The Family Tree

by John Everson

  “Thanks,” he said. “I wish I’d have known him.”

  “You could get to know him a little bit through me,” she said. “I could tell you so many stories.”

  “That would be nice,” Scott said. “My dad really never talked about our family. I honestly had no idea about this place until I got the note that, for some weird reason, it was now mine!”

  “Well, it’s yours because you’re literally the last of the Belvedere line,” she said.

  Sherrilyn stood up from the couch and brought back the decanter to refill her glass. He put a hand in front of his own to show that he still had a quarter glass left to drink but she just grinned. “Bottoms up, laggard. Shall I tell the family that you can’t keep up with a girl?”

  He laughed. “I thought you said you weren’t a girl?” She raised one eyebrow but said nothing. He took her challenge and drained the glass. As she refilled it, he could feel the burn quickly work its way from his throat through his chest and belly. His face suddenly felt as if he’d been out in the sun for an hour.

  “Wow,” he said. “What is this stuff? And what proof is it?”

  “It does go right to your head, doesn’t it?” she said. “It’s distilled from the sap of the Family Tree. The tree is only tapped for a couple months each year, and then Ellen brews the ale and the bourbon for weeks afterwards before they are ready to be bottled. I don’t know the proof, but this stuff’s not for lightweights!”

  Sherrilyn set the decanter down on a small table and slid back in next to him. “Here’s to strong liquor,” she said. He clinked his glass to hers and took another sip. The skin of his cheeks felt flush as the amber liquid passed his lips. He felt her fingers slide around the back of his neck.

  “I could teach you about your Family Tree… I’m kind of rooted to your past.”

  He snorted. “I think you’re milking the metaphor a little too much now.”

  She leaned closer and brushed her lips against his. Something firm pressed down on his crotch. “I could milk something else,” she offered with a whisper in his ear.

  The offer was so ridiculous, he almost laughed in her face. But at the same time, he couldn’t deny his reaction to her. Wisps of strawberry hair tickled his cheek as she shifted closer to him. The red cotton of her dress had crept dangerously high up the skin of her thigh. He didn’t understand how the sap of the tree could make everyone at this inn horny as a damn rabbit, but that didn’t mean he was going to break away from the moist kiss that bloomed on his lips from a woman who looked way higher on the A list than he could ever hope to score with in “normal” life. He knew his league, and she was not in it.

  She arched her back and broke away from their kiss. Her face was flushed, and her smile broad. She pressed his glass towards his mouth. “Bottoms up, Mr. Belvedere,” she said.

  As he lifted the glass to his lips, she tilted hers back at the same time. Then she set her drink down delicately on the table next to the couch, and deftly lifted his glass from his fingers after he finished a warm, burning gulp. The soft lighting of the room seemed in his eyes to flicker and grow even dimmer; everything was seemingly painted in a blur of amber.

  Sherrilyn flipped herself then, and suddenly she was on him, straddling his lap after adjusting his splinted leg so that he was comfortable. She slipped her fingers around his ribs. Her dress no longer hid the color of her panties, which were, what else? Rose.

  “Let me tell you about your grandfather,” she said, working his shirt up to expose the hair of his stomach.

  “Um…” he said.

  “He was a strong man,” Sherrilyn said. She ran her fingers across his arms, as if to measure his own muscle in comparison.

  “He could use an axe to chop wood, or play the piano in the evening if company demanded. He was a man with manners. He was a man who mattered.”

  “He really made an impression on you,” Scott said. His breath was uneven. His eyes couldn’t leave her face. The wet promise of her lips. Her hair hung in loose curls across the thin straps of her dress, and she nodded as he put one hand on her shoulder and slipped a strap lower to bare her beautiful white skin.

  She nodded. “Yes he did.”

  Then she peeled his shirt up without pretense, and he let her take it over his head.

