The Big Sugarbush

by Ana Good

  Bunny’s nervous eye twitched uncontrollably as she drank in the snowboarder’s thick muscles and lopsided grin. Oh shit. I love Vermont already.

  Babe pushed a stack of papers across the desk toward Justin. “Ms. Van Randolph will have to read and sign these.”

  “Read?” Justin scoffed. “Ms. Van Randolph does not read.”

  “Well, she’ll have to read. Treatment papers.”

  “Treatment?” Justin bent and whispered into Babe’s ear. “Say, what kind of resort is this?”

  Babe snorted. “The kind where we’ll resort to anything to cure women of their addictions.”

  Justin paled. “Oh, well, the senator did not tell me. I thought we were going skiing at some rustic hippie lesbo family resort. I’m sure Ms. Van Randolph doesn’t know … about the rehab thing.” He uttered the last part softly.

  “Guess you’ll have to tell her.”

  But before Justin was done speaking, Bunny was sashaying around the lobby arm in arm with Dirk McGraw. She brushed by Justin, her valet, tossing Mr. Yummy, the terrier, to him for safekeeping. The dog yapped his head off, but Bunny ignored him, her attention fixed squarely on the tall, muscle-bound snowboarder.

  “Dirk is going to show me to my room,” Bunny said as she snatched the key from Babe’s outstretched hand and climbed the stairs arm in arm with Dirk.

  6. Storm Ho

  Sometimes Sugarbush guests arrived in such a state they had to be literally tied down and sedated. Babe Swenderson was used to this by now. She kept a tranquilizer gun under the front desk for rabid wildlife and surly drug-crazed lezzies.

  And she knew how to use it, just in case.

  Three a.m. Babe was asleep at the registration desk, snoring deeply. A loud boom! brought her out of her sleep along with a blast of arctic air rushing through the wide-open front door. A tornado of snow swirled into the lobby as Babe’s head popped up.

  As the snow settled, a petite woman dressed in desert fatigues and a hooded orange parka appeared. Pale icy-blue eyes appraised Babe from under a fur-lined parka hood. The eyes were mesmerizing, almost as captivating as the steel machine gun the woman shouldered.

  “We expecting you?” Babe yelled across the snow-blown lobby. She squinted hard, hoping to make out the woman’s face. She’d never had a guest arrive wearing a machine gun ensemble before. Her right hand shot under the desk and located the tranquilizer gun, just in case. There had been a rash of break-ins on the western slopes, kids looking for drugs, so Babe and Lily had decided to be prepared.

  The woman in desert fatigues unzipped her parka and let the machine gun drop from her shoulder as easily as if it were a purse. She smiled as she stepped into the bright light of the foyer, sweeping her dark pageboy back from her eyes. “Military airlift was late. Damn Brits. Hell of a time getting out of Baghdad.”

  “Storm Waters?” Babe gasped as she caught sight of the woman’s face.

  “And you?”

  “Babe Swenderson. My partner, Lily Rockworthy, and I run this place.”

  Storm cast her gaze around the farmhouse. “You gals dry me out? Got forty days before I’m due back on tour in the Middle East.”

  “What’s the problem?” Babe was amazed at how beautiful Storm was in person. She’d read somewhere that the war correspondent had a Japanese father and a Swedish mother. Her unusual parentage gave her skin a delicate creamy sheen, like porcelain. Her dark hair was straight, jet-black Japanese. Her voice was strong, raspy from cheap foreign cigarettes and too many late nights crawling around in desert foxholes.

  “Can’t sleep. I’ll suck down anything that helps me calm down when the job’s done. Sleep on my job, get your throat slit.” Storm made a cutting motion with two fingers under her chin as she spoke. Then she grinned, as if enjoying the daily danger of her job.

  Babe could imagine. At least twenty war correspondents worked the danger zones of the world for CNN, but Storm was the only woman who reported live from the front lines. She looked so fragile, yet her voice had a deep, sexy quality. She wasn’t even five feet tall, but her personality was huge, electric, alive. She never sat behind a desk and read the news. She always reported live from the war zone, from the site of the latest natural disaster, always dangling from some dangerous place, looking cool as a cucumber as bullets and bombs whizzed around her beautiful head in halos of iron and fire.

  America was in love with the woman.

  (Babe, too, but she’d never, ever cheat on Lily.)

