by Emerson Rose
Outside the clouds are heavy and gray, and it’s already beginning to snow as we get into our skis. “You walking?” I ask when I see she’s wearing hiking boots.
“Yeah, we haven’t gone far yet. We’re supposed to start climbing tonight, but with the snow starting so early, I’m not sure what the plan will be now.”
“You should stay put until it’s over. It’s supposed to be bad.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. Hey, thanks again for the pack. I swear I’ll pay you back.”
“Oh, I know you will. I’ll hunt you down if I have to. This one has the memory of an elephant. She never forgets.” I give my daughter a little shove, and she giggles.
“Maybe you can come visit sometime, Clover? We never get to have people over. We can bake cookies and hike in the woods.”
Clover looks at me for guidance, and I clear my throat. “Honey, Clover is in college. She’s doing a course where they have to live on the mountain for sixty days. She’s going to be busy learning like you do in your online classes. Do you understand?”
Her face clouds over, and she nods.
“But, hey, who knows, maybe I’ll run into you on the mountain. You live there, and I’ll be hiking all over the place. We’re bound to run into each other, and if we do, I’d love to bake cookies with you, Adley.”
Adley’s eyes sparkle, and she leans over to try and hug Clover while on her skis. Clover moves closer to make it easier, and I find myself hoping she will come across our cabin and bake cookies with my little girl.
It’s never been more apparent to me how much Adley needs a female role model beyond her online teacher, Miss Kitty. How could I have thought she would be fine growing up in seclusion her entire life? She’s missing so many important things because of my inability to deal with my past. I can’t keep denying her these experiences, but I don’t know how to live any other way since Constance died. The mountain was my savior, but eventually, it’s going to be Adley’s prison.
2
Clover
I’m pretty sure our instructor is trying to get us all killed. A storm is on its way, and there are winter weather warnings all over the place, but he’s still insisting it’s safe to leave tonight as planned.
My new backpack is full of the things I will need for the next two months minus food and wood. I’m a senior, and this is the last thing I have to do before graduation. It’s kind of like a final internship except instead of merely working for someone and doing a good job, we have to survive and learn to teach others to do the same.
My best friend, Freda, thinks I’m insane for majoring in adventure education. She made fun of me for months before I left the safety of my aunt’s California home to come to Colorado to attend Fort Douglas. Ironically, she only lasted one year studying fashion marketing and management in Cali before she up and transferred to FDU.
I was stunned. She was out of her element, but she said she couldn’t stand life without me, and I loved her for that. Freda is not studying adventure education with me. She’s a senior and still has no idea what she wants to be when she grows up. What she does know is she will have a diploma, and her parents will be proud of her for earning it, and a boyfriend who worships the ground she walks on, and that’s enough for her.
Not me, though. I have purposely stayed out of long-term relationships. I have a plan, a goal, and a dream to open a diverse summer camp for low-income kids who wouldn’t be able to attend camp otherwise. Everything I’ve done in school was to make my dream a reality, and having a serious boyfriend, for me, would have distracted me from my adventure education.
“Girl, why are you listening to those fools? You know that damn trip is gonna be suicide. Get your ass back to the apartment and tell them to go screw themselves.” Freda has been against me going away for two months since she found out about the program’s last hurrah six months ago.
“I can’t, it’s a requirement for graduation.”
“You can’t graduate if you’re a dead icicle on a friggin’ mountainside.” She’s got me there.
“What am I supposed to do then?”
“I don’t know, call the damn program director or something. Tell ‘em your teacher is a damn idiot. You want me to do it?”
“No, if it looks like he’s going to make us go, I’ll call.”
“Girl, you need to call now and stop messing around. If he was going to cancel, he would have done it by now.” She’s talking to me in her low, serious, look here woman, voice, so I listen.
“Okay.”
“You get a new backpack?”
“Yeah.”
“How much?”
Freda wanted to pay for my pack when she found out I needed a bigger one. She may be crass and blunt, but she has a big heart and an even bigger trust fund. I wouldn’t let her on principle, and now she’s going to be pissed when she finds out I let some sexy mountain man do it instead.
