“Javier!” I mumbled. Cold water filled my mouth.
Javier emerged from the abyss and lifted me by the shoulder.
When I surfaced, I vomited out the water and found my footing on the vehicle.
He’d removed his helmet and with it smacked ice barring us from land. “Evan, get to the shore!” He waded chest-high through a path, like an icebreaker clearing a channel.
I jumped off the snowmobile and plunged deeper into the frigid water. The cottage wasn’t far away, and I reeled toward it. My lead-like boots and soaked clothes weighed me down.
Javier tugged at my shirt and continued to chip away at the frozen shore.
My feet hit ground.
His effort grew weaker. As he smashed his helmet onto another layer of ice, it spun several feet of ice away from us. “Fuck.” He sloshed forward.
I reached for his waist under the water to not only carry me forward but to help steady his wobbling body.
He elbowed his way through. Blood peppered the sheets and pooled in the water.
In the shallows, we stumbled onto the shore and out of the frigid depths. Like rigor mortis, my pants stiffened, cracking as I emerged into the air. We staggered to the cottage—frozen, dripping, and blowing into our hands to keep warm.
Javier fiddled with his key chain so we could get inside. “I…can’t…get it.” His fingers turned purple.
“Why’s the door locked? There’s no one around for miles.” I reached for the key chain at his waist to help.
“To protect the dogs.” He fell against the door. Icicles clung to his hair, and his teeth chattered.
“Let me.” I tugged the chain, and he stumbled into me. “Which key is it?”
“The-the…red one.” He steadied himself.
I fiddled with the ring more. “Don’t give out on me.” His lips were blue. His body shook. I located a key inserted into a red band, and with all my strength shoved it into the lock, turned the knob, and we fell in.
“Quick.” Javier crawled in farther on his elbows. “Take your clothes off.”
The fire warmed us as huddled under a blanket naked. Our clothes thawed in a heap by the door. We hadn’t taken the time to hang them to dry. Frostbite prevention won priority.
“Better?” The ice in Javier’s hair was now a wet slop that he whisked back with a not-so-purple hand. Color had returned to his lips.
“Better. Thank you.” My feet stung as they regained blood flow—a tingling sensation and a series of quakes raked my body.
We were silent for a time. I absorbed my surroundings, keeping my mind off hypothermia. The room was decorated simply, a twin bed with flannel sheets behind us. We’d used its black-and-white spread to cover us after we’d disrobed. The chest of drawers held little but a can of WD-40 and mothballs—no clothing. The fire Javier had started heated the small room. An oil painting of a dog carrying a pheasant in its mouth hung above the hearth. The colors were muted with age, and a layer of dust grayed part of the black frame.
While we stared into the fire, my mind attempted to piece together the situation—ice cracking, needing to find Dillon and figure out the genesis of the pictures.
Beside me, Javier shivered and I pulled him near. His clammy skin rubbed my side. “I’m sorry,” he said, “that I got you into this predicament.”
“Nonsense. After all, it was my idea to go find my husband.”
“It was my idea to check on the dogs and get fuel.”
“We needed the fuel. It’s no one’s fault.”
He quivered.
“How far are we from Dillon?” I asked.
“If we’d been able to cross the lake, we wouldn’t be far.”
“I don’t think traveling it is an option anymore.” The fire snapped, and I turned to it.
Sleet pelted the roof and clicked at the four-over-four-paned window to our left.
Javier snagged a part of the blanket at his collar and pulled it closer to him. “I don’t think traveling anywhere for the time being is an option. I can’t believe the lake thawed so quickly.” The latter part, he whispered to himself. The dogs howled in the back room, and Javier turned toward the door that led to them. “They don’t like the sound of the rain on the roof.”
“Are they all right? Should we let them out?”
“They’re fine. They ate. And the pellet stove keeps them warm.” He looked at the wall clock, with hands permanently reading four thirty. “In fact, I’m supposed to get them over to the set.”
“Can we get hold of someone?”
Javier turned to the heap of clothes on the floor. “I’d call Adam to get help,, but my phone’s toast.”
