by Polly Becks
And now he always came home after dark, leaving her alone in the horrible cabin among the scary night sounds and the threatening hum of mosquitoes and mayflies.
Sam had come to the end of her patience. She was past ready to go home.
Except she didn’t really have anywhere to go home to.
In her own way, Sam loved Jeremy. Before whatever happened had taken place he had told her routinely that she was beautiful, had left her raunchy notes under the peanut butter jar or in her pocket when he left for work about what they would do when he came home, and usually followed through, even when he was tired.
He had been pretty excited with this place when they first got here, and was especially fascinated with the massive tree on the hill in the middle of town. Back when the weather didn’t suck, they had spent some time picnicking underneath it, watching the sun go down, like much of the rest of the town. It had been early spring, still barely past winter when they arrived, so their time outside was limited even then.
When the warmer weather came around, he had shared his excitement of fishing off the public pier in the melting ice of the lake with her, something she found disgusting, but hadn’t said so, because she was glad to see him happy, especially since scuba diving equipment rental had turned out to be far beyond their limited means.
As promised, the outdoor sex had been great until they had accidentally rolled onto a nest of stinging ants and spent three days itching ferociously in places that hurt a lot, especially for Jeremy.
After that, it had been awkward and quiet.
But not like it became after whatever had happened a few days before this one.
In addition to being alone all day, for a week or more Sam had been trapped inside the cabin by the constant rain drumming on the roof, leaking a little near the pit toilet and bottle of hand sanitizer in a closet that served as the bathroom, again, nothing like the flyer had advertised. The books she had bought at the grocery store and brought along and had read a dozen times were no longer working to help her escape her reality.
Every night when he finally came home, Jeremy was a little more agitated. He would pace the floor of the cabin, running his hands nervously through his sweaty hair, as if he was trying to solve a puzzle that his brain wasn’t up to. Often he would go outside and stare up at the sky through the trees, but never seemed to find whatever he was looking for.
Now, as she was musing about her problems, she heard the roar of a motorcycle shifting down outside the cabin.
She stretched out on the lumpy mattress and waited.
After a longer time than she expected, the door of the cabin creaked open and Jeremy came inside, soaked from the rain. He took his motorcycle helmet off and shook his hair, which was drenched, spattering her with droplets of it.
“Eeeggaagggghhkkk,” Sam muttered, recoiling. “Thanks, Germ.”
He set his helmet down and ran his fingers through his wet hair, not looking at her.
“Got a hole in your helmet? Your hair’s all wet.”
She got no response.
“Where ya been?” she asked, sitting up and hanging her legs over the side of the bed.
“Ridin’ .” The word was more mumble than speech.
“No kidding. I thought you hated riding in the rain.”
Jeremy turned in her direction as he unzipped his jacket, but didn’t meet her eyes.
“I do, but in upstate New York, you ride in the rain or you don’t ride. That’s just how it is. Especially in the Dacks.” He glanced around the small cabin. “What’ve we got to eat?”
Sam rose from the bed and sauntered over to him, trying to look sexy. “Each other.”
He rolled his eyes and turned away, looking into the single empty cabinet and along the small counter that together served as a kitchen. “Seriously—what’ve we got?”
She rolled her eyes as well, then went to a drawstring sack she carried as a purse and fished out half a candy bar, which she tossed unceremoniously at him.
“Here—choke on that.”
Jeremy caught the half-eaten bar in the air, looking at her in surprise. “What’s the matter with you?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Jeremy tore back the wrapper and bit into the bar, then looked at her for the first time since he’d entered the cabin. He scarfed down the candy bar as he watched her, then lowered his gaze and swallowed.
“Sorry,” he said. “I know it’s sucked here. We should never’ve come.”
Sam watched him as he sat in one of the rickety chairs at the even more rickety table. He had turned toward the door as he did, and let his head fall to the table on his arms.
Sam’s brows drew together.
For the first time since he had come into the cabin, she noticed he was shaking.
“You gonna tell me what’s wrong?” she asked as she rose and came to him, pulling his wet motorcycle jacket carefully from his shoulders. She hung it over the back of the other chair.
“No. Not ever.”
Sam blinked. “Why?”
Jeremy lay with his face on his arms for a long time. She waited in silence, sensing that whatever was upsetting him was far worse than she had imagined. Finally he spoke.
“Because I love you. Can you let it go now?”
Sam waited in silence for something to change—for him to stop shaking, or raise his head, or change the subject, but he did nothing, just lay with his head on his forearms on the table.
Trembling.
Sam did not have a lot of tools at her disposal at the moment for comforting a man with very little imagination. She waited for a long time, then took hold of the bottom of his wet T-shirt and slowly pulled it up and over his head and shoulders.
He pulled away. “What are you doing?”
“Taking off your shirt.”
“Why?” His voice sounded almost threatening.
Sam contemplated the good sense of going forward, then decided she had nothing to lose.
“Because I love you,” she said matter-of-factly. “And you’re wet. Don’t want ya to catch cold. Now turn around.”