“Well, I got it on credit… sort of.”
“What do you mean, sort of?”
“The one I needed was way out of my price range, and there was this guy at the supply store. He wanted to pay for it, and I’m going to pay him back with free summer camp for his daughter when I open Camp Coexist.” My words tumble out in a rush. I’m hoping she will miss half of them and not question what I’ve just told her. I know it’s a stupid plan, but it’s all I’ve got.
“You what? What the hell, Clover! You let a complete stranger buy you a three hundred dollar…”
“Two hundred and fifty,” I say cutting her off. “And he was a handsome stranger.” I know this little tidbit will cool her temper. She’s always harping on me about dating someone. Maybe she’ll think I’m into Gage and give the damn backpack issue a rest.
“Handsome or sexy?”
“What’s the difference?”
I hear her sigh into the phone like that’s the dumbest question ever. “Handsome is, yeah, he’s nice. Sexy is, holy shit, I wanna bone that like right now.”
“My God, isn’t there a happy medium? I mean he was dressed from head to toe in ski gear, and he had his six-year-old daughter with him. I wasn’t exactly thinking about boning him. He was sexy, I guess. He had the whole mountain-man beard and long hair thing going on. And I could see the edges of some tattoos near his hands and neck.”
“Tattoos? Okay, good, but a six-year-old kid? How old was he?”
“I didn’t check his ID, Freda. Old enough to have a kid.”
“Well, when are you seeing him again? You know he isn’t waiting for you to open a summer camp for payback. Were you wearing your purple snow pants? Because those make your ass look fine, you know they do. He was probably thinkin’ Man, if I get this girl this expensive backpack, ima hit that hard!”
“Freda! I’m hanging up now. If I freeze to death in this snowstorm, remember I love you and tell Gage, the mountain man, I’m sorry I didn’t pay him back.”
“Oh stop, you’re not gonna die, call the director. Tell him you got a debt to settle, and you can’t be dying before it’s handled.” She busts out laughing when she says handled like it’s the funniest play on words ever. I roll my eyes and tell her goodbye.
An hour and a half later, I’m wishing I had listened to my best friend and called the program director. We are hiking up a hill, and the path behind us looks more and more impassable the further up we go. I’m afraid there will be a point where he decides we aren’t going to make it to the campsite, and we won’t be able to get back down either.
There are fifteen of us including the instructor. He has fifteen people’s lives in his hands, and he is being incredibly careless with them. I cup my hands around my mouth and yell, “Mark!” Our instructor pauses and turns his head toward me and into the wind. He’s wearing a ski mask, but I can tell from the way his mouth is scrunched up, he’s squinting. He’s having trouble seeing.
“Do you think we should go back? The trail is getting deep behind us. What if we get stuck?”
“We’ve come too far now, we have to keep
going,” he yells back, and the six people between us look at me with concern. We keep trudging along until I start to hear the sound of wood being chopped in the distance. Somebody’s up here, thank God. Maybe they have shelter and can help us out until morning.
“Mark!” I yell again, and when he looks back at me, I point in the direction of the sound. He nods and changes course heading toward the sound, but it’s almost impossible to see now with the direction change. The wind is whipping the snow around making it white-out conditions. I don’t even know if we are still on the trail anymore. Everything looks the same—white and covered with snow.
The sound of wood being split echoes off the mountainside into the woods making it difficult to follow at times until I see him. It’s only a silhouette, but I know right away it’s him. The way he moves fluidly raising the ax and lowering it down to slice through the pieces of wood like butter is so masculine, so rugged, and so hot.
And since hot is the opposite of what I am right now, I gravitate toward him even faster passing my classmates until he is within earshot. “Gage!” I yell. “Gage, hey!”
