by Katie Cross
This conversation had instantly pushed us back into the Mark-and-Marie that I knew so well, and that calmed me. For a moment, it felt like we were on the phone, worlds apart. Now, however, immersed in his life, his vision seemed so much brighter. The idea ran through my head a few times, accruing statistics and numbers as fast as I could form a thought.
“Do you have supplies to 'cozy this place up'?” I asked.
“Maybe. I also have a Justin.”
“What's a Justin?”
“Justin. The camp ranger.”
“Oh!” The name finally surfaced in my mind from his payroll paperwork. It struck me—not for the first time—how oddly intimate a relationship between accountant and client could become. We saw most people in a light they didn't even comprehend themselves. Behaviors, statistics, impulses, challenges, all laid out in numbers.
To see it in real-life was disorienting, at best.
“Justin.” I nodded. “Right.”
“We'll need to do most of the work.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Lizbeth nearly perfected this little cabin, not to mention the addition of the bathroom, so we could spruce it up a little more with an artist in mind and try here first.”
His ideas flowed so easily now I almost missed the we in there. When had we become an official thing? Drywall? No thanks. Then again, this cabin wasn't too bad. Maybe people would pay to live here.
Hadn't I?
I cleared my throat.
“If we rent this place, then what about me?”
“The attic,” he said immediately. His brain really did move fast. He waved his hand in that direction again. “I'll crash on the couch or something. I've done winter camping before. It sucks, but with the right gear, it’s livable.”
My mouth opened to protest, but I stopped. Winter camping? Okay, this was going sideways somehow. His phone was buzzing incessantly in his back pocket, so I pointed to it with the hope of a mental break. He was hard to keep up with.
“Do you need to get that?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Just the app.”
What app? I wanted to ask but figured it must be his online dating one. He'd mentioned it vaguely one day when leaving for a date or something. Because we were client and accountant, I hadn't asked. Stupidly, I had to shake off a flare of annoyance that came with the thought of him on a dating app. I forced myself back into his idea.
“Give me a sec,” I murmured. “I need to think.”
He said nothing but kept pacing. Because he moved, I closed my eyes and tilted my head back on the mattress. With the chance to stop talking came more thoughts, and with them, more clarity. Finally, I pegged what had me most stymied here.
What Mark was really asking—though I couldn't be sure he realized it himself—was a dissolution of the client-accountant boundary. Mark wanted to approach our mutually-messed up situations as . . . friends.
Why did that make my throat tighten and feel like a bad idea?
I had no idea. Friends were in short supply these days, and I needed more of them. Or just one really good one. Fortunately, Mark had all the underpinnings for that. His offer was mostly innocuous but hid so much more. Was I willing to live and work with Mark? To be his . . . buddy? We were water and fire when it came to details. The details he brushed off so easily were the ones I hyperfocused on because you had to. Those were the parts of a project that could make or break the entire thing.
But he'd also offered me a safe spot. Himself, on some level, as protection. And I couldn't deny that it gave me an unexpected level of comfort to know I'd be near him. He was a gentleman, indeed, and had no absence of strength or ability. At the very least, he could keep me physically safe, which felt like too much of a selfish ask. But one I would gladly take.
In fact, Mark was far lonelier than I would have ever imagined. Like a puppy stuck in the store, staring out the window and wishing someone would just take him home already.
Once again, I had to force myself back to his business idea when my mind wandered into deeper territories. Thankfully, he left me in blessed silence for almost ten minutes. I kept my eyes closed, but quietly cataloged all my thoughts around it until I had no more.
Then I opened my eyes. He sat on my desk chair and stared at the ground. When I shuffled, his gaze locked on mine.
“You know, Mark . . .”
He stopped, eyes wide. “Don't tell me! You love it.”
“I don't hate it.”
He let out a whoop. “That is definitely a first.” He bounced back to his feet and rubbed his hands together. “We're going places. So what do you say? You hang out here and help me get organized and prep these cabins? I'll run the errands in town so no one can see you, Justin will help with the big stuff, Lizbeth will do the website and social media management. My mom probably knows crazy people that want to escape. Dad definitely knows crazy people.”
“Mark. Stop.”
I stood next to him and he stuttered to a standstill. For two seconds a strange expression crossed his face as if he braced himself, but it faded soon into a silent question.
With firmness, I said, “It's a good idea.”
His shoulders dropped. Until that moment, I hadn't noticed how tense he was underneath all his energy. But the absence of it left him glaringly obvious. He really did have a hard time finding people that would listen to his ideas. Which was understandable on some level. The man was like a fountain that didn't shut off. On the other hand, I could see a lonely little space of him existed in the vacuum of people that could twist his gear and slow it down.
Something like hope showed on his face. I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
“I'll . . . help you however I can. As a friend.”
The word didn't strangle me. In fact, it slipped out easily.
His brow dropped, and the softening in his gaze made him look so much like a happy little boy I almost lost my composure. Dagnabbit, but why did he have to be so rugged underneath all those layers of entrepreneur?
This was a bad idea. I didn't know why and I'd have to figure it out later, but this was a bad idea.
