“What do you like about it?”
“Being active and outside. I can hike for a living and teach people about nature.”
I swung my legs, and tried not to think about the way down. “It’s really the coolest job. Your family must come visit a lot.”
“Nope. They hate that I’m here.”
I wasn’t expecting that response. “Really?”
“Really. My mom and dad live in San Francisco and they don’t like camping. They just ignore what I’m doing.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed that. My parents don’t even know I’m here.”
Now it was his turn to be shocked. “For real?”
“For real. My mom and dad got divorced. My dad is in New Orleans. My mom is in Texas. They told me once they figured everything out they’d come back and get me. That was when I was four. They never did. My grandma raised me in Iowa. I’m not in contact with them.”
“That’s awful.” He reached out a muscular arm and put it around my shoulders, giving me a squeeze. And no one, not one person, had ever done that before—acknowledged that it was bad how my parents dumped me and wanted me to feel better. My grandmother never talked about it, trying to shield me from late night whispered conversations on the phone with my mother, her daughter. The snippets I’d heard, though, were enough. I knew I was a burden on everyone. So I knew I had to make it on my own. There wasn’t anyone I could rely on.
I looked at him and nodded, and we stayed there for a while, listening to the sounds of the forest—the wind in the trees and the river down below, with the occasional bird call.
“You know, I think it’s weird you’re from Iowa. You don’t seem like a farm girl.”
“I’m not. It was . . . awkward growing up. Besides not having a mom and dad around like the rest of the kids at school, and not looking like everyone else, my grandma didn’t have much money. I got made fun of a lot. Or ignored. I spent a lot of time online or in the library. I had to get out of there. That’s why I studied so hard. I just needed to leave. I mean, look at me. Demographics-wise, I don’t fit in.”
“Fuck demographics. That’s what makes you so beautiful now.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Keep telling me that and maybe I’ll believe it someday.”
Shaking his head, he pushed a wayward curl out of my face. “You’re the most stunning girl I’ve ever seen.”
Huh.
Like Katie said, there was a difference between what I thought of myself and how others thought of me.
I’d never thought of the way I stuck out as an advantage.
Maybe I should start.
His compliments nudged open a small place in my heart, and I smiled at him, grateful. Robust lips met mine. Then he scooted way back from the edge and pulled me to him, so I straddled his lap, letting him kiss me deeply under the wide sky and the tall trees.
“We’ve never kissed inside,” I mused. “There’s no privacy at my place.”
“Privacy at my house, babe.” He had to have felt the shudder go through me at his words, and perhaps smelled my arousal caused by his beard tickling my cheeks, his tongue touching mine, his wild, clean scent.
“You want to come over?”
Did I want to go there? Really have a fling? Squarely out of the friend-zone?
Absolutely.
I nodded.
He wrapped me in a huge hug, and then picked both of us up off of the rock. Leaning down for one last kiss, he said, “It’s getting dark. I’ll pick you up tomorrow after work. Feed you dinner.”
And he held my hand the whole way down the trail.
“You kissed him!”
“Emma! Hush!”
After kissing Court on the doorstep and watching him drive away, she’d greeted me at the door in her sweats, and loudly announced my business to the whole cabin. The guys, sitting in the living room talking, had heard. Ian looked pissed. Or maybe jealous?
I glared at Emma, and grabbed her tiny hand. That little chipmunk of a person would not shut up. As I dragged her to our room, she trilled, “I’m so excited! You and Court. Love is in the air!”
“I’m regretting telling you anything,” I muttered.
“You haven’t told me enough!”
I rolled my eyes and flopped down on my lumpy bed.
“So he really does like you! It’s not Amanda.”
Heaving a sigh, I groaned, “Why did you have to bring her up?” I put the pillow over my head, not wanting to think about her. Someone who certainly knew him better than I did.
Kissing Court, I hadn’t realized how it would affect my relationships with my housemates. If I got hurt, they all would know.