  “Now I want you to make an impression on me,” she whispered. With one hand, she trailed anxious fingers through his hair. With the other, she turned out the dim light next to the couch.

  Chapter Ten

  Scott woke to the sound of a clock’s steady ticking, amid a tangle of lavender-scented sheets. The room was blacker than night, and he struggled to see shadows in the depths of the room. There were no windows to let in the hint of stars. Or dawn. It was a room outside of time. But the ticking did not stop.

  For a moment he was confused, and then the memories of fire-bright hair and soft, pert breasts that visibly needed his kneading washed back over him. Sherrilyn had led him to her bed with no subtlety, and he’d not refused. He’d barely even thought of refusing, no matter how strange it all was. When luck like that came calling, only a fool slammed the door. He had denied Rocky’s kinky outdoor advances, and look where that had gotten him. He touched the upper part of his splint, unconsciously. If denial in that instance had been a mistake, he hadn’t made the same mistake twice. And Sherrilyn didn’t have a husband standing across the room watching her advances.

  Of course, that didn’t mean she didn’t have a husband somewhere. His stomach chilled at that thought briefly. What did he know about her, really? Nothing.

  Except that she was amazing in bed.

  And that she was no longer in the bed.

  Scott slid out of the cool silk of her sheets and carefully made his way through the pitch-black room to the door, where a faint light emanated. He could just barely make out the shadows of the bar and end tables and couch there, thanks to a small dim table lamp that was lit across the room. It acted as the equivalent of a bathroom nightlight, offering just enough light for him to find and claim his clothes from the floor near the couch. He couldn’t find his underwear.

  Where was Sherrilyn?

  Scott turned on the light next to the couch and confirmed that she was not in the small apartment. He couldn’t really think of it as a guest room…she lived here. And it was three times the size of his own room.

  The bathroom door was open and the space beyond was dark. He walked back to the bedroom. He couldn’t find a light switch there, and after running his hand along the floor near the bed in the dim shadows a few times, he gave up. The space between his eyes felt under pressure, and his hands shook slightly. He was hot, though the room was not. Scott suddenly wanted nothing more than to be back in his room, lying down with a wet towel on his forehead. The liquor Sherrilyn had fed him had stilled any aches in his body, but it had put a dull background one in his head.

  He gave up on the search for his underwear and pulled on his jeans and shirt. Then he slipped on his sandals and opened the door. He hesitated in the hallway a moment. Which direction had they arrived here from? He seemed to remember turning to the left when they reached Sherrilyn’s door. He looked in that direction and nodded. That felt right. To retrace those steps, he exited her door to the right, down a dark, shadowed hall. The only light came from the occasional old wall sconces. It was night, he realized, as he passed a window that hinted at the shadows of trees beyond, but showed nothing more. The darkness was almost palpable. He’d lost the entire afternoon and evening in Sherrilyn’s parlor.

  He followed the winding hall and then slowed as he reached the series of doors that he’d seen earlier that day. The doors that had all been locked. He heard a low murmur of voices from beyond one of them. A faint glow slipped out from beneath. Scott hesitated. There was laughter from inside. He put his hand on the knob, and gently tried to turn it. This afternoon it had not budged—he’d tried each one
in this hall.

  Now it turned easily.

  The door creaked slightly as it opened a crack, lighting the hall in an orange glow. He peered in through the opening, and saw that there were candles lit on wall sconces. Three of them led the way down a wooden stairway that wound around and out of sight before he could see the bottom.

  The voices came from the bottom of the stairway. He couldn’t make out words, just the sibilance of many conversations going on at once. A rhythm of whispers. And then a louder sound, almost a moan.

  Scott pulled his face back and eased the door shut. Then he took a deep breath, and frowned as his head throbbed. He had missed dinner again; that probably wasn’t helping. He didn’t know what was going on down there; maybe he didn’t want to know. Whatever it was, all he wanted right now was to go back to sleep. He stepped away from the “party room”.

