He opened the door and casually walked out onto the porch in his bare feet.
“Hey you.”
She pulled the helmet off and held it under one arm. Jake noticed the unnaturally purple bruise that formed on the left side of her cheek and visibly winced.
“Listen-”
“Do you want to come in for some coffee? I don’t have any bacon, just coffee,”
She stopped. “I like a lot of sugar,” she replied.
Jake let her inside and motioned for her to make herself at home as he moved into the kitchen and fiddled with the archaic percolator. He noticed the pie as well and fished several plates out of the cupboard. All the while Lia took his advice, peeling out of the leather jacket and walking around the bottom floor as if she were touring it for the first time. She moved as if she were in an art gallery, taking in the scenery, giving each element of the cabin the proper amount of time and attention. When she stopped at his typewriter Jake saw her pause a little longer than normal.
“Is this it?” she asked. “The novel you’re working on?”
“What I have so far, anyway,” Jake hollered from the kitchen.
“Can I read it?”
Jake flushed. He had always been a private person, especially when it came to other people reading his work. Specifically his uncompleted work. Lia seemed to notice his hesitation and waved her hand in a sort of dismissive gesture. Jake flushed again. The only person I ever let read my drafts was Alissa, he realized.
“Go ahead,” he quickly blurted, and he wondered if he truly wanted Lia to read it, or if he was just trying to avoid thoughts of Alissa again. Probably a little bit of both.
Lia sat down in the chair and started reading over the first couple of pages. The smell of dark coffee simmered in the air like volcanic soil, and the steam of the percolator ticked and bubbled precociously. Jake brought out two steaming mugs and a piece of pie each, and set them on the coffee table. Lia stood up with a final glance at the stack of papers.
“So you did visit Irma’s,” she observed.
“Well, after you told me about her pies, that’s all I could think of,” he said.
“And blackberry too!”
Jake watched as Lia ladled a spoonful of the purple crust into her mouth, and was almost alarmed at her gusto. Either she really liked pies, or Irma hadn’t been exaggerating the girl’s appetite. When she noticed Jake looking at her, barely containing a grin she lowered her eyes and took a smaller nibble. Jake couldn’t help bursting into laughter, and Lia pulled her legs up under her on the couch and stifled her own smile with the back of her hand.
“Ah, you shouldn’t do that?” he said.
“I was hungry, alright?”
“No, I mean hide your smile like that. You have a good one,” he said, and Lia blushed. “I mean, that’s what my grandfather always used to say. Especially if the girl was pretty. I get the impression there were some things about him I didn’t quite grasp when I was kid.”
“He used to fix me a sandwich every time I came over,” Lia said, wiping at the crumbs around the corners of her mouth with one finger, “when I was little.”
“I wondered what your relationship with him was.”
“He was a good friend of my grandma’s. I think that’s why she took to you so well.”
Jake smiled and leaned back in the couch. He stretched the muscles in his thigh and accidentally bumped Lia’s knee with his own. They both seemed to stagger at the immediate contact, and Jake hid his embarrassment with a sip of coffee. There was a topic none of them had broached, and he knew that he was probably going to have to be the one to bring it up. He had distinctly avoided looking at the mark on Lia’s cheek where the biker had struck her.
“So, are you actually okay?” he asked, trying to sound casual. You’re such an idiot, Jake, he chided himself.
Lia put the empty plate down on the table in front of them and took her time, taking another sip from the dark lake of coffee in her mug, before finally facing him and giving him a tiny shrug. “I’ve had worse,” she said, and Jake tensed. “I mean, I got whippings harder than that growing up. This one time I thought it’d be funny to spray paint our sheep, we used to have sheep, see. I thought it’d be cute to have different colored sheep. I was too young to realize that they were wool sheep, and grandma had a cutter coming the next day. I ruined the whole flock. Boy, did I get it!”
Jake was attentive to her story and let out a small chuckle. “You would have been a precocious child,” he said. He believed Lia, in that she was probably fine. But she was also hiding something, and he couldn’t understand what.
“Anyway, just forget it. There’s douchebags in every small town,” she said, and when she saw him still stewing over something reached out with one skinny hand and touched his own that was clamped over the coffee mug. “But thanks for… being an idiot,” she said.
Jake nodded. “I’ve made a career out of it!”
Lia laughed. “I thought for sure you were going to try to take on all four of them,” she said, “anyway that’s why I came back. I wanted to thank you. Even though you got your ass kicked. Because you got your ass kicked, all because of me.”
Jake felt her dark wiry fingers tighten over his and was surprised again at how warm she was to the touch. “Don’t worry about it. Although I can’t promise anything the next time I see them,” he joked. He saw something like concern cross over Lia’s features. He had failed to notice how demure she was up close, and the roundness of her face beckoned him in a way that confused him. “I see you got your bike fixed!” he said, trying to break the tension.
Lia turned in the couch to stare out the pantry window. “Yeah, just a busted sparkplug. That’s actually the other reason I came up here. Uhm… well, on account of it being a long weekend, there’s some friends who are camping down by a nearby lake. I was thinking… if you’re not busy or anything, I probably owe you, so… if you wanted to come?”
