Every Last Look

by Christa Wick

  Pulling the shirt down, he retreated. I drew my hand to my chest, my fingers tingling from where they’d been in contact with his warm flesh. Dipping my head for a second, I touched the still buzzing tips to my lips.

  Fiddling with the zipper on his sleeping bag, Barrett cleared his throat.

  “Making Dawn cry like she did, it hurt worse. A man can be kinda proud about being dumb enough to get a bit of bull horn in him. There’s nothing but shame in hurting a woman.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered as I reached out one last time to briefly touch his arm.

  There was just enough light from the fire to see the question my fresh gratitude had stirred.

  “For being open with me like that, for telling me something it hurt you to say. I hope I can be that brave with you one day.”

  I pulled down the tent flaps and tugged at the zipper.

  “Goodnight,” I said right before Barrett disappeared from sight.

  “Sweet dreams,” he whispered back.

  7

  Quinn

  Hugged by the oversized leather chair in Barrett’s living room, I sat cross-legged with my laptop balanced on my knees. I had run through all the local job listings searching for work that would let me get back and forth to the property for my check-in times. There weren’t any. I might as well be on house arrest given the restraints Cross was imposing.

  After reading through local listings, I answered some online ads requesting design help. Then I whipped up a pre-made book cover for the digital store that usually brought in enough money each month to pay my car insurance. My book cover business was the one non-banking area online that Naomi and her hacker boyfriend hadn’t managed to destroy. Probably because I kept a separate email account for it.

  Right, Wool-for-Brains, no reason not to make new email accounts. Restore the computer to factory settings, too, I decided with Naomi’s last warning still crowding my thoughts.

  For far too long, I had maintained hope that my mother and sister would stop carving me up between them. Avoiding those two entirely was impossible even in a city as big as L.A. But I was as good as invisible out in the middle of nowhere. I hadn’t told a single person where I was going. That made it the perfect time to cut ties completely.

  “You okay out there?” Barrett asked from the second bedroom that served as his home office.

  Waiting for the water to re-heat after my shower, he was processing payroll for his team, invoicing the state, and paying the pilot for time and fuel. Everyone else on his team had an extended weekend to recover from the fire. But they’d be right back to training come Monday, he told me.

  “Did I sigh too loudly?” I asked, realizing I had made at least one such noise in contemplating my baby sister.

  “It was barely audible,” he grinned. “There’s TV and more than enough bandwidth on the Wi-Fi if you want to watch videos or something.”

  Seeing Barrett’s grin and the crinkle around his eyes, I couldn’t help but smile back.

  “It wasn’t boredom. I was just thinking how I should move my accounts locally and change a few things online.”

  His grin stretched bigger.

  “That’s a great idea.”

  Funny, I thought. Just looking at Barrett made me happy. Made me feel safe, too.

  “When is Sutton coming by?”

  He glanced at his computer. “About an hour.”

  Sutton was the only brother Barrett hadn’t told me about the night before, except when he mentioned him having a purple heart. Barrett had suggested Sutton meet me today so I wouldn’t feel like I had a total stranger staying with me overnight if Barrett had another fire to put out.

  “So, is he a rancher or a timber guy or a smokejumper like you?”

  The grin disappeared at my question.

  “The Army medically discharged him last year.” Barrett pushed a few things around, lining the stapler up at the edge of his desk then sliding the pen holder next to it, a finger’s width separating them, everything placed just so before he continued talking.

  “Enemy fire took out his parachute during a mission. He broke too many bones on his landing to return to active duty. No more twenty-mile ruck marches or fitness tests for him. No more jumps, either.”

  “Oh,” I squeaked. “Last year was…”

  I frowned. He didn’t need a reminder that he’d lost his father and sister or that his brother had lost his profession.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “It was. But we had each other. Sometimes it’s easy to forget what family really means. Then something like last year hits and you’re reminded that family is everything.”

  I nodded at the sentiment while ignoring my private reality. I wanted to live in a world where family was everything, but my world had a crazy mother and an even crazier half-sister. Naomi was exactly the offspring science would predict when an over-the-top narcissist got knocked up by a hyperactive paranoid.

  “Sutton is taking some time off to decide if he wants to get a degree and for what,” Barrett continued. “He’s doing some repair work in the meantime, something he’s always done.”

  “Like repairing other people’s cars?”

  “I wish,” he grumbled. “He certainly knows how, but changing oil and doing tune-ups would bore him to death and he doesn’t have a lift or a pit for a lot of the work that would actually interest him. He’ll do a little bit of car repair, especially buying something that only needs a little fixing and selling it after. But he knows his way around electronics at least as well as he does around engines and he can solder and stuff sitting on his couch with his leg up.”

  Closing the lid on his laptop, he came out of his bedroom office and sat on the corner of the love seat close to me.

  “Have you been to college?”

  My cheeks warmed and I mumbled something about a four-year scholarship to an art school on the east coast. I didn’t tell him how it had been the best four years of my life or how it all seemed like a distant memory or maybe a movie I had watched and tricked myself into believing I had lived instead.

