Magdalene

by Moriah Jovan

  “You won’t need this, trust me,” he said, divesting me of my coat and handing it back to the guard. The noise from out here was loud, but not so loud that I couldn’t hear Trevor if he spoke loudly.

  “Let me help you with these,” he said, practically in my ear. So I did, and it was an odd feeling to be dressed by someone. “I’m going to take you to see the furnaces. Dad’s casting ingots right now and his dinner break is in an hour. He packed an extra lunch for you if you wanted to eat with him.”

  I stared at Trevor in shock. “He’s doing what?”

  “Didn’t he tell you?” Trevor plopped a hard hat on my head. “He works the night shift on Sundays. He rotates out with each worker in the mill to give them a paid Sunday night off.”

  Of all the implications of that that swept through me, I could only articulate the simplest one. “Isn’t that breaking the Sabbath?”

  Trevor flashed me a grin. “He says service is the higher law.”

  I tried to catch a breath and said the only thing I could come up with. “Please call me Cassie.”

  “Okay.”

  In other circumstances, I would have asked why the CEO of a several-billion-dollar business such as this worked at such blue-collar tasks, but here I didn’t have to. Any man who’d spend so much time serving his parishioners for free would serve the lowest of his employees in the same way. No wonder Jack respected him so much, treated him with a deference he didn’t show Sebastian—or any other of his clients, for that fact. Why Mitch didn’t return that respect, I didn’t know.

  We didn’t speak as we trudged along into the bowels of a building twice the size of a hangar. I couldn’t tell whether the floor was concrete or hard-packed dirt, but it didn’t make any difference. I looked up, up, up at the mammoth beasts radiating heat that was oppressive even in the depth of winter; I couldn’t imagine what this place was like in the summer.

  “What do you do here?” I asked Trevor suddenly.

  “I’m on second shift, almost full time. I can do every job in the mill, so I usually end up filling in for whoever called in sick.” I could detect the note of pride in his voice.

  “You don’t normally work on Sunday, do you?”

  “No. My dad asked me to come in tonight to show you around at a reasonable hour.” Trevor flashed me a grin. “He didn’t expect you to show up and he can’t leave his station. Decker would kill him.” Confusion must have shown on my face. “The foreman. Dad gets bossed around like the rest of us when he’s out here.”

  “Are you getting paid to be here tonight?”

  “Of course. I don’t work for free.”

  I laughed out loud at that. “So your dad—”

  “Keeps his hand in the pot. It’s hard to strike on a guy who works with you doing the shittiest jobs, gets bossed around by the foreman, brown-bags his dinner and eats with you. Out here, he’s no different from anyone else. Watch out.” Trevor grabbed me then and jerked me aside as a bucket as big as a house—a raging inferno—slid past us, suspended on massive cables from a double track attached to the ceiling, fifty feet up in the air. The heat was suffocating. One tap from that bucket and I’d have been toast.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. You get used to the ladles.”

  I had no words to describe the size of the blast furnaces and buckets—ladles, like something one would use to dip gravy or punch—that poured liquid flames into chutes where they ran like a fire river toward the other end of the building. “Orange is your father’s favorite color,” I mused, though more to myself than Trevor.

  He looked at me sharply. “Yeah. Did he tell you that?”

  “No.” I pointed to the steel. “He sent me roses that color.”

  So. Those roses hadn’t signified any passion he had for me whatsoever; the thought might have deflated me, except here I was, eight weeks into a relationship with a chaste Mormon bishop. I’d surprised him at church, thought I’d completely blown it, only to end up touring his steel mill with his son.

  Mitch was showing me his life, sharing his most deeply held accomplishments with me, even if it was through the conduit of offspring and steel and church.

  “Where around here is your father, by the way?”

  Trevor pointed toward the opposite end of the building, in the same direction the steel creek ran. “Forming ingots. The steel flows through here to a bed where it gets molded into blocks. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  We walked slowly so I could take in the sights. Occasionally, someone would take a second glance at me, but it seemed everyone here knew who I was or, at the very least, knew who I belonged to.

