Two Cabins, One Lake: An Alaskan Romance (7 page)

Chapt
er Six

I
n
my assessment of people who lived in the woods, I fell under the Loner
category. 

Thus, I wasn’t much for barbecues.  But Suzy was supposed to
be there, and I hadn’t seen her in a while.  And there’d be free food, and I
don’t think I’d ever turned down free food.  I’d even eaten what Gary had made
me that morning.

The barbecue was an anniversary party for two of our
longest-standing residents, a sweet old couple that ran the local post office.

Clearwater Lodge, owned and operated by Suzy’s parents, was
hosting the party.  It was a neat little operation with eight cabins scattered
back in the woods.  None of them had indoor plumbing, but there was a central
bath house with nice toilet facilities.  The main building was a large,
two-story chalet with a wrap-around deck that ended less than twenty feet from
the river’s edge.

As I approached in my boat, I saw that the party was already
well under-way.  Several people milled about on the deck and the lawn.  Smoke
billowed from the gazebo fire pit, and a breeze plucked at checked tablecloths
already spread with food.

The lodge had pretty extensive boat parking at their dock,
but every slot was full, so I pulled in to the shore alongside three other
boats that’d done the same.  I threw my anchor up on the beach, and picked my
way over the other anchor lines to the steps that led up from the dock.

It was pretty much just at the top of the steps that I
realized this hadn’t been a good idea.

My ex-boyfriend slash asshole-extraordinaire stood twenty
feet away, bullshitting with his guide buddies.  Most fishing guides were
viewed by the locals with the deepest suspicion, and in Brett’s case, it was
warranted.  He was a skeezy, schmoozing, low-life egotist who’d do anything for
a buck.  We’d been together almost a year, and I had no idea how it had taken
me as long as it did to catch on to what a grasping, arrogant, self-centered
asshole he was.

We’d broken up six months ago, and I’d managed only to see
him from afar, in another boat on the river, since.  I didn’t want to see him
up close, without an expanse of icy water between us, and I certainly didn’t
want to conversate with the fucker.

I turned around, intending to walk back down those steps and
motor away.  I had a chest freezer full of food—I could find something else to
eat.

“Helly!”

I winced. 
Oh, goddamn.
  I turned around.  “Hey, Ed.” 
Over his shoulder, I saw that Brett had glanced up at my name, and his
shit-brown eyes were on me. 
Double damn.

“Hey,” Ed said, ending his eager trot in front of me.  “How’s
the four-wheeler running?”

“Great, thank you,” I said.  “I’d really like to pay you for
your help.  How much—”

“Naaahhh,” he said, waving off my offer.  “We’re friends,
right?  Consider it a favor,” he said with a wink.

I clenched my teeth.  He didn’t understand.  I didn’t want
to owe him a ‘favor’.

He took me by the elbow, and guided me toward
his
group of buddies.  I let him, because I was shamelessly using him as a shield
against my ex-boyfriend.

I glanced around for Suzy, but didn’t see her.

“Beer?” Ed asked.

“Please.”  I was going to need to be well-liquored to
tolerate this evening, I just knew it.

He introduced me to his group of friends—there were two I
didn’t know—and then dashed off to get me a drink.

 “Helly,” the new friend named Max said.  “That’s an unusual
name.  Is it after the clothing line?”

Helly Hansen was a fancy outerwear brand, and it was a fair
question, but I found it funny that a man was asking it.  I smiled.  “My name’s
actually Haley, it’s just my brothers started calling me Helly instead, and it
stuck.”

“And do you work at one of the lodges?” he asked.

“I’m a fishing guide,” I said.  “I’ve worked for all of the
lodges at one time or another.”

Ed’s friends tittered, the locals making their usual subtly
sniping comments and jokes about female guides, and women doing men’s work. 
Sexism in the Alaskan bush is alive and rampant, but my response was tempered
by the knowledge that men truly were better at a lot of tasks (not including
fishing, of course) necessary for survival in the wilderness.  They were quite
simply bigger and stronger, and that made a heck of a difference in daily life
out here on the ragged edge of civilization.  Just try pull-starting a
snowmachine sometime, and you’ll see what I mean.  So although their comments
irritated me, they were nothing I hadn’t heard before.

