Anywhere (Sawtooth Mountains Stories, #3)

by Susan Fanetti

  He lifted his head and made his boiling eyeballs focus. “What’re you sayin’?”

  “I’m sayin’ I’ve been happy these past few months. I’d be happy to have a chance to fall in love with you. But I only want to be in love with someone who can love me back. Right now, I think you and I should take a break. Sort things out with Gigi.”

  “There’s nothing to sort out.” He knew that for the outrageous lie it was, and so did Ellen. Goddamn, he couldn’t think. “I don’t know, babe. I don’t know.”

  She stood and came around the table, setting her hand on his shoulder. “I know you don’t. That’s what I mean. I’m gonna step to the side while you work this out. I don’t want to get caught in the middle of this. I deserve better than that.”

  He closed his fingers around hers on his shoulder. “Yeah, you do.”

  “I’ll be around.” She kissed his head. “Go upstairs, Reese. Get some real sleep.”

  As she walked toward the back door, Reese called out, “El, wait.”

  She stopped and turned back. She waited.

  He wanted to say something real, something she deserved. She was a good woman. He felt close to her and enjoyed what they were building. But words failed him now.

  As she started to turn away again, he spat out, “I care about you.”

  She smiled. “I know. I care about you, too. A lot. Get some sleep, hon.”

  Chapter Six

  “You seen any more of her?” Logan asked as he took the bottle of Budweiser from Reese and brushed the clinging ice chips into the grass.

  “Nah. I’ve been out here.”

  Reese grabbed a bottle of his own from the cooler and slammed the lid down. He leaned back in his camp chair and watched Victor and Paul dress and skin the six-point bull elk Victor had brought down with a single arrow.

  Letting his head drop against the back of the canvas chair, Reese closed his eyes and turned his face up to the autumn sun that dappled through leaves just beginning to turn. The last part of the year, from October through the holidays, was just over the horizon, and it was his favorite part. Everything slowed down and took a breath. The tourists—those who came out for a pricey dude ranch adventure at the Moondancer and those who dragged their kids along on a budget-friendly road trip through the West—were gone. The harvest was in on the farms, and the herds were easing into their winter languor. Jasper Ridge wasn’t close enough to skiing to pick up much traffic beyond people driving through on their way to or from it, so everything just got quiet. He loved it.

  And nature, too—out here, in the woods, early fall brought a warm golden shimmer to the world. Fall was just easier on the senses all the way around, and Reese needed to give his senses a break.

  After Ellen had left on Saturday morning, he’d taken her advice and gone up to sleep the rest of his drunk off in his bed. When he’d woken around noon, he’d been able to think clearly enough to know he had to get out of the town fishbowl before he’d be able to get his head around what he needed. He’d showered, called Linda and put her in charge of the bar, rearranging the schedule to cover him for a few days, and then he’d run off to the solitude of his cabin.

  For about twenty-four hours, he’d been completely alone out here, but he hadn’t gotten anywhere in his thinking. All his mind wanted to do was remember and feel bad. Surrounded by peace and beauty, he’d been sitting alone, glowering at the trees and feeling like shit.

  Then, this afternoon, a truck had roared up his wheel-rut road and dumped out a load of the meddlesome sons of bitches he called friends. God love ‘em.

  “Maybe she’s not stayin’,” he muttered, more to himself than Logan.

  That thought had hooked on this morning: maybe he was getting twisted up for nothing. Maybe she’d dropped in out of nowhere and would drop right back out again, headed off to anywhere but here.

  In fact, wasn’t that the most likely thing? Obviously, in ten years away, she’d decided she liked it better out in the world. While she was away, nothing at home had improved: her dad was still dead, her family was still poor, and now her sister was divorced and raising a little kid who had some kind of problems. Her sister was still drinking too much—maybe her mother still was, too, though she stayed on the reservation these days, so Reese didn’t know. All the things that had been wrong at home were still wrong, and more besides. And now her grandmother was dead. Why would she stay?

  And how would he feel if she didn’t?