  I stumbled.

  “Careful,” Trevor said as he caught me. We walked for a while in silence. Then, in a forced casual tone, he said, “My dad really likes you.” He was too young to have learned how to finesse his voice to betray nothing. Trevor wouldn’t give his okay until he’d had time to probe me for ulterior motives.

  “I really like him, too,” I said in a moment of utter candor spawned by the shock of having run up against a seventeen-year-old man. “Does that bother you?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I worry about him. He needs someone to take care of him.” He glanced down at me, his eyes narrowed. “I’d really, really hate it if he met somebody, you know, and he cared about them, but they didn’t care about him that much, if they were just playing some kind of...game...and ditched him when they were done with him. That would really suck. Especially after my mom just died, yanno?”

  I swallowed. Hard.

  He stopped glaring at me, and we continued our stroll past the blast furnaces. “I can’t remember a time when someone took care of him, when he wasn’t taking care of everyone around him. I try, but you know, I can only do so much and I’ll be leaving for college soon.” He paused. “I mean, the Taights and Kenards try to take care of him as much as they can, but they live so far away...”

  The rules of the game—the game itself—had just become irrelevant.

  I took a deep breath. I wanted to close my eyes so I could come to terms with that, but I didn’t dare, what with all these buckets flying around like Dorothy’s house about to land on the Wicked Witch of the West.

  “Don’t you have sisters?”

  “Yeah, but they have their own lives and Dad would be upset if they left them to tend to him. He raised us to be out and on our own by the time we were eighteen. Or twenty-three, depending on if we went on missions.”

  “Did your sisters?”

  “Yes. And then went to the Y—Brigham Young, I mean. Got married like good Mormon girls, in the temple. Lisette hasn’t even been married a year and she’s already got one kid on the way.”

  “You don’t approve?”

  “Oh, it’s not that I don’t approve. It’s just so...Mormon. I thought they’d do something more exciting. Geneviève speaks Russian and Lisette speaks Mandarin. I mean, come on. They could have gone to the State Department or something. The CIA cruises BYU like it’s a singles bar. They were both recruited, but...”

  Damn. That was depressing, considering I’d had to fight tooth and nail to get to go to college, and even then, it had been on the sly. Sneaking my tuition, squeaking it out of what little Gordon had left me that month. Cheating on my husband with NYU. “So you’re disappointed in them.”

  “Yeah. I am.”

  “Are they happy?”

  “They seem so, but I don’t see them that often. One lives in Colorado and the other lives in New Orleans.”

  “What did your dad think?”

  “Don’t know. He said he was happy with whatever they chose to do, but I don’t know if that was the truth. He’ll lie to you if he doesn’t think the truth matters and you keep pressing him for an opinion. He could lie to Satan and Satan would believe him.”

  Oh. Hmm. “Are you going on a mission?” I asked, as if I didn’t know the answer to that already.

  “I don’t know yet. I don’t believe in what my church teaches.”


  I feigned shock. “But you go every Sunday anyway.”

  “Sure. It’s one way I can take care of my dad.”

  “I’m confused. If you don’t believe, why would you even consider going on a mission?”

  “Well, I might go ahead and put in my paperwork after my dad’s released. If I go on a mission, it’ll only be if I get called somewhere foreign. Take the path my sisters didn’t. I’m not looking for some spiritual experience, and selling something I don’t believe? In a foreign language? Priceless training.”

  “That’s rather mercenary, don’t you think?”

  He laughed. “I’m all about taking advantage where I can get it. I don’t want to spend my life being four hundred people’s slave. I figure, as long as I follow the mission rules and do a good job, the Lord has no right to complain about why I’m there.”

  “Does your father know about this plan of yours?”

  “Not yet, but he knows I don’t believe. No point in lying to him. He’s had years of people lying to him; he knows when someone’s going to lie to him before they say a word.”

  “Would he step in to block it some way?”