  “Art is a funny thing,” Barrett said, his face suddenly flat and serious. “Take this guy in Vegas I saw on TV. He paints things like dice and martini glasses, poker chips, stuff like that. He’s a millionaire dozens of times over from it. Then there’s Jester with all the things he could do with wood.”

  “What?” I asked. “Do you mean like sculptures?”

  Barrett nodded. “There were always a lot of carvings at his place that he’d done. He made some beautiful totems, but the fire took them. I guess, if you ever wonder where the talent comes from, now you know part of it is in your blood.”

  I shrugged. If it was in my blood, it was diluted to the point of pointlessness.

  “I decided I would be a starving receptionist instead of a starving artist,” I told Barrett. “At least receptionists don’t have to buy their phones and cover the telecom bill on top of barely getting paid.”

  “Well,” he said, folding his arms and cocking a brow, his smile only minimally contained despite my gloomy tone. “Once the land is yours, you won’t have to worry so much about meeting basic expenses, at least not for a while.”

  I stared, questioning. Winter was in my future. There was no structure on the land for me to live in. I didn’t think I could survive in a tent.

  “No, seriously,” he smiled. “There’s a lease with the cellular company that’s worth about a hundred dollars a month, more if they want to reposition the tower and put up a bigger one now that the fire took it down. There’s no better place in the area for that than on your property.”

  I nodded. I had more than enough experience in how to fill my cupboard and my gas tank on a hundred a month, then there was the money from the book cover site. But I would still need transportation—there was no corner store to walk to and, even if there was, the costs at a convenience store would quickly burn through a hundred dollars a month.

  Add to that car insurance, health insurance, and my cell phone
. Plus, by the time the property was mine, I would probably have pushed my credit cards to their limit.

  I needed to come up with about eight hundred a month beyond the tower lease payment and book covers.

  Barrett rubbed at his chin for a second then hooked my gaze. “I didn’t want to mention it because I’m not sure exactly which trees survived the fire, even though I know the path it took. But there are some great burls out there. We just need Walker to go look at what’s left.”

  “Burls? Is that a type of tree?”

  “Nope, it’s something you can find on any kind of tree, but they’re rare. Basically, it’s a tumor on the tree. The wood is harder and more interesting for design purposes,” he explained. “One burl can be worth more than the whole tree without it. Sometimes worth more than a hundred trees. And Jester wouldn’t part with any of his burls no matter how much Walker begged to let him harvest just one.”

  I smiled, imagining a man I still hadn’t seen, not even in a photograph.

  “Did he plan on carving them all himself?”

  Laughing, Barrett nodded. “Exactly so. Jester would say he could see the figure in each one waiting for him. He had names for the trees like Clutching Eagle, Devouring Serpent…”

  I closed my eyes, imagining what my granduncle saw.

  “You carve?” Barrett asked.

  “Never tried. My major was painting and drawing.”

  “But you don’t do that anymore?”

  I shook my head.

  “Not even to pass the time?”

  I shook my head a little harder, a familiar tightness spreading in my chest at the mere idea of taking up a brush again. Pushing things around in Photoshop and adding pretty fonts was as artistic as I got nowadays.

  “I had a gallery showing scheduled. My first real one,” I told him. “Someone burned the place down.”

  “That’s bad luck, but—”

  “No,” I interrupted. “They took one of the paintings with them, slashed it up and left it on my car in front of my apartment miles away from the gallery.”

  Barrett was silent for a minute then leaned across to gently squeeze my arm.

  “That kind of crazy won’t follow you here,” he promised. “If it does, you just point me in their direction.”

  A knock on the door ended the moment. Sutton had arrived. He brought with him news that the repairs on the cell tower should be finished within a week, his source one of the technicians doing the actual work.

  He stayed maybe thirty minutes, long enough for me to get comfortable with the idea he might have to babysit me up in the woods.

  He was lean and handsome, not as tall as Barrett or as personally appealing to me as his older brother, but he had a genuine smile and kind eyes. He was everything I expected from a man raised by Lindy Turk.

  8

  Quinn

  Barrett cooked dinner for the two of us around five o’clock. Nice juicy burgers with asparagus tips and an ice-cold beer to wash everything down.

  We had used Barrett’s truck at his suggestion. Anything to cut down on the rental’s mileage made me happy and I had already let him drive my vehicle.

  “There’s one,” he said as we turned a bend on the dirt road leading to the campsite.

  Stopping, he put the truck in park and turned it off. I looked around, not certain what “one” was.

  “A burl,” he clarified, stepping out.

  Unhooking my seat belt, I followed him over to a twenty-foot or so tree covered in needles that were a pale blue-green and bark that was almost purplish.

  “Wow,” I said, seeing the large bulge growing out of the tree. It started about three feet off the ground and was about three feet high and nearly as wide. “So this is a burl in a pine tree.”

  “Hemlock,” he corrected and patted the center of the bulge. “Jester called this one Bear Belly.”

  “Beer Belly?”

  He laughed. “That’s what I thought the first time he said it. But, no, like a grizzly bear.”

  He pointed to a few more hemlock trees, none of them sporting any burls.

