Page 41 of The Boss

“Red post-its are high priority, right? But you don’t have red tasks on the calendar enough. Or not enough staff to each red shift. Some of the red could go to yellow if you added it more often.”

“Huh,” she stares at the board, processing what I just said. This is how my brain has always worked. Papa made a route too long. He put too many men on one shift or too few on a truck. It’s like I can see puzzle pieces and how they fit. “Wow, you’re right. I will talk to my mam and change this straight away,” she says, starting to smile. “Anyway, back to Quinn’s orders,” she starts moving again and soon we’re at the back door. “The worst of them are in here, since they can’t come inside like that,” she says, laughing and pushing the door open but stepping back for me to pass her. “Can you imagine? It’d smell like the kennel in here!”

I step forward and see…boots.

A fuck-load of black boots.

Covered in mud.

At least, I hope it’s mud?

This is clearly a “mud room?”

I turn to her, frowning and start to talk but she cuts me off. “There’s the hose and scrub brush on that far wall. Oh! And here, in your pretty set, you’ll want this!” She takes off her dark green kitchen apron embroidered with a small Q on the corner and hands it to me.

“Quinn told you about this?” I say, trying to get more information out of her before she leaves to sew some damn buttons or something. Hopefully some task in which I can find a flaw and get Quinn to kick her to the curb.

“Oh, was it supposed to be a surprise?” She asks, genuinely concerned. “Because he told everyone! Said you wanted to do this act of kindness for the boys right away this morning, before they all leave for their rounds.”

“Right, no, um, that’s okay,” I say. I look at the boots and then the apron in my hand, then back at her, but she’s gone.

Alright, Quinn. Well played. I guess I’m going to scrub some muddy boots.

•••••

It’s not mud!

Mother of God Himself!

“What is this?” I say aloud to myself, for the millionth time. What the hell do these men step in? Dog shit. Mud. Blood. But also…eggs? Vomit? Pee?

I scrub and scrub, marveling at the amount of crap on the current boot in my hand, roughly the size of my torso. Actually, at this size, these have to be Quinn’s.

The thought makes me drop the slippery thing and—

No!No no no no no.

“No!” I shriek. “It’s on my face. It’s on my face!”

“It is,” I hear a deep voice chuckling behind me.

I turn to the door to see Quinn watching, arms crossed, face beaming. Until he spots the apron. He frowns at it. I lost the sweater about ten seconds into this disgusting task, now I’m sweating like I’ve had a full workout, hair up in a knot and the apron hardly covering the whole mess.

“I didn’t say she could give you an apron,” he grumbles.

“A lot of good it did me,” I huff. “There’s piss on my arms, vomit down one leg, something like dog food inside my shoe and now, I’m pretty sure there’s someone’s blood and shit, human shit on my face, Quinn!” He laughs again. I ask, “What is this, hazing?”

“Just a reminder,” he says plainly.

“Reminder?”

He stalks closer, “Yes, myvirginbride. I thought I explained it last night about your pointless scheming but then you walk down and parade in front of not just me but all of my men halfnaked? Sure, call this hazing. Plus, we all work together here. Didn’t Sheila—”

“Yeah,Sheilasaid some words and pointed to some post-its, in between sighing your name like a lovesick teen.”

“What?”

“Do you fuck her in our—I mean, ugh, does she come to your room? Because that ends now. Obviously, I don’t care, you can plow into whoever you want, but I don’t want it happening in the house. Or on the grounds. I don’t want to walk Marlon and end up having to bleach my eyeballs.”