  “He might. He’d definitely blow his top and refuse to pay for it, but I have the money. And Sebastian would if I asked him to. On the other hand, my dad knows I’d do the job right. Guys go on missions all the time to get straightened out, or because their parents make them. They don’t care. Probably don’t believe. But they go anyway and make it hard for the other missionaries who are really there to do the work. He hates that more than anything, I think. I’m just a lot more honest than they are about my goals and I wouldn’t fuck around while I’m there.”

  “So what do you believe?”

  “About all I can swallow is that there’s a God and he or she—they—made us. Somehow. Maybe with his hands. Maybe through evolution. Maybe some combination. I don’t know and I don’t care, but look around. I can’t believe that minds that can create this had no creator. This didn’t just form out of the soup on its own. The soup had to have had a finger stirring it, adding ingredients here and there.”

  Any man who had bred and raised a kid like this was worth a helluva lot more than a casual lover and I didn’t know what to make of this strange longing curling through me. I didn’t have a chance to examine it more closely, though, because we had arrived at our destination.

  I saw Mitch high up in what looked like the cab of a bulldozer, pulling levers systematically. Trevor pointed over to a flat bed where the steel pooled. Two sides of the bed moved inward so that the steel was extruded as it cooled. The mechanisms that extruded it moved in sync with the levers Mitch pulled. He hadn’t seen us yet and I wanted to watch him rather than the steel, fascinating as it was.

  From what I could tell through the dirty glass of the cab, he was as filthy as his son, in a coverall and hardhat and thick gloves. He had sweat running down his face, which was a study in concentration.

  I had never seen a more beautiful man in my life.

  “It’s called slab casting,” Trevor said. The ingot Mitch had just pressed and cut was about six feet long, two feet wide, and four inches thick. “They’ll get hot and cold rolled in different buildings,” Trevor said, interrupting my musings, but then he lapsed into silence. I watched Mitch while Trevor watched the next ingot take shape. “Some of this will go toward the Jep products. That’ll get loaded up on a semi and taken over to Allentown and machined there.”

  A small tributary caught my eye, and I pointed to it. “What’s that?”

  “That’ll go to the mixing bucket for my dad’s alloy.”

  “The one he wants to make high-end domestic products with.”

  “For starters. High-performance engine blocks, bridge trusses and cables, rails. Other stuff. Medical instruments and prosthetics, joint replacements. Racing bikes. Jewelry. Stuff like that.”

  Would I ever get a handle on this man?

  Suddenly a siren blared. Trevor started and looked around him, his easygoing face suddenly intense. Its pitch and volume shattered the nearly deafening clatter of the mill, which came to a sudden halt all at once, ladles swinging pendulously from the momentum. I whirled in confusion as men began shouting and running.

  Mitch vaulted out of his cab and sprinted down the fairway at an impressive speed, Trevor hot on his heels, then outpacing him—the only one who could. Panic seeped through the building and I began to run, too, to follow them, to see what had a foundry full of men frantic.

  I gasped when I saw it.

  A man sprawled unconscious on a set of metal stairs, his leg almost completely severed at mid thigh. Mitch and another man a generation older than he worked determinedly to stem the blood flow with makeshift tourniquets torn from the man’s severed pant leg.

  It wasn’t working. There was no give to the cloth and it wasn’t long enough to get a good, tight knot. The best they could do was pull the ends against each other and hold the position to keep him from bleeding out.

  The blood, the gore... I swayed a bit. No, it was all I could do to stay upright and watch without puking.

  I’ve always been squeamish about bodily fluids of the thick red variety.

  The dangers of a steel mill hadn’t really settled into me, even when Trevor had pulled me out of the way of the ladle. He’d seemed so nonchalant about it at the time, but this place was a death trap, I saw now. Mitch bellowed commands rapid-fire while he held his end of the tourniquet.

  Rescue sirens screamed through the night almost immediately and an ambulance raced through the concourse toward the gathered men, who scattered.

