by Franks, LE
About Of Nuts and Men
Jamie's desperate to shed his skin and let the squirrel inside run free, and a trip to the family cabin proves a perfect time to do so. But instead of revisiting his buried treasures, Jamie finds the man of his dreams.
Sawyer is ready to wrap up his season on the mountain. All he wants is a hot shower and his bed, but a frisky cougar has other plans for the naturalist. Chased up a tree Sawyer has no way to call for help and no company besides the inquisitive red squirrel on the tree limb next to him.
Jamie has a choice—expose his deepest secret and risk everything, or rescue the man of his dreams. With the sun setting, is time running out for Jamie’s best chance in finding love?
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Copyright
LE Franks Books, San Anselmo, CA
“Of Nuts and Men” © 2015, 2020 by LE Franks
Originally released in 2015 through another publisher, and as part of the paperback anthology Kiss, Kiss! Stories of Love and Cake on Amazon.
Cover by Angsty G LLC
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writers’ imagination or have been used factiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Contents
Of Nuts and Men
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
About the Author
Also by LE Franks
Of Nuts and Men
By LE Franks
Chapter One
It was the largest fucking cat he’d ever seen.
At least he’d thought so until the monster started playing its twisted game of cat and mouse with him, and it was suddenly less about body mass and more about teeth and claws and finding the shortest route away from both. And if he wasn’t crazy, he’d swear the damn thing was herding him along, keeping him just within striking distance as he scrambled over the rocky trail, backtracking along the deep canyon he’d just hiked down.
Fuck all the advice he’d ever read about not running from big predators—standing still didn’t seem to be a viable option, so run it was. And he had, shaking off the fatigue from his hike. But now his lungs burned, and sharp panting gasps wrenched from his chest as he tried to suck in enough oxygen to fuel his frenzied dash across the mountain. His ribs were already a mass of bruises from the pummeling they were receiving from the flashlight strapped to the side of his daypack, and he didn’t know how much longer he could keep this up.
Reaching back, Sawyer grabbed a flapping strap to cinch it tighter, pulling the pack against his body when his ankle twisted, throwing him off his gait and nearly sending him to a knee and into the maw of the great tracking beast.
He jerked upright, compelled his legs to pump higher, run faster, and in desperation he prayed his not-so-silent prayer, invoking every god and goddess he could remember from his World Religions class at Berkeley. He called down their blessings, their divine intervention, and maybe a few lightning bolts—anything to obstruct the nightmare closing in.
Maybe if he survived, he’d think about the timing. Maybe he was born lucky or Fate had another task for him to complete. Maybe there really was a God, or he had an angel, or chaos theory was in play. Whichever it turned out to be, he’d thank them/it later. Because as sure as all hope was lost the second he felt the foul breath of a predator on his neck, the pack shredding under one grasping blow and torn from his back, Sawyer found himself knocked into the arms of a huge pine. Without conscious thought, he launched himself up.
He barely noticed the boughs breaking under his feet as he climbed higher, didn’t care that the bark scored his hands and tore his nails, or that the pitch stained his clothes—all that mattered was that the snarling mountain lion, now pacing thirty-five feet below and growling every time he shifted on his ligneous perch, was without one afternoon snack.
He wrapped his arms around the trunk to watch the big cat. There wasn’t much he could do if the animal decided to climb up after him, though so far it seemed content enough pacing back and forth, rubbing against the tree like he was marking it for later. Eventually these behaviors gave way to rolling around in the dust until even a dirt bath in the sun lost its appeal, and the giant feline scrambled to its feet. He lifted one mighty hind leg to show off an impressive set of furry balls, peed on the base, and then disappeared down the trail, Sawyer’s day pack dangling from his jaws as he went.
It was close to an hour later, when the adrenaline had subsided and the nausea faded somewhat, and it was apparent that the cat had moved on to more interesting prey, that the gravity of his situation made itself known— literally.
In his race up the tree, he’d managed to break off several of the key branches that had made his climb possible. Now from his vantage point, all he could see was space beneath him, and no way to climb down without risking his neck in a fall. Small wonder the big cat wasn’t in a hurry to eat him—it wasn’t hungry, just shopping for later.
Sawyer began to pray all over again.
Chapter Two
Nuts, nuts, nuts....
Jamie’s mind raced and pine straw flew as he darted over the last of winter’s detritus, hopping over empty cones and broken branches, gliding over granite boulders covered in the erosive grit sloughed off in gray pebbles by winter’s freeze like snakes shedding skin.
The rocks themselves, buttressing stands of Jeffrey pine, were anchors against the wind and snow and blazing sun that regularly beat against them this high up in the Eastern Sierras.
