Bedding Down, A Collection of Winter Erotica (11 page)

Asking those questions was nothing more than trying to jus-

tify a way out. Fletcher might have been stubborn, but he wasn’t the kind to play games with himself.

“Yes.”

Janine’s eyes flooded with tears. “Then come with me. Come

to New York with me.”

He shook his head, his heart breaking. “I can’t.”

“You can. You’re saying you won’t.”

Fletcher tried to push away from her, but she held him tight,

not letting him go anywhere. She pulled him closer, and he gave in. His head rested against her belly. He felt her sigh, and shudder, fighting tears. The truck pulled up a few yards away from

them, and the driver honked the horn.

“If you don’t try,” she whispered to Fletcher, “Then you’ll

never know for sure.”

A week later, spring came to the mountain. The trees shook off

the last of their snow and blossomed anew. The rivers began to

run again, then spilled over their banks. The avalanche was just a distant memory—but Janine’s memory was still so fresh, so

vivid, sometimes Fletcher reached out in the middle of the night to touch her, only to find she wasn’t there.

The hike back to his cabin was hell without her. He had

watched her climb into that truck, then had watched as it disap-84

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peared over the horizon. He kept standing there, rooted to the

spot, listening to the engine until even that vanished. Fletcher sat heavily on the bench at the ranger station as he realized she was gone—really, truly gone. Not one given often to tears, he buried his face in his hands and cried until his body felt hollow.

That week he cleaned up the cabin, airing out every piece of

fabric, washing down every wall, cleaning out every nook and

cranny until the place smelled just as fresh inside as it was outside. He fed the raccoon when the old boy came around, but the

visits were few and far between, which didn’t help his loneliness one bit. Fletcher sat in front of the fireplace at night, now with only a small fire to cut the lingering chill, and he stared at the flames, his mind thousands of miles away.

One day, he found Janine’s camera. She had lost it in the fall

and both of them thought it gone forever under the snow, so

neither had thought to search for it. The avalanche had stripped clean the trees at the top of the ravine and carried them down

the valley, but somehow the forces of nature had seen fit to leave her camera only a mile or so from where she had dropped it as

she fell into his life.

The case was battered and the film inside certainly destroyed

by the months of ice, snow, and rain. When he held it in his

hands, knowing she was the last one who had touched it, the

onslaught of vivid memories stole his breath. He longed for pictures of her, something to look at from time to time, and won-

dered if she ever looked at pictures of him.

The thought of pictures made him think of the tabloid pho-

tographs that were taken of him, back when he was a part of the same world Janine inhabited. Living on the mountain was like

S
ix
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eeks on
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unrise
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ountain,
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olorado
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living on his own little planet, but Janine had found him. And

if she had found him, someone else could, too.

As he turned the camera over in his hands, he wondered what

he would do when that happened. Was it best to be on the of-

fensive, or was it best to call the shots himself ? And what better reason to head off the inevitable, than to give Janine the chance she had asked him to give?

He took the camera to the house and put it on the kitchen

table, where he stared at it while he considered doing the one

thing he had sworn he would never do.

Everything in New York City moved fast. The lights, the cars,

and the people—it was all a sea of getting somewhere quick. In

the middle of it all was a man in the back of a cab, fresh off the plane, scared to death of what he was doing there, but certain he had no other choice.

“Manhattan,” Fletcher said to the cabbie.

When Janine saw him standing at her office door, her eyes

widened with shock. Her face went pale, and her hands began to

tremble. She looked different in colorful clothes, with her long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, color on her cheeks and soft pink lipstick on her mouth.

Then she smiled, and it transformed her into the Janine he

knew.

“You’re here,” she said, disbelief radiating from every inch of her.

“You said I would never know until I tried,” Fletcher said.

“Can I still try?”

The tears in her eyes spilled over as she nodded, too overcome

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asters

to speak. Fletcher strode behind her desk and wrapped his arms

around her, lifting her off the ground. Her high heels dropped

to the floor as he kissed her. Coworkers gathered around the

door, looking in at this strange man with Janine, the one who

had made her cry and laugh at the same time. Fletcher ignored

them, caring for nothing but this woman in his arms, the one he had missed so much, it had damn near driven him crazy.

“You wanted a story,” he whispered into her ear. “You got

me instead.”

Janine held on as if she would never let go. Outside her big

window several stories up, the sun was setting. For the first time in years, Fletcher watched the final rays burst over something

other than his mountaintop and marveled at how pretty it was.

He cradled the woman he loved in his arms and smiled over her

shoulder at the glorious Manhattan skyline.

About Gwen Masters

GWEN MASTERS
writes all the time: in her sleep,

in the car, even in church. Hundreds of her stories have

appeared in dozens of places, both in print and online.

Her latest novel,
One Breath at a Time
, hit shelves in the spring of 2008. Gwen hides away in a sleepy little town,

writing novels and working on the century-old home

she shares with her journalist husband. For more

information on Gwen and her works, please visit her

website: www.gwenmasters.net.

It’s Not the Weather

by Alison Tyler

Winter

“I hate this,” Roger groaned. “I fucking hate this miserable

fucking weather.”

I glanced outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of my living

room, taking in the bright sunflower sun, crisp Crayola-blue

sky. Even better, there were only two days left before the twenty-fifth. We were destined to have sunshine on Christmas day.

From the international weather report, ever-present on Roger’s

open laptop, I could see that the East Coast was socked in with the type of storm we won’t have unless hell literally freezes over.

California looked like the place to be.

But not to Roger.

