by Frankie Love
“It’s not exactly Jell-O shots and an ugly holiday sweater party,” I tell her, bringing the box to the table where she sits cross-legged, snipping at the snowflakes again. “But, it’s the best party I can offer you.”
Her face brightens, and I love that I made her smile.
“You’re telling me we are having a Christmas party?” she asks unfolding the paper in her hand. It’s another perfectly intricate snowflake.
“That I am, Evie. I reckon you like music?”
“I love music.
“I don’t play much music, or really any music, but my grandfather did. And I remembered I have his old record player.” Before I can even open the box, Evie has scrambled over to me, reaching inside eagerly.
“You have a Bing Crosby Christmas album?” Evie exclaims, practically jumping into my arms. “Do you have any idea how perfect this is? Everett, your grandfather had great taste.”
“Let me set this up.”
“I’ll set it up,” she says. “You need to get us some Christmas drinks.”
“I’m telling you, I don’t have Jägermeister or whatever shitty drinks you like at those parties you go to.”
She cocks an eyebrow, her body language saying, let’s get this party started. “Give me some whiskey. I’m good to go.”
“No,” I tell her shaking my head. “We already had our whiskey for today. I think it’s time we had some hot buttered rum.”
“Let me guess,” she says plugging in the record player and opening the lid. “You made the spiced butter yourself?”
“Are you teasing me, Evie?”
“No, I was just thinking you should definitely have a guest feature on my blog. I mean, a mountain man who makes his own hot buttered rum? You would have more pussy than you know what to do with. It’s like an entire thing, you know, that, right? Mountain men? It’s like the new cowboy. Only hotter.”
“In that case, I’ll definitely do a guest feature on your blog.
“Oh, so you want a lot of pussy?”
“No. I want your pussy. If I do that for you, will you come back and visit me?”
My words must’ve struck a chord with her, because she swallows and looks away, averting her eyes from me. I take that as my cue to go to the kitchen and get our drinks.
Self-doubt crawls at my skin, as I get out the mugs, and maybe I read this woman all-wrong. I swear to God she liked what she saw. She liked what we did. But maybe she doesn’t want to come back for more.
“This is perfect,” Evie says clasping her hands together as the record begins to spin a soft familiar sound through the room. “Do you have any twine?” she asks as I bring over our hot buttered rums and set them down on the dining room table.
“Sure do.” I go to a drawer and ask, “Green or brown?”
“Both,” she says, laughing in shock. “I don’t think you understand how much I love the fact that you have more than one kind of twine. It’s pretty much a craft blogger’s wet dream.”
“Your wet dream, huh? Well, finding you lost in the woods is kind of a mountain man’s wet dream.”
She laughs again, and I swear to God no one would ever need to listen to records, not a single goddamn piece of music if they could just hear Evie’s laugh. It fills up the room in a way Crosby never could. She sounds like Christmas when she laughs. Bright and merry and full of hope.
She’s a fucking angel.
“You have to help,” she tells me, handing me a pair of scissors. “I already folded the paper, all you have to do is cut some shapes out.”
“Oh yeah? And what are you gonna do?” Holding the paper in my hand I suddenly feel like a second-grader learning to cut in a straight line. I’ve no idea what the hell I’m doing. I may be able to harvest a field and milk the goats... but cut a snowflake, that’s impossible.
“I’m going to make garlands out of them. For the tree.”
We work in quiet unison, the music our background and the two of us finding an easy rhythm side-by-side. She folds and hands me the papers to cut, pointing and smiling encouragingly.
Once we have enough snowflakes, she ties them to the twine, and together we wrap them around the tree. The white and black newspaper snowflakes look classic, and when she places her snow globe cutout at the top of the tree, I can’t help but smile.
“Now we need popcorn,” she directs.
By now, I’ve learned not to argue with her.
“I’ll start that and you can get the needle and thread.” I know where she’s going with this.
