Epilogue
BEKAH
“Stewie!” I call from the sofa as I turn up the volume on the telly. “Hurry up! It’s starting!”
Poor, longsuffering Officer Stewart (Stewie for short—note, a nickname assigned by me, not suggested by him) trudges into the room.
The man truly had no idea what he signed up for when he was given detail at my safe house.
I’m not allowed to leave. I’m not allowed to scroll social media or post anything online.
I’m not much of a reader, even less of a cook.
My only current outlet is watching all of the reality television that we get access to on the basic government cable package we’ve been provided.
Tight bastards didn’t even splurge for streaming.
So far Stewart’s suffered through three old seasons of The Bachelorette and more seasons than I’d care to admit of various Housewives spin-offs. Tonight, though, should be a special treat, and not just because I’ve made one of the few snacks I feel confident whipping up in the kitchen—Oreo popcorn.
“What is it this time?” Stewie asks as he takes the seat beside me on the sofa.
He can groan and complain all he wants about my telly choices. It’s all just an act. I happen to know he got cross with me when he missed Rachel Lindsay’s finale because Officer Mulligan (aka Mullie) was on duty the day I watched it.
“This show should be different,” I tell him, handing him the bowl of popcorn, which he wordlessly takes.
“It’s called Mountain Man. Apparently, it was originally meant to be a reality show like all the others, but something big and dramatic happened on set, so they turned it into a documentary instead, showing all the behind-the-scenes rigamarole. Exciting, don’t cha think?”
Stewie would never own up to it being exciting, of course—he’s much too masculine and stoic to be able to admit that something as feminine as a dating show could be entertaining—but he’s settled back into the sofa, not sitting up ramrod straight like when we first started watching our programs together, so I’ll take that as a victory.
As the documentary begins, I’m immediately sucked into the wonky world of what would have been the Mountain Man show. “Aww, they should’ve followed through and made this. It’s absolutely barmy! I love it!”
“Why are there so many axes?” Stewie wants to know.
“I dunno. Lumberjacks. Axes. It’s a whole thing!” I shrug, powerless to explain the appeal of a flannel on a handsome bearded man. “Ask your wife about it. Maybe she can explain it better.”
Stewie just scoffs. “Carly is not into lumberjacks.” At my expression, though, he loses some of his certainty. “I think?”
I’ve never met Stewie’s wife, of course, since she exists in that elusive world outside of the safe house, but I’d be willing to bet my last pint of Ben let him still believe we women are simple, sweet folk who can orgasm from the tiniest bit of foreplay and definitely have never looked up monster erotica.
(Not that I’m speaking from any personal experience or anything.)
“Nah, I’m sure she finds big, burly men who can chop wood repulsive,” I lie. Probably unconvincingly, based off the side-eye Stewie gives me.
The documentary interrupts for an interview with the two movie stars who would have been the executive producers of the show, Sienna Diaz and Raquel Ezra.
“Ooh, I love them!” I tell Stewie, both because I am eager for the shift in conversation topics, and because I genuinely adore both of those women.
I’d give a kidney to either, if they needed it, that’s the level of adoration I’m at.
“Raquel is my style icon. And Sienna is my life icon. Or maybe reversed? It’s impossible to choose. ”
“They look vaguely familiar.” Stewie frowns as if genuinely trying to place two of the most famous women in the world.
God bless him. I resist the urge to patronizingly pat the side of his face, instead taking a long sip of my wine. In my experience, men don’t like to be condescendingly patted. Shame, though, since the urge happens so very frequently.
“This scene was the first time we began to notice that one of our Mountain Men wasn’t necessarily keeping his focus on the show,” Raquel teases in the interview. “And if you watch some of this footage, I think you’ll see what we saw . . .”
The documentary cuts to one of the Mountain Man scenes, which seems to have been set up as a date between one of the Mountainettes, Harmony, and her front-runner, whose name is, I think, Nate R.
It’s hard to remember the names of all the fellas, but I liked him ever since I saw him juggling and wearing that goofy coonskin cap.
When you watch enough reality shows, you know it’s genuinely refreshing to find someone who doesn’t take themselves too seriously.
So far, Nate R. has appeared to be reciprocating Harmony’s feelings pretty closely, but on this date—which takes place in a bakery—he seems distracted. His eyes keep darting over to a very pretty girl who’s sitting a few tables over with a very handsome man with gorgeous dark hair—
I spit out the wine that’s in my mouth. Yep.
A genuine spit-take. That’s really a thing, apparently.
I never knew. I thought it was only something that happened in the movies.
But here I am, so surprised the wine comes spewing out of my mouth.
Shame—it was a pretty good one for being on discount. “Holy shit!”
Stewie seems to think I’m reacting to something dangerous. He’s on his feet in an instant, one hand on his holster, the other reaching for his radio.
I wave him down before he can shoot anything again (RIP old coatrack), trying to deescalate the situation, even though my heart is racing. “No, no. It’s fine. It’s fine. I just—” As the man’s face comes on screen again, I grab the remote and hit pause.
There. Slightly blurred, a few years older, still alarmingly handsome. Grady Kelley. I stare at his frozen face, surprised, then not surprised, by the way my heart lurches in response to him.
Stewie settles back again, looking between my expression and the screen. His response might be comical if I weren’t still feeling like someone just pushed me off a high-speed train—emotionally speaking, that is. “You know that guy?”
Hah. That’s a bit of an understatement, if ever I heard one. I fish around for the right words to explain what I was to Grady. What Grady was to me. “He used to be my . . .”
There are so many ways I could finish that sentence. I go with the one that is both the simplest and the most complicated. “My priest.”
Well, not really my priest. I was never one of his parishioners.
But then again, he’s always been my priest, in every other way that mattered.
To Be Continued . . .