The Body of David Hayes Read Free Page B

and happiness she and her husband and their family had found.
    She would end this again, as she had ended it once before.

    Six years earlier, in the same office, she had waited impatiently behind her desk, unable to get any work done before someone arrived, annoyed that these things took so long. It was suddenly as if, with her computer frozen, she had nothing to do. Though she knew this was untrue, that there was plenty on her desk that needed her attention, she couldn’t bring herself to it, her excuse the unresponsivescreen in front of her and the resident terror that her data might be lost. She brooded, like a spoiled little girl, angry at herself for pouting instead of getting something done.
    Finally, a knock on her door, and she looked up in time to see him enter. A kid in his mid-twenties. A little pale, but with sweet, intelligent eyes and a habit of pursing his lips between words as he spoke, as if everything he said held some secret irony for him. Dark hair and strong shoulders. She took him for a rock climber, or one of the army of twenty-somethings that headed into the surrounding forests on weekends in search of extreme outdoor experiences.
    “I’m David. I.T.,” he said, referring to the bank’s Information Technologies department.
    “Liz Boldt.” She held him in the same regard as she did a garage mechanic, or the guy who came to fix the refrigerator at home. “You want my chair?”
    “I’d like to sit in it,” he said. “I don’t need to take it with me.”
    A wise guy, at that. She stood behind and to his left, wanting to see what it was he did to her machine, wanting to step in and move him away if he restored the spreadsheet she’d been working on, because it contained figures such bank employees should not see.
    He typed at a speed she thought reserved for only the highest-paid executive secretaries. It seemed at times his left hand typed while his right worked the mouse, navigating through a dozen screens so quickly that she failed to identify a single one.
    “Control panel?” she asked.
    “Very good.”
    “You’re fast.”
    “Typing, yes,” he said. “Not in everything.”
    She thought him rude for the comment, but wasn’t about to say so, wasn’t about to piss off the one guy capable of getting her back to work.
    “You were working a spreadsheet?”
    “Yes.”
    “You’d like the data back?” “If possible. Please.”
    “It’s all ones and zeros—anything’s possible.”
    If only that were true, she thought. She and Lou had been nearly as frozen, as malfunctioning, as her computer.
    David Hayes stopped what he was doing and looked back at her. Again, she wondered if she had spoken some of her thoughts aloud. Was there any other explanation for that inquisitive expression of his? Had he asked her something, and she’d missed it?
    He returned to his work at the keyboard, but in that penetrating look of his she experienced both terror and excitement. Terror, because she didn’t know what she’d missed, excitement because from somewhere within her bubbled up a primitive urge born of flesh and nerve and the raw juices that pulsed through her. She dismissed this physical response as nothing more than an errant sensation, like being barefoot on a carpet and having a spark fly from fingertip to wall switch. A low-energy warmth flooded her entire body. She tried her best to ignore it.
    He left a few minutes later, her data restored on the screen, but not before she’d made the mistake of calling out to him, “You’re my hero!” This offering of hers created the opportunity for him to connect with another of those looks. This time, as the door closed behind him, she felt herself shudder toe to head, her body warming as if aftera shot of liquor, and she knew she’d crossed some forbidden line.

    Liz skipped out of work early to make the 5 P.M. deadline. She drove through the nightmarish traffic that had come to own Seattle, the sun already sinking toward the green of the