“I’m just happy for you, that’s all.”
“I know,” I said. “Thank you.” I went to the bathroom, washed my face, and brushed my teeth. Then I went to bed. And lay there for a long time, chewing on my hangnail, lost in thought.
I was really going to do this.
The next morning, I was assigned to work at a meadow that was a five mile hike from the road. By the time I got to it, my feet were screaming and even though I’d bandaged my feet, I had even more blisters. This sucked.
I hobbled around, taking plant surveys and identifying species, and after I did my work, hiked the five miles out again.
When I arrived home, I took my hiking boots off, adding them to the piles of gear in the house, and joined my roommates outside on the patio, barefoot. I heard the scratch of the needle of the record player over the speakers, and realized from the first bars of the song, that Matt had put on Rod Stewart’s Maggie May for me. “Ugh, I hate this song. My grandma loved it and played it for my mom, which is why I’m named Margaret.” And stopped playing it after I turned four.
“Too funny,” said Emma. “This old music isn’t that bad.”
Yazmin nodded. “I love this song. All I needed was a friend, but you turned into a lover. So hot.”
I tried not to listen to it.
“I don’t know about this field work,” I said, sipping water. “It’s too hard on my feet.”
“I thought that’s what you wanted to do,” said Emma.
“I thought I wanted to do it, but now that I’m doing it, it’s hard. I don’t want to work in a lab, though. But what else can I do with a botany degree?”
“Teach botany?”
“Ha. I suppose I should have thought of that before I got my degree.”
“You could do chainsaw art,” piped in Ian, kicking back and taking a drink of his beer.
“Or plant sitting,” said Yazmin, who had her nose in some hippie-looking book about enneagrams. I didn’t want to know what that meant.
I gave them all some serious side-eye. “You all are hilarious. It’s a legitimate question. I spent all these years studying something, and now that I’m using it, it’s kicking my ass.”
“But do you like the actual work?” asked Katie, sketching Matt.
“Yes, I do. I just don’t like how my feet are all blistered.”
“Blisters heal. Follow what you love.”
Ian waggled his eyebrows. “Or else you can use that botany degree to colonize Mars.”
“You, my friends, are no help at all.”
I was so tired. I just wanted to sleep. But Court was going to make me dinner, so I showered, put on clean clothes, and waited for him to come pick me up.
Was I going to sleep with him? Or was this just dinner?
He arrived, looking edible in a green flannel and jeans, and took me out to his truck. I paused before I climbed in, wondering if I was doing the right thing. He read the look on my face. “What?”
“Nothing.” He buckled my seatbelt and kissed me, and then drove me to his house.
It was so freaking cute, a small rustic cabin on the other side of the river, nestled in a grove of pines. Roughhewn logs made up the exterior walls, with a green door and paned windows.
“How do you get to have a private house in a national park?” I asked.
“My
family’s owned this parcel since before it was a national park. There are little pockets of private land in Yosemite, because the original land grant was just the Valley and the giant sequoia groves. This land can stay in my family as an inheritance, but if I sell it, by law I have to sell it to the federal government. When I turned eighteen, my parents transferred it to me.”
We went inside.
I stepped into a small kitchen with a gleaming, white vintage stove and an old-fashioned rounded refrigerator. Cafe curtains filtered the light over the tiny sink. The knotty pine cabinets made the room dark, but cozy, like out of a fairy tale. It reminded me of the Seven Dwarves’ house in Snow White.
It smelled glorious too, like sturdy home cooking.
I shook my head. “Did you cook?” He nodded. “I’m so impressed.”
Holding my hand as was now his habit, he pulled me into a modest living room with a couch, a man-sized chair, and a flat screen television over the fireplace. Guess Netflix and chill could happen here.
Snowshoes, skis, and ski poles hung on the walls, and a bicycle had been suspended from the ceiling.
He really was a mountain man.
“I can’t believe you made me dinner.”
“That’s what Dutch ovens are for. No biggie. Take a look around. I’ll finish up.”
