As soon as she was out of sight, I heard her laugh.
Properly chastised by my mate for the first time and in front of my mother. Would never live that down. I sighed.
“I am sorry, Addi. I didn’t mean to make anyone gag. Or kill the seabirds.”
She laughed.
My traitorous dick reacted. Ugh.
I looked around and realized Delia wasn’t there. “Where’s your partner in crime?”
“Delia? She’s off schtumpfing the hot tour guide.”
Quirking an eyebrow, I was confused. “I’m sorry, what? Schtumpfing?”
“Yeah. Horizontal hula? Naked tango? Dirty disco? Any of this?”
I laughed. “Got it. She found a bed buddy.”
Addi nodded. “And a field buddy. And a tree buddy. And a river buddy… Well, they’re active. She won’t be home…tonight or possibly the rest of the summer.”
I took a deep breath. “Would you like to have dinner with me?”
My mother’s snort and laugh came barreling out of the back room. “You’re as smooth as a lava bomb!”
“Mom, shut up,” I grumbled, with a hand on my head.
Addi smirked and stared at me. “She’s awesome.”
“See?”
“Mom!” The yell came out hoarse and embarrassed.
Still, Addi hadn’t made an excuse and run. Yet. “You’re serious?”
“As a lava bomb!”
“Mom! Go home!”
She did go, but she cackled all the way out the door. I just stared up at the ceiling, clenching my jaw until I heard the door close.
Addi burst out laughing. “I like her. She’s funny.”
“She is mortifying.” Rolling my eyes, I turned back to the window to make sure the burn pile hadn’t caught half the Tongass on fire.
With quiet steps Addi was next to me, looking out the window at the inferno. “Why did you suddenly burn that mattress?”
“Impulse control problem,” I answered. “I wanted a new one and the only way to make sure I actually ordered it was to burn it.”
“Extreme but effective.”
I let out a sigh and stole a glace of her perfect-for-me profile. “So. Date? Coffee? Beer? Dinner?”
She seemed surprised. “You are serious.”
I gave a brief nod.
She gave a brief nod back. “Yes.”
“Really?” The words fell out of me.
“Well, did you want me to say no?”
“No! Not at all. I just thought that…”
She smirked. “I’d play hard to get? Nah. I’m old and too complicated to play games like that. So. Yes, Patrick, I would love to go out to dinner with you.”
I grinned. “Sweet.”
“Your mother’s right, though. You’re as subtle as a lava bomb.”
“I think she said smooth.”
Addi cocked her head. “Have you ever seen a lava bomb?”
Chapter Five
I held out my fist and poised it over Patrick’s hand.
He was confused, but offered his palm, and I dropped the rock into it. The spiky edge poked his skin and he let out a small yelp.
“Ouch! Hey, what the heck…”
“Small lava bomb.” I grinned. “I had Delia find it just for you.”
He looked at it and started laughing.
A wave of relief washed over me. It had been a calculated risk, but one I didn’t want to pass up. It was a kind of test: I wanted to make sure he had a real sense of humor.
I had also chosen to play stupid with his mattress. Jess had explained to me that Patrick was a player who was trying to mend his ways. The mattress was most likely one of the most disgusting things I would have ever laid eyes on. Garrett had been relieved when their mother told them he had hauled it out and burned it.
Even though he shouldn’t have burned it.
Patrick put the small lava rock on his mantle. It wasn’t a big stone, it barely qualified as a small sample of Pele’s Tears, but it was perfect for what I wanted to do. Which was make Patrick laugh.
Opening the front door of the house, he motioned me forward. I walked ahead of him and we headed for his car, as he pulled the door closed.
“I didn’t want to take you to the usual restaurants,” he said. “Midsummer, we’re all full up with tourists. Everything has a two-hour wait. So, I thought we might do something a little different.”
“Uh-oh.”
He held the door of his car open. “Trust me?”
Sitting down in the car, I shrugged. “I guess so.”
The Subaru Outback, which was the most common, non-pickup style vehicle I had seen, wound through the roads of the compound to the main highway into the city.
We drove quietly, and I could see the buildings of Juneau in the distance, but we turned off long before they could grow into a marina with all kinds of boats and planes.
Patrick guided the car to the end of a dock and parked. He smiled and headed around the car to help me out.
The salt water was pungent. There was something about northern ocean water that was so much more strongly saline than anywhere else. I really liked it and let the scent just drift by.
He stopped us halfway down the dock, after taking my hand and leading me down the plastic decking.
“No wood?”
“Rots fast in the extremes of weather,” he explained. “The textured plastic lasts.” He popped the door open on a single prop engine seaplane.
My eyes grew wide. “What?”
“Come on. It’s Cessna Two-oh-Six Floatplane with a Soloy turbine engine.”
“Yeah, you may as well have been speaking Klingon.” I stared at the plane.
“ylDohgQo.”
“What?” I stared at him this time.
Patrick grinned. “That actually was Klingon.”
“You speak Klingon?”
“A little.”
I chuckled. “Why?”
“Because we have really long winters.”
I shook my head. “But you really expect me to get on that plane?”
