Chapter 1 #2
An ache, sharp as hell, pierced my heart.
“Are you all right?” the man asked when I hadn’t managed more than an oh, um. “Do you need help?”
“I’m sorry.” I shook my head, barely aware of the way my palm had started pressing into my sternum. “I…must be at the wrong cabin.”
But that wasn’t true. The key code had worked. Steph’s directions had been immaculate. And the sign… I wasn’t at the wrong cabin.
He was.
“I mean, is this,” I cleared my throat, my pitch rising when I asked, “PeePaw’s Hideaway?”
His lips twitched. “The one and only.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “So, are you leaving today?” My gaze found its way back to his towel. “Maybe late for checkout because you were taking a shower?”
Crossing his arms over his chest, he leaned against the door frame. His eyes kind of…sparkled at me. “No shower. This cabin doesn’t have running water.”
“But…you’re all wet.”
His brows rose, and I had a sudden desire to dive headfirst into the creek behind us and let it burble me all the way to the ocean.
“I wasn’t planning on leaving today,” he said with something that felt like generational calm, like if he had them, his siblings were calm too.
And his parents and grandparents. Like if his family ever came to one of my family’s cookouts, they’d all sit back and share a good-natured chuckle at our generational chaos. “I’m booked through Monday.”
“Just you?” I asked for some insane reason. “I mean, you’re here alone all weekend?” Good god! “I mean I am here alone all weekend. This is my cabin. My coworker rented it for me.”
“Wait.” His brow knotted. “Are you serious?”
I pressed my lips into a well I’m certainly not joking smile.
“Hmm.” His hum was low and thoughtful. “They must have double-booked us. I reserved this cabin last year. And the year before that. I’ve stayed here at PeePaw’s every Labor Day weekend for the last four years.”
The smoke from the cognitive grenade of seeing a half-naked man in a cabin I thought would be empty began to clear, and my heart, putting it all together, kicked itself off a cliff. This wasn’t my rental. This wasn’t my weekend to get away from it all and find myself again. It was his.
“Shit.” Despite the way my eyes burned, I refused to cry in front of some bare-chested, deep-voiced, generationally calm stranger. But I really needed one thing in my life to go right. Just one.
Spinning on my heel, I marched back to my car.
“Hey.” He came after me, walking to the end of the porch. Which, with that porch and his bare feet, seemed ill-advised. “Where are you going?”
“To find somewhere to sleep tonight. Sorry to bother you. Enjoy your stay.”
When I started back down the drive, he remained in my rearview, standing in his towel, watching me go with a frown while his dog dropped a tennis ball at his feet and a light rain began to fall.
“Please, tell me you have Wi-Fi.”
“Storm caught you out, huh?” the twenty-something cashier behind the counter of the mercantile store asked. Their eyebrow ring glinted above their charitable smile as they handed me a towel with an intricately tattooed hand.
“Thank you. Wi-Fi?” I asked again, drying my face and neck as rain pelted the windows, rain that had transitioned from a light sprinkling to a biblical downpour once I was a mile from the cabin.
“Yeah, we do. It’s $4.99.”
“You charge for your”—I raised a hand, cutting myself off. “Of course you do. We’re a captive audience. Like a cruise ship that goes absolutely nowhere.”
They winced. “I know, right? But you get lifetime access so…” Trailing off at my expression, which probably conveyed at least eighty different ways of saying do you really think I’m ever coming back here? they took my card.
After paying for the Wi-Fi—and a huckleberry cinnamon roll because I was a stress-eater—I tucked myself into a corner. Surrounded by chocolate bars, tourist hats, and Montana history and travel books, I pulled up Steph’s contact.
“How did I know you’d be on the Wi-Fi within ten minutes of getting there?” she asked by way of hello. “Seriously—”
“There is a man in my cabin.”
“Damn, woman.” She whistled. “That might be a land-speed record for finding a hookup. I am so proud of you right now.”
“No, Steph.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Not a man for me.” Although I might have thought about it for 0.5 seconds after watching that drop of water slide down his throat into the divot above his collarbone. “A man who also rented the cabin for the weekend. We were double-booked.”
“Oh, no.” The gravity of the situation finally set in. Almost. “Wait, what does he look like?”
“Steph!”