Jeremy, now sitting straight up, rotated ninety degrees until he was facing her.
It was all Sam could do not to gasp at the look on his face in the dull gleam of the kerosene lantern.
His jaw was clenched like a vise, and his eyes were shining.
She wasn’t certain, but she thought that it might be fear gleaming in them.
Her voice broke. “Aw, Germ,” she whispered.
She straddled him and sat down on his thighs, looking at him thoughtfully. Then, slowly, she pulled the clips from her hair and let it fall from the messy knot she had tied it up in atop her head into the long brown waves she knew he had a soft spot for.
Sam took Jeremy’s hands in hers and placed them on the ends of her longest locks, closing his fingers around the strands of her dark hair, then pushed the rest of it up against his chest, rubbing it sensuously against his nipples.
She could feel the muscles in his thighs tighten beneath her. The muscles of his chest and shoulders did so as well; Jeremy was a skinny young man, hardly more than a boy, really, but what little flesh he had was nicely sculpted along a ribcage on which she could count every bone.
Beneath her open legs, even through her jeans, she thought she felt some of his other muscles tightening, too.
One of which was impressively oversized for a man of his slight build.
Sam ran her hands up his chest to the back of his neck and interlaced her fingers, then applied her lips to the hollow of his throat, warmly, as tenderly as she could.
Feeling his throat quiver beneath them, whether from panic or, perhaps now, heat.
“Aw, Sam, baby, no,” he whispered as her lips made their way up his neck, kissing it softly, but she could tell his resolve was crumbling. “I’m tired. C’mon.”
“Heck, I’m working on that,” she whispered in his ear. “You’re just not helping much.” She decided to try humor.
“You’re the one that told me the best reason for coming to this gross place was that everybody gets laid in the Adirondacks, that there was sex everywhere around here.”
“There—there is—”
“Yeah? Well, there hasn’t been any around here—” she took hold of one of his hands and pulled the ends of her hair from it, redirecting it between her legs—“not for almost two weeks.”
Jeremy leaned his forehead against hers and sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry—just do me. Or let me do you; I don’t care, just let’s do something—I’ve been so bored and dry, you’re making me feel like an old woman—”
Jeremy seized her face and kissed her hard.
Caught by surprise, and by the blind intensity of his kiss, Sam opened her mouth and let him in, his tongue probing, caressing hers, stealing her breath. She let go of him and quickly began to unbutton her camp shirt, pulling it from herself without making him need to release her or stop the wildness of his kiss.
The kiss that was sending waves of hot desire through her entire body.
The kiss that continued as his hands left her face and were immediately on the clasp of her bra, springing it open like a pro.
“Dry, are you?” he said as he pulled back from her mouth, which was now open and panting. “We’ll see about that—stand up.”
Shaking now herself, Sam stood, her legs astride his on either side of the chair.
Jeremy had already tossed her bra aside and turned his attention to her breasts, gleaming with the sweat of unexpected excitement.
“You’re so pretty, baby,” he said, his voice low and husky, as his fingertips, then his warm mouth addressed the first, then the second one, blowing a stream of warm breath over her tingling nipples, holding her around the waist so she wouldn’t fall over. “I gotcha—open those jeans.”
Her head swimming now, Sam obeyed, her hands trembling.
Distantly she could hear the rain beating on the metal roof, filling the ugly little cabin with a pounding thrum that drove her excitement higher as he roughly pulled her jeans off.
She was anticipating a different pounding thrum momentarily.
An anticipation that was met and exceeded a few minutes later, perched on the table in front of the kneeling Jeremy, his head between her legs, her fingers wound through his hair.
And then again on the floor in front of that table, atop him.
And then once more on the lumpy mattress of the uncomfortable bed, beneath him.
Once he had finally partly-pushed, partly-carried her, scrambling through the discarded clothes on the cabin floor, to that bed, and was driving his impressive self into her again, gripping her backside instead of her thighs this time, Sam forced herself to open her eyes and think long enough to focus her swimming gaze on his face, hovering over her in the darkness.
And immediately wished she hadn’t.
She’d been having sex with Jeremy for fairly close to two years, but had never seen a look on his face like the one she saw now.
His eyes, usually closed as he approached climax, were open wide, staring blankly above him.
His teeth were still clenched as they had been before, but now in an ugly manner that made the shivers of impending orgasm that were sweeping through her turn cold for a moment.
Making her suddenly afraid.
Then, caught between fear and passion, instinct took over.
Sam planted the soles of her feet firmly on the terrible mattress and slid her hands from Jeremy’s back down to his backside, which she gripped as hard as she could.
Sending him, and, a moment later, her, completely over the edge into hot, black oblivion, fireworks shooting behind their eyes.
They lay for a long time afterwards, panting and clinging to each other, trying to recover their breath.
Rather than resting his head between her breasts, as he usually did, or running his fingers through her hair, Jeremy remained with his eyes open, still staring above him.
He almost seemed to be looking through the wooden walls and the metal roof to the black, rain-filled sky beyond them.