“Yeah, the water didn’t help mine, either.”
“Don’t worry.” His hand touched my knee. “Adam will send someone after us—and probably fire me in the process.”
“Why would he fire you?”
Javier stared blankly into the fire and shrugged. “Plus, Tim’s going to kill me.”
“Tim? Your husband Tim?”
Javier nodded. “On Summerwind…where we live…he’s always after me to play it safe. Ice fishing, drilling into brackish water, I’ve never had any problems.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
He sighed.
“No one needs to know.” I rubbed Javier’s leg—a hairy trunk of solid muscle, still wet, cold, and shaking.
“They’ll know.” The cosmos in Javier’s eyes pierced my soul, and I saw deep into his. Time stopped until I broke my gaze.
Dark gray clouds prevented daylight from entering the cabin. It appeared much later than early afternoon. Perhaps the broken wall clock was right. Us snuggling under a blanket reminded me of the times Dillon and I, after making love by the fire on a dreary winter day, would talk for hours about nothing and everything at the same time. Eventually, I’d turn to books and read him stories about wizards and warlocks, tales of miseries meeting with fortunes, and paperbacks ending happily ever after. Other times, I’d recite passages from biographies on Kennedy, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King. The whole time Dillon would listen with rapt attention, staring lovingly at me rather than being consumed by the books’ content.
I missed my husband. I missed our times by the fire. I missed lying next to him in bed while he snored—annoying as that could be. I longed for a simple grocery-shopping trip and chiding each other about who was worse: me for snagging blueberry Pop-Tarts or him for hiding his Cap’n Crunch in the corner of the cart. Both temptations shoved beneath layers of vegetables, hummus, almond milk, and organic quinoa.
“There’s got to be an explanation,” I muttered.
“For what?”
I hadn’t realized I’d said it aloud. “Oh, nothing.” Dillon. The man I married. The man who proposed by renting a billboard near the office we’d worked at together with the words, This just keeps on getting better. Marry me, Evan? Dillon, the man so smitten with me that I made him tongue-tied as he played footsie with me by the lake near my house—our house now.
Dillon Deiss. The man who held my hand when I threw up from chemo treatments. The one who cradled me in his arms and rocked me to sleep as I cried. “Dillon.”
“It’ll be all right,” Javier said.
I wiped a tear from the corner of my eye. “I’m just thinking about…stuff.” On the table to my right, a hardback lay flat. I slid it over, opened it, and slapped through a few pages of fairy tales. “Hansel and Gretel. Hmm.”
“Are you going to read me a bedtime story?”
My hand smoothed a page with an illustration of children in the grip of a cannibalistic witch. “I think that’d be cheating.”
“Reading?” Javier shrugged. “Tim reads to me.”
“He does?”
“Like this, by the fireplace in our cabin on Summerwind. He’s more of a reader than I am.”
“Definitely cheating. Do you read to him?”
“Oh, I can read.” Javier leaned forward defensively, elbows on haunches. “I’m more of
a visual guy—TV, sports, murder mysteries.” His arm came out from the clutches of our wrap. He reached for the fireplace tongs and stabbed at the logs. Embers spit and smoke rose. “I prefer someone else do the reading.”
“Perhaps Hansel and Gretel isn’t such a great inspiration for us right now.” I returned the book to its spot, clearly marked by a square of dust where it’d lain.
“We should throw on another log.” Javier peeled out of the blanket and lumbered, naked, to the stack of wood wedged in a cubbyhole on the hearth’s left. He slid out a chunk of wood. Javier was thinner than Dillon and his ass firmer, not that Dillon’s was flabby in any way. The boy—and he was a boy to me—was younger and trimmer.
Chapter 40
Dillon
Making a movie isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There’s a lot of waiting, adjusting of lights, and allowing the talent to “feel the moment”—at least that was how Vilhelm described it. The ping of pelting sleet held us back for a time too. I didn’t know much about Tapped in New England. Adam had told me it was about a widowed maple-syrup farmer who’d lost everything in the Long Depression of the late 1800s—nothing but his dog for companionship and living on a small spit of land threatened by industry.