“You’re right. Sorry. But you know, I remember thinking it was kind of wild that the cabin was available, because literally everything else there was booked. I thought it was kismet. Like it was meant to be. You and Balsam Ridge and that one perfect cabin.”
“Did you just say that everything else was booked?” I sounded like a steel guitar, high-pitched and whiny. “Because it’s getting late, and it’s raining, and I don’t have anywhere to stay.”
“I am going to figure this out for you. Give me ten minutes, and I’ll call you right back.”
Sliding my phone into my purse, I walked back up to the counter.
“Is there a hotel around here?” I asked, giving the cashier a humorless laugh. “Someone is already staying at my rental.”
“I overheard. What a bummer.” They ran their hand over their pixie cut. “I’m pretty sure the entire town is booked up. Holiday weekend, ya know? But you might find something in Garnet Springs.”
“That’s two hours from here.”
“Yeah.” Their nod was solemn, understanding, like a doctor telling a bread lover they had to stop eating gluten. “We offer free camping out back, though. I think there are still some spots if you have a tent.”
Did I have a tent? Steph packed my trunk full of “everything you’re ever going to need up there.” And since the cabin I was supposed to be drinking a glass of red wine and reading a book in had no running water, that everything might actually include a tent.
Lightning flashed, followed by a crack of thunder that shook the windows.
Handing the towel back, I said, “I’m not really a camp in a thunderstorm kind of gal.
” I rubbed my arms as adrenaline drained from my bloodstream, leaving me cold and wet and hollow.
I needed to get warm, then I could figure my life out.
I needed a sweatshirt. I had one in my bag, I just needed to go get—
I looked through the window. At my car. Where my bag was not because I’d left it on that bare-chested man’s porch. “Oh, fuck my entire life.”
“Good luck,” the cashier called out as I hauled open the door, ducked my head, and stomped back into the rain.
When had my life become such an enormous cosmic joke? I used to be on top of shit, totally in control. I was a mother, a wife, a professional and put-together person. Now I was a lonely, single, midlife disaster who did things like leave her bag on stranger’s porches.
Driving back down the dirt road that was starting to look more like a muddy river, I turned left at the big ass tree, again at Prince’s mailbox, then jerked hard into my seatbelt when my tire sank into one of the ruts on PeePaw’s driveway.
I threw the car in reverse, then rocked it forward again.
Not budging physically—but spiraling at lightspeed emotionally—I stomped on the gas pedal and gunned it.
Wheels spun in a futile, high-pitched whir, fat clumps of mud painting the windows while the car burrowed itself deeper and deeper into the earth.
And there was a metaphor in there somewhere that I refused to acknowledge.
Surrendering to my downward mobility, I shouldered the door open, staggered out into the rain, and promptly lost a shoe to the wet, sucking mud.
While I hopped one-footed toward the cabin, shouting curse words at the sky, some distant part of me knew that my tenuous grip on sanity had slipped.
That the loneliness creeping up behind me had finally sank its teeth in.
By the time I dragged myself up the porch steps, the rain had plastered strands of hair to my face, my clothes clung wetly to my body, and I could barely breathe through the viselike grip cinching my chest. Hot tears made tracks through the cold rain on my cheeks.
And when he pulled open the door before I’d even raised my fist to knock, when he stood there in a snug white T-shirt and loose gray sweatpants with his mouth half open and his brow half creased, I fell apart.
“I’m…sorry,” I stammered through a violent onrush of fat, unstoppable, body-wrenching tears.
“But I just drove all day in a rental that has decided to fossilize itself in the driveway, made it through a live cow roadblock, and just lost one of my favorite shoes in the mud so I could come here for what was supposed to be a relaxing getaway. So I could at least try to reset after a really shitty week that included,”—I started counting on my fingers—“totaling my car, flooding my basement, getting my first colonoscopy, talking down one of my sophomores after he let me know, in the middle of the hallway, that he was freaking out because his girlfriend wanted to peg him. And then”—I pulled in a jagged, throat-incinerating breath—“and then my son, my favorite person in the whole world, decided to leave for college a full week early because he wanted to hang at the beach with his buds instead of hanging with me, his mother, the woman who has loved and supported him unconditionally his entire life, who had been his ‘bud’ since the day she pushed him out of her body and into the world.”
The man only blinked. Not that I could blame him.