Page 3 of The Progressions

I dropped the act, too. “There’s no way that either of them had on underwear,” I agreed, and turned to the juicy part. “They started to make out. It was really hot.”

“Wow,” she breathed, eyes big, and I nodded.

“She said they could use the bed.”

“Like hell they could!Ourbed?”

I didn’t think they’d cared about the ownership.

“On sheets in a model home…who knows where that stuff has been or what already happened there?” she asked, nose wrinkled. “It’s so unsanitary.” Iva liked things neat and clean.

I didn’t think that had been a concern for the couple either, but I nodded again because I agreed that it was pretty gross, especially since they’d had an audience. Me. “Anyway, that’s only an air mattress, and it needs to be reinflated,” I pointed out. “It wouldn’t have been very comfortable for sex.” But would they have noticed? He’d looked at his girlfriend like he wanted to devour her, and would a squishy bed have stopped him? Ishivered internally, imagining if someone looked at me like that. I could use the tip of my tongue to lick over my top lip…

“Why did the fire alarm go off?” Iva asked. “I heard it start but it stopped pretty quick.”

I went to my desk and picked up the phone, pretending to check messages so that I wouldn’t have to look at her. Setting off the alarm was probably something my boss would have frowned on, and not something I needed to explain. “I’ll talk to the company rep,” I said, which was vague enough to suggest that I could have been looking for an answer as to why it had happened.

“Great, thanks. Can you also talk to Oren? I saw him standing next to the dumpster for at least ten minutes, staring at something, and now he’s disappeared. We’re supposed to get a bad storm and I want him to make sure that the drain on the east end of the parking lot is clear of debris.” She waggled the walkie-talkie on her desk. “He forgot this again. It’s too hot and I’m too pregnant to chase him down. If you go now, you’ll miss the bottled water delivery, too.”

I did want to avoid that. Also, she was very pregnant and it really was hot, so I trooped back out into the parking lot. The dark asphalt, freshly repaved, shimmered with the heat of the day and I was glad that I wasn’t wearing a fur hat. I never could have carried off either of those outfits in the way that Tyler Hennessy and Shay Galton had, for one thing because I would have gotten a rash due to chafing and for another, because I felt way too naked without underwear. It was a necessary part of my day.

I walked around the property, my hand up to block the summer sun from my eyes, and eventually I did find Oren. All of the units here had full-sized washers and dryers, but we also had a separate laundry facility, and that was where he was. I opened the door and saw that his back was to me, and he’d started a machine so that it was vibrating. His pants were down and he stood pressed against it…

I walked back out, now with my hand covering my eyes. I hadn’t needed to see any of that; why was it sex day at the condo complex? Sweet Jesus!

“Oren!” I yelled as loud as I could, and then picked up a clod of dirt from a nearby flower bed and flung it at the wall of the laundry building. It made a satisfying thump and a less satisfying mark, but he was going to have to deal with that. After all, his masturbation had led to it. “Oren!”

He opened the door and put out only his head, so the lower part of his body wasn’t visible. I was so very glad for that.

“You forgot your walkie-talkie and Iva would like you to check the storm drain on the east side of the parking lot,” I said, still shielding my eyes so that I didn’t have to look at him. I thought I might not be able to, ever again, not unless I could shake the thought of him humping the dryer. I’d seen his boxers, which were stained and also covered in cartoon bunnies, and somehow those things made it all a lot worse.

It was enough for me for the day, but I couldn’t leave yet. I had spent the morning doing homework and focusing on my secondary sales job, so I still had a list of tasks to accomplish.I whipped through those and then there were some tenant problems to deal with, things that Iva had mostly handled before. Now that she was so pregnant and hot, she just didn’t have the patience and I had taken over. I returned the call of the woman who insisted that the fan in her bathroom was too loud—she had bought a decibel meter and kept telling me, “I could have permanent damage.Permanent damage to my hearing!”

Well, I certainly might too, after she’d yelled like that. I promised to have maintenance come look at it, which meant that Oren would be in her home. I hoped she wasn’t running the dryer when he showed up. When I finally got off the phone, Iva said she was done with sitting in our overheated office. She stood, stretched, and wearily waved at me before heading out to put up her feet and work from her living room. I promised that I’d hold down the fort here.

So next, I talked to a guy who claimed that someone had been in his apartment and no, nothing was stolen, but someone had touched his plants! Then there was the man who had a leak under his sink, and how had he dealt with it? Band-aids. He’d wrapped several stick-on adhesives around his pipe to stop the water. It was no surprise to me, but it did seem to really shock him that his solution hadn’t been effective.

“The box says that they’re waterproof,” he explained. “What went wrong?” It wasn’t worth the time it would have taken to explain, so I lied and claimed I couldn’t understand it either. Again, I scheduled Oren. I moved on to email a man who was concerned that the electricity wasn’t working, but the attached picture demonstrated that only one of the recessed cans in hiskitchen ceiling wasn’t on. I was fairly certain that the problem was a bulb that had burned out, but again, Oren—

The door to the leasing office opened abruptly, letting in a whole lot of blinding light. Our office got brighter and hotter as the sun came off its peak in the sky and its rays angled directly at our door and singular window. Its slant now meant that I was temporarily blinded and could only see the outline of a figure, but I could tell that it was a tall, strong man. When he said hello, I recognized his voice.

Tyler Hennessy had returned.

I stood up and tucked my dark hair behind my ears. “Mr. Hennessy,” I said. “Hi.”

“My girlfriend lost something here,” he announced. He had ditched the hat and now wore a t-shirt with his leather pants instead of the fitted, matching jacket he’d had on earlier.

“What did she lose?” I asked.

“An earring,” he told me. “I want to find it.”

“Oh,” I said, and nodded, thinking of how her hat had been knocked off during their vigorous kissing. It would have been easy to lose an earring at that moment. “Sure, we should go look.”

He let the door close as I stood and gathered my things. It was late enough in the day that the office had quieted down, and I figured that I could bring my purse and lock up for the night. Calls from residents that came in after-hours went straight to my voicemail and I faced them the next day unless there was anemergency, in which case the greeting I’d recorded instructed them to call my cell. The last emergency had been three nights ago at two a.m., when a woman had sobbed into my ear that she couldn’t find her credit card and she needed my help. At that moment.

Tyler Hennessy followed me across the parking lot, walking behind as he had done when his girlfriend had been with us. “What does the earring look like?” I asked over my shoulder as I scanned the asphalt for anything that resembled jewelry.

“It’s a diamond, about six carats, Asscher-cut, in a platinum setting.”

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