Trying to outrace the whip of words swirling through his brain, he leaped onto the lowest branches of the closest pine, but his intention foundered halfway up the hundred-foot span. The sensation of claws digging into the crevices between the plates of pine bark distracted him, the tang of vanilla-scented resin overwhelmed his delicate nose and drew him to thoughts of....
Something. A fragment of a picture popped into his mind, then melted away just as fast, leaving him with an impression of an earthen gouge and a nest of pine straw.
He barely noticed the end of the branch before he was free gliding through space, a focused fall into the embrace of the next pine, a tumbled landing, then a skitter through the cluster of fresh needles and off again— bounding from tree to tree until they fell away from each other, opening into a wide mountain meadow of grasses and wildflowers and a few scattered black oaks and....
...and he was scampering down headfirst.
The ground, a freight train of dirt and rocks, rushed to meet him as he flew toward—
Purple!
He spun at the last second, jumping away from the open-jawed pain waiting for him on impact and swerved along a branch low enough to brush against a rocky ledge where tiny alpine flowers grew in cracks along the granite wall. Very pretty, but not....
His whiskers trembled. If
only he could remember which way to go now.
The bough shivered under his weight and swayed with his indecision. Once. Twice. Three times he scampered back and forth, pine needles combing through his fur, matting it down with sap.
Remember, remember, remember....
Yes.
Pictures dropped into place like a perfect row of cherries for a ten-thousand-dollar jackpot on a fifty-cent slot in Vegas. He tore across the dried grass, touching each landmark as they appeared: that rock, those oaks, that lightning-charred snag, this moss-covered log.
All were markers on the mental treasure map to his cache, lying somewhere, nestled under the roots of a leaning maple tree.
He looked again to where a break of leggy bigleaf maples stood prudishly on their own, like the Jeffrey pines were too forward in their encroachment around the edges of the meadow.
It made them easy to spot as a group. Individually they were all leaning in one direction or another, but they were certainly entangled, their branches hugging each other in a gesture of kinship, and he wondered if trees acknowledged such relationships. Or if they even had them. And if they did, did that make them aware?
He almost tripped over his paws.
Were there tree shifters?
Half of him wanted to stop and consider the private lives of trees and the other half just wanted him over there already so he could sniff out the right tree—his tree. The reminder that he was so close to finding his treasure vanquished idle curiosity; his contemplation of dryads and other flights of fancy would have to wait. Maybe.
It was enough to push him over the last few feet. He tore around the base of the first maple in giddy delight, twitching his nose to find the exact spot hidden under a blanket of dead leaves and tucked between gnarled roots.
Then he stopped.
A breeze ruffled the fur of his tail, teasing the fine hairs of ears now stiff with tension.
Not here, not here, not here!
Maybe here.
Maybe. If it wasn’t lost under the overpowering and maddeningly familiar smell of the piss destroying every olfactory reference in a twenty- foot radius.
Mountain lions and big cats.
The stupid frat boys of the shifter world.
And he lived with six of them—one of them had gotten here first. Not just anyone.
Kevin.
The dick.
He’d recognize the smell of that particular cat’s urine anywhere. He’d smelled enough of it over the years. Kevin made a point of marking just about every shrub, tree, and rock around their cabin... and the Cat house off campus... and behind just about every rest stop between San Francisco and the Canadian border.
Bastard.
A flood of anger crashed through him, the shock too much after the frenzy of his quest. The betrayal, the fuckery of them all—teasing him, toying with him.... He felt a rage bordering on hate build on itself, growing hotter and larger than he could contain, locked as he was in his tiny body, the volcano of emotion at odds with his animal instincts.
Letting go of the tight hold he had on himself, Jamie let his control slip at the same moment he reached for the change, calling his humanity back to him, welcoming the power rippling across his body.
It flowed over him from the font in his head, where it seemed the magic lived, down and across every part of him. The sensation was like a tide retreating back out to sea and leaving the ocean floor bare and vast. One second he was just a single wave lapping on the shore, and the next he became the entire seabed. It was an odd feeling.
To help it along, he visualized the shift: in his head he was unzipping a jacket—except instead of a sweatshirt or coat, he was unzipping fur from the top of his skull to the bottom of his red bushy tail, revealing his human body inch by inch until he was fully formed and lying naked to the sky.
He rolled over onto his knees, gasping for breath. The change from beast to man, while happening in the blink of an eye, felt like it lasted an eternity.
A friend once watched him and later reported he’d shifted in a flash of bright light—like the special effects from one of those sci-fi movies—except faster than a brain could identify, so he was only left with an impression of light and nothing he could swear to. One second he’d been there, his friend said, and the next... he was replaced by the equivalent of a stuffed animal—cute, with a swishy tail.
Not exactly how Jamie preferred to be thought of.