“Winter is supposed to mean snowdrifts and sleigh rides.

Caroling and Christmas shopping.” He watched with extreme

distaste as I dropped my bubble-gum pink towel and slid into

my favorite winter bikini—the emerald one with the scarlet

straps. Carefully, I tied two tight bows at the hips, then slipped
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yler

into my jade-colored knee-high socks. I perched on the edge of

the sofa to slide on my rollerblades, before neatly doing up the licorice-red laces. Roger couldn’t accuse me of not being into the holiday spirit.

“Don’t you miss the snow?” he asked, staring as I adjusted my

perky little red-and-white hat. I stood and caught a glimpse of my reflection in mirror over the mantel—
Santa, eat your heart out
, I thought as I tilted the cap down in the front, then adjusted my dark ponytail to hang low down my back.

“I’ve never lived in snow,” I reminded him. There were two

stockings pinned to the mantel, over a bricked-in fireplace that would never sport flame.

“But you realize that winter’s
supposed
to be cold, right? You’re a weather girl, after all.”

“Meteorologist,”
I corrected him, knowing already from our month together that there was zero sense in arguing when he

was in this sort of a mood. “I’m going Rollerblading. We can

find a snowdrift to fuck in later.”

Roger didn’t laugh.

I stared out the window while he continued to mourn the

weather on the computer screen. When you’re from Southern

California, “cold” is anything under 78 degrees. Even though

I had the day off, I knew the weather report for the following

twenty-four hours. Today, the temperatures were supposed to

soar to the mid–90s, and the beach was certain to be beautiful, like almost every day of the year.

“I’ll be miserable with you later,” I assured Roger, planting a kiss on his forehead in my attempt to be a properly sympathetic girlfriend. “I promise.”

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In a San Francisco–like fog, Roger returned to his bong and

my sofa bed. He had brought out a thick velvety comforter with

a frolicking red reindeer pattern leaping against a glistening

green background. I watched skeptically as he tried to enjoy

wrapping himself up in the fuzzy blanket, but the room was far

too hot for the wintry weight. Too hot for anything but bare-

naked skin and sun-drenched skies. For melting cherry-flavored

Popsicles on each other’s body and licking along the trail of icy red water. For taking cold showers together, pressing up against the slick colored tiles.

One look at me in my bikini, and most men would have

tossed me onto the mattress, undoing the sexy little ties at my hips with their teeth. But Roger wasn’t like most men. Was that what attracted me to him? I hadn’t decided yet.

I blew him one last kiss and sailed out the door, bikini strings flying behind me like the kite tails out in the clear Santa Monica sky. As I skated, I worried about my new man. We’d met four

weeks earlier at a premier party for his sitcom, a laugh-a-minute farce called
Wish You Were Beautiful.
I’d been hired early on as a consultant because the main character was a weather girl—

“meteorologist,” I’d told the creators, although they’d ignored that note. “
Weather girl
sounds so much sexier,” they’d said. Roger had been imported from New York at the tail end of the project

as a pinch-hitting writer, and he’d charmed me throughout the

night with quips.

“I don’t have to wish
you
were beautiful,” he’d said over drinks.

“And I don’t have to wish you were here,” I’d teased right

back.

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There’d been an ice fountain spouting champagne and a clear

moonlight sky, perfect for outdoor kissing. Roger had admired all the right things—my lips, my eyes, my laughter—while his hands

had wandered ever so cautiously down to my ass as we danced.

When the pilot was picked up, Roger had been hired full-

time. And our little fling had turned real, as
Velveteen Rabbit
real as cute meets like that can be in the make-believe world of Los Angeles.

But now, thirty days in, the mood was changing, if not the

weather. Roger’s attitude seemed frostbitten as he huddled over his laptop, shades drawn against the sunlight whenever I wasn’t there to fling up the blinds, dark clothes matching his scowl.

The closer we got to Christmas, the bleaker the forecast of his emotions.

I rolled out of the apartment complex toward the pedestrian

path, my skates sliding on the smooth concrete surface glisten-

ing with silver sparkles like crushed diamonds. When I rounded

the bend, I caught my first panoramic shot of the beach. There

was nary a snowdrift in sight. Instead, the gold-sanded beach

glowed with festive parasols and the world’s most attractive

people. Los Angeles attracts beauty like a magnet. That was an

integral part of the sitcom Roger was writing. The weather girl in the story was a beauty who had fallen for an average Joe of a guy. The conceit of the sitcom was that this perky little meteorologist actually
could
change the weather, as if in a modern-day version of
Bewitched
.

I wished this was magic I could perform, as well.

My new beau had grown up back East, with Technicolor foli-

age and honest-to-goodness seasons. I’d heard him wax poetic

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93

about the way trees actually changed colors, heard him describe the seductive crackle of fallen leaves under his boot heels, the need for different clothes throughout the year. Roger seemed

to feel that one shouldn’t enjoy picture-perfect weather without first paying the price, as if so many uninterrupted days of sunshine in a row was something obscene.

“You can’t wear a bathing suit in December in New York

City,” he’d said solemnly the night before as I’d paraded around in my brand-new two-piece from Powder Puff Pin-Ups, a blue

bikini adorned with rhinestone-studded snowflakes. “You need

scarves and hats, overcoats and earflaps.”

Earflaps
. I’d shuddered.

“At home, I have three winter coats in various thicknesses—

mild, snowstorm, and blizzard—along with stripy scarves,

gloves, galoshes . . .” Roger had spoken the words with pride,

like a Boy Scout describing hard-earned badges.

The truth was that although I tried dutifully to understand