8. Paul
Paul
One day later.
Fucking fuck.
I stood under the rusted metal showerhead, letting the water hit my back.
I cranked the hot water valve as far to the left as it would go.
It bordered on scalding, turning the skin on my back a bright, stinging pink, but I didn’t turn it down.
I stood there, letting the heat punish me, watching the grit, sawdust, and sweat from a brutal twelve-hour shift wash down the drain.
It didn’t do a damn thing to wash away the ache in my chest.
Georgia was gone… or would be soon. She was probably packing up her car right now, signing that contract and getting ready to drive back to a life that made her miserable just because it felt safe.
“I’m telling you, man, no woman is worth it,” John’s voice echoed off the damp tile walls of the community bathhouse. I didn’t even open my eyes. “They’ll all break your heart at some point. It’s just a matter of time. Georgia just got there fast. In and out in a weekend. Women are all the same.”
“Don’t listen to him, Paul,” Holden called out from two stalls down, his voice carrying over the sound of his own shower splashing against the floor.
“If she actually cares about you, it’ll work out.
Have you ever done long distance before?
Austin isn’t on the moon. You could always drive down there. ”
I let out a low, rough groan and turned the water off. I grabbed my towel off the hook and dragged it roughly over my face and hair.
“Is it that obvious?” I asked, my voice echoing loudly in the shower room.
“Yes,” John, Holden, and four other lumberjacks answered in perfect unison.
Fuck.
I wasn’t good company for anyone right now.
I wrapped the towel around my waist and grabbed my clean clothes from the bench. I was going to pack my gear, get in my truck, and drive out to the woods. I needed a week away from town. Away from that empty roadside stand.
Dylan had already cleared me for the time off. It had been an easy choice after I’d fucked up with the disc delimber today.
“Hey, Paul!” Mina’s voice cut through the heavy humidity of the bathhouse. She was standing right outside the door.
“No women allowed!” Holden hollered playfully.
“Paul, are you decent in there?” she yelled back. “You’ve got a visitor out front!”
“Ooh, a visitor,” Holden joked, turning off his water. “Maybe it’s Georgia.”
“Maybe she’s come to tell you she wants a man that smells like pine sap and misery,” John added, his voice bouncing off the tile.
“Shut the fuck up,” I barked. “Both of you.”
But my heart kicked into gear. Could it be her?
Yes, but it was unlikely as fuck.
I dressed quickly and grabbed my pile of filthy work clothes, tucking them under my arm. I pushed the doors of the bathhouse open and stepped out into the fading heat of the summer day.
The logging camp was lively as usual. A dozen tired lumberjacks were sitting around the long wooden picnic tables outside the cookhouse, shoveling down meatloaf and mashed potatoes that Mina had made for all of us tonight.
I scanned the yard, ignoring everyone while I looked for my visitor.
Then I saw her.
Georgia was sitting at the far edge of an empty picnic table, looking nervous and out of place.
She was wearing a pair of jeans and a plain white t-shirt that skimmed her perfect curves. Her dark hair was loose, blowing slightly in the evening breeze, and her hands were clasped tightly in her lap.
Georgia.
I almost didn’t want to hear what she had to say. What if she’d just come to say goodbye? I walked straight towards her, my boots kicking up small clouds of dust with every heavy step.
She stood up as I got close, her eyes locking onto mine.
“What are you doing here, Georgia?”
She swallowed hard, her eyes searching my face. “I made Sean give me an extension. But I have to make a decision by tomorrow morning. About the house. About the offer.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, locking my jaw. “And?”
“And,” she breathed, taking a small step closer to me. “I realized I can’t make the decision without talking to you first.”
I looked around. A few of the guys at the closest table had stopped eating and were openly staring at us. This wasn’t the right place for an important conversation.
“Come with me,” I grunted and turned away, walking towards the bunkhouse.
She followed close behind me. I opened the heavy wooden door and held it for her. The bunkhouse was empty right now since we mostly used it just for sleeping.
The bunk beds were neatly made, the air smelling faintly of engine oil and sawdust.
I walked over to my bunk in the far corner and sat down on the edge of the mattress.
She walked over and sat down beside me, leaving a few inches of space between our hips. She looked down at her hands, her fingers twisting nervously together.
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” she whispered into the quiet room.
Her words shot daggers straight into my heart. I was trying to forget about her, and if she came by talking sweet like this, it was going to make it even harder when she drove out of town.
“It seems completely crazy,” she continued, her voice shaking slightly. “To feel this way about someone after one wild weekend together. It shouldn’t make any sense. But I sat in that empty house all day today, and everywhere I looked, I just saw you.”
She finally turned her head to look at me. Her eyes were wide and scared.
“I am terrified, Paul,” she admitted. “I’m seriously considering throwing my whole life away for a man who might not even be looking for anything serious.”
“You talking about me?”
“Of course I’m talking about you.”
She held my gaze, practically begging me to give her an out. Or a reason to stay.
“I need to know, do you want something real with me?” she asked. “Or was this just a weekend love affair?”
My heart thumped slowly, beating back to life. A world that had gone gray suddenly had color in it again. But that didn’t mean I’d get the outcome I wanted.
“You’re the one who said nothing could come of us, Georgia.” I looked her dead in the eye. “You’re the one who said you were leaving. I’ve got both feet in. I have since the minute I saw you standing behind that counter. But I’m not going to force myself on you. This is your decision to make.”
She took in a deep breath, her eyes misting over.