Standing up, he surveyed the landscape, his perspective altered in every aspect from his current height of six foot two versus the seven inches he’d been before, his keen eyesight and sense of smell both faded to the back, like a thick wall of glass was now standing between him and the rest of the world.
He picked up a long, dead branch from a maple and, ignoring the stickers and sharp rocks under his bare feet, carefully surveyed the area, looking for signs of his cache. He probed the bases of the trees, pushing aside larger stones and the occasional log without success.
Everything looked so different in his human skin. He never fully understood his animal side when it came to instincts like foraging. But each fall he’d find himself driven back to the cabin to spend a shame-inducing weekend gathering nuts, then hiding them in random caches across the mountainside. Not that he ever came back for them in the dark of the season.
Rationally he knew a winter in the Sierras followed by the spring thaw would have the nuts sprouting and inedible (not that he’d ever eat them, he’d promised himself) but that other part, his squirrel brain, demanded he see for himself.
And that’s what pissed him off the most—being driven by animal instincts on a fruitless errand just because his idiot roommates thought it was a hilarious prank to play on him. He’d only been in the cabin one night. Stuck on the couch to boot, because those lousy cats had been too damn lazy to make up their own beds and had all flopped on his instead. Like they weren’t expecting him.
But they were, and that was the problem. He’d been living with them for the past three years, and every summer it was the same thing: screw with the little herbivore. He’d thought when he came back from his freshman year at Berkeley, they’d be over it already, that they’d finally stop hazing him and treat him like he belonged.
They were supposed to be family. At least that’s what their mother had promised him when she’d adopted him into their clan.
Jamie felt like a fool.
Like today.
He’d been trying to relax after a morning spent washing six loads of laundry—only one of which was his—an hour on his knees scrubbing out the shower and picking long blond hairs from the drain, and a trip halfway down the mountain to replace his new carton of almond milk because Kevin had dumped it down the sink, stating it was “foul.” So when he finally settled on the couch for a late lunch, hoping they’d leave him alone with his peanut butter sandwich and novel, they instead lounged next to him in their underwear watching game after baseball game on TV.
All he heard was “cashe” this, and “nut” that. As if he wouldn’t know what they were doing by preying on his anxieties and poking at his disheartening tendency toward suggestibility.
“Jamie, want some roasted pea... nuts?”
“Jamie, I have a casssssheeeeew for you!”
“Jamie, by Thor’s furry nuts.... Get out of the way!”
By the third inning of the second game, he couldn’t stand it any longer and had started chasing all over their mountain in a squirrel suit checking his nuts.
Mountain lions were the worst.
A cold breeze blew off the higher mountain passes, the ones still covered in snow, and Jamie shivered. He had no fat to speak of, one thing to thank his shifter genes for, he guessed, but standing in the waning afternoon light, his naked flesh covered in goose pimples, was getting him nowhere. He quickly shifted and darted back up the trail to the next site. Maybe his animal would let him go home for a nice bowl of vegetarian black bean chili if he found the next cache intact.
Hopef
ully.
Chapter Three
Sawyer had had plenty of time to work out how utterly screwed he was. Beyond his unbelievable luck in avoiding becoming the featured special on nature’s lunch menu, he was literally stuck up a tree with no fireman to be found. Worse, if he leaned over to an alarming degree and angled his body just so, he could spot his shiny new iPhone wedged between two boulders a good thirty or forty feet below. He only did that once before bowel-liquefying acrophobia kicked him in the gut. He now kept his eyes firmly on the trunk he was pressed against.
In the plus column, he had his pocketknife, wristwatch, a Ziploc bag filled with gorp, some jerky, and a couple of single-serving bags of peanuts from his flight into Sacramento. No water, though. That was a major bummer.
He still had his vest, so he was warm enough for the moment, glad he’d opted for the lightweight climbing pants instead of shorts—the high-tech fabric was currently blocking the wind now rocking his tree with nausea- inducing frequency—but if he didn’t get down soon, he’d lose the sun, and spending the night in a tree would not be fun, mountain lion or no.
Sawyer eased himself on the pine branch. It was about five inches in diameter and sharply pitched, so he was squeezed into a saddle of space just big enough to fit his bottom before it rose to give some support along his back. The only problem was the shimmy he could feel through his bones whenever the tree moved, or he moved. It didn’t feel secure. And with each gust, his anxiety heightened.
He’d toyed with the idea of sliding down the trunk, a sort of slow, controlled descent/fall... until he thought about the “fall” part of the equation. Broken branches leaving gaps almost as big as he was tall... granite boulders on one side, deep canyon on the other—one wrong move and he was asking for broken bones or death. Neither seemed too appealing, so he was left with sitting tight, hoping for help to come from up or down the trail.