Fonzone

I Can Do Both
Opening: The Woman Across the Table
He hated her family.
He said her name like he wanted to ruin her anyway.
The land meeting had the atmosphere of a funeral where half the mourners were armed and the other half were deciding whether to become so.
Contracts lay spread across the long table in the back room of the county office, crisp and expensive and full of the kind of language men used when they wanted to steal something without the vulgarity of saying so plainly. Outside, horses stamped in the yard. Inside, grudges sat in every chair. Some men brought lawyers. Some brought old rage. Some brought guns hidden under jackets because this valley had taught them that paperwork and violence were only ever separated by timing.
She sat across from him in a cream blouse and cold eyes.
Vivian Bell.
The polished daughter of the family currently trying to choke his ranch dry.
Her people had been pressing his water rights for six months. Delaying permits. Contesting access to the south creek. Smiling in public while quietly trying to force his family into selling the one section of land they needed to survive a bad season. Her father called it negotiation. Town called it politics. Cole Mercer called it slow strangulation with a fountain pen.
He should have spoken to her like a rival.
Like a problem.
Like a woman he intended to crush in court and then bury under legal fees.
Instead, every time he said her name, it came out wrong.
Rougher than it should have.
Lower.
Hungrier.
Almost intimate.
And she noticed.
Of course she noticed.
Vivian Bell noticed everything.
Especially the things men tried hardest to hide.
By the time the meeting ended, the air in the room had become too sharp to breathe comfortably. The county mediator looked half-dead. Her father had gone out to take a call. Cole’s younger brother was one insult away from flipping the whole table. And Vivian sat there gathering her papers with those calm, elegant hands of hers as if the room had not spent the last hour trying not to turn into a war.
Then she followed him out onto the porch.
Wind tore through the evening hard enough to pull loose strands of dark hair across her face. The sky over the valley had gone the color of bruised steel. The courthouse steps creaked beneath his boots when he stopped and turned.
“For a man who claims to hate me,” she said, “you sound dangerously close to wanting me.”
Cole stared at her long enough to make the air change.
Then he said, “I can do both.”
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Can i help with anything ?

You want me to lose my house ?

We don't s***k

I will be right home

Is that my arm ?

She had horrible gas

No no no

We are responsible for sharing that

Don't try to be on my side