was too distracted, wondering what he was going to do to me and how many orgasms it was going to involve.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
It’s called data mining,” Toni says, booting up a computer I hadn’t realized existed before, located in a set of cubicles in another part of the warehouse we reached after going through a maze of doors and corridors. “We get all the raw feed in, drop it into folders, and sift through it when we can. Sometimes we use computer programs to help, and sometimes it’s just a matter of watching the stuff on fast forward until something interesting pops up.”
She opens a folder and clicks on a file. “This is what we got from the Parrot yesterday. This feed file covers through nine this morning.” She stands and moves to a cubicle next to the one I’m sitting in. “I’ll start with the dragonfly; you start with the Parrot. We’ll pick up the Go-Pro action we got after.” She sits down at a second computer and clicks on another folder, picking up some earphones from the desk and sliding them onto her head.
I tap her on the shoulder, and she looks over.
“Sooo, what exactly am I supposed to do?”
She grabs her headphones and pulls them off with a sigh. “Watch the video. Write down the time stamp of anything interesting. Screenshot faces if you see any.”
She’s about to put the headphones back on, but I stop her with another question.
“Talk to me about interesting.”
She rolls her eyes. “Jesus, Bo Peep, you want me to spoon-feed you lunch too?”
I sit back in my chair and cross my arms. I’m too tired from my workout to have patience for this. Lifting weights drains my body and my brain, I guess. “Maybe before you do that, you could tell me what the hell your problem is with me.”
Her expression is mutinous. “I don’t have a problem with you.”
“Of course you do.”
She shrugs, going all cool on me. “Paranoid much? Jesus, Bo Peep. Relax. You’ll get your minivan later today.”
I reach over and knock the headphones out of her hands as she’s about to put them on again. Minivan, my butt. I’m not driving a stupid minivan anywhere.
She spins around and glares at me. “You better watch yourself, Bo Peep. Nobody’s here to protect you from that smart mouth of yours.”
I raise an eyebrow. “And that’s supposed to scare me?” Maybe yesterday it would have, but today, knowing Ozzie has my back, not so much. Obviously she has issues, and if I’m ever going to work here permanently, I feel like we’re going to need to get them out on the table. It’s also possible my workout used up all my fear factor juice and I have none of that chemical left to respond appropriately to Toni’s threat. I should probably be scared crapless, but instead I’m antagonizing her.