The small house, two bedrooms, was neat, but lived in, with framed black and white pictures of Yosemite lining the walls. I paused at the entrance to the larger bedroom, which had a wooden bed with a plaid green comforter.
I got a few ideas of what we could do there. Then I wandered back into the kitchen.
He seated me at a vintage Formica table and used oven mitts to pull a lidded cast iron pot out of the stove. “I do meat and potatoes. Beef stew.”
“Sounds good, and smells even better.”
We ate the stew with hot, crusty rolls and pints of local beer.
It may have been the best meal I’d ever eaten.
“Where’d you learn to cook like this?” I asked.
“Allrecipes.com.”
I laughed. “You?”
“Yep. But I think that the simpler things are better, you know? Real food. Not fancy.”
Finding myself comfortable in his house, sleepy, warm, and fed, I smiled at him. “I agree.” But then my stupid brain decided to interrupt. I was about to go to bed with a guy with a serious reputation. Could I really do that?
How many other women had he brought here?
Did I want to know?
“What?” he asked, reading the look on my face. And I realized I’d fucked up.
I needed to suck it up and accept that I was playing with fire here. If I was going to have a fling with a guy who had a reputation, I was going to have to accept that he had a reputation for a reason. But it was too late for me to play it off.
“Nothing.”
He pressed. “That’s a look that says something is wrong.”
“You wouldn’t want to hear it.”
“Try me.”
I let out a sigh. “I just can’t help but wonder how many other women you’ve brought here. And wonder where I fit in.”
His eyes narrowed. “I’ll tell you what, Maggie. I’ve been with a lot of women. A lot. And I know that’s not what you want to hear, but it’s the truth. But no one, I repeat, no one has been like you. None. You’re so goddamn beautiful, but it’s more than that. I’ve been with a lot of good-looking women. It’s what’s underneath I like. I see a smart girl who cares about nature and wants to protect it, not just talk about it. I see someone who does what’s needed to be done. I see someone who doesn’t fall for the woo-woo crap, but who still gets it. You know? You get it. You get what it means to live an outdoor life. Like I do. I’m gonna get to know you. Take care of you. Don’t worry about who was here before.”
I heard his words but I didn’t know if I believed him. Maybe he thought I was pretty, okay. He’d nudged open that part. He liked me because I was different. But him thinking he could take care of me?
That felt like a line.
Because of my parents saying “It’s just until we get settled somewhere,” I’d had trouble believing people. Trouble trusting that what they said was what they meant.
Because the promise to come and get me never came true.
So was he telling me the truth?
Though I didn’t know why I cared if this was just casual.
We cleared the dishes, making the tiny kitchen clean again. Then he looked at me. “I’m gonna start a fire. It’s cooler tonight. Mountain weather always changes. Want s’mores?”
“I’ve been wanting them since I got here.”
“Done, babe.”
He went into the kitchen and came back with a bag of marshmallows, a few Hershey bars, a box of graham crackers, and a plate. Poking a marshmallow on a long skewer for me and for him, we sat next to each other on the bearskin rug before the fireplace and roasted them until they became golden on the outside and melted on the inside.
We assembled our s’mores and put them on the plate. I held one out for him to bite. Unlike at Kristy’s party, I wanted to feed him, and I wanted to be fed.
He smiled his half-grin and opened his mouth. I carefully held the dessert up to him, but he still got melted marshmallow in his beard and graham crackers on the rug. My hands were a mess. “It’s good,” he said, “but you taste better.” And he leaned over and gave me a chocolatey-marshmallowy-beardy kiss. I wanted to touch his hair, wanted him inside me, wanted him, period. But sticky hands meant that I settled for his tongue right now.
We broke apart. He grabbed the other s’more and held it out for me to bite. The marshmallow oozed all over my tongue, the sweetness of the chocolate and the crunch of the graham cracker giving it bite.
Yum.