“Let me guess, you have a sewing basket?”
“You’re gonna have to stop teasing me, girl,” I tell her as I add oil to a pot and throw some kernels in. “My sewing kit is next to the bookshelf.” Then I turn the burner on high and wait to hear the pop, pop, pop.
“My God, is this your book? I mean your books?” she asks. I look over and see she’s picked up the sewing kit, but my books are on the shelf next to it.
“Everett Miller, A Modern-day Mountain Man,” she reads. “Everett, you told me they were e-books, you have print copies too?”
I shrug, reluctant to talk about myself.
“This is so impressive. You know I’m going to stay up all night reading your most intimate thoughts, right?”
“You want to read about my last three hundred and sixty-five days? You want to hear about me drying my clothes on a line outside in the summer? About me butchering a goat? Go for it, honey.”
“You seriously do that? Butcher your goats?”
“How do you think we had chili?”
“That was goat chili? Oh. My. God. I’m telling you, Everett, I run a frugal girl’s blog, and have heard of some weird shit to cut corners... but I’ve never heard of people eating goat chili.”
“Calm down, woman. It wasn’t goat chili. I was joking. Yes, I butcher goats, but that was venison in the chili.”
She shakes her head, opening the sewing kit. “I don’t think I could do it,” she says, pulling out the thread and a needle.
“The butchering? It’s not so bad. I mean unless you get queasy around blood”
“No,” she says softly. “I don’t think I could do this whole off-the-grid thing. I think it would drive me a little crazy, to be honest. What if you want to go to the movies? Or enjoy a cup of coffee you didn’t have to make yourself?”
I know where she’s going with this. I get plenty of readers who send me letters asking me the same sort of thing. I know this life isn’t for everyone.
But in my bedroom, earlier, when I was taking Evie against me, when my hands were running over her soft skin, I thought that perhaps we could be something beyond this night. I thought we could be something real.
“I’d be lying if I told you there aren’t times I get a little stir crazy. I go to town about every eight weeks and pick up things I need. I’d say on a whole, eight weeks of making my own coffee isn’t so rough. Like I said, I don’t take anything for granted.”
Evie bites her bottom lip, straightens her shoulders, her body language telling me that my words aren’t the ones she wanted to hear.
“What is it? What did I say?”
“It’s just that when you say it like that, that you don’t take things for granted, it implies that everyone else does. I guess ... it’s kind of hard to hear. I wish you didn’t think of me that way.”
The popcorn starts smoking.
“Dammit.” I lift the pot off the burner, realizing it’s scorched. Using a potholder, I carry it out the front door and set it in the snow. The snow is still falling heavily. She’s followed me to the doorway, and I turn to look at her.
“I don’t think of you that way. I believe you live a full life and care deeply for those around you,” I say, speaking from my heart. “And, I’m sorry, I know you really wanted to string popcorn.”
“I don’t need it.” She sighs and reaches out for my hand. “Come inside. Let me warm you up.”
Chapter Nine
When Everett pulls me into
bed that night, my heart feels torn. Which is strange. On one hand, I have this ridiculously dreamy man who has a massive boner for me holding me tightly against it. But on the other hand, I know this isn’t going to last... and I wish it could.
At the end of the blizzard, I’m going home to my little cottage, going to continue as if this never happened, because no matter how perfect Everett appears, his life couldn’t be more different than mine.
Even me, a girl with endless amounts of optimism, can see that there’s an expiration to this rendezvous.
Everett pulls me toward him until our noses touch. I reach out my hands and run them over his beard. It’s soft, and I have a sneaking suspicion he uses some sort of handmade balm for it. A smile crosses my lips, and before I lean over and kiss him on his lips, he kisses me.
“Are you always in your head like this?” he asks.
His hands run over my spine, down to my ass, and he squeezes it ever so slightly. Hard enough, though, that I know what he wants.
Hard enough for my body to tell me what it wants, also.