  Storm pulled a pack of cheap French cigarettes from her parka pocket and lit one. “Hooked on painkillers, Percocet, blah, blah, blah, and these,” she said, blowing the words out in a puff of smoke. “But I ain’t giving these away. These are legal far as the network suit boys are concerned. I flunked my last drug test for opioids. Network won’t renew my contract if I can’t pass the next one in January.”

  Babe could imagine Storm’s incentive. She’d read in People that Storm earned two million a year, plus bonuses for any story she broke right out of the gate. For two million a year, most gals would give sobriety a try.

  “Doesn’t matter you’re late. We saved you a room.”

  Storm laughed, a rich, deep laughter that came out in a cloud of smoke. “Where do I sign, sugar?”

  Babe slid the big book across the desk. “Hand over the smokes and sign here,” she said.

  Anchoring her fine black hair behind her ears, Storm scrawled her name boldly across the page. She squinted at the name above hers. “OMG. What the fuck. Bunny? Bunny Van Randolph? She’s here? Really?”

  “You know her?”

  Storm sucked her cheeks. “Yeah, I know her. Sort of. We had a fling this past summer on the Cape. Frankly it was screwing her that convinced me I might have a little judgment problem. I mean, have you ever seen such a princess?”

  Storm rolled her eyes before lowering her voice. “She alone?”

  Babe squirmed. She wasn’t sure how to respond. Bunny wasn’t really alone, not the way Dirk McGraw, the snowboarder, had been hanging off her when they disappeared upstairs. “Er. More or less.”

  Storm chortled. She had a feeling she knew what that meant. Bunny was never alone if she could help it. There wasn’t a butch on the East Coast social circuit who hadn’t pearl-probed the Princess of Cape Cod.

  “Well,” murmured Storm, “she’s such a pill hound, probably won’t even remember me.”

  Studying Storm as she walked up the stairs, Babe seriously doubted any woman who’d slept with Storm could forget the experience. The woman didn’t walk, she swaggered. Put a swagger like that in a dress instead of military fatigues and Babe bet most women wouldn’t be able to decide if they wanted to be Storm or bed her.

  Babe thought about shouting up the stairs after Storm, warning her that her assigned roommate the next thirty days would be no other than Bunny Van Randolph, but then decided to let it slide.

  They could deal with the issue in group therapy, every day for the next thirty days.

  7. The Midnight Sound of a Satisfied Woman

  Babe was sound asleep, head buried in folded arms, snoring at the front desk, when all hell broke loose upstairs. She glanced at the grandfather clock in the foyer: four a.m. “Not already!” she groaned as she rubbed her eyes. Shaking off sleep, she bounded the stairs two at a time toward the second story, where the women shared bedrooms.

  Heads popped out of doors as Babe strode the corridor searching for the source of the commotion. Wee Gee had her hair, which she’d treated with a conditioner, stuffed into a flowered nightcap. She was sharing a room with Poppy, the rock star. Both women had been fast asleep when the odd yodeling had begun.

  “Not me!” Wee Gee called after Babe. “Not this time! Old Wee Gee was fast asleep in her own damned bed.”

  Babe scanned the heads as they popped out the doors up and down the hall. Who was missing?

  Thumper McGraw, the snowboarder, stepped into the hallway. She was wearing black silk boxer shorts and a skintight sleeveless blac
k silk T-shirt (causing Poppy to gasp). Thumper had been alone in her room watching a training tape of the Kyoto snowboarding trials where she and her sister had taken gold last month. She didn’t have to do a head check for her twin sister. She’d heard yodeling like what was happening now before, lots of times. Her twin, Dirk, had a peculiar talent for pleasing society ladies. Unless she was mistaken, Dirk had just scored some grade-A East Coast pussy.

  The yodeling was coming from Bunny Van Randolph’s room at the end of the hall. Indeed, it was the only room where the door remained shut. Bunny’s clipped Cape Cod accent had turned into an orgasmic yodel — yes, baby, yes baby, oh yes, please, yes! — that shook the rafters of the farmhouse as Babe quickened her pace toward the closed door.

  “What in bloody hell was that?” inquired Poppy, wide eyed, her ebony hair swept up in a Pebbles Flintstone ponytail.

  Wee Gee, Poppy’s roommate, snorted. “That, girl, was the midnight sound of one very satisfied woman.”