“Isn’t it bad luck to have a woman on a boat?” asked the
other newb whose name I’d already forgotten.  Ed’s friends laughed as if he
were funny.

Just because I’d heard it before didn’t mean I had to put up
with it.  “Excuse me,” I said.  I turned around, snatched the beer out of Ed’s
outstretched hand, and chugged it as I crossed the lawn toward the steps.

“Helly!”  Suzy’s high, sweet voice cut through the hubbub.

I turned toward her.  She was adorable, as usual, somehow
turning a plaid shirt into a fashion statement, a red handkerchief failing to contain
her cloud of curly brown hair.  She had bright eyes caught somewhere between
green and brown, a mischievous smile on an elfin face, and the cutest freckles
I’d ever seen.

“Oh thank God,” I said.  “Please save me.  Ed thinks I owe
him something because he fixed my four-wheeler, and his friends are sexist
pricks, and Brett’s over there waiting for his opportunity to strike.  All I
wanted was free food!”

“Aww,” Suzy said, patting my arm.  “I’ll protect you from
them.  Come get a burger with me.”

We wound over to the grills, stopping along the way to
congratulate Dotty and Harv.  They were an adorable couple, both in their 70s. 
Dotty asked how my writing was going, and gave me a wink from under her cloud
of white hair.

We finally moved on with me shaking my head.  I really
didn’t understand why I got along so much better with older folk than with the
assholes my own age.  Maybe I should have been looking for an older man…

Suzy and I went through the burger line, and then settled at
the picnic table up on the deck so I could keep an eye on both Brett and Ed.

“So how’s it going with your new neighbor?” she asked.

I almost choked.  And then I turned red.  It was just
yesterday we’d almost had sex in my yard, and then just this morning that he’d
made me look like an idiot and dumped a glass of water on my head.

She laughed.  “That good, huh?  My parents invited him, but
I haven’t seen him yet.”

I shot to my feet, ready to abandon my burger and get the hell
outta Dodge.  Ed and Brett in the same space were one thing.  I absolutely knew
adding my neighbor to the mix would trigger Armageddon.

“Oh, quit being so melodramatic.”  Suzy grabbed the hem of
my shirt and yanked me back down to my seat.  “You can share airspace with your
neighbor.  I told you, I’ll protect you.  Here, have another beer.”

I whimpered, feeling like a trapped animal, and chugged my
second beer.  About ten minutes after that, I was at the point where everything
was a wee bit fuzzy around the edges, and the world was doing a gentle wobble.

Suzy waited until my wobble stage to ask me again.  “So,
seriously, how’s it going with the neighbor?  Did you take my advice?”

I nodded.  “I did ask him to be quiet in the mornings—you
would have been proud of me, I was damn polite, but it was wasted on him
because—do you know what he did?”

She shook her head, looking entertained.  “No idea.”

“The very.  Next.  Morning.  He woke me up again.  Six a.m.,
his damn saw starts up.”  My hand clenched into a fist, crushing my red plastic
cup.

I must have had a look in my eye, because she said, “Oh,
Helly, what did you do?”  She knew me so well.

“I woke him up, with my chainsaw.  Practically under his
window.  At four a.m.,” I added with a self-satisfied smirk.

Suzy looked like she didn’t know whether to gasp or laugh. 
She covered her open, smiling mouth with a dainty hand—
why couldn’t
my
hands be that cute?

“And… I locked myself in his cabin, cut his hammer in half,
and stole his saw blade,” I continued.

“Helly!”  I’d obviously shocked her, but she recovered
fast.  She leaned forward, her eyes dancing.  “What did he do?” she asked.

“Stole the chain off
my
saw, started playing loud
music when he works, and is even more blatant about having stolen my dog,” I
said bitterly.

“What do you mean, he stole your dog?”

“I found her on his couch the other day.  She had her head
in his lap and he was feeding her junk food.  And now, I see her hanging out
over there a lot.  More than she ever hangs out with me,” I muttered, and I
knew I was pouting, but I couldn’t seem to stop.

“Wait.  Mocha likes him?  Mocha, your spooky dog, had her
head in some guy’s lap?”

“Yeah.”  My tipsy mind was going a little wild with the
head-in-Gary’s-lap imagery.

