Chapter 12
TWELVE
Dutch
I opened the door, my notebook under my arm, to find Mouse on the damn porch again.
It had been a week since I’d fucked up with Phoebe. A week of waking up each morning with my dick hard as a damn pike from dreaming about her. That lush mouth sometimes sucking me off in my dreams. Or I counted all the flecks of paint on her breasts and proceeded to give her an orgasm for each one.
Each time, I was denied.
Because I didn’t deserve to come. No matter how many times I used my own goddamn hand in the shower, the orgasm was hollow and made me feel like shit.
I shouldn’t have touched her. She wasn’t the kind of woman who had meaningless sex. She practically sparkled with golden happiness. I’d just fuck her up with my bullshit. She didn’t deserve that even if I’d been weak enough to tap into it for those precious few minutes.
She was better than any fucking drug I’d ever had in my life.
And I’d tried more than a few in my thirty-five years on the planet.
I’d done the rebellious teen phase with an extra layer of grief when my mom died.
Luckily I hadn’t gone too deep into the harder stuff.
I’d mostly stayed in the party-drugs-and-alcohol lane.
But writing had eventually replaced the parties and I’d traded one obsession for another.
I channeled the dark and twisty corners of my mind into psychological horror.
And my last book had been my finest one yet.
My publisher had believed in it as well.
To the tune of an eight figure deal. The first twenty-five percent had landed in my account two years ago.
Monte’s faith in the outline had driven me to write faster than ever before.
Between the research and development phase of my process and actual words, my novels usually took over six months.
Then a good chunk of revisions with my editor.
This one had been entirely in my head. No folklore jumping off point. No gods and monsters of lore.
Just man versus land. My character Gerry’s mind had been the monster. The Great Basin Desert had been the protagonist. Punishing extremes in temperature had been a great way to fuck with my character both body and mind.
Vantage Point was supposed to bring me to the next level in my career. Christopher had whispered all the things I’d secretly longed for. The movie adaptation that he’d seeded in my mind after he read the first few chapters.
My best friend and agent knew exactly what I wanted to hear.
Mouse barked and nudged my hand bringing me back to this damn rocky cove in New York. “Why aren’t you with Phoebe?”
His stupid tongue lolled out of his mouth as his nails tapped on the wood of the porch as he practically vibrated with the need to go for a run.
The snow and ice had melted leaving only a few mounds along the stairs and framing the driveway.
I headed down the stairs, Mouse following with excited barks.
No matter how much I ignored him, he looked for me every morning.
Phoebe had been quiet and distant. I spotted the lights on in her studio and her truck was gone at odd hours.
I found myself looking through my window for her all too often.
My system kicking into overdrive when I heard her calling for Mouse.
The dog was always on one of his walkabouts in the evening, but he always came ripping out of the forest at her call, happily tripping over his own feet to get to her.
The morning seemed to be my turn. I walked the beach each morning, Mouse usually in tow.
I’d found a cove about a mile away from Phoebe’s place.
The other side of my cottage was still walled off with ice and snow.
As the temperatures slowly rose, huge chunks of ice crashed against the rocks at the base of my house.
The sounds added to my sex dreams about Phoebe. Either I was sweaty and a second from getting off with her, or I was losing her to the lake. Didn’t take a genius to figure out I was a damn head case and ruined a good thing before it even began.
It was for the best, I just had to remember that.
For now, the walks on the beach were the only thing saving my sanity.
I climbed the trail at the edge of the cove and sat on one of the sunbaked rocks.
Mouse explored the shrubs, marking his way around the area.
I pulled my pen out of its loop and scribbled a few descriptions of the lake.
The lake took on a green tone thanks to the wreath of white pines, sugar maples, and eastern hemlocks with their massive statures.
I made some crude sketches. Analog felt far safer than even using my phone to take photos of the area.
I got up and stretched my back, called for Mouse, and made my way farther up the trail.
The sun had melted most of the ice and snow from the storm so I chanced the climb to get a better look at the center of the lake.