“Yes, of course. It’s a good plane. People pay a lot of money for these and my dad bought it when we were kids for a fraction of what it’s worth. I keep it perfectly maintained and have been flying since I was six.”
Cocking a hip, I stared at him. “Why do you sound more like a car salesman than a guy trying to take me on a date?”
“I do flightseeing once in a while during the spring and fall, and I’m used to people freaking out at the pontoons. More than one person stopped at the dock and said no…” He rolled the window down. “And I really don’t want you to say no.”
He was sweet. I wasn’t thrilled about this idea, but I could play along. Screwing up my courage, I walked to the edge of the dock and grabbed the ladder.
“Spot me, man. I don’t want to end up in the drink.”
“Step on the pontoon and then lift off the dock onto the ladder.” Patrick put a hand on my hip to guide me.
And there were sparks and shivers from the touch. All the way through my body, up my skin, down my arms and legs. The skin pebbled, and I had never ever felt that at a touch.
I thought for a moment that I heard Patrick suck in a breath, but the plane slammed against the dock at that moment, caught in the wake waves of a nearby motorboat.
“Upsie daisy,” he said, and I climbed the ladder into the airplane.
Ducking down not to hit the ceiling, I maneuvered my butt to the other seat and sat. Patrick was already up and in and closing the door. He plucked a headset off a hook and handed it to me.
“Go ahead and put that on. Once the engine’s running you’ll be able to talk to me.”
Looking at the headset, it seemed like it had been last replaced in the late seventies by the deep brown color with orange highlights.
“Got a wet wipe?”
He looked mildly offended. “I sanitize them after every flight. Whether or not they were used. The wipes are under your chair.”
“Sorry, Patrick. But… I have issues.”
“Don’t we all?” He grinned and slapped his own, more modern headset on. There was a crackle, and then I heard him in my headset. “Okay, it’s going to be really loud for a few minutes. Once we’re in the air, it will be better.”
He buckled in, and I did the same with the slightly more-than-a-commercial-airline seat belt. The plane sputtered to life, not exactly instilling confidence in it. But Patrick’s hands moved over the controls like a master conductor and we moved away from the dock as he talked with the tower of Juneau International for clearance.
I’d never paid much attention to flying, being in the back of the plane 100 percent of the time before this, but by the ease with which he moved his hands across the boards and levers, he was at home in this thing.
It was only a moment before we were picking up speed and he pulled back on the yoke, lifting us up and out of the water. We picked up even more speed, and more Gs as he angled us up and away from Juneau, out to the islands that protected the coast from the sea.
“Juneau is on the Inside Passage. It’s always been safer to get up the coast this way. There’s a hairpin turn for the cruise ships, but it’s never been a real issue for them. Not with the azopods.”
“You don’t do tours?”
“I only do them in the spring and fall,” he answered, flying a little lower so we could see the lakes that dotted the ground. “I let the townies handle the summer crowds. I have work I do with U Alaska that takes up a lot of the summers, and the research works with the spring and fall runs.”
“University of Alaska?”
“I have a master’s in biology and I work with the Alaska Native department and the anthropology department. My family is Russian and Tlingit-Tsimshan. I help all those students with their thesis and research, and it works since I have to go out in the plane if they need anything. I can grab samples from all of these ponds and islands. I’ve located several empty native villages for some of the anth students.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You’re native?”
“Very much. Dad’s chief.”
“And Garrett will be chief someday?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t realize he was native, but now that he said it, I could see all the hallmarks in his face and stance. He also had a lot of the Russian in him—
“Your mother’s name is Olga.”
“She’s half Russian.” He smiled. “And she knows the language and loves to yell at us in it. Garrett knows it fairly well. But our sister is good at it. She and Mom talk for hours.”
I smiled, but I felt the wistfulness of it. I couldn’t imagine halving a mother who would not only talk to me but talk to me in the language of her childhood.
“How about you?” Patrick cut through the drone of the engine.
“I went to Northeastern for Human Resource technology. I met these four dipsticks my first day in the dorms and we hit it off so hard that there was no stopping us.” I looked at my watch. “Elephantine should be getting the eviction notice in another few days.”
“Elephantine?” There was no denying his laugh.
“She was our sixth roommate. Delia got stuck sharing a room with her. By the time October rolled around, we knew she wasn’t going to last with us. She was horrible.”
“Well, okay, but Elephantine?”
He was more confused by her name, I realized. “Fantine. Her mother was fan of Les Miserables. She would go around trumpeting her commands to all of us. I forget who mumbled it first, but it stuck for all five years.”
He nodded. “This trip was a ruse to not be there when she got evicted?”
“No. This was Brandy’s chance to see the property she had to pay an arm and a leg for to get away from her cousin Harrison. She had the feeling he wasn’t taking care of it, and she wanted it to stay in the Yéil family.”
It was quiet again, and he steered the plane down to flit between the tall hills that dotted all the islands along the coast. I should have been terrified. This was the kind of flying that very few people ever got to experience—close, low, almost slow. Nearly brushing the water and the tops of trees.