Now that I'd started, however, I couldn't stop it.
“But I won't put my accountant support behind it until we prove it out in the numbers and . . . we find someone to rent this cabin.”
He nodded, hands held in front of him as a concession. “Fair. I'll take that offer. Shall we 007 tonight after we crunch the numbers?”
His eyebrows waggled. My lips twitched.
“What's your draw to this place?” I finally asked, just to seal the final uncertainty. Would we work hard together just for him to decide to sell it on a whim? He'd certainly done that in the past.
Mark blinked. “Adventura is home. Forever. I'll never sell my home. I'm going to live on this piece of land and be that smelly old guy the summer camp kids always laugh at because he farts so loud and doesn't realize it.”
Unbidden, I giggled.
He grinned.
And then the decision was made: Mark and I were going to save each other.
Like friends.
10
Mark
Stella let out a heavy sigh behind me the next morning as we strode toward the commissary, which happened to double as a garage in the winter. We kept most of Justin's supplies in a back room that he'd roped off.
After our second 007 movie night and her relentless grilling of details, Stella had curled up on the couch, absorbed in her tablet, and mostly fallen quiet. I didn't mind. The silence wasn't so deafening when someone shared it. So I'd scribbled more ideas onto paper, mulled over our options, and, in general, had the best night in a while.
Pale morning light tinted the horizon as we quietly walked through Adventura. Both of us had been up early. We normally didn't even attempt to interact before noon, as if both of us couldn't sleep. Most of the time, it was easy for me to put off the enormity of tasks that I took on, but this was different. Never in my adult life had I formed any attachment to a place.
JJ and I had literally lived in an old bus for a while. For nearly all of our twenties, we bounced around the globe, living on JJ's climbing sponsorships and whatever money I could scrub up on my early, failed business attempts. When my parents divorced, the house I grew up in was the first thing to go.
Adventura was my first home.
And now I could lose it.
Which is why I finished my workout by 7:00, showered, had breakfast, and responded to two new Hearts on Fire messages. One from a girl named Shanti that was driving through tomorrow, and another from Sunni, who needed some money but really hated to ask. Shanti—that one had hope.
At 7:30 on the dot, I paced the floor to work out the broad logistics of this plan. By the time Stella snuck in through the back door at 8:00 and peered around the corner, as if afraid she'd disturb me, I'd already moved past basic cabin redesign and onto website construction. My sloppy notes covered four sheets of paper. Even I couldn't read two of the sentences.
But this morning seemed to have brought a change in her. Deep lines lived in her brow, and a growly expression covered her face. Was she the kind of girl that got hangry? Because she hadn't eaten yet.
“Regretting it already?” I quipped as I nudged her to the left, toward the commissary. She grumbled something as we approached the door.
“What are we doing here again?” she asked as I pushed open the door and motioned her inside. She tilted her head back to look at the two-story rafters overhead. On the far right were warehouse-sized shelves that stored and separated meals for campers in the summer. Workers organized and stored the food with weekly deliveries. Now, they lay empty, like a skeletal structure forgotten in the zombie apocalypse.
I yanked open a side door off to the left. Steel scratched across the cement floor as it swung toward us.
“Just checking what Justin's kept here so we know how much we'll have to pay for, as you put it, dolling it up.”
She made another sound, her focus back on her tablet, which she clutched like I'd take it from her. As if electronics and I had ever been friends.
A dusty lightbulb did a poor job of illuminating the closet, which was as perfectly organized as I expected. Nothing out of place except dust. A quick scan confirmed all the tools we would need. Basics like hammer, nails, spackle, every imaginable size of screwdriver, and more. Paint cans. Brushes. Rollers. Tarps.
Man land.
I freaking love this closet.
“Listen, Mark, I've put together a rudimentary cost analysis based on your current profit and loss—”
“English,” I muttered.
She sighed. “Me know your numbers.”
My back was to her as I attempted to wrench an old cardboard box off the shelf, which made it safe to grin.
“Tell me more, cavewoman Stell.”
“Okay,” she drawled, “to summarize in Mark terms, you need about $4,000 a month to pay off credit card debt and the mortgage. Right now, you have $1,000 in savings and $15,000 in credit card debt. You have three weeks until both the mortgage and the credit card are due again. You pay $2,000 for the mortgage and a minimum of $1,200 for the credit card.”
Those numbers normally wouldn't bother me. Money was fluid and came and went, but a long, lonely winter awaited me with little to do. There had been years in my life when I grabbed any job I could just to eat, but that kind of work wasn't available in Pineville. Now, I had nowhere else to go.
“Not bad,” I muttered as my finger caught the edge of the box. Dust trickled on my nose and made me sneeze when I finally yanked the box off the shelf. The lid tipped to the floor, scattering dead moths. She eyed them and stepped back to the doorway, which she leaned against.
“Setting aside income from your HomeBnB's to pay electric and food, if you plan to open one cabin—mine,” she added with an edge of tightness that made me grin further, “—you would need to earn $3,000 from renting that cabin in the next 21 days. That requires you to book out the next three weeks for $152 a day.” She hugged the tablet to her chest. “Starting within the hour.”