Jake was already nodding before she finished her sentence. “I have been camping in years, I’d love to,” he said.
***
The evening Lia returned. She had strapped a large army green canvas bag on the bag of her bike, and tossed a dated bicycle helmet at Jake, who rolled it over in his hands like it was something he’d never seen before.
“Wait, we’re taking yours?” he said.
“What, you afraid of bikes?” Lia shot back.
“Hmm…of course not,” Jake said, failing to pull off any amount of confidence.
Lia laughed again, the perfect whites of her teeth stunning the smooth auburn of the rest of her face and she clicked the chin strap on her helmet and motioned him over with a nod of her head. “Just hold onto me, and lean when I do, okay?”
Hesitantly Jake swung his leg over the sloped back seat of the Triumph. His whole body slipped forward and he found himself in a less than flattering straddling position, with his legs hugging Lia’s. Tentatively he reached around her waist and felt the coolness of her leather jacket and the roughness of zippers over his arms. “You have to hold on tight, okay? I don’t want to lose you and then have to double back,” Lia instructed, revving up the engine.
It was a lot louder than Jake had anticipated and he reflexively tightened his grip around Lia’s waist. Although she had on full motorcycle regalia, it didn’t prevent a conductive warmth from passing between them, and Jake felt his heart beating faster, not so much with the jolt of the bike catching its traction in the gravel but the proximity to this unusual girl he had only met days ago. The frizzy bun of her black hair poked out behind her helmet and brushed gently against the roughness of his cheek as the wind caught it. He caught that particular scent of her he had only faintly acknowledged earlier, but now each time he took in a deep breath it was infused with the animal smell of her skin, and images of dark fertile wildernesses and the tall dry branches of a fir tree solidified behind his eyes.
“You okay back there?” Lia asked as she guided the bike back onto the
main street. Some of Barrelgrove’s city lights had come on, and there was a spectrum of orange and blues set against the matte background of sky.
“Hell yes!” Jake hollered back, but it felt like the wind captured most of his voice.
Lia responded by cranking back harder on the throttle, and the bike took off, forcing Jake to press himself harder against her serpentine back. He felt her strong lithe muscles wrench under the different layers of fabric. He was careful to keep his hands low on her waist, but each time she accelerated it forced his grip a little higher up her ribcage. He gulped when he realized his palms had crept almost unnoticeably under the angle of her breasts, even though it was hard to discern her bosom through the thick leather of the jacket. They turned down a side road and Lia accelerated again, forcing the bike’s headlights through a lengthening darkness.
She’s doing that on purpose, he thought sardonically.
Chapter Seven
The lake was in fact a reservoir, hedged on the only accessible shore by smooth sloping granite cliffs and a meager line of dry pine trees that seemed, for all intents and purposes, to exist solely as a renewable source of firewood.
By time Lia and Jake had parked and hiked down the steep forested bank to the small clearing on a broad basin of granite, there were already four similarly aged locals huddled around a pyre of sappy wood, beers in hand. They’d all been friends of Lia’s growing up and he shook each of their hands in turn, trying to grapple with their names.
“I don’t suppose you’ve written anything I might’ve read,” said Roy, a bulky looking guy with a thin goatee.
“Probably not,” Jake said, accepting a beer.
“He’s working on something though,” Lia interjected.
“Another book?” Roy asked.
“Something like that. We’ll see what it turns into,” Jake took a sip of his beer. He didn’t like talking about his writing. It made him uncomfortable. There was something sacred in the writing process, and he knew none of them would be able to understand or appreciate it. Except Lia, he thought.
Roy’s girlfriend, a petite woman with sharp hawk-like features poked at the coals of the fire with a hot-dog stick. “Well, on behalf of Barrelgrove-”
Jake grinned and raised his beer before she could respond. “Oh, I’ve got the Barrelgrove welcome, don’t worry. But thanks.”
They all laughed and Jake took another sip from the beer. The flames danced higher and Roy added another pitchy log which began to crackle and pop, and Jake found himself entranced by the slow digestion of the fire as it turned he wood to coals. There was something liberating about being in the middle of the woods with the heavy scent of smoke and the heat of the flames singing at his cheeks. Lia’s friends were all laidback, and other than Roy they’d all moved out of Barrelgrove at the earliest opportunity – some had gone travelling, some had professional careers, but the common theme seemed to be that they had all irrevocably returned to their home-town to live, and Jake wondered what it would be like, to have such a firm idea of ‘home’. He had no foundations, and had taken it for granted, but as he listened to the friendly banter and inside jokes between the small group he felt a slight pang of jealousy.
He didn’t even realize Lia was no longer sitting around the fire until Jordan retold an anecdote about his car and saw that she had slipped off without any of them noticing. He excused himself and stumbled out of the ring into the shadows, and followed a small crude path that led to another flat rise of granite overlooking a part of the granite cliff that gave a one hundred eighty degree vantage of the reservoir. Lia had already set up a small green tent from the heavy canvas bag and he saw her perched on the lip of the cliff, her gaze lost in the wide expanse of water and sky.