We filmed in downtown Settlement, near a stream tempered by ice. The cottage, that up until a month ago had been a plumber’s warehouse, looked like its nineteenth-century former self with loose clapboards and wavy windowpanes.
Under the cottage’s doorframe, Vilhelm stood transfixed in character. Dark wool garb made his tall frame look stern. He welcomed me inside as written in the script.
I eschewed our earlier scuffle. I needed to act. Okay, Dillon. You can do this. “Yes, Mr. Smith, I’ll build the—” Stage lighting ripped me from the moment. I tried to pretend I stood in a secluded cabin in the 1800s alone with widower Smith to explain my preparations to build a dam and flood his property to the south, preventing potential bidders from acquiring it. But the camera, the slew of people with clipboards, headsets, and microphones, made it all seem so unreal.
“Let’s take it again,” Vilhelm’s voice rippled like a smooth ride down a lazy river. “Can we clear the set? Only the essential.”
A girl with a pencil sticking out from her bun of hair rolled her eyes. “Who the hell isn’t essential? We’ve shot this five time—”
“Please.” Vilhelm held up his pale hands. “As if this were 1875.”
Pencil-bun left. The lighting dimmed. A few more crew dispersed. I picked a wedge from my too-tight union suit. “Why am I in red pajamas?” I finally asked. It irked me that I was lumbering about the set with every ripple of body fat—well, all ten percent—and each bulge of my privates for mankind to see.
Vilhelm held a hand up to the director—a Frenchman with glasses too small for his hawkish nose and wide face—who appeared ready to provide me my motivation. “Allow me,” Vilhelm said, and placed a cold hand on my shoulder. “You see. I’ve been alone for many years.”
“You or Mr. Smith?”
He grinned. “I’m Mr. Smith.” The character’s aura never faded, palpable like the funk of sharp cheddar when you enter a cheese shop. “You’ve come along,” he explained the backstory, “as a faithful friend, a servant working the syrup with little to no pay. Remember, you stay in the cottage next to mine.”
In reality, there was no other cottage. I guess I had to imagine it. “Sure, but the suit?” I picked at a cinch of material cupping my crotch.
“We’ve become close.” Vilhelm’s breath smelled of spearmint and hints of lemongrass. “We’re lonely. We’ve been everything to each other during this Long Depression.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Are Mr. Smith and I queer for each other in this movie?” Was this what he and Darlene wanted to rehearse back at the house?
“It’s subtextual,” Frenchman said, and I turned to him, having forgotten he was near.
“We’re both widowed and lonely.” Vilhelm returned to his mark, noted by a piece of white glow tape on the wide-planked pine boards.
“I am? I mean, he is? My character’s a widower?”
“Yes, of course. That’s what bonds us.”
My wind whirled. Evan. His cancer. The shit we’d been going through. I leaned against the column with its cast-iron pan hanging from a hook. When the camera switched on and the light above glared again, I didn’t let it throw me.
“Alphonse,” Vilhelm said, addressing me by my on-screen name, “the last of the maples on the hill are dying. I fear if we flood the lower forty, we’ll risk the rest.”
I let his words soak in. “But we’ll stop the encroachment of the city. No one will want to build on waterlogged farmland.” I surprised myself by my ability to ad-lib.
Unrehearsed, Vilhelm brushed a strand of hair away from my eyes. “You’re like a younger brother to me, Alphonse.”
“Mr. Smith, I’ll build the dam…and any other things that get in the way of our survival.” I placed a firm hand on his shoulder.
The fire in the hearth crackled, and Vilhelm moved to his cot, pulled back the itchy blanket, and got inside.
Sharing a bed with him unnerved me, and rightfully so. Because of a storm, my character couldn’t get to his cottage—which didn’t really exist, but I was supposed to pretend it did. Mr. Smith/Vilhelm had opened his home. As I’d learned, nineteenth century men slept with each other for warmth.
I crawled into the bed, setting aside the fact that my ass with its buttoned flap in view of the camera would later be on prominent display for world.
