by Alice Archer
It wasn’t going to happen.
Freddie tried again to kiss me on the lips, but I couldn’t get into it. He resorted to kissing my jaw and beard, until I tensed.
“Now you’re being weird,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Uh.” My mind felt too full. “I must be… I think I just need food, and I’m… distracted. Like, by the interruption.”
Freddie disengaged and stepped back. “The green flag was up. Did you think you’d changed it?”
I hadn’t thought about the flags at all, but I nodded.
“Damn it, Oliver. I wanted to get sexy with you before I head to Whidbey for that interview.”
“When?”
“Now,” Freddie said.
“You’re going to Whidbey Island today?”
“Yeah.”
“But… Why didn’t you call first?” I asked. “You didn’t drive all the way down here on a whim for a quickie before you hit the road, did you?”
Freddie’s leer was answer enough.
“Um. Huh.” It hadn’t bothered me before how much Freddie assumed about our arrangement. He didn’t call ahead or give me details about his travel plans. He just… showed up, assumed I’d be ready and willing. To be fair, I always had been, after an initial period of getting used to him again in the flesh, which usually took an hour, not days.
“Hey. Oliver, don’t worry about it. I can wait. You’re always reluctant when I get back. Not usually this reluctant, but it’s not a total surprise.”
“Yeah, well, I’m surprised too.” But if Freddie wasn’t worried, I wouldn’t worry either. “How long will you be gone?”
“Week or two maybe.”
“That’s a long time for an interview.”
Freddie shrugged. “I like Whidbey.”
“Well, when you get back to Vashon, come over. I’ll make dinner. You can tell me trip stories and stay the night.”
After a quick peck on my cheek and a stroke down the front of my shorts, Freddie smiled and left.
Apparently, if booty was off the menu, he didn’t want to hang around. I’d wanted to make him a nice lunch. We could have eaten and talked. I couldn’t figure out why Freddie’s visit disturbed me. He hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary.
The edge of the kitchen counter dug into my back. I put my shirt on and closed my eyes to try my fantasy again.
The gallery set out a generous buffet. Canapés filled with mushrooms and gruyere. I reach for another just as someone else reaches for the same one. Our fingers touch. The jolt of sensation makes me yank my hand back and look up. The scruffy man who tried to nab my canapé wears too many layers of clothing for the mild weather. He looks a bit… desperate, like maybe he crashed the opening to swipe some free food.
He turns his back on me and hunches over the table. With his big hand, he grabs half the bacon-wrapped dates and makes a hasty retreat.
I pluck a few napkins from the holder and follow, drawn by the man’s daring and the look he’d given me. Dark eyes, black hair, skin as stark white as Ophelia’s neck in Millais’s painting.
The opening night crowd fills the rooms between the food table and the front door. He veers toward the back hallway, eats as he walks, with jerks of his elbow, spitting a trail of discarded toothpicks.
At the emergency door at the end of the hall, the man whirls, snatches the front of my shirt, and turns us in a half circle until my shoulders hit the door. Huffs of angry breath and his hard look contradict the uncertainty I detect in the furrow between his brows.
We stare until I lift my arm and say, “I thought you might need a napkin.”
In a move too fast for me to avoid, the man slams my hand against the door by my head, trapping the wad of napkins between our palms. I expect harsh words, but he leans into me with his full weight. I have to thrust my hips toward him to keep from pressing the emergency bar on the door.
“It’s okay,” I say. I want him to know I don’t think he’s doing anything wrong and I won’t tell anyone he crashed the party.
In a blur of motion, he unfastens my pants with unmistakable intent. His mouth, when he kisses me, tastes of bacon and sweet richness. I smell dust and sun-warmed skin, like he’s been outside too long. My hands around his upper arms grip muscles too spare on a frame built for heft.
He takes my cock in his palm slick from the greasy food he’d stolen, and yanks me in a tight, busy grip. His desperation makes me imagine ways I can make his life better.
When he bites my tongue, I blast my climax between us, cover his hand and the edges of my suit jacket with cum.
The man doesn’t stop. He grabs at my kisses, rubs at his cock through his thin jeans, finishes with a grunt, mauls me with his mouth from start to finish—one long, angry, unbroken kiss.
I clawed my way out of the fantasy, snapped hard back into reality to find myself doubled over the kitchen counter, my hand and my dick covered in spunk. I shivered from overstimulation, tried to catch my breath.
Grant Eastbrook was officially messing with my life—a life that had worked fine without him for a long time. I hadn’t invited him into my fantasy, but he’d barged in anyway.
I don’t want him.
He was broken and furious. He’d cast himself in the role of victim. I had no business being attracted to that, to him, despite my imagination’s rude betrayal.
I straightened and rinsed my business into the kitchen sink. When I failed to also rinse away the awareness of my physical attraction to Grant, I escaped the scene of the crime.
For hours that afternoon, I tried to lose myself in the motion of the mallet. Curls of wood dropped around me to the rhythm of Les Charbonniers on infinite replay. A forest of leaves, freed from the dead wood, grew from the tip of the chisel. I pushed beyond the ache in my arms, into the shadow of twilight, on a search for one leaf, one curve of one line, that didn’t evoke the scene I’d drawn on the papers spread across my dining table, or the infuriating man who’d invaded my sanctuary.
