Chapter 10 Kipp
Kipp
I was just keeping an eye on her.
That was the lie I told myself as the lights in her cabin stayed on long after the woods went quiet.
I had my own place less than a hundred and fifty yards away, my own bed, my own business, but there I was on my deck with a warm beer in my hand, watching the glow through the trees as if it meant something.
Fish was collapsed next to me, snoring after he chased pinecones for an hour back and forth in the fading light over at the Annex property.
I’d made sure not to come back here until it was almost dark.
The temptation that was everything Hattie with those lush curves was too great for me to resist during the day.
There had been a tube of caulking at my door with a sticky note that just had an ‘H’ on it. It was tempting as fuck to use it as an excuse to go over and ask her what she was thinking leaving it for me. Was something broken in her cabin?
Instead, I propped my feet up on the railing and watched her.
She was sitting back at her table, laptop open, headphones on.
Tonight, she was focused. I could tell by the way she leaned forward when she was concentrating, the crease between her brows catching the light each time she paused to think.
Now and then, she’d hold all that hair in one hand and pull it off the nape of her neck before letting it fall back down.
It made me think about gathering it in my hand, running my hands through it … and doing other things.
She spoke softly into her mic, measured and calm, pressing a button every once in a while before leaning forward and speaking again.
True crime.
The words scraped against me every time I thought them. I’d looked up her website and felt a little mollified. All of her cases were serious and weren’t any campy joke shit. There were some pictures on her website, but they were generic when you clicked through them.
OSP handled all kinds of cases, and before I moved to Fish and Wildlife, I worked homicide.
It meant that I’d watched families fall apart more often than I liked while strangers leaned in around the edges of scenes.
There were those moments when I’d zipped up the classic black body bags over faces that were swollen by heat or ravaged by animals and learned how quickly people forgot themselves when their curiosity turned ugly.
Death was something I was used to, and it prepared me well for my current job.
Being a game warden meant that if someone went missing, I was sometimes part of the team that went searching, and it also meant that we were sometimes the ones who found people who chose to end their lives in the woods.
It was often on us to bring them home to their loved ones for a proper burial and to respect their privacy while we did so.
Hattie made a living telling true-crime stories, and that should have been enough to shut down whatever this was. A clear line. A professional red flag waving in my face.
Instead, I was out here on the deck letting the dark stretch while I sipped my beer, letting my attraction towards her braid together with frustration at my inability to pretend that I was above it.