“I don’t think people would say there’s that Evie, she’s a thinker.”
“No? What would they say.”
I roll on top of Everett and push up so I straddle him. I unbutton his flannel shirt, the one I’m wearing, slowly. The lamplight glows across the room and his dog Johnny Walker sleeps at the foot of the bed.
“I suppose they would say there’s that Evie, she’s always the life of the party.”
“Did you like our Christmas party?”
“I did.” I shrug off the shirt, leaving my breasts bare. His hands gravitate toward them instinctively.
“Me too. Strange, not having shared this place with anyone for five years. That’s a long ass time.”
“You’ve gone five years without having sex? I feel honored.”
“Pretty close. The first year I moved here, I was still dating this woman back home, and I’d go visit her for long weekends but eventually we both knew neither of us was willing to sacrifice the lives we had chosen for a life with each other.”
I close my eyes, arching my back as he thumbs my nipples. It’s a double-edged sword, giving into the way my body feels, and simultaneously pushing down the way my heart constricts.
Everett may be a ruggedly handsome mountain man, but there’s no way our lives can merge. His words, his last girlfriend, hit too close to home.
It’s crazy to even be thinking any of these things after just one afternoon with this man, and I don’t know why women seem to be programmed to think about futures with men they’ve just met, but I can’t help it.
Maybe it’s because of the serendipitous way we met, maybe it was the unexpected way our bodies connect. Maybe it’s the way he takes my hands and laces our fingers together, pulling our bodies closer still.
Everett kisses me and I pin his hands over his head, my breasts pressed against his chest. My ass in the air. His mouth on mine.
“Oh, Evie.”
Our mouths part and our tongues meet and heat rushes over me, onto him. My body is on fire; his cock is so hard. I feel him beneath me, my pussy grinding against his length. Wanting him in me, desperately.
And I don’t want to wait.
“Take me, Everett. Now.” I pull up so that I’m sitting on him, pressing a hand on his chest, my other hand beginning to stroke his long shaft up and down, up and down. “Now, Everett,” I whimper, needy in a way I have never been before.
“Shh, we can take it slow, baby,” he tells me.
I’m already lifting my ass, ready to sink down on him. I don’t wait. I need my pussy filled with his cock, the massive rod that makes him a man. Makes my pussy cry out in pleasure. I moan in delight.
This might all end in the morning.
I am not leaving here with any regrets.
“You want a condom?” he asks.
I shake my head. “I’m on the pill.”
He nods our eyes meeting. Everett makes me feel so understood with just one look.
“I just want to feel you in me, Everett. This might be our only chance... and I want... I want to hold on tight... I don’t want to lose you yet, not before I’ve really had you.”
He must understand exactly what I mean because he doesn’t say anymore.
He just fills me up with everything he has.
Chapter Ten
The next morning, I wake up with Evie in my arms. Yesterday felt like a dream, but now it’s morning, and she is here. This is real. She is real.
It feels like I’ve known her forever, or maybe just that I have been waiting for her, forever.
I guess it’s like that with people sometimes, though I can’t say I’ve ever had that instant connection with another person -- the kind you see in movies or read about in books.
The kind that is fiercely loyal, the kind that keeps you up all night trying to figure out how the fuck this will all work.
It’s complicated. While not everyone believes in that at-first-sight stuff, the bigger issue is the reality of her life not lining up with mine.
That truth is glaring me in the face. I tossed and turned all night, half the time in agony, and the other half in complete devotion. When my cock was buried deep inside her pussy, everything made sense. She and I were one, our bodies puzzle pieces. Our lives seemed to fit.
We took a shower and washed one another off our skin. In bed, she nestled against me and fell asleep as if there was nothing rattling around in her heart or mind.
That’s when I couldn’t stop wrestling with this fucked up fact: the blizzard would end and I’d be driving her to her car.
Saying goodbye. Walking away.