Chapter 25
Grant
After I rejected Oliver’s terms and retreated to my campsite, I had ample time to note that I was still right where I’d been since I quit my job—flat on my ass.
To conserve energy and reduce my food intake, I didn’t take a walk to burn off my anger. The reduced caloric intake impaired my ability to think.
I stopped doing much of anything.
I watched sunlight spray across the roof of the tent.
The second day after my interview with Oliver started with rain. I spent half an hour in a spot of forest near my campsite trying and failing to use rainwater to bathe, then lay on the sleeping bag and willed myself not to scratch my arms. Not bathing thoroughly for so long had made my skin splotched and itchy.
For the hundredth time, I tried to pinpoint the internal moment when my life had veered off track. I remembered what Oliver had said during the interview, right before I called him a goddamned busybody. Something about the rules I live by. Doing anything Oliver suggested didn’t sit well, but as I stared up at tent fabric bouncing in the rain, outrage retreated enough to allow me to wonder about my rules.
People suck seemed more like a belief than a rule. Rules made me think of my parents. I tried to put into words the rules I’d grown up with. Don’t steal. Say please and thank you. Take out the trash when it’s full. Other rules shoved their way up into my consciousness, rules I heard in my father’s voice with Mom as backup singer. Beggars can’t be choosers. No playing until the work is done. There’s always more work to be done. School is play.
I hadn’t seen it when I was growing up, but as an adult, I understood how ridiculous some of their rules were. I’d never once questioned them. I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing I could close my mind to keep it from searching for more rules.
I also didn’t want to look at the rules I’d m
ade up on my own, but one of them nabbed my attention anyway.
If I don’t like it, I leave.
My undernourished brain turned leave into leaf.
If I were a tree, I couldn’t leave.
Due to the lousy job I’d done with the tarp, it didn’t cover the entire tent. The single layer of tent fabric saturated and raindrops began to fall on me. When drops hit my face, I wiped them away. It made me feel like I was crying, but I wasn’t. I rolled onto my side and put a sock on my head to keep the drops out of my ear, pressed my face into the side of the pack. I curled in so my back wouldn’t touch the tent wall and pull in more rain.
For about twenty seconds, I achieved a state of perfect mental vacuousness—a trick my mind played to empty the arena before another rule stepped into the spotlight.
Creativity is play.
For the first time in days, I thought of the zodiac scroll. I could no longer totally hate it, because it had led me to Vashon and the idea of simple work in nature. Even when damp and hungry, I felt better on Vashon than I’d felt in Seattle, better than I’d felt during my marriage or when I was a kid.
With some urgency, I scrambled up to locate the pants I’d worn the last day I remembered feeling the scroll in my pocket. I’d returned to the campsite after a long hike, taken off my sweat-drenched jeans, turned them inside out, and draped them over the line by the cooking area to air overnight.
Too impatient to put on my rain poncho, I balled the sleeping bag into the middle of the tent, shoved my feet into my boots, and sloshed out to yank the jeans off the line—the jeans that had kept the tarp line taut.
With sadistic timing, I pulled the mass of soaked paper that used to be the scroll out of the pocket right when the loosened tarp dumped its load of collected rainwater onto the tent. The wet tent walls plastered against the sleeping bag and my pack, letting in more rain.
“Goddamn it straight to motherfucking hell.”
Someone laughed.
It was a child’s laugh, and it didn’t compute, not until a girl in a green raincoat with a hood, flip-flops, and shorts walked into my outdoor installation of mishaps.
She smiled at me with a mouthful of metal braces.
“You should not be here,” I told her. “Run away right now from the creepy man you stumbled upon in the woods.”
Her grin remained fixed in place. She looked eleven or twelve.
“Seriously, honey,” I said. “You don’t know me. You can’t just walk up to a… a stranger in the woods who’s…” I looked around at the disaster of my current home. “Who’s…?”
“Who’s having a really bad day?” She kept smiling at me.
“I mean it.” I made my voice stern.
The girl laughed and took a step toward me. “Don’t worry. If you were scary, you wouldn’t be so terrible at camping.”
The incongruous vision of a kid splashing around the clearing in flip-flops adorned with plastic flowers made my brain grind to a halt.
The girl untied one of the tarp ropes and gave it a hard tug. Water flew into the air. With efficient movements, she retied that line to a different tree, then moved on to retie all the other lines, full metal smile in evidence the entire time. By the time she’d redecorated my campsite, the tarp covered the tent and the cooking area. She’d slanted the tarp to shed water onto the low side of the slope, which meant rainwater wouldn’t run under my tent anymore.
“There.” She put her hands on her hips and looked around.
The pail I’d been using to steal water from the spigot at the unoccupied home caught her attention. She set it under the steady drip from the tarp. And I had washing-up water on tap.
“I almost thought of that,” I said.
I thought the girl was done blowing my mind, but she spotted the clothesline. The clothesline I had not hung my pants on. After she retied the clothesline, it ran along under the edge of the tarp, so whatever I hung on it would be out of the rain.