  Babe stepped over Storm Waters, who was sprawled atop her parka outside Bunny’s door, chewing on the butt of a French cigarette. She stuffed the cigarette in her pocket when she saw Babe raging up the hallway. “Not me,” Storm murmured. “Soon as I saw you’d put me in a room with the Princess of Cape Cod, I backed out and crashed in a pile here.”

  Babe squared her shoulders. “Bunny have company in there?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Who?”

  “Dunno. When I went in about an hour ago, I caught sight of one very muscular ass poised midair, not the princess, either, if you know what I mean.”

  Babe tried the door, but it was locked, which was impossible because she and Lily had removed all the locks eons ago since no one could ever trust an addict not to get embroiled in ridiculously stupid adventures.

  Bunny or Dirk must have dragged something up against the door.

  Babe banged on the door with both fists. “Open up, ladies! Open this door now or I’ll use Storm’s machine gun to blast my way in!”

  Before long Dirk McGraw was standing at the door, grinning. She was dressed exactly like her twin sister, in black silk skivvies. Her thick thighs strained against the flimsy material. (Poppy fainted and had to be propped up by Wee Gee.)

  “What?” Dirk smirked. “Something wrong? What’s wrong?” She rubbed her hand across her spiked blonde hair as she spoke. One hand hiked up her tight boxers.

  “Is Bunny Van Randolph in there?”

  Dirk glanced back over her shoulder. “I’d have to check, but yes, I think so.”

  “What are you two doing in there?”

  “Talking. About stuff. We’re going to be roommates, Bunny and me. Her assigned roommate” — Dirk pointed to Storm on the floor of the hallway — “wants to, er, be reassigned. Seems they have a past conflict of interest.”

  “No,” said Babe, arms crossed. “You can’t room with Bunny.”

  “Why?” Another lopsided grin.

  “You’re in treatment. You’re not allowed to have sex with each other.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ll go over that later, in group.”

  Dirk shrugged. “Bummer. But okay, I guess.” She walked across the hall and slid into the room her sister occupied, quietly shutting the door behind her.

  Babe turned and stared at the women who lined the hallway, their eyes focused on her. “You guys are not allowed to have sex with each other. No sex. It’s part of your treatment. Some of you are here because of sex addictions.” She stared overlong at Dylan Redford, the artist, making her flinch. “No sex. Nada. You girls got that?”

  Nan Goldberg, the bond broker, stepped into the hallway, clutching at her monogrammed silk overcoat. “Excuse me. Not even with ourselves?”

  “Not even!” cautioned Babe with a wag of her finger.

  Wee Gee pulled the still-stunned Poppy back into their room as Babe stormed downstairs, where someone was pounding on the door begging for harbor against the storm.

  8. Eye Candy

  Wee Gee Judd was secretly delighted the bed-hopping had begun. She wrote steamy romance novels and was dead out of bodice-ripping ideas. If her luck held, she might be able to ditch Little Debbie and get a slutty new novel out of this whole rehab thing.

  Her fertile imagination was already casting Dirk and Bunny in starring roles. She’d have to change Dirk’s sex. No biggy, since Dirk was already halfway to Trannytown. Many of Wee Gee’s best-selling novels were based on lesbian relationships she’d had to “edit” into straight novels for the Midwestern mainstream.

  She was out of the closet with close friends but her professional peers in Romance Writers of America thought of her as hair-raisingly straight. She conveniently had two ex-husbands and seven grown kids to back up her hetero image: more than enough “family” to throw your average Republican housewife off track.

  Only her agent, Jackie Perkins, knew otherwise, and that was only because Wee Gee and Jackie had enjoyed too many Wicked Blonde ales together when Wee Gee’s last book hit the million-dollar mark. Author and agent had ended up hopelessly entangled in flowered silk sheets at the Atlanta Hilton.

  One night only; that had been enough for Wee Gee. Her agent was a little mouthy for her long-term liking; also, her agent had a scary husband, a thick-necked fellow from Nashville who could literally belch the alphabet.

  “Was that a girl?” the stunned Poppy asked Wee Gee about Dirk McGraw as they climbed back into their respective beds.

  “Why you asking?” asked Wee Gee as she tucked the covers over her ample body and turned out the bedside lamp. Her mind was already busy creating a lurid plot line. “You got nothing like that in England, girl?”

