“No.”
“Being a bona-fide bushrat,” said Zack, “I can’t help but wonder… Do you bathe regularly?”
POW!! went the next cork, but Zack was ready, and managed to dodge it. It bounced harmlessly off my siding.
“Certainly,” Ed said, looking unperturbed by the byplay. “The question is, do you?” He’d looked up with his inquiry, treating them to his deep, dark, challenging stare.
And, miracle of miracles, the brothers backed off. They turned a little red as they let their eyes drop to their food. It was partly because, no, having been living in my yard for the last couple days, they hadn’t been bathing regularly. Sitting between them, I could confirm the lack by smell. And partly… Well, that other part must have been Ed. That look he’d given them had been quelling.
But they didn’t stay down long. Zack turned in his seat to look down at me. “How come you fainted?” he asked. “You’re not pregnant, are you? Is it his?”
J.D. sucked some wine down the wrong pipe and started to cough. His eyes teared as he thumped on his chest.
I met Zack’s gaze with a narrowed look of my own. “I have a little problem with blood,” I said.
“Was it your first time?” Rory asked. “Falling into the river, I mean.”
“Yes,” I said. “That was the first time I’ve fallen in.” I was thinking about disinviting the dumbass duo from dinner. Or beating them with a stick.
“How embarrassing,” said Zack.
What the hell was this? If they couldn’t have me, they were going to tear me down? I don’t think they understood who they were dealing with. I may be small, but I’m fierce. But before I could go Suzy Steaknifehands on them and then give them the boot, Ed spoke up.
“You live around here for any length of time, and you will fall in the river,” he said. “At least once. It’s almost a rite of passage, and it’s always embarrassing. But it could have been worse.”
“Worse?” I asked. It’d been pretty damn bad, me going in in front of an audience of dozens, complete with walk of shame home, shoeless. “How?”
“Well…” Ed looked up at me, his expression sheepish. “You could have lost your pants.”
“My pants?”
Rory guffawed.
“You’re saying you fell in the river and lost your pants?” asked Helly.
Ed shrugged. He was looking at me with a soft curve to his lips. “You want to hear what happened?” he asked.
“I’d love to,” I said. Helly was nodding. The brothers grumbled, but we all ignored them.
“So I was fifteen, and had just shot my first bear. I was real proud of it—it was a big male, and I’d been stalking that sucker through wetlands for two days. I got in a perfect shot with my rifle, and he went down next to the river, on top of one of those cut banks. There was a thirty-foot drop down to the river—you know what I’m talking about, one of those steep slides?”
We all nodded. The river wound back and forth, slowly eroding even tall hills, sucking the sand and soil right out from under them, making whatever was at the top slide down. The bank at the top, held together by years of growth and roots woven together, was usually the last to go.
“Well, so I’m up there cleaning my bear, and I happened to glance down and notice two local girls in a boat very nearly under me. They were stopped, their anchor out, maybe fishing—probably trolling for male attention, now that I look back. They weren’t wearing much, and they were giggling, and glancing up at me all coyly, and—did I mention I was fifteen?”
I watched, captivated, as his cheeks started to turn pink.
“They started smoothing suntan lotion on each other. They were wearing nothing but bikinis and smiles, and their skin was glistening in the sun, and… I was fifteen.”
“Instant erection?” Gary guessed.
Ed nodded. “I shifted around so they wouldn’t see the tent in my pants, and I must have gotten too close to the edge. The bank crumbled out from under me. Me, my bear, and the leaning tree next to us—we all went plunging straight down into the river.”
He glanced up at me. “It was cold. You don’t know how cold until you actually do it yourself, until you’re in that icy water. I came back to the surface, and heard the girls’ voices. They were calling to me, sounding worried. I started to flail, trying to swim away. All I knew was I didn’t want them to see me like that. I heard their engine start, and they pulled alongside. They were trying to pull me up with their paddle. I remember they were calling me ‘kid’: ‘C’mon kid! Grab the paddle, kid!’ I swam even harder.”
Rory and Zack were chortling.