  In theory, he should be relieved. If she left, everything could just go back to normal, and he’d finally have the closure she’d denied him—because leaving again would be a resounding signal that she was done with the place and everybody in it. He could shrug the past ten years off, make this hiccup right with Ellen, and maybe finally be able to commit to a woman who was there for him. Something he’d been unable to do since Mac left.

  He should want her to go away. Everything would be simpler if she went away again.

  But he didn’t.

  Logan took a long swallow of beer and asked the question Reese had been unhappily mulling. “How would you feel about that, if she left again?”

  Reese turned and stared at the man. Until a year or so ago, Logan had been the most notorious hound dog in Jasper Ridge and maybe all of Idaho. But he’d gotten married this past June to the lawyer who’d gotten his baby brother off that murder charge, and now, apparently, he was in touch with all his feelings.

  Though he and Logan were about the same age, Reese was actually closer to his brother. They all were. Logan was a life-of-the-party kind of guy, who got along with just about everybody, but rarely got close to anyone. Heath, on the other hand, was pretty quiet, but when he let you in, you were in.

  If it had been Heath sitting here and asking the same question, Reese might have entertained answering it. But Heath was home with his family. His wife had given birth to their second child just a few weeks earlier, and he’d been keeping close to the nest.

  So Reese shrugged. “I don’t want to talk about it, man.”

  Logan nodded and finished his beer. They sat in quiet while Victor and Paul finished skinning the elk.

  When they were finished and the skin was draped over a line Reese had put up for that purpose, Victor carried the animal’s innards off into the woods for scavengers and Paul went to the pump to wash his hands and clean the tools. They all lived on land with good hunting—in fact, Reese was the only one who couldn’t just walk out from his own home and bag that night’s dinner—but this place had become the group hideaway. Because it wasn’t his actual home, it didn’t carry with it the responsibilities of life. No family, no neighbors, no bills on the desk. Just peace and quiet. Reese didn’t allow gun hunting for that very reason. Nothing to disturb the quiet, even when one of them took down a seven-hundred-pound elk.

  He had beers ready for Victor and Paul as they came up, the work done for now.

  “You bums enjoy yourselves, watchin’ us work?” Paul groused with a grin.

  Reese grinned back and held up a bottle. “Hey, you know the rules—you kill it, you clean it, and the one who’s gone longest without one helps. You want to sit and take a load off, you better bag a kill soon, pal.”

  Paul snatched the bottle and popped open another camp chair. Victor took his beer and sat on the ground, his back against the stump of an old oak, and his legs stretched out. The four men sat in companionable quiet and drank their beer.

  After a while, Paul said, “You plannin’ on hidin’ out here and drownin’ your sorrows till she leaves?”

  Reese quelled his defensive instinct and only shook his head. “Just takin’ a minute of quiet is all. And I’m not drowning anything. I’m sober right now.”

  “I don’t know if she’s leaving, anyway,” Victor said, and that had Reese’s full attention. He opened his eyes and lifted his head. Victor lived on the reservation, too. Though there was a lot of crossover from the reservation into town, and a lot of shared information, not all the reservat
ion news made it into Jasper Ridge.

  “What d’you mean?”

  Victor shrugged and knocked one of his braids over his shoulder. “Natalie said she was in the shop yesterday afternoon, askin’ if there was any openings.”

  ‘The shop’ was Sun Dance Art and Craft, a gift shop run by a small collective of Shoshone women who sold Native crafts to tourists. Mac had worked there as a clerk through high school and in the years after.

  It wasn’t a big place, and the collective did most of the work, but they hired a couple young women from the reservation to work afternoons and weekends. Victor’s little sister, Natalie, was working there now.

  If Mac had gone in looking for her old job back, yeah—maybe she was staying.

  “Did she get a job?”