It wasn’t quite as incredible as the photos of Clear Lake from central New York, but Providence Lake sure as hell showed out. I was hoping to see the car Phoebe mentioned, but the chunks of ice were obstructing the view. I tried to visualize it.
My imagination had always been my super power for as long as I could remember.
Until this shitstorm.
Annoyed, I worked my way back down the path to the beach. Mouse crashed through the bush behind me making me jump. He bounded over to me with a stick in his mouth. He dropped it at my feet.
“I’m not in the mood to play.”
He nosed it closer to me.
I growled and picked it up, hurling it down the beach. He took off, pure joy in each stride. He tumbled after the stick and wiggled into the wet sand making Mouse angels, the stick still in his mouth.
I stood over him. “You’re an idiot.”
He pawed at the air until I bent down and rubbed his belly. I took the stick out and whipped it farther up the beach toward my cottage. He took off and we continued with that game until Phoebe’s house came into view.
She was on her basket swing, her knees tucked up against her chest. As I got closer, I realized she was painting her toenails. Such an ordinary thing, but instead of stillness, the basket was slowly rotating and she had complete focus.
Focus in chaos.
It was Phoebe in a nutshell. She’d been the same when we’d kissed. Vibrating with need and this inner glow that lured me in closer. I wanted to feed off it. To let it help heal the dark nothing I’d been sitting in for so long.
Which was why I’d stopped.
She didn’t deserve that. Using her for that was unfair to her because I wasn’t sure I’d ever have something to give back.
Mouse’s happy bark changed from the pure joy in the stick to realizing he was close to her house. He took off running up the icy hill, his weird little alien dew claws gripping the dirt and rocks for purchase as he climbed as nimbly as a goat.
Research was my default. I’d looked up everything I needed to know about the damn dog. If he was going to keep intruding on my life, I wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into. That was the only reason.
Phoebe’s face lit up as he scrambled up her porch. She set aside her bottle and opened her arms for him as he climbed into the swing with her. He wasn’t a lap dog for fuck’s sake, but she simply wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his fur.
What was she saying to him?
Shut it down, man. You don’t care.
I continued my trudge along the beach, my thighs burning from the longer than usual walk.
It was a good burn, but the beaches of California were different from being out in the cold, clean air here in New York.
I couldn’t help but glance over my shoulder at the two of them before I let myself in my cottage.
She didn’t even look my way.
It was a good thing.
I tossed my notebook on the sideboard then stripped off my sweatshirt and toed off my boots.
Before I could overthink it, I grabbed my notebook and stalked down the hall to my office.
The stretch of my rolling blank plotting board started shutting me down, so I rolled it away from my desk along the far side of the room.
I picked up the chalk and started scrawling on the walls instead.
A list of things I wanted to research about the lake. About the difference in seasons. About the people who came to the lake. Maybe even archives from the local library to see just how many accidents happened.
All of it would build the story and the tension.
I wrote in my own shorthand and the wall looked like hieroglyphics and odd dashes that I’d come up with over the years. First so my father hadn’t known what I was writing as a kid. The dark prose that consumed me after my mother died, then the crumbs from those ideas had been stolen for stories.
Being a writer didn’t make sense to my architect father.
After losing my mom, he’d thrown himself into work leaving me on my own a lot of the time, but I was expected to excel at school. To keep in line. To follow the path he had for me.
I’d never been good at following directions. I acted out and partied, and the only way he could control me was to go through my room to find my stashes and rip apart my notebooks.
So I’d learned to hide the real me a long time ago.
Now Christopher’s betrayal brought all of that back up. Stealing my work and my trust.
My nails scraped on the wall as the chalk disappeared into a nub. I swiped my fingers over the half thought to erase it then tossed aside the sliver and grabbed a fresh stick out of my chalk box right next to the doodle from Phoebe.
The happy little face with the sign that said “smile.”
I leaned on the table, my hand fisted to swipe it away, but couldn’t bring myself to ruin another of her drawings.
Instead, I sat down in my chair and rolled back into the center of the room to look over my brain dump.