  Mitch and the old man held the tourniquet as well as they could until the EMTs could take over with the rubber ones. It took both EMTs, Mitch, and his compatriot to get the man and his leg onto the gurney. Without a word, Mitch bounded into the ambulance and caught the gurney as one paramedic rolled it in and the other rushed to the driver’s seat. The second paramedic leapt into the back of the ambulance and the doors slammed shut. The ambulance shot out of the mill.

  “Get back to work,” barked the old man. His gaze flicked over me before he turned to Trevor. “Go call his wife and get me the paperwork. You,” he said to me as Trevor broke into a run to obey. “The hospital’s six miles west of here. Can you find it?”

  I nodded numbly, understanding somewhere in the back of my mind that he had just ordered me to go to Mitch.

  He needs someone to take care of him... If they were just playing some kind of game and ditched him when they were done with him... That would really suck.

  I found Mitch in a dark, private corner of the nearly empty emergency waiting room. He was sitting on a couch, slumped over, his elbows on his knees and his face in his palms. I sat beside him.

  “I brought you some food,” I whispered, hesitant to intrude on him, not knowing how he dealt with such things. He didn’t respond, and I began to babble. Sheer nerves, I knew, but I couldn’t help it. “Um, I got you some root beer. And Sprite, some water. Maybe food wasn’t such a good idea, but you need to drink something, Mitch.”

  He said nothing for a moment. “Sometimes...” he muttered out from under his hunch, “I really hate that foundry.”

  My mouth dropped open.

  “I know what it’s like...uneducated, working at a filthy dead-end job because you have no other options. You’re thirty-two, you’ve got nine kids—”

  I stared at the plastic tops of the Styrofoam cups that held the drinks I’d chosen for him, and offered, “But it’s a well-paying job. Nine kids? That’s expensive.”

  “So what? You’re a little boy, you want to be a fireman because it’s dangerous. Heroic. Romantic. You aren’t dreaming about being a peon steel worker, where your life is at stake because you can’t do anything else.”

  There had never been any trace of young steel worker Mitch in our relationship, and now it disturbed me to think he could have been the one to have his leg severed once upon a time.

  “They’ll reattach it,
” I said, which was an utterly stupid thing to say. “At least you kept him from bleeding to death.”

  He glared at me from under his brows. “Six men have died in my mill,” he growled. “This guy’s leg is just the latest in a long line of serious injuries. Safety measures— Nothing guarantees a hundred percent safety.”

  My mouth tightened. “Nothing guarantees your employees won’t be stupid, either.”

  He blinked.

  “Don’t forget. I know the Steelworks’s stats inside and out. I know what happened in every case, and I will not let you blame yourself, especially after you saved that man’s life.”

  It happened so quickly.

  One second I was beside Mitch, snuggling against him in an inadequate attempt to comfort him, and the next his big hand was gripping the back of my head, and he was kissing me.

  Hard, harsh.

  Urgent.

  I opened my mouth instinctively, my tongue meeting his in a mating dance of adrenaline, testosterone, and guilt. His cheek was scratchy under my palm, warm, sweaty, and I sighed into him, closed my eyes to capture more of his taste, his scent, part sweat, part grease, part expensive cologne—my senses perfectly attuned to each detail of this moment.

  We kissed for long minutes, his mouth on mine, his tongue sliding along mine—

  The perfect kiss from the perfect man.

  I pulled away from him slowly to speak, but he dragged me into his lap and kissed me again. I wrapped my arms around him, pressed my hip hard against his arousal.

  I knew nothing but Mitch.

  Nothing but his hands on my body and his tongue in my mouth.

  His body trembling with need.

  Mine, too.

  The kiss softened into a series of lingering strokes. “Let me take care of you,” I whispered against his mouth, as I caressed his face. “Please.”

  He stilled. He shifted his hips closer to mine, closed his eyes, and groaned softly, so softly, against my cheek. His hand crept up under my sweatshirt and caressed my belly and torso. Oh, how I ached for him to touch my breast, my nipple... I shuddered with desire, my pussy wet and ready for him.