  Victor shook his head. “It’s the end of the season, and it wasn’t a great year. Natalie’s freakin’ that they’re gonna have to let her go next week, and she needs to keep a job for her probation.” His sister, only eighteen years old, had gotten caught up in a federal investigation into meth dealing on the reservation, because she’d been hooked up with the leader of the gang that made and dealt the meth. Honor, Logan’s lawyer wife, had defended her and gotten her probation instead of hard time in a Fed prison.

  “Tell her to come into the Jack. She’s too young to waitress, but I can put her on to bus and do open and closing shit.”

  “Yeah?” Victor grinned. “Thanks, man.” He held his fist out, and Reese bumped it. “When should she come in? I mean, I think Geej might be stayin’, if she’s lookin’ for work. You can’t hide in the woods until she dies.”

  “I’m not hidin’.”

  All three of his so-called friends gave him three different looks with identical meanings: they thought he was full of shit.

  Which, of course, he was. “Honest to God, I can’t believe y’all are sitting here like a goddamn group therapy session. Did your dicks all shrivel up or somethin’ and you turned into chicks? It threw me, seein’ her. Yeah. ‘Course it did. But it’s been ten fuckin’ years, and I’m a fuckin’ grown man. I’m okay. Vic, tell Nat to come in tomorrow afternoon. Now, can we please stop talking about my feelings? ”

  Paul sat forward in his chair and flipped up the lid on the cooler. As he twisted off the cap of another beer, he said, “Works for me. Let’s get drunk.”

  *****

  His own personal intervention team rolled back out after dark, with the elk and its skin wrapped in game bags and laid out in the truck bed. They’d spent the whole afternoon with their asses parked in camp chairs outside the cabin, drinking Buds until the case ran out. Nobody achieved actual drunkenness—they were all experienced drinkers—but they all got mellow and easy. It had been a good afternoon, and Reese’s mind hadn’t stewed on unpleasant things.

  Straight up, it didn’t matter how he felt about Mac being back in town, or if she planned to stay. She was here, maybe for a day or two, maybe forever. He didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. Jasper Ridge was his home; he was going to be here. If she was, too, they’d work it out. If she left again, he’d work that out, too. What they’d had in the past was pretty much irrelevant. He’d been trying to get his head around something that had happened a decade ago, and no matter what, he couldn’t change anything about it.

  The past was the past, locked in stone. The future would happen whether he wanted it to or not. All he could do was pay attention in the present and try not to let it mow him down.

  He’d sleep out on the cabin’s back porch tonight and roll back into Jasper Ridge in the morning.

  The cabin was rough—just one room, with a little kitchen setup in one corner, a double bed in another, and a couple fold-out sofas framing a stone fireplace on the other side. No water but the pump outside and another at the sink. No electricity. No bathroom, just the outhouse in back. A little covered porch out front, leading to a fire pit. A bigger screened porch off the back, where he kept a clutch of camp cots. It was possible to have a party of about dozen people or so out here for a weekend and give them all a place to sleep. Or a whole lot more people, if they didn’t care where they crashed. When he was younger, back when his dad was alive and Reese was kind of a clueless asshole, he’d done a whole lot of partying out here. Webb-vana, they’d called it in high school. It had even made the yearbook. Dumb fuck kids.

  He was no longer a dumb fuck kid looking to curry favor with his classmates by throwing dumb fuck parties. Now this place was a sanctuary. After the guys had left and he’d cleaned up, he took an old Coleman lantern out to the back and sat in the rocking chair on the porch. The stream was off a little in the distance, far enough away down a gentle hill so the cabin didn’t flood in the spring, but he could hear it clearly in the still night. He closed his eyes, let the autumn cool, the burbling stream, and the soft sounds and scents of night woods mix with his sustaining gentle buzz, and he felt good. This was what he needed—not to think things out, but to slough them off.

  The night was so quiet that he heard the engine from a distance. A motorcycle engine. His heart made a weird twitch. There was only one person he could think of who’d come out this way, over his intentionally shitty road, on a Harley. He’d heard she was riding an old one, and he’d been surprised to hear it. After what happened to her father, he would have guessed she’d stay clear of motorcycles. But then, his Mac had always confounded expectations.