“I think they thought I was delirious. In an effort to subdue me, they whacked me with the paddle. I went under. Next thing I knew, one of them was standing in the water with me—standing in the water next to the boat, because, as it turns out, I’d been swept to a spot that was only a couple feet deep. She had me under the armpits, and was trying to lift me up. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, ‘cuz I was shrimpy at that age, skinny as a bean pole, probably weighed much less than either of them. But my hip waders were full of water, and as she lifted me, the boots dragged at my belt. I flailed, trying to yell a protest as my pants slipped, but my lungs were at least half full of water, and I’d been weakened by the cold, and there were two of them.”
Ed took a deep breath. “By the time they got me into the boat, I wasn’t breathing. They had to resuscitate me. When they got me back, I realized that I’d lost my bear. And my rifle. And my hip waders…”
“And your pants,” whispered Rory, his eyes big.
Ed nodded.
“And your boner?” asked Zack.
Ed’s gaze flicked to me. “Uuuuhh.” His grin was sudden, wide, and shit-eating. “They had to give me mouth-to-mouth, both of these mostly-naked, greased-up girls, so… no.”
I stared at the man across from me, trying to reconcile the Ed from my kitchen with awkward, pantless Ed. “Another beer?” I asked him. I was still trying to loosen his tongue.
“No, thank you.”
“More wine? Vodka? We can maybe even mix something…” I wanted to hear more about him. Even if it had nothing to do with a gold nugget or secrets; I didn’t care. I was interested in Ed.
He grinned. “No, but thank you, Suzy. I don’t drink much anymore.”
“Anymore?” I prodded. “So you used to?”
“Yeah. Had a couple bad experiences in my teens.”
“Worse than losing your pants in front of a couple river hotties?” Zack asked.
Ed’s head tilted. One shoulder shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Tell us!” Helly called.
I smiled at him encouragingly, and it was oddly flattering that the motion seemed to make up his mind.
“Well, okay, it was actually a couple different occurrences that convinced me I should never, ever, ever get drunk again. The first one was an incident that will live on in infamy…” He took a fortifying swig of water, then sighed. “I was a little older, seventeen maybe. It was me and three buddies, and we got a little drunk. And one of them, his dad had just gotten a brand new air boat. His parents were spending the night in town, and he got the bright idea—let’s take the airboat for a test drive. So we did. We roared up and down the river in the dead of night—it was one a.m. I think, and us making all this noise. Have you ever heard an airboat? A bigger racket, I don’t think we could have made.”
Uh-oh. There was a sudden gleam in Gary’s eyes.
Helly must have seen it, too. “Don’t even think it,” she warned. Then her gaze softened, and she climbed into his lap.
“You know how there’s just that little bump of land between the river and Iron Lake?” Ed asked.
Helly and I nodded.
“Well, we throttled it full-open toward that bank, wanting to see if we could jump it. And it worked, it was beautiful. We sailed through the air, landed perfectly on the lake. Motored around there a bit. Then decided to see if we could skim around on gra
ss. Did some brodies around Mr. McCarty’s lawn…. I’m not proud of what we did that night,” Ed said, looking out over the river. He shook his head.
“Anyway, a couple hours later, we headed back. We were tired, planned on just parking the boat and going to bed. Problem was, we pulled up to the wrong place. And, bigger problem: My buddy hit the gas instead of the brake.”
I covered my grin. “Oh no.”
“Oh, yes. We roared up to the shore, hit a ramp we hadn’t known was there, and launched the boat for the second time that night. We landed on Tony Eihr’s roof.”
Helly gasped. “That was you? Tony’s Boat Repair, the airboat sticking out of his roof—that was you?”
“Yeah,” Ed admitted.
“Wait, you landed your boat on a roof?” Zack asked. He looked stunned and admiring. “How?”
“I have no idea,” Ed admitted. “The throttle, the ramp, the wind, the weight. Everything was just right, I guess.”
“What happened? Did Ralph ground you for a month?” I asked.