But, with Patrick… it felt natural. He really did know this plane.
Until he slammed the yoke to the right and headed us due west.
“What the hell—”
“Whales. Whale pod,” he said, the glee clear in his voice. “Yes! Under your seat is a camera case with a camera and a telephoto lens. Can you use a DSLR camera?”
“Yes, actually I can.”
“Awesome. We’re going to buzz the pod and I need you to take some shots. I want to identify the pod. I hope it’s AN-10, but it’s probably AG.”
“What?” I asked. “No, wait. I have to unbuckle myself. Please don’t do any stunt flying.” I managed to finally grab the camera case and haul it out.
“So there’s two kinds of pods. Resident and Transient. Residents are easy to track. Transients are not. AG is a local resident pod. AN-10 used to be. I have a theory those suckers went rogue and changed to transient after the Exxon-Valdez spill in eighty-nine.” He dipped in close. “We lost a lot of whales after that.”
Tipping the plane up on its wing, Patrick gave me a clear shot. I could see the whales just below the water. I snapped a few, then zoomed in. I could get a lot of them as they crested out of the water to take a breath.
“How many do you think are down there?” he asked.
“Oh, at least twenty-five. I see two calves.”
“Excellent. Just get as many as you can and I’ll deal with ID’ing them later. If there are twenty-five, I’m pretty sure that it’s AG pod, which is fine.”
“For the bio department?” I clicked a few more shots, trying not get the same whales twice.
“Yup, and everyone else who monitors the waters along the coast.” He grinned. “Got them?”
“As many as I could.”
“Good, let’s go eat.”
Eat?
Turning the plane back, Patrick lifted us over the hills and seemed to be looking for something. It took him a moment to find it, but he did, and the plane dipped down over a hill.
Skimming the water, he paralleled a long lakeshore, craning his neck to check something. Rising in the air, Patrick turned the plane around and then brought it right back to the shore line and touched down on the water.
How was I so calm?
With the blades of the propeller still whirling, Patrick steered us to a little stone beach and pulled the plane up to the pebbles.
“Won’t that wreck the pontoons?” I asked, trying to see what was going on.
“Not at all. I installed small wheels on the front years ago to make sure that if and when I had to do this, the pontoon would never scrape. They’re on the back too, in case I have to back in.”
“That’s cool.” I was now enchanted by this insane flying machine.
He jumped out and stood on the float, slamming the door and popping open a small compartment. I saw him run out with a long coil of rope and wind it around a tree.
As he headed back, he waved me out. “Come on! She won’t go anywhere now!”
I climbed out and looked around.
A wave of awe tripped through me. I was standing on the pontoon of a floatplane, staring up at what was clearly just one part of a massive wall of a caldera, covered in pine forest. The sky was a blinding bright blue, and white puffy clouds mixed with low patches of mist. The water was dark, reflecting back the ripples the plane had made. It was cool, not quite still but a soul-deep calm that made everything…perfect.
I knew Patrick was behind me on the float by the way the plane wobbled a bit.
“You okay?”
“This place…”
“I come here sometimes to think. Others know about the lake and visit once in a while. Only by plane. But I love the calm here.”
“The green is so…deep. Late summer greens at home.” My voice hitched.
; I hated home.
“Come on. Picnic dinner.”
I smiled and followed him off the pontoon, jumping off to the land we were anchored on.
He popped open the cooler and looked down into it. Pulling out some bottles, he handed me one. Spruce beer, local brew.
“You know me already!”
“Well, Garrett mentioned that Jess was angry you all had gone and enjoyed the spruce beer without her, so I figured I’d get some more.” He turned back to the cooler. “So, what would you like? I have turkey, ham, turkey ham…”
I stared straight at him. “Was…was that a South Park reference?”
Patrick cocked his head. “I don’t know how to handle this situation. One is to be embarrassed that I just got caught quoting South Park or two, be really fucking impressed that you knew such an obscure reference.”
I laughed. “Oklahoma has really, really long summers.”
* * *
Addison was from Oklahoma.
That was the first real thing I had learned about her outside of her going to school at Northwestern with her friends. It was like a happy little diamond in my brain.
“Is that when the wind—”
She held up a finger. “Don’t say it. Do not say it.” She stared at me. “That’s the springtime anyway. Tornados, you know?”
I laughed. “I guess you hear that all the time, eh?”
“Well, only when I got to college.”
Handing her a turkey sandwich and taking one for myself, we sat down on the patch of grass I had found. The rocky ground wouldn’t have worked well.
“Have you…” Addi started and stopped her question. She frowned at the sandwich, but the frown wasn’t for the sandwich. She was thinking about something.
I waited. I didn’t want to interrupt her. It was something serious—I could feel the eddies in her mind.
And that was new and interesting.
Finally, she moved the sandwich away from her mouth and stared at the plane for a moment. “Look, Patrick. This all is going to sound very strange to you right now, but I need to get it off my chest, before things go…wrong.”
I nodded and took a bite of my own lunch, chewing slowly.
Exploring Alaska (The Juneau Packs Book 3) Page 4