  He picked up the lantern, went off the porch and around to the front of the cabin. The headlamp winked through the trees as the bike approached. He hung the lantern on the post and and waited as Mac pulled her bike up beside his truck. She ditched her helmet and shook out her hair. Strange to see it so short; she’d always worn it so long it had brushed her waist.

  “Hey,” he said as she walked up, dressed just like the other night—old leather jacket, old ripped jeans, plain t-shirt. He felt surprisingly mellow, all things considered. And not at all surprised she was here. In fact, now that she was, Reese understood that when he’d come out here yesterday, part of him had been hoping she’d follow.

  “Hey,” she answered, stopping about an arm’s length away.

  “How’d you know I was out here?”

  “You weren’t at the Jack. Where else would you be?”

  She stood in the glow of the lantern, and the reflected light made her dark, dark eyes seem otherworldly. She was so goddamn beautiful. Her bronze skin was smooth as ever, not a hint of a line, not even at the corners of her eyes. Her black hair, thick and straight, gleamed in the lantern light, too. She tucked one side behind her ear—a small turquoise stone dangled from her lobe—and he saw her pulse fluttering at her throat. Fluttering—its beat quick and light. She was anxious.

  “We should talk, Reese. Don’t you think?”

  She was right; they needed to talk. There was a vast mass of pent-up shit between them, and he, for one, had some questions he needed answers to. They definitely needed to talk.

  Reese’s arm came up as if with a will of its own. He reached out and slid his hand under her hair, along the side of her neck, resting his palm on that flutter. His fingers hooked over her nape, and he pulled her to him, until her body stumbled into his. She gasped in quiet surprise, and he bent down and covered her open mouth with his.

  Mac barely hesitated. Just a subtle flinch accompanying that gasp, and then she softened completely, molding her body to his, tilting her head, welcoming his tongue in her mouth, meeting it with her own. Her mouth, fuck, the feel of her mouth, so perfectly familiar, so incredibly soft and lithe. She tasted exactly the same, smelled exactly the same, felt exactly the same.

  Goddamn.

  Ten years disappeared, wafting away like smoke. Reese was holding the woman he loved, kissing her, feeling her, wanting her, and nothing was different. She was his, plain and simple.

  Her hands skimmed up his arms, over his shoulders, and her arms crossed around his neck. He felt her fingers slipping into his hair and clutching. He wrapped his arms around her waist, g
rabbed handfuls of her sweet ass. She moaned into his mouth and pushed her body more tightly against his. A desperate groan crawled up his throat.

  Letting go of her ass with one hand, he eased up, under her jacket, under her t-shirt, and felt the hot, smooth skin of her back, the breathtaking sweep of her waist, the quiver of her belly. His fingers played under the waistband of her jeans, and she whimpered again.

  Her arms dropped from his neck, slid down his chest, circled his waist, snaked under his hoodie and t-shirt, and then her hands were on his skin, too, pushing up his back, hooking over his shoulders. All the while, their mouths crashed together, ravenously.

  Finally, needing to get a real breath, Reese broke the kiss, turning his head to skim his cheek over hers. “Fuck, Mac,” he gasped with air he couldn’t spare. “I missed you so fucking much.”

  “I missed you, too. Every day.”

  He didn’t want to give a fuck about the time she’d been gone or why she left. He wanted those years to stay gone, to not matter. He wanted to hold her and be glad to have it. He wanted to draw her into the cabin and get her clothes off. He wanted ... God, he wanted. But her words clanged around in his head and woke up all the shit that had been slinging back and forth in there for the past two days. With those few words, she’d brought time back. He dropped his hands to her hips and stood straight.

  “Then why didn’t you come home?”

  She looked up at him, breathless and so flushed it showed in the lantern light. His kisses still shone on her lips. “It’s complicated, Reese.”

  “No, it’s not. Not that complicated. You missed me? Well, I’ve been here. Right where you left me. So why didn’t you come home? Why did you just disappear?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to tell me why.”