  Poppy didn’t reply. In her head she was busy thinking maybe a Vermont holiday might not be so glum after all. Sure, that Bunny chick, whoever she was, seemed to have dibs on sexy Dirk. But she’d gone hand to hand with Yankee princesses before and won.

  Of course Dirk did have that identical sister, Thumper (which had already translated into “thump her” in Poppy’s sordid young mind). Poppy could set her sights on Thumper, thus avoiding a messy fight with that Bunny chick.

  But hey, why not have both Dirk and Thumper.

  Poppy fluffed up her pillow, dead certain what her dreams would be about tonight.

  Downstairs, Babe unlocked the door and stood back as a tall, stately woman stumbled head first into the foyer. The woman was wrapped in what Babe recognized as a finely cut plaid English Burberry coat with fur cuffs that must have cost a mint. Her ears were wrapped in matching plaid with fur-lined earmuffs. She slid off the earmuffs and tucked them neatly into a side slit on her Gucci overnight bag before peeling off her form-fitting Italian leather gloves and sliding out of her coat.

  “Bellhop?” the new arrival trilled as she shook snow from her carefully clipped red hair and stepped toward the desk. Emerald earrings glistened on the lobes of her alabaster ears. An emerald teardrop pendant framed in diamonds beckoned from her creamy bosom.

  Babe slid the registration book toward the redhead’s outstretched hand, which held the Montblanc pen as if it were an extension of her fine porcelain fingers.

  “Candice Antwerp, M.D.,” read the woman’s signature in an eloquent script.

  “Bellboy?” the doctor asked again, clearly impatient.

  “No bellboy.”

  “All right,” she sighed, assuming she’d been caught in yet another feminist faux pas. “Bellgirl?”

  “None of those, either.”

  Dr. Antwerp tapped her foot, which was clad in custom knee-high, Italian riding boots. “How will my bags get upstairs?”

  “You might carry them, Candy.”

  Dr. Antwerp’s fine nostrils flared. She leaned over until her surgically assisted aristocratic nose almost touched Babe’s much larger snout. “Don’t ever call me Candy,” she hissed. “It’s Dr. Antwerp. Candice, if you must get familiar.” She straightened the collar on her form-fitting, jade-green Armani jacket as she spoke. “Never Can
dy.”

  “All right, then, Candice. I’m Babe and I’ll be the official guide to your darker side while you’re here. Care to tell me why you’re here?”

  Candice unwound a scarf from her elegant neck. She folded the scarf carefully before sliding it into the outer zipper compartment on her overnighter. “I’m off my game. My surgical precision,” she sniveled, “seems to be suffering. A friend of mine recommended your place to help me refresh myself.”

  Babe narrowed her eyes. “Your treatment card says your malpractice insurance carrier ordered your stay due to a fondness for prescription downers and anti-anxiety meds. Seems the AMA is about to yank your license to practice as a plastic surgeon, Candice.”

  “That too,” she sighed.

  Babe recognized Candice — “don’t call me Candy” — Antwerp from her monthly thrill reading People magazine at the massage therapist’s in Stowe. Dr. Candy was the surgical mastermind behind the best-sculpted bods in Hollywood. She’d given Cher the ass (and nerve) necessary to appear on stage in spandex after the age of sixty. She was rumored to be the woman who’d done Madonna’s vaginal rejuvenation.

  Babe guessed the good doctor to be just past forty: the age professional women often started losing control over what began as a recreational taste for easily obtainable drugs that helped them wind down after a hard day at the office.

  Candice studied Babe. “You recognize me?”

  “Don’t worry, honey. Your secret’s safe. Lots of famous dykes vacation here.”

  Intrigued, Candice tried to sneak a peek inside the registration book, but Babe snapped it shut. “You’ll meet your partners in crime come morning. Seven a.m. sharp, in the kitchen.”

  She handed Dr. Antwerp a key. “Room at the end of the hall. You’ll be bunking with Bunny Van Randolph.”

  Dr. Antwerp caught her breath. “The senator’s daughter?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Candice caught the key in her hand and held it tightly. So it was true, the rumors she’d heard out West about the East Coast senator’s daughter. While she hated the idea of sharing a room — good lord, she hadn’t had to endure that particular hell since her college days — it was comforting to know she’d be rooming with a woman of her own ilk. Thank God she’d brought along business cards. Bunny, a true A-gay, would be a stellar client. The woman was just the right age for everything to be giving out.