He stops and straightens to his full height, which I would estimate to be six feet three or four and shields his eyes to see who is yelling his name. His beard is white with snow, and his hair is swept up into a bun on top of his head also covered in snow. He looks like a god, a mountain-man god. I want to fling myself into his strong, capable arms and let him drag me away and… What the hell? I must be experiencing an altitude imbalance. I don’t think thoughts like that about anyone, ever.
“Clover? Is that you?”
“Yes, can you help us?
“What in the hell are you doing hiking in this storm? Are you trying to get yourself killed?” He flicks the ax into the stump he was using to chop on and trudges toward me taking my hands.
“W-e-e-e sh-houldn’t have tried…” I stutter not realizing just how cold I have gotten.
He pulls me against him and looks over my head at the others who are close behind. I should be thinking about them. I should be thanking my lucky stars he was out chopping wood. I should be asking him to help us back down the mountain, but all I can think about is how good he smells, how hard his body is, and how safe I feel in his arms.
“How many of you are there?” he asks rubbing his arms up and down my back trying to warm me up.
“Fif-f-ft-teen.”
“Is everyone accounted for?” he yells as my class begins to surround us in the clearing.
Mark calls out a yes, and Gage swings his arm in a follow-me gesture. I’d like to see where we’re going, but it’s coming down so hard now, I can’t. I follow Gage. He has no trouble finding his way. He’s lived here for at least six years according to what he told me this afternoon. We exit the woods five minutes later, and I can see the vague outline of a huge A-frame house jutting out from the mountainside.
“This way,” he calls pointing up a long flight of stairs leading to the house. We all struggle up the slippery stone steps, Gage and I in the lead. He has ahold of me, and I don’t slip once, but the others aren’t so fortunate. I watch them fight against the wind and snow until we are all on the landing outside his front door.
He pushes it open, and I walk inside to the smell of sugar cookies wafting through the air. The warm heat from an enormous fireplace in the center of the great room is more than welcoming, it’s life-saving. “Daddy! The cookies are almost…” Adley stops talking when she sees what I am guessing are more guests than she’s ever had in her house at one time.
“Honey, grab some blankets and towels, will you, please?” Gage says, and she drops her spatula and bolts from the room. “Everybody, take off your wet clothes and get close to the fire. We will get you some blankets and towels, but you have to get out of the wet clothes before hypothermia sets in.” He turns to me. “How long were you out there?”
“Left at six,” I stutter. He looks at a clock on the wall. “Shit, that was three hours ago, you must have been walking in circles.”
“Couldn’t see.”
“Who’s your instructor?” I open my eyes wide and shake my head back and forth. His tone is venomous, and I fear what he might do to Mark if I identify him as the man who almost led us to our death. “I’m not going to hurt him, I only want to talk to him. Promise.”
My eyes slide to my right where Mark is standing literally frozen by the front door. Gage grabs a fluffy cream-colored blanket off the couch and hands it to me. “Strip and wrap up in this by the fire. Now. Go.”
In the midst of nearly freezing to death along with thirteen of my classmates and my instructor, oh, and let’s not forget being in the presence of Gage’s six-year-old daughter, my hormones have just kicked into super warp speed overdrive. I don’t know where the bedroom is, but I know with all certainty if we were alone, and he had just said those words to me, I would be making a beeline there.
His instruction to strip and warm by the fire has my temperature rising faster than it ever would have without his commanding tone. I remove my coat and boots with frozen fingers and wrap the blanket around my body before shimmying out of snow pants, jeans, and sweater. I sit on the stone hearth around the fire in my panties, bra, and a blanket watching Adley pass out blankets and towels like a perfect little hostess.
Everyone is shedding their wet clothes and joining me by the fire while Gage and Adley work to hang things on every surface available. Gage takes Mark aside and speaks to him calmly pointing his finger around the room and then back at Mark tapping him lightly on the chest. Mark nods and lowers his gaze to the floor in shame. He knows he fucked up, and Gage just made sure of it. I respect that he did it privately and quietly.
He could have blown up and yelled at him for almost killing us, but he knew Mark was already beating himself up, and he didn’t want to humiliate as much as he wanted to educate.