Ed laughed. “No, actually. He thought it was kinda funny. My other friend’s dad, the owner of the boat, did not. He got his insurance to pay him back the price of the boat—you could see it was totaled even without getting it down—but he was livid. He forbade his son to ever see us again. So, I lost a friend that night. Because we were drunk.”
Rory giggled. “Because I was high,” he sang. Helly reached across the table and took his wine glass away.
“You said there were a couple incidents,” I said. “What was the second?”
Ed winced.
“It was worse?” I asked, incredulous. “How could it possibly be worse?”
“Are you sure you want to hear this? I don’t wanna bore y’all…”
Helly, the brothers, and I all talked over each other trying to get him to continue. I glared around the table with eyes narrowed. Helly was on my side, trying to get Ed to talk, so I understood that. But the brothers? Were they actually enjoying Ed’s exploits? That couldn’t be a good sign. Could it?
“Fine, but it’s a little… dirty,” he said, still hesitating.
The whole table was a chorus of ‘please’, ‘puh-lease’, ‘you’re in good company’, and ‘spill it, or so help me God…’. That last one was Helly, and she looked like she was on the verge of climbing out of Gary’s lap to tear the words from him.
Ed heaved a sigh. Leaned back. Scrubbed his hands through his hair. Then began. “You may have noticed, I’m not the smoothest with women.” Ed pressed on before the brothers could insert their comments. “Well, at seventeen, I was worse. Much, much worse.” He looked around the table as though hoping for a lack of interest.
We were riveted.
“There’s a girls’ bible camp a half hour downriver,” he continued. “There were a couple dozen teenage girls there our age. Me and my friends—the two that were left—got this bright idea that if we brought enough booze, we could get them all drunk, and have an orgy. It was… aahh… mostly a plot to rid me of my virginity.”
I sat forward, gossip senses tingling.
“An orgy with bible camp girls?” Zack asked, squinting at him.
“You must have been drunk yourselves, to have planned that,” I said.
Ed grinned at me. “Oh, we were. And,” he said, looking at Zack, “my friends had heard that… those girls… wouldn’t have sex before marriage, but might be willing to have… alternative forms of... well… My buddies brought a gallon of lube, along with the alcohol.”
“Ooooohhh,” said Rory. “We gotcha.”
“For your first time?” Helly asked, squinting at him.
“Where’d you get the booze?” Gary asked.
Ed looked embarrassed. “We appropriated it from my dad, from the bar. So we get there, and we meet up with the girls—my friend knew one of them, and she brought out several with her—in an outbuilding, an old barn… and that’s where it starts to get fuzzy,” Ed said. “I think the girls managed to get us roaring drunk, so drunk I have no real firm memory of what happened. When we woke up—to my first real hangover, the worst of my life—” he scratched his head “—and I’m not sure about this, but I suspect….” Ed hesitated.
Rory and Zack leaned forward. “Yes?” they asked.
“I think we’d been baptized. We were wearing the lacy white gowns—they’d dressed us up like dolls and taken the rest of our clothes. I woke up damp, with a promise ring and a Jesus tattoo. So I think I might have gotten religion; I know one of my friends got converted that night. Never did see him again, either,” he muttered.
We all stared at him. “Wait, what?” asked Gary. “A bunch of bible camp girls gave you a tattoo?”
“Yeah.” Ed picked up the last rib on his plate, nibbling on it like he thought it was big enough to hide behind.
“Where?” I blurted.
Ed’s eyes caught mine. His lips curled into something suspiciously resembling a smirk. “My right shoulder,” he said.
“Show us!” howled Rory.
I grimaced, wishing I’d cut him off an hour ago. Then my eyes were drawn back to Ed as he set down the rib, wiped his fingers, and started to unbutton his shirt. I watched him hungrily, feeling a tense, aching longing as he partially disrobed.
He peeled the blue shirt to the side, and pulled his undershirt sleeve up. Sure enough, he had a sloppy rendition of a crucified Jesus on his deltoid.
“He looks like a corn dog with eyes,” Zack said.
Ed shrugged.
“But, did you guys get any?” Rory demanded, asking the important questions.