“Your friends are nice,” Jake said, slumping down beside her. The cold of the granite snaked up through the thin fabric of his pants, and he pulled the zipper on a borrowed hoodie up to his chin.
She didn’t seem to notice him, and he wondered if she was just ignoring him or so lost in her own thoughts that he hadn’t registered in her consciousness. Finally, she spoke. “They’re okay, I suppose.”
“You don’t seem convinced?”
“I didn’t have any friends growing up. In fact, they tended to tease me more than anything. But, now we’re adults, so I think they figure that just erases out the past. It doesn’t,” she said, and there was a grim note to her words, “but they’re okay people, you’re right. I just don’t feel connected to them. I thought I would, after all this time.”
“You don’t need to explain,” Jake said, and took a sip from his beer.
“I don’t? I brought you out here… I dunno, I felt like, maybe, it would be different this time. But I’m not one of them and I never will be.”
“The way I see it, you brought me out here. So I came along because it meant I got to spend time with you,” he made an exaggerated motion with his hands to indicate the both of them sitting side by side, “and what do you know, here we are.”
It was too dark to make out the nuances of her facial expressions, but Jake thought he saw a smile cross the dark ridge of her lips. “You’re so simple.”
“That’s unfortunate. As a writer I’m supposed to cultivate an aura of complexity,” he handed her the beer and she gave it a wry look. “You don’t drink?”
“I drink, it just never affects me,” she said, casually taking a sip and handing it back.
“Heavy weight?”
“Heavy metabolism,” she said and pushed him, “and don’t call a girl heavy.”
He was surprised at her strength and rocked precariously before Lia reached out and grabbed him by the sleeve. “Alright, She-Hulk,” he teased.
“I could kick your ass. I’m a lot stronger than you think,” she said, flashing her white teeth at him.
Almost against his will he reached out and with the back of two fingers stroked the side of her cheek. Rather than pulling away or calling him out, she simply stared at him, and he gently rubbed the fine line of her jawbone where the biker had hit her. Remarkably there was no indication of bruising or swelling, but it was hard to tell in the dark. Both of them seemed to be balanced on the edge of a cliff, and neither seemed willing to take one step back or one step forward. Slowly, Jake pulled his hand back, finished the can that was lying beside him, and crunched it on the rock face.
They were quiet for several minutes, and he was surprised at how comfortable the silence could be with someone else who appreciated it. Lia straightened her arms and leaned back with her legs outstretched in front of her and Jake noticed that all she was wearing was that iconic black tank-top that seemed to fold over her supple form as if it were her own shadow.
Lia tilted her head back and he saw the fine delineation of her jaw as it pointed sharply at the nest of stars above them. Back in the city the light pollution had made it impossible to get a very clear view of the night sky. Except for a few bright points of light, Jake had grown accustomed to the orange restless hue of the urban skyline, and he wondered how he could have forgotten how vast and decorated the heavens were with their multitude of alien suns. Lia must have noticed him transfixed by the stellar ceiling above them and leaned in closer until his hair brushed against the shoulder of his hoodie.
“See that one up there,” she said, and Jake could smell the sweet aroma of her skin again as he followed the length of her skinny arm to where she was pointing at some indistinct points of light, “that one right below the dipper, the three stars in a line, and then those two bright ones close together?”
“I see it.”
“That’s the Great Wolf. My grandmother would always point it out,”
“I don’t know that constellation.”
“I don’t think it’s any you would have heard of. She used to say it was a constellation that was passed down through our family. There used to be a village, a long time ago, and one winter game was so scarce that the villagers were starving. One day a girl from the village went out to col
lect water and on the way back heard a strange sound coming from a cave. When she went in to investigate there was a dead doe, and consumed by hunger she cut as much meat as she could and hurried home.
“The villagers were thankful for the gift, and when they asked where she had found the meat she lied and told them she had killed it herself. The next day she returned to the cave to gather more meat. But as she tried to leave for the second time she was confronted by a wolf, whose cave it was. She tried to apologize for stealing the meat, and the wolf agreed to help her. He bit her, and then she passed out.
“When she awoke she was a wolf. Terrified, she tried to return to the village, but the other villagers were scared of her and chased her off. She realized she had lost her human tongue and had no way to communicate with them. But because she was a wolf, she was now able to hunt. So that winter, and every other winter, the villagers would awake to find fresh meat at the foot of their village, and they knew that the girl had become a wolf and was looking after them.”
Jake nodded. A gold gust of wind scattered across the flat face of the reservoir and moved up over the rocks. He shivered. “That’s a sad story,”
“But a good one. Now she runs across the night sky, forever trying to return to her human shape, but cursed to live as a wolf,”
He was reminded of his dreams, the image of a large black lupine figure staring down at him. The cold yellow eyes. He decided against telling Lia about it. He adjusted his weight and his elbow touched hers. “Do you think she’ll ever succeed. I mean, do you think she’ll ever be able to turn back?” he asked.
Lia didn’t answer. She let out a yawn and tried to change the subject. “What about you?”
“I’m not a wolf, if that’s what you mean,”
“No, that’s not what I mean. What about you? What are you really doing out here?”
Shifter's Moon (Paranormal Shifter Romance) Page 5