I don’t want to, but I’d never ask her to give up her life for me. A man who is just a stranger.
Even though I swear I’ve known her in my heart for my entire life.
When she wakes, it’s obvious that her sleep was different than mine. Her eyes are rested, soft. Out of focus and hazy, but not in a sleepy way. In a, I feel safe with you, way.
“Hey baby,” I whisper. “You sleep well?”
She murmurs a yes, before pressing her lips to my chest. “How do you smell so good? Like you’re made of fresh air.”
“Speaking of, I gotta go feed the animals. You wanna help?”
She lifts her head from my chest, licking her lips. Lips, I have memorized. Lips, I don’t want to forget.
“If you’re okay with a city girl with literally zero clues of anything livestock-related tagging along, I’m your woman.”
Soon Evie and I are bundled up. She looks the exact same as she did yesterday when I found her. Her pink hat and fur-lined boots are coordinated perfectly.
“Are you ready to get your hands dirty”?” I ask, pulling open the barn doors.
She shakes her head but doesn’t back away. I like that, her spunk. Her spirit. I can picture her memorizing every detail of this morning to try to capture later in a blog post about the city girl gone country.
I show her around and explain the lay of the land.
She gasps in delight over everything and is particularly mesmerized by the speckled eggs. “Really, she lays blue ones? They’re so pretty. I feel bad even thinking about cracking them open.”
And when I kneel before a goat, Evie watches me, wide-eyed.
“You really know how to milk it?”
“Evie, of course, I do. This goat here provides me with milk for baking and my coffee, but also I can make goat cheese. A cow would produce more than I’d ever need.”
“I can’t wait to get back to the cabin and make you an omelet with that cheese and these eggs. But what do you do with fresh produce?”
“Well, that’s the biggest issue. I can a bunch in the summer, and freeze a lot too. Do you want an omelet with onions, peppers, and a jalapeño? All of that is frozen. But you’re right, if you’re looking for fresh sliced tomatoes, you’re screwed this time of year. When I go to town, I pick up as many bags of produce as I’ll be able to m
anage before they spoil. Bananas, avocados, strawberries. Plenty of them.”
“That’s incredible.”
“Incredibly good or incredibly strange?”
I begin filling the bucket with the goat’s milk and tell Evie to fill up the troughs with feed.
Evie takes the bag of millet and scoops out plenty for the chickens, the goats, and the pigs.
“I don’t think it’s strange in a bad way... More like, just so different from how I live.”
“Yeah,” I stand, the bucket full. “It sucks, doesn’t it? How you and I are living parallel lives, or maybe not parallel, depending on how you look at it?”
Evie talks with her back to me, her eyes on the piglets suckling against their mama. “You’re kind of all in with this homesteading thing, aren’t you?”
“I’ve worked for five years to get to this point.”
For all I know, Evie and I could be through in a week, in a day. I know what I feel, but I have no clue where she’s at. And what would I do right now? Tell her, after less than twenty-four hours together, that I want to put a baby in her and keep her here with me forever?
That could have her running for the goddamn hills.
“I’m all in,” I expound. “I never thought I could make my livelihood selling books about what I do out here. But I know I couldn’t write the same books if I lived in the city. There’s not much of a market for a guy detailing working a 9-5 job.”
If she wanted to come toward me... give me an inkling that maybe she’d be willing to try... something... this would be her opportunity.
Instead, she back peddles.
“Oh, I know,” she says. “I just. I get it, Everett, you worked really hard for the life you’ve made for yourself.”
I nod, not knowing what else to say, short of freaking her out by admitting that I want her to stay, for her to give up her life for mine.
“You said something about omelets?” I tease, trying to shift the conversation to a lighter tone.
She nods, and we head out of the barn toward the cabin. The snow is deep, and a white expanse covers the horizon.
“The storm’s over,” she says. “But I can’t imagine you getting your truck out of here today.”