  “Maybe another night,” he said softly, and turned to walk down the hall.

  When he finally turned the corner and found his room, he fumbled his key out of his pocket like a drunk. He pressed the door shut behind him with an audible sigh of relief, and stripped off his clothes. In the bathroom, he bent to the faucet and drank from the tap for several swallows, until he needed to break for air. Then he washed his face, and staggered to the bed.

  For a second, he worried that Caroline might have let herself into his room, and lay in wait to ambush him beneath the covers, but he slid his hand across the bed, and met only the cool cotton of the sheets.

  “Thank God,” he breathed, and laid his head back on the pillow, staring at the shadow of the ceiling above.

  Over the past week he had been seduced—been laid—by three beautiful women. This was not how Scott’s life ran. Hell, the last time he’d even had a date had been six months ago. And that had not gotten past dinner. He’d heard of Southern hospitality but…this was weird.

  It was also something he could definitely get used to. He closed his eyes, and saw the red waves of Sherrilyn’s hair in his mind, glowing with its own fire in her bedroom.

  Where had she gone tonight?

  Chapter Eleven

  When Scott woke up, the morning light was shining bright and full through the bedroom window. He’d obviously slept late. He sat up slowly, worried about the severity of the hangover he knew he was going to be nursing after last night…but as he blinked and stretched, he realized that he felt…really good. His head didn’t hurt. His eyes were clear. His stomach growled loudly, and repeatedly, with hunger.

  Huh.

  He sped through his morning rituals and then pulled on a T-shirt and eased his khaki shorts over the splints—which he noted were growing increasingly itchy—and headed to the dining room.

  Thankfully, he’d missed the breakfast rush. Ellen had left out a carafe of orange juice and a pot of coffee, and there were still a handful of muffins on a tray. Everything else had been cleared away. He sat down at the empty table and enjoyed the solitude. The blueberry muffins were moist and delicious, and the orange juice had to have been fresh squeezed.

  “I really could get used to this,” he murmured.

  There was movement behind him, just then. “Glad to hear it,” Ellen said, and Scott jumped.

  “I didn’t know you were there,” he said.

  Ellen smiled, reaching in front of him to remove his empty plate. “We’d love for you to stay on here, if you’d like. This is your inn now, and it could be your home. You wouldn’t have to stay in Room 23—we have suites for those of us who live here full-time.”

  Scott thought of Sherrilyn’s room and wanted to answer, “Yes, I’ve seen one of them,” but instead only shook his head. “Thanks, but I have to get back to my job. This is our busy season, and I have been gone way longer than I intended. I really should wrap things up here and hit the road tomorrow.”

  Ellen’s face wrinkled up. “Oh, no,” she said. “You can’t leave now. Next week is one of the most important days of the year here at the inn. It’s our Last Tap celebration. You came all this way, you have to stay and see it.”

  “What is the Last Tap?” he asked.

  “It’s the day we turn off the taps on the Family Tree. We tap the tree in March, and on May 1, we hold a festival to celebrate the end of the tapping. In May, we take all of the sap that we’ve collected for the past few weeks and use it to make our ales and liquors and syrups for the coming year.” She paused and grinned. “But on the night of the Last Tap, we pull out whatever remains in the barrels of beer from the previous year’s harvest and…well, we do our best to drain ’em so’s we can use those barrels again. After that night, for the next few weeks, all we have is what’s been bottled until the new batch is ready to drink.”

  “Sounds like quite the party,” he said.

  She nodded. “Our rooms are full that night. It’s one of the most important days of the year for the inn.”

  She put a hand on his arm. “Please tell me you’ll stay with us until then?”

  Scott thought for a minute. He could work remotely a few more days. His boss didn’t care where he was, so long as the work got done. And he had his laptop. Certainly his nights with Caroline, Rocky and Sherrilyn gave him plenty of reason to want to stay longer. He felt guilty for enjoying intimacy with all of them, but it wasn’t as if he had pushed for that. They had pushed him; all he’d done was agree to mutual pleasure…and he didn’t relish the idea of going back to the chastity (well, more like the left-handedness) of his empty apartment back home.