I reached out and cupped her face. “If you stay, I don’t want you to regret it. The last thing I want is to take you away from your dreams.”
“If I stay, I can’t do it alone.”
My chest ached so hard that I was certain it would burst. Then I leaned in and kissed her, and everything turned right in the world.
The kiss was a promise.
She didn’t have to be alone. I’d be right there by her side every step of the way, as long as that’s what she wanted.
Georgia melted against me, her hands grabbing onto the front of my shirt, holding on to me like a lifeline as she kissed me back fiercely, as though she were fighting for our love.
When I finally pulled back, a single tear tracked down her cheek.
She let out a small, wet laugh, swiping it away quickly.
“How would this even work?” she asked, her voice hitching. “I don’t have a job here. The roadside stand was a good weekend, but it’s not exactly a long-term business strategy. And… the house is falling apart.”
I kept my hand firmly on her waist. I’d spent the last twenty-four hours doing nothing but thinking about this exact problem.
“Do you like the old house?”
She thought about it for a moment. “Yeah. It reminds me of Henry and Etta, and they’re the closest family I have.”
“Well, then, it can work however you want it to work,” I told her confidently. “But the version I like best goes like this.”
I caught her hand, tangling my fingers with hers.
“We fix up that old farmhouse,” I said. “We patch the roof, level the foundation, and turn it into a new home for a new family. Our family.”
Her eyes went wide. “Really? You think we can do that?”
“I know we can, if it’s what you want.”
“And you’re right about the stand,” I continued, keeping my voice level as I walked her through the logic.
“Selling pies three days a year isn’t a living.
But you have an entire acre of overgrown blackberry brambles sitting behind that house.
We clear it out. We put in proper irrigation.
We turn it into a U-pick berry farm for the tourists in the summer.
And we open the roadside stand for local vendors and handcrafted items on holiday weekends. We’ll get a percentage of the sales.”
She stared at me, her mouth slightly parted.
“And for the rest of the year,” I said, squeezing her hand, “you do whatever you want. I make enough money lumberjacking that you could be a stay-at-home mom. Or if you want to be a career gal, you do that. It’s your choice.”
Georgia laughed. “A career gal?”
“Yeah. You know what I mean. There might not be a lot of jobs on Red Oak Mountain, but you could get one of those modern work-from-home deals if you wanted to. You keep pursuing your marketing career right from that farmhouse living room. You don’t have to give up your skills just because you live on a mountain. ”
“What about you?” she whispered.
“I’d still be a lumberjack,” I said, a slow smile touching my mouth. “Because that’s what I do. And on my days off, I’d fix whatever breaks at the farm.”
She looked at me, something peaceful shining in her eyes.
“What was that about being a mom?” she asked, the word rolling off her tongue as if it were something fragile.
I nodded, sliding my hand around to the back of her neck. “Not everyone wants that. But if you do, well, we could have some little baby Georgias running around. And maybe a few baby Pauls with teeny-tiny lumberjack axes.”
“How many kids are you talking about?” she asked as a laugh broke through her tears. “Because that sounds like a wild pack.”
“Dozens,” I joked, my chest finally feeling light for the first time since she told me she was leaving. “Unless that’s going to scare you back to Austin. We could take it slow if you prefer. I’m just telling you the kind of future I see for us.”
Georgia leaned her forehead against my chest. Her shoulders shook slightly as she laughed. “I think my uterus would collapse if we had dozens.”
“Do you want to stay here with me, Georgia?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I think I do. I already called Sean before I came here. I told him I needed until tomorrow morning, but the truth is, I already knew. I just needed to know if you were on board, too.”
My whole world locked into place.
“I don’t know how it happened so fast,” she murmured, looking up at me. “But I am so in love with you, Paul. I don’t even know your last name, but I want to see that future life with you.”
“Gallagher. Paul Gallagher.”
“So I’d be…” her voice trailed off.
“Georgia Gallagher. If you want to be.”
She laughed and pulled me tight. “I do want to be. I do.”
I opened my mouth to tell her I loved her too, with the plan to pull her down onto the bunk and show her exactly how much.
But we were interrupted.
“WOOO!”
A loud cheer erupted from the front of the bunkhouse.
Georgia gasped, and I whipped my head around.
Half the damn logging camp was standing in the doorway. John was clapping his hands, Mina was wiping a tear with her apron, and Holden was leaning against the doorframe with a massive, shit-eating grin on his face.
“Now that, boys,” Holden announced loudly to the crowded doorway, “is how you get a woman to stay!”
“Get the hell out of here!” I barked, grabbing a heavy work boot off the floor and throwing it at the door.
The boot slammed against the wooden frame, and the guys scattered like a pack of stray dogs, laughing and hollering as they ran back out. The heavy door swung shut behind them, plunging the bunkhouse back into quiet privacy.
I let out a long, heavy sigh, rubbing the back of my neck. “I am going to get every single one of them back. There’s no damn privacy in this camp.”
Georgia laughed. “I guess you’ll just have to move in with me then. We’ll get lots of privacy together. But you’ll have to share our life with my cat. I haven’t mentioned her yet, but I’ve got a prissy little Persian waiting back home.”
I turned back to her. She was sitting on my bunk, her eyes shining, looking completely at home in the rough, dusty reality of my life. I could handle a cat if it meant I got to spend the rest of my life with this woman. Hell, make it twenty cats. She could have whatever she wanted.
“If that’s an invitation, I accept.”
I reached out and pulled her back into my arms, realizing that I was holding onto my future. And it looked damn bright from here.