“Baby, you need to get those cookies out of the oven, okay? Daddy’s going to make coffee for everyone.”
“Okay, is Clover okay?”
I see him searching the room. When his gaze lands on me, he nods. “Yeah, I think so.” The concern and tenderness in his expression stir the boiling hormone pot inside me, and I should look away, but I don’t, I can’t. He is too beautiful.
I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing him outside of his heavy winter coat until now. He is by far the most masculine man I’ve ever seen in person. His jeans fit like a real man’s should, perfectly accentuating his ass with a little room in the legs. No skinny jeans for this man. And his blue waffle-knit shirt clings to the muscular build I knew he had under all of those clothes. His tattoos are still mostly hidden except for the ones on his forearms where he has pushed up his sleeves. They cover every inch of his skin in a sleeve of colorful words and symbols I can’t make out from here.
He moves around the kitchen with ease, gracefully dipping and dodging his daughter as she removes the cookies from the oven and places them on wire racks to cool. When a pot of coffee has finished brewing, he fills a dozen mugs and moves around the room passing them out to my grateful classmates. A few of them are appreciating Gage’s beauty almost as much as I am, and I find myself not liking it.
When everyone is settled in with a blanket and a mug of coffee, he comes to sit next to me on the hearth. “Here, I hope black is okay. I don’t buy creamer, and I think Adley used all of our sugar to make her cookies.”
I accept the mug trying not to spill as I hold my blanket around me. “Are you warming up?” I haven’t been thinking about the cold. I’ve been too busy watching Gage be the sexiest host on earth. “Yes, I think so, a little.”
“Sometimes it takes a while, and then it hits you hard. Rub your skin when you start to feel it prickle.”
I’d rather have him rub my skin, but I keep my mouth shut and gratefully nod for being saved. “Thank you again. We would have been goners if I hadn’t heard you. Isn’t it too cold out for chopping wood?”
He leans his back against the rock of the fi
replace and places his hands on his knees. “No, I dress warm, and I only go out for short periods of time. You guys are a tough bunch, you should have frozen to death, but you kept going.”
“We didn’t know how much danger we were in until it was too late.”
“That’s how people die up here. Your instructor should know better. He’s under pressure from the school to get everyone to graduate on time. The school gets a gift or bonus or something, and that influenced him. He feels bad, and now he knows how easy it is to get turned around and freeze to death. I don’t think he will ever make that mistake again.”
“Thank you for talking to him privately. You could have humiliated him, but you didn’t.”
“I’m not into making people feel bad. It doesn’t do any good.”
I try to take a drink of my coffee, but it’s too hot, and I burn my tongue. “Shit,” I hiss. I hop back when the hot liquid hits my bare knee, and the blanket around me slips exposing my chest. Gage jumps to his feet to stand in front of me blocking everyone’s view and adjusts the blanket tight around me. “Come on, I’ll find you something to put on.” He takes my hand and leads me to a grand set of stairs on the backside of the fireplace.
“You don’t have to do this, what about everyone else?”
“I don’t have enough clothes for everyone, and the only person I’m worried about being exposed is you.”
I stop on the stairs watching his fine ass climb until he doesn’t hear me behind him and stops. “Why?”
He turns holding onto the bannister to look down at me. “Why? Why do I want to keep your classmates from looking at your breasts? Oh, I don’t know, maybe because I’d like to help you keep your dignity?”
“What about Michelle’s dignity? Or Carly? Or Sarah?”
He descends the few steps separating us and takes my hand pulling me up the rest of the way with him.
He opens the door to a bedroom leading me in and closes it behind us. “For the record, I don’t have to explain myself to you, but since you don’t seem to want to let it go, I will. I have a very young, very impressionable, daughter downstairs. She’s doesn’t spend time with other people living up here on this mountain, which is my fault but that’s neither here nor there. What I’m trying to say is, she likes you, and she knows I like you, too. I want to show her how a man treats a lady so she will know what to look for in a man someday. Understand?”