Sam closed her eyes, unwilling to watch.
Finally, he lowered his head and kissed her nose.
She was awake, but she didn’t respond.
He brought his lips closer to her ear.
“Betcha don’t feel dry no more, now, do ya?” he whispered teasingly.
When she remained still, unmoving, he rolled off her and laid his hand on her stomach.
“That’s too bad,” he said seriously. “Because, pretty soon, you’re gonna be grateful to be dry.”
Sam lay still until Jeremy began to snore beside her.
Then her eyes opened wide in the darkness of the cabin, staring at the ceiling.
Wondering what he meant.
IN THE MORNING, they got up, got dressed, got packed, got on the bike.
And got gone from the beautiful Adirondack mountains and the pretty town of Obergrande.
Never looking back.
Chapter 3
‡
THE NEXT DAY, Thursday, 2:35 PM
Obergrande Elementary School, Obergrande, NY
“RAIN, RAIN, GO ’way, come again some other—no, never mind. Just go ’way.”
Lucy Sullivan, the newest of the school’s three kindergarten teachers, was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her classroom, up to her elbows in paste and children. She choked back laughter.
Then looked up to see five-year-old Dominic glaring out the classroom’s wall-to-wall back window at the sodden playground and gray-black sky where the clouds hung down almost to the ground. His arms were crossed over his chest and his small, rotund face was set in a scowl, making his cheeks even more deliciously chubby than they normally were.
“I hear ya, Dominic,” she said in agreement. “Come back and finish your collage, please.”
Nicola, a tiny girl with long, golden ringlets similar to Lucy’s own, and enormous eyes, came over to her side.
“S’been waining a bewy, bewy long time,” she agreed, moving so Dominic could come back in the circle.
“You are certainly right about that, Nicola,” Lucy said, nodding for the little girl to sit down next to her. “Can you use your r’s that you and Mrs. Mastrantonio just learned?”
Nicola swallowed hard, her little face puckered with anxiety.
“S’ been rrrrrraining a berrry, berry, long time,” she said carefully again.
Lucy’s alabaster face lit up, and she smiled at the little girl. She leaned close to her.
“Beautiful,” she said. “Beautiful r’s. Good job. Will you please pass Dominic the paste, then sit down and join us?” She handed Nicola the jar.
Beaming, the child complied.
Lucy exhaled. The project was almost done, a mosaic mural of construction paper collages that would be graced with dried flowers, if the rain would stop falling and the sun would ever come out again long enough to gather them.
Given that the edge rains of Hurricane Clarence, a seemingly mild tropical storm that had roared unexpectedly into a Category 4 off the East Coast a few days before, were predicted to dampen the area of the central Adirondacks later in the week, that possibility didn’t appear particularly likely.
So Lucy had procured an impressive stash of tissue paper in a glorious variety of colors to make into small folded flowers if the naturals ones were unable to be dried in time for the Mother’s Day Tea.
She looked with secret pride and not-so-secret fondness at her eighteen students, grouped in two big circles, one with her, the other with her aide, Kelly Moran, all working intently on the art project that would decorate the walls of the Playroom for the big event that their mothers and grandmothers had been invited to come to next week.
The class had made ribbon decorations for each of the ladies’ chairs and cookie presents for each guest of honor, had learned a poem to recite together entitled Mothers Are Very Nice People, and were practicing several mother-rel
ated songs with their vocal teacher, Mr. Daniels, during music class.
There had been impressive cooperation, only a few spills of art supplies, and surprisingly little fighting, mostly because all of the energy the kids usually put into bothering each other had been directed at the annoyingly endless rain.
She glanced at the clock. The warning bell would ring any moment.
“All right,” she instructed as she rose. “Let’s pick up the supplies, get cleaned up and ready to go home. Collages on the window shelf. Mrs. Moran will help you. What day is it tomorrow?”
The entire class pointed in unison to the enormous calendar on the wall near the door where the word THURSDAY was impossible to miss, even if many of them still couldn’t read it.
“Friday!” they shouted. The approach of the school day’s end had sweetened their mood, and hers.
“En Español?” she asked.
There was a pause. “Miércoles!” half the class called half-heartedly.
Lucy shook her head disapprovingly. She turned to a little girl in a lacy white cotton dress, odd among the jeans and T-shirts of the rest of the class.
“Elisa, can you help us? Mañana—qué dia es?”
“Viernes,” the little girl said shyly.
Lucy turned back to the class as the warning bell sounded.
“Repita?”
“Viernes!” they shouted, even louder than before, in unison.
“What language will we use for the calendar tomorrow?”
“German!” the most-awake kids called as the rest of the class was beginning to dissolve.
She clapped her hands, catching their attention, and the class followed suit.
“Whose turn is it to feed Sebastian tomorrow?”
Dominic’s hand shot up excitedly. “Oh! Oh! Oh! Me! Me! Me!” he shouted, hopping up and down, his hair flapping like batwings. “Meeeeeeee!”
Lucy let loose a belly-laugh in spite of herself.