Marie—Stella—had always had a slice of self-righteousness to her tone just when we were about to start arguing. Her depth of belief in numbers was a sure foundation. They don't lie, she always said to me around gritted teeth.
But outside forces could skew numbers within seconds of discovery. A winning lottery ticket. A new investor. An idea that built with sheer work instead of monetary investment.
That same tone built within her now and gave me a little thrill. It's why I secretly loved to talk to Stella: we always did this back-and-forth. While I dreaded it because I never won, I adored the path to my demise.
“You assumed we need to make $3,000 this month,” I said. “Drop that to $2,000.”
Her frown could be felt through my back. “The only way to do that is to use your savings?”
“Yep.”
“But then you have no savings.”
“Yep.”
She paused. The silence stretched so long I thought she'd left. When I looked back, she still stood there, eyebrow quirked.
“But . . .”
“Savings are meant to be used in the worst of times, right? I'm in the worst of times, Stella. Calculate please?” I asked.
With another grumble of assent, her tablet pen poked away. I turned half my attention to the box I'd just pulled down. Though dusty, a few tidbits still lived in there, half-eaten by mice. Nothing usable. With a grunt, I tossed it into the commissary to throw away with the next trash run, and moved onto the next one.
“$95 if you book out every day,” she said.
“Try for 14 days.”
Another dramatic sigh. “$143 per day.”
“Perfect!” I wiped my dusty hands on my jeans. “That gives us one week to find enough people to pay $143 per night to stay in that tiny cabin for two weeks.”
“You make it sound so easy,” she muttered.
I glanced back at her. Her lashes were low as she stared at the tablet, lips quirked to one side of her face as the tablet pen tapped against the side. When her gaze lifted to mine, I gave her a lopsided smile.
“It doesn't have to be that hard.”
“I think you're underestimating how much marketing you need to do to find someone,” she said. “Do you have a social media presence?”
“We don't have to market.”
She glared at me. “You're going to conjure them out of thin air?”
“Yes.”
At my simple response, her mouth shut.
“You’re going to cut and dye your hair so you blend in better?” I asked, to cover the fact that I'd been staring at her a little too long.
She snorted. “My life is not a Loveline Channel movie. So no.”
Her attempt to keep it lighthearted wasn't a failure, but I saw some tension in her response. Maybe she wasn't full-on witness protection program yet, but what if it turned to that? I couldn't discount that it was possible.
Honestly, the cougar scared me more.
“Can we return to the numbers?” she asked. “And the details? I need to know how you conjure clients out of thin air. Most companies require money in marketing to generate leads.”
“I'm not most companies.”
She snorted. “Whatever. I'd like to pad these a bit. I don't want to use up all your savings. Let's assume we can charge $160 a night. It buys us a little leeway.”
“I'm going into town tomorrow.” Another rain of dust showered on me as I gripped the third box to pull it down. “I'll start talking to people. I texted Lizbeth this morning and she's already starting on a website and social media page.”
“Just like that? You don't have the money to pay her.”
“I'm not.” I shrugged. “They love me. It's what family does. We're going to try listing the cabin as a HomeBnB first, see if we can get traction there since I already have a profile she manages for me for now.”
Stella quirked an eyebrow. “Lizbeth sounds pretty amazing.”
&n
bsp; “She is.”
“How long have you known her?”
“Less than a year.”
“So fast?”
I shrugged. JJ and Lizbeth moved faster than even that. I didn't mention the fact that they spent only two months dating before they were engaged. For them, it fit. Plus, Lizbeth had loved JJ forever. Stella didn't seem like the uber-trusting type. She made a sound low in her throat, but kept her eyes on her tablet.
When the third box joined the other one to be thrown away, I clapped the dust off my hands in resignation.
“There's nothing here. I thought we had some odds and ends we could use to clean up one of the other cabins—lamps, light fixtures, that kind of thing—but nothing is here so far. I'll have to buy some things in town.”
“With the savings you plan to spend for a minimum credit card payment?” she asked sharply, throat bobbing. Stella stared outside, though there was nothing there, and I recognized the tight, pinched part of her voice.
Did risk scare her?
Maybe it should scare me more, but this wasn't the tensest situation I'd ever been in. Things always had a way of working out.
“Something will pop up,” I said easily. “Now that it's warming up outside, let's hop on the four-wheeler. I'll tour you around the camp. Let's see if it triggers any ideas for either of us.”
11
Stella
Twenty minutes later, we bounced down the road on a tired four-wheeler that gasped every time Mark pushed the accelerator too fast. I sat behind him, the autumn sun warm on my face. His back felt firm against my chest even though I tried hard to keep space between us. The bounce of the ride made it almost impossible. Eventually, I gave it up and enjoyed the feeling of him close to me.
How long had it been since I'd had physical touch with someone?
Too long.
My mind shifted away from that and tried to quell the rising panic.
This is Mark's responsibility, not mine.
This is Mark's responsibility, not mine.