He pulled my sticky fingers over to him and sucked them one by one, which felt like he was licking something else. I returned the favor, gazing at him, not breaking the eye contact.
But we both got up, brushed the crumbs off of ourselves, and washed off. Coming back to the living room, choosing to get off of the floor, I sat on the super comfortable couch.
Instead of sitting next to me, though, he went over to a wooden desk and opened a drawer. When he came over to me, he looked circumspect. He handed me a brown paper-wrapped package about the size of a large, squat dictionary.
“I got you something.”
I was so surprised and touched. Not expecting a present from Court Thompson. What did this mean? I took it tentatively, but gratefully. “Thank you.”
He stood before me, looking down. “Open it.”
I did and found a digital camera, a higher end model than the usual point-and-shoot. A really thoughtful present. There had been more occasions than I could think of this summer already when I’d wanted a camera to record the moment.
“Court. This is so nice, but I can’t accept it. It’s too much.”
He shook his head and pushed the camera back to me. “Take it. I want you to remember this summer. We’ll go take pictures. I’ll take you up to Glacier Point, Tuolumne Meadows, Big Oak Flat. Mono Lake. You said you wanted a camera.”
“I did.”
“Now you got one.”
Was he just trying to buy me so I’d go to bed with him?
The thing was, I’d decided to go to bed with him without it, so why was he even bothering.
Seeing the look on my face, he stepped forward. “What is it? Don’t you like it?”
“It’s fantastic and thoughtful. I guess I just think it means that you really do want me to sleep with you.”
Fuck.
More toothpaste I couldn’t put back in the tube.
“Babe?”
I nodded.
“There will be little sleeping involved.”
My eyes widened and my hands shook. I set down the camera on a table.
Even though I didn’t know if he wanted me as his staff pick of the summer or something else, my body didn’t care. I was goin
g to turn off my brain and pay attention to my body. Be with him. Even if it was just for now.
Maybe this would be the alpenglow I’d remember in my later years. The warm summer memory, never to be repeated.
“You good with that?”
I nodded. I was good with that. I was sick of the friend-zone. I wanted the fling.
Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe I shouldn’t trust him. Or anyone.
But something in the way he’d already acted made me believe he’d take care of me.
Because he already had. He’d already bandaged my blister and taken me safely home from Kristy’s crazy party. Rescued me from dirty meatballs and shown me Yosemite—the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. The one place I’d always wanted to see—and he’d made it a priority.
Was I good with that? Was I good with trusting him, even for tonight?
“Talk to me.”
“Yes, that’s okay,” I whispered.
“Good,” he whispered back. “Because I want to spend the rest of the night mapping out every inch of your body.”
And his plump lips crashed to mine and this time he tasted like toasted marshmallows and beard and wood smoke. His tongue touching mine, dancing, licking, playing, teasing. His hands low around my waist, almost on my ass, mine up around his shoulders, holding the nape of his neck to me. My athletic body pressed to his solid one, feeling that yes, he was really interested in me.
Then somehow I found my head nestled in a fluffy white pillow on his large bed, looking up into his blue-green eyes in the low light of a rustic room. Had he held my hand down the hall? Picked me up? I didn’t know. It was happening in a blur, and I loved it so much that I wanted to slow things down. Mark this moment. Take a picture so I could remember it.
But time sped up. My shirt was off, then my bra, my nipples hard nubs, turned on for him. And he was kissing down my torso, his whiskery beard running over my midline, the longer part of his hair flopping down, his scuffed hands gently exploring my body. His tongue tasting my skin.
“Let me see you with your shirt off,” I said.
He knelt up, and whoosh, off. Hours spent hiking and chopping wood made his torso toned and tan, a light trail of hair under his belly and a dusting of hair on his pecs looked so fucking tough and strong. His jeans rode low and I could see an indentation where his hip muscles started. He bent to my neck, beard on my skin, tongue and teeth activating my nerve endings.
Lumbersexual (Novella) Page 6