I glanced over to see Suzy’s brows had shot to her
hairline.  Even though I was getting on toward drunk, I had just enough control
of myself not to tell her about the orgasm he’d given me.  If she found my dog
changing sides shocking, I could only imagine how she might react to
that
news.  More importantly, I wasn’t nearly ready to own up to my little
transgression.

“You know,” she said finally, “I’ve always thought dogs were
good judges of character.”

I scoffed.  “By that logic, he’s a better character than
me.”

She just looked at me with this irritating little smile on
her face.

I went and got another beer.

The neighborhood women found us and sat down, and soon the
table was full of talk.  I frowned, hearing the break-ins were still going on downriver. 
And moving up.  Whoever the perpetrators were, they were armed.  If the cabin they
were ‘visiting’ was locked, they were just as likely to shoot it open as they
were to break the window.

“But they aren’t really taking anything,” one of the women
said.  “It’s so odd.  Guns, things of value, just left behind.”

“They’re probably just vandals,” Suzy pointed out.  “Those
miserable people that take joy out of destroying other people’s stuff.”

“Or else they’re looking for something,” someone suggested.

“Has anybody even seen these people?  They’ve been here for
a couple weeks now; surely someone has seen something suspicious.”

The women all shook their heads.  “With all these fishermen
in for the summer, there are way too many strange faces.  No one stands out.”

“Well, my Mikey has started sleeping with his gun under his
pillow.  If anyone tries to break into
our
cabin, they’ll be sorry.”

The conversation drifted on to commiserations about husbands,
with Suzy gleefully soaking up details of the latest marital strife.

I finally tuned out entirely. 
Husbands.  Who needs ‘em? 
Er…people with broken four-wheelers, that’s who.

When all of the females at my table gasped in unison, I
looked up.  I followed their gazes, and what did I see?  You guessed it.  My
neighbor.  The one who’d chased me, tackled me, and made me scare the wildlife.

I drank my third beer as they talked about how good-looking
he was, what nice hair he had, what broad shoulders. 
What big eyes and
teeth, more like.

“And he’s got a helicopter!”

“Oooo!” went the group.

Just kill me now
.

Conversation moved on from there, and I tried not to think
too hard about why I kept watching Gary.  He showed no discomfort at all moving
around and talking to dozens of people he didn’t know.  If I was being
objective, I could say he had a nice strong handshake, a lovely smile, and shoulders
and biceps that strained at his shirt.  He appeared to be quite charming when
he wanted to be, and the one or two women who weren’t at our table threw
themselves at him.

Make that the women at our table, too.  Even the married
ones eventually excused themselves to go make his acquaintance.

At one point, Brett slithered his way in through the circle
of ladies.  I snorted, watching him balefully.  I couldn’t hear him, but I
could see that ingratiating smile on his face, and I knew exactly what my
horrible-human-being ex was up to.  He was trying to make a new rich buddy,
because God knows, you can never have too many of those.

It was interesting to see that Gary seemed immune.  He was
friendly enough, but he didn’t seem more interested in talking to Brett than he
was anyone else.  I wasn’t sure, but toward the end of one of Brett’s little
speeches, I thought I caught the faintest hint of irritation on Gary’s face. 
He finally managed to escape my ex and went to get some food.

I had to stop watching him when he looked up and caught my
eye.  His lip quirked, and a rush of lust so strong it ought to be illegal
blasted through me.  Damn him.  I had a perfectly nice man pursuing me—one with
mechanical skills!—and it was this damn loud-ass piece of work that apparently
did it for me.  It made absolutely no sense.

Those beers finally caught up with me, and I excused myself
to make my way to the restrooms in the bath house.  The evening was getting
more advanced—I guessed it to be a little after nine p.m.—and the shadows were
getting longer.

I’d rounded the corner of the lodge and was tottering along
when somebody grabbed me.  I had a bare second to recognize Brett’s face before
his mouth crashed down on mine.  Then he stuck his tongue down my throat.

I was drunk, but I wasn’t
that
drunk.

I tried to push him away.  “Brett, get off me!” I mumbled, my
elocution foiled by his slimy tongue.  I almost gagged at the overpowering
taste of polish sausage and sauerkraut.  When had I ever enjoyed his nasty
kisses?