I must have looked as gobsmacked as I felt. The brutal efficiency with which she’d revamped my world stunned me.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Who are you? My fairy camping godmother?”
“You’re funny.” Her laugh shook her shoulders. “A small tweak of perspective can make a big difference. And my family camps a lot.” She held out her hand. “I’m Penelope.”
Her hand hung there for a long moment before I rallied and shook it. “Grant. And thank you. I’d be embarrassed about my ineptitude, but I’m too grateful to care how much of a dork you must think I am.”
She shrugged, smiled wider yet, and headed off on the track I’d used to get to Oliver’s.
“Are you going to visit Oliver?” I called out.
With a nod and a glance back over her shoulder, she said, “Last drawing lesson before art camp starts.” As an apparent afterthought, she called out, “Supposed to be sunny this afternoon. Good luck.”
I’d set up camp on Penelope’s trail.
I clutched my drenched pants to my chest and stared down the path at her. Before I lost sight of her, I shouted, “I’m sorry I cussed.”
I froze to listen better and heard a faint “No problem” float back through the patter of raindrops.
The thick forest swallowed Penelope, and I was on my own again.
For the duration of her campsite makeover, I’d kept the former zodiac scroll clutched in my fist. I decided if a change of perspective could do that, give me a renovated home in five minutes, I might be willing to push past my discomfort and try to see things differently.
I uncurled my fingers and dumped the handful of pulp onto the mud of rock bottom.
Chapter 26
Grant
I sat at Oliver’s dining table in the same chair as before, determined to do whatever he required so I could leave with a bucket of water I hadn’t stolen.
Oliver slid a sheet of paper toward me before he took his seat at the other end of the table. It was a neat, one-page contract written in clear language. No posturing or ornate fonts, which surprised me.
When I got to the bottom of the contract, I saw Oliver’s signature. “That’s presumptuous of you.” I set the paper down but didn’t pick up a pen.
“Do you have any questions?”
Oliver seemed smaller. He sat with his body drawn in, no costume, no hint of the professor in his manner. I wondered if I was seeing the Oliver beneath the roles he played to entertain himself.
“As soon as I sign, I can take water from an outdoor spigot?” I asked.
Oliver nodded.
“And I get one additional amenity per week, in trade for three hours of labor plus the week’s assignments.”
Oliver nodded again.
I folded my arms and leaned back. “Why aren’t the assignments specified?”
“I haven’t decided what they are.”
“That’s messed up.”
“I can help you,” Oliver said.
“You assume you know how to do that?” I could feel myself yearning to take a chance, even though it scared me, but I wanted Oliver to convince me.
Beggars can’t be choosers.
No playing until your work is done.
Creativity is play.
I rubbed my face to focus my thoughts. “Hard no on examining my rules. If you scratch out that part, I’ll sign.”
“Really?” Oliver sat forward in his chair. “Why?”
“Because I feel sure you’d require me to tell you about them. I’ll try the journaling, but I won’t share it with you.”
“What are you more afraid of—sharing your rules with me or being homeless and jobless?”
“Jesus,” I said. “What scares me the most is your presumption that you can wave a magic wand and resuscitate my life.”
“But you need help,” Oliver said.
He was right, but his attitude rubbed me the wrong way.
“I don’t like you,” I said.
“I don’t care if you like me or not. I can still help you. It might be easier if you don’t like me.” A hint of Professor Snooty Pants reappeared in Oliver’s gaze.
“Right,” I said. “We’ve established that I’m a loser and you’re an arrogant prick, so can we move on?”
Oliver watched me with his steady gaze. He remained tight and distracted, like he had just enough energy to negotiate the deal, but couldn’t wait for me to leave.
Whatever. I picked up the pen. “What are your fucking journal stipulations?”
“One page minimum per day, and if you won’t do the rules, you have to do one self-portrait a week, which I get to see.”
“Did you get some bad news today, or something?” I asked. “You seem… clenched.”
Oliver snorted though his nose. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Gotcha. You’re tense enough to crack granite with your asshole, but it’s none of my business. Memo received.”
“Leave my asshole out of this. Sign or don’t, but hurry it up.”
“Why? Do you have a hot date with—”
“Do you have any more questions?” Oliver butted in to ask.
“I was in the middle of asking a question when you interrupted.”
“About the contract. Stop procrastinating. I have things to do.”
“Let’s cut it to three weeks,” I said.
Oliver shrugged. “Five weeks. Take it or leave it.”
“No negotiation about the timeline?”
“You’re in a tough spot,” Oliver said.
“You’re an imperious dickhead.”
We stared at each other.
Oliver didn’t blink. I studied his face for signs of life. His skin seemed to have lost most of its blood supply.
“What happened to Professor Chatty Pants?” I asked.
“Sign it.”
I huffed my way through an eye-roll and bent to read the contract one more time. I crossed out examine the rules you live by and wrote above it do and share one self-portrait a week, then initialed my edit and signed on the bottom line. What did it matter? It was all bullshit anyway, a figment of Oliver’s imagination.