  “Hemlock doesn’t have any commercial value, unless it’s got a burl on it. If you get title to the property and let Walker harvest it, you’ll see the inside of the burl is a real nice red with lots of darker swirls in it.”

  “You learned this from your brother?” I asked.

  I expected a fireman who jumped out of planes to know how fast a tree would catch, which trees were tougher to chop down—things like that. Not what their polished insides looked like.

  “Learned it from Jester,” he answered. “I came here at least once a year every year from the time I was eight through last year. Great fishing.” Extending his arm, he pointed at the ridge. “I shot my first elk when I was twelve near the stream on the west side of the mountain. Lots of rabbit around here, too. Get you a nice little small game rifle, you won’t need to buy meat if you’re not squeamish about skinning and stuff. Can sell them, too, meat and fur. Again, if you’re not squeamish about it.”

  My mouth warped into a squiggly line. “I guess I’ll find out if I am.”

  Throwing me a wink, he walked toward the truck. I followed after him.

  “I have a little surprise up top,” he said as I slid my seatbelt on. “Buddy of mine won’t be hunting for a while and…”

  His pause stretched all the way to the top of the mountain.

  “That’s so cute!” I squealed, seeing the small teardrop trailer, its bottom third painted hot pink, the rest of it white. “Wait, he takes that hunting with him? Shouldn’t it be camouflaged or something?”

  “He bought it used. He’s a little cheap and doesn’t believe in working harder than he has to, but don’t tell him I said that.”

  Turning in my seat, I beamed a grin at the man. “You mean, like keep it a secret or let’s not mention it?”

  “Hoisted on my own petard,” Barrett groaned.

  “Oh, Hamlet, eh?”

  He shrugged. “Mama taught high school English until the twins came along and she decided it was better to give the job to someone who needed it. But she still made sure we all learned the classics.”

  “The library at your mom’s house is awesome.” I hopped out of the truck, continuing to chatter as I walked over to the little trailer. “It looks like something an English teacher would have—the library, I mean. This cutie pie definitely belonged to a He-Man hunter once upon a time.”

  Reaching the door, I stopped and looked over my shoulder to catch Barrett standing like a little kid in a candy shop as he stared at me.

  Wishful thinking, Wool-for-Brains, I scolded.

  “Is it locked?”

  “Hope not,” he laughed. “Key to the door is probably inside.”

  I pressed the handle down and pulled lightly. The door opened. Sticking my head inside, I was struck by how clean everything smelled. Hardly what I would expect from a hunter. The colors were light and airy, too.

  “His daughter just joined the Air Force,” Barrett explained. “She would use it for hanging out in with her girlfriends when he didn’t need it for hunting. It’s purely for staying dry and warm and for slightly more comfortable sleep than the ground.”

  “It’s amazing,” I insisted, standing on tiptoe and kissing his cheek.

  “Uh, one more thing,” he said, coughing as he opened up a block of space between us. “Not as adorable…not at all adorable, but a step in the right direction.”

  Following behind him, I saw a blue plastic container about as tall and wide as a phone booth. It even had a door on it. The bottom had a lip and someone had driven stakes through the plastic to hold the structure down.

  “Oh, is that the outhouse?”

  I had noted the debris that morning on my hunt for a cluster of trees to pee behind before we left the site and headed to Barrett’s house.

  “Yep.” He opened the door to reveal a clean bench seat with a hole and a toilet lid. Someone had even left toilet paper.

&
nbsp; I gave his shoulder a light tap with my fist. “This was all done while we were at your place?”

  “I had Sutton supervise it for me. He texted while I was cooking the burgers to say it was all done.”

  I wanted to kiss Barrett again but his reaction to the first kiss made me wary. He hadn’t seemed to welcome it. Had even appeared put off by the act. I sighed on the inside. So much for assigning any optimism over his earlier blushes and occasionally penetrating stares.

  “We’ve got just enough daylight left to gather up some small branches to start the fire,” he said, turning toward his truck. “If we go down the west side, you’ll be able to see the stream.”

  Barrett pulled a canvas strap and a hand axe from the box of his truck. He looped the strap over his shoulder and pointed west with the axe’s head. We walked side by side. When we had enough branches to start a bundle, he secured the pieces with the strap and then we looked for more.

  The path of devastation was clear on this side of the mountain.

  “Fires are necessary,” Barrett said, reading my expression as I stopped and stared in dismay at the ashy carnage. “Older trees can choke a forest, suck up all the nutrients. Takes a long time when a tree falls for those nutrients to make it back into the ground—unless the tree is turned to ashes.”

  I nodded, my mouth refusing to uncurl from the frown that anchored its edges.

  “Sucks for the animals and people,” he acknowledged. “Lives are lost or forever altered, property is damaged, but the forest needs to burn every now and then, otherwise the whole thing dies off. So would every creature that depends on it.”

  He waved his arm over the once green ruins then hooked my gaze. “Wait until you see this in three years.”

  “Thanks to you, I’ll be here to see it.”

  His head bobbed, the gesture looking more like a retreat than an acceptance of my gratitude.

  “We wait any longer we’ll be using the flashlights to get back to camp,” he warned.