“And…cut!” the Frenchman shouted and hitched his glasses up a notch on his nose. He simmered in contemplation. “Did you like the take, Vilhelm?”
“I thought it was good.” He hugged me in the cot.
The French dude turned to someone behind him. “How was the sound? Crew, are you happy?”
Pencil-bun stepped in from outside. “Can I get a replay?”
“Roll it back.” The director twirled a hand in the air toward the cameraman, who pivoted on his chair.
Vilhelm tapped my shoulder. “Nice job, Dillon. You may have a career in film after all.”
As the group huddled around a small television, I rose. They pressed hands to their mouths and squinted. I pulled the blanket back.
“I’m sorry about this morning.” Mr. Smith had vanished, leaving Vilhelm, the shy star, in his wake. “Darlene thinks I need to learn a few things.”
I looked down as he lay on the bed with a hand over his head. “Do you?” I asked.
He smirked. “Mr. Smith and I have a lot in common.”
“I’m not a whore,” I whispered. “I didn’t sign the NEFO deal to sell my body—”
Vilhelm held an index finger to my mouth.
A camera clicked. Ka-chick. Ka-chick. “This is beautiful,” said a lanky man behind a Minolta. “It’ll make good promotional material.”
I lay down in Vilhelm’s arms as the camera continued its capture.
“You see my dilemma?” Vilhelm whispered in my ear and held me tight from behind. “The homoeroticism in this film could make people wonder about my sexuality.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“Because it’s the right thing for the film.” He pressed into me, and his groin hardened. “It’s a great role and a wonderful picture.”
The lights slammed on again and the director called for action. I tried not to let their glare displace the moment. We cuddled. The fire roared, and I gazed into it, forgetting the camera inches from my face as it captured us nuzzling. As Vilhelm curled closer, my own erection grew and wedged against the mattress. No! The lack of control over my nether region frustrated me. Luckily the blankets covered us.
“Cut,” Frenchman said and took another beat to contemplate. “That was good. Unscripted.”
Pencil-bun stepped up. “We need to redo the prior scene. The lighting was off a smidge.”
“Places, everybody!” the director yelled. “Let’s retake scene 15A, from t
he top. Vilhelm, you ready?”
We were to return to the cottage’s entrance. Vilhelm’s erection kicked my rear. “Um, can you give us a moment?” he asked.
I slammed a hand on the desk, arranged as the spot where Mr. Smith—Vilhelm’s character—was to write the next great novel. Now that my phone was charged, I replayed Evan’s voice mail. He’d received at least one of Darlene’s photos.
“What do you mean you don’t know where Evan and this dogkeeper are?” I asked Adam.
“Easy,” said Pencil-bun, who annoyed me with her constant bickering about having things on the set look perfect. “You will mess up Mr. Smith’s writing.” She repositioned the ink bottle and its accompanying sheet of paper.
Adam placed a hand on my shoulder, which I shrugged off. “They’re around,” he said. “Their phones are probably just out because of the electricity.”
“You used that line before.”
After shooting our scene, Vilhelm removed to the trailer across the way for a wardrobe change. Only Adam, some of the crew, and I remained.
“I don’t get it.” I paced by the cabin’s door where my scene—15A on page 25—had initiated. “Doesn’t this Jose kid—”
“Javier,” Adam reminded me.
“Javier. Doesn’t this kid have a generator to charge his phone?” The crew had all charged their apparatuses, plus cameras to allow us to shoot. “Besides, the electricity is back.”
“One more scene,” Adam said, “and I’ll take you—”
“I’m not waiting.” I stepped back into Evan’s pants that I’d shucked to get into my red union suit and tore his Salem State University sweatshirt from the grip of some woman with glasses and a slight mustache. “I’m going.”
“I can’t believe this.” Pencil-bun rolled her eyes. “One scene and he thinks he’s a diva, pulling star-power and all.”
“Please.” I shoved my head through the sweatshirt.
“Okay,” Adam said. “Everyone, let’s take a break. It’s time to eat, anyway.”
Building Us: A Gay Romantic Comedy and Adventure (Marketing Beef Gay Romance Book 2) Page 15