Ed shook his head. “Nope. And the worst part was, the camp counselors found us before we could escape, and we were still wearing those damn gowns. And they called Suzy’s dad, who at the time was still a police officer, and he wound up escorting us to town, where we spent the night in jail, in the gowns.”
We all gave that the moment of silence it deserved.
“Dude,” said Zack.
Ed nodded in agreement.
Chapter Ten
Helly seemed to be a semi-permanent fixture in Gary’s lap.
As I watched them rub noses and whisper back and forth as they stared soulfully into each other’s eyes, I wondered how on earth she wasn’t pregnant yet. I knew that, unlike me, she wasn’t on any sort of birth control. I knew their ‘method’ consisted of a hit-and-miss collage of condoms and withdrawal. And I knew they screwed like bunnies.
So. How?
Pushing my dessert bowl aside to make room for my elbow, I propped my chin on my hand and narrowed my eyes at them, trying to figure it out.
Helly laughed at something Gary said, her cheeks turning a pretty shade of pink. She squirmed as his hands wandered.
Then she jumped to her feet, and dragged Gary up after her. She smiled at me, looking drunk on love. “We’re gonna head home,” she said. “I’ve gotta…” she waved her hand around “…get to bed.”
Five dollars says they don’t even make it to a bed. I scoffed, and heard a similar disbelieving noise from across the table. My eyes were drawn to Ed’s. He gave me a small smile, distracting me long enough for Helly and Gary to slip through the door from the deck.
Helly and Gary were leaving. I jumped up, gathered my dishes, and hurried after them. As promised, my stairs now sported three new treads.
“Thank you guys for coming,” I said.
“Hey, thank you for feeding us,” Gary replied. “Everything was excellent.”
Helly was tugging him toward the front door. “Sorry, don’t have time to help with the dishes,” she said. “I’ll owe you one.”
I set my dishes down on the table as they hurried out into the blue night. I stuck my head out after them. “Don’t forget the Passion Party,” I called. “Sunday!”
Helly waved a hand to let me know she’d heard. They were already halfway to their boat.
I closed my screen before any more mosquitos flew in. I watched my friends as they made it out onto the
dock. There, with a backdrop of swirling silvery water, Gary bent Helly over backward in a sweeping kiss.
I sighed. Helly and Gary really were perfect for each other, like two pieces of a puzzle.
So where the heck was the guy that was perfect for me, my other half?
When I turned around, I saw Ed setting a stack of plates next to the sink. He glanced up to the landing, where the brothers were just starting down the stairs. “Get the glasses, would you please?” he said.
My eyebrows shot up at his nerve, but then I realized—we still had three brothers. “Oh crap, J.D.,” I said. “You better go.” Helly and Gary were certainly distracted enough to leave without him.
“We took separate boats,” J.D. said. “I’ve got Helly’s boat, they’ve got Gary’s.” He turned and headed back out onto the deck without argument. After a moment’s hesitation, Zack and Rory followed after.
Ed started pulling dishes out of the sink.
I hurried over to him. “You don’t need to,” I said. “You already helped me make the food.”
He half-turned toward me, and smiled. “I want to,” he said.
My mouth opened, but I couldn’t find a damn thing to say. Not while looking up into his alpine-lake-fading-to-whiskey-chocolate eyes.
His gaze moved from mine up to my forehead. He frowned. “Looks like you could use a new bandage.”
My stomach was suddenly queasy. I pressed a hand to it, hoping those awesome ribs wouldn’t make a reappearance.
Ed reached out to steady me.
The brothers clattered down the stairs with their arms full. “This is the last of it,” Zack said. They deposited the dishes on the table, and then edged toward the door.
I was actually kinda surprised, after their efforts to seduce me last night, that they would tap out so easily. But they were probably just trying to avoid dish duty. Again. They’d left the kitchen a huge mess after the pasta and chocolate cake. The fuckers.
I opened my mouth to say something.
“Well, good night!” Zack said. He turned and sprinted for the door, Rory hot on his heels. J.D. slipped out behind them like a ninja, and the screen slammed closed.
Two Captains, One Chair: An Alaskan Romantic Comedy Page 12