  “Let me see what I can do,” he promised.

  Ellen smiled. “You won’t regret it,” she said.

  After she left the room, Scott pulled out his cell phone and called work. He had taken two weeks off for this trip, so he was still on vacation for a couple days, but if he was going to stick around, he should plan it now. His boss, Jacob Trenton, picked up on the second ring. When Scott explained what he wanted to do, the other man laughed. “Must be a really nice place you’ve inherited out there, eh? I’ll make a deal with you. I need the Reliant project as soon as I can get it. I know you’re still burning vacation days, but if you could finish up your part on that this week, I’m not going to ask what you’re doing next week. Deal?”

  “Deal!” Scott smiled. “Thanks, Jake, I’ll work on that this afternoon.”

  “Look, you know I’m okay with you working remotely for a few days while you settle your business, but…Scott, you are coming back, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t worry,” Scott promised. “It’s nice here, and they do know how to show a boy some hospitality, but I’m a Chicago boy. I’m definitely coming back. Nothing could stop me!”

  A moment later, he said goodbye and broke the connection. Just as he did, two hands slipped across his shoulders and squeezed.

  “Nothing?” Sherrilyn’s voice said with a quaver. “I’m gonna take that as a personal challenge.”

  “Oh, there you are,” Scott said. “You don’t want me to go home, but last night you abandon me. Where did you go?”

  Her hands squeezed him harder, and then slipped away. “I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and took a walk. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “I have to admit, I’m not used to waking up alone in a strange place.”

  “It’s not a strange place,” she said. “It’s your place. All of it.”

  “I’m pretty sure that was your bed I woke up in,” he said.

  “I’m just a fringe benefit,” she said, stroking her fingers across his chest. “The bed is yours. And I’m yours too, if you want me.”

  That one stopped his mouth from running so easily. But before he could say anything, her hands pulled away, and she slipped from the room.

  He felt his mouth hanging open, in a silent, extended “Eh?” Was it really just the crazy aphrodisiac effects of the tree sap? And even if it was…did he care? Three beautiful women were offering themselves t
o him here basically every day. Why would he want to go back to Chicago?

  Scott lifted his coffee cup and drained it. The heat warmed his throat and his chest, and after a moment, he stood.

  Time to find a place to disappear to. The Reliant file was going to take him a couple days to process. In the meantime, he couldn’t keep getting distracted by the women here. The very sexy, very pushy women.

  Scott got up from the table and hurried back to his room to grab his laptop. He knew just where he could settle in for a few hours and remain undisturbed. Caroline had done more than simply “show” it to him it a few days ago before his accident.

  The eyrie.

  It was a perfect day for working outside. From his vantage point, Scott could see all around the inn. The fields where someone was currently running a tractor. The forest, which was still leafing out with the spring, but already vibrant. The air was warm but not heavy. There were no outlets on the balcony, but he found an electric outlet in the hallway that his computer cord could just barely extend to reach inside, and then settled in with the laptop. Once he had all his windows launched and began keying things in, the hours slipped by. When the bell rang in the distance, announcing dinner, he worked straight through, until the sun slipped with a flourish of pinks and purples to disappear beneath the line of trees in the distance. When he finally finished, he leaned back and stared at the stars coming out.

  “This is beautiful,” he whispered. The breeze slipped through his hair and he shivered. “I could really get used to this.”

  Somewhere below, he heard the faint rumble of a car running over gravel and branches. He set down the laptop and looked out, finally seeing the running lights of a vehicle moving into the midst of the tree line. He’d been hiking there, and he knew from experience that there was no real road for cars. It was a trail.

  A hiking trail that led to an auto graveyard, a voice in his head reminded him.