6. Hugo
Hugo
Ishouldn’t have kissed her, God, I shouldn’t have done it, but I needed to, I’ve been wanting to kiss her since the moment I saw her.
Now, I’m sitting in my truck in her cabin driveway, my engine running, watching the sleet come down, and all I can think about is doing it again.
The feel of her mouth, the way she kissed me back without hesitating, the way her hand found the front of my jacket, and the way she said you're a terrible liar, Hugo letting me know she wasn’t hurt by me pulling back, instead, she was joking with me about it.
I put the truck in reverse and pull away and remind myself that she works for me and she’s twenty-four years old.
She’s in Forge Creek for three weeks, and then she goes back to the city and her life that has nothing to do with mountain roads.
She came here after a man hurt her publicly?, and she is still flinching from it, even when she is pretending not to.
I was to curious about her, that I searched her name up online, it wasn’t hard to find and I read everything, I know I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help myself.
She needs steady ground, not a man who is nineteen years older than her and pressing her against a cabin door in the sleet because he ran out of restraint.
I drive home, but I don’t sleep.
The storm has moved faster than the forecast said it would.
By six in the morning there’s snow above four thousand feet and sleet below it, and the upper ridge access road has two reported inches of new ice since midnight.
I’m at the Road the state team has confirmed the inspection date. Twenty-two days is now fifteen, they had a cancellation and we’ve been moved up. Damn it, that’s what we get for being on their cancellation list.
I stand at the window with my coffee and look at the weather moving in off the mountains and think about everything still sitting in the grant file that is not done.
The remote bridge on the upper ridge access route, we repaired the drainage channel and the abutment on that bridge two months ago.
The repair is solid, but the photo log has a gap.
The weather condition note is missing, and the state file will flag it as incomplete if we don’t document the site before the inspection, and if this storm settles in for three or four days the way the forecast suggests, we won’t get back up there before the road conditions become impossible to justify.
It needs to be done today.
I’m making the file list when I hear the office door.
I turn and see Elsie enter the office and I notice that she’s wearing her new boots, she’s carrying coffee, her laptop bag, and wearing her high-vis vest already, over a thick sweater, like she’s about to going on a field trip.
"Road's worse today," I say.
"Good morning to you too," she says.
She glances at me and looks away and then deliberately looks back, chin up, the same way she did at the culvert the first day, like she is daring herself to hold the eye contact.
I give her the upper ridge file without saying anything else, she laughs as she opens it and thankfully doesn’t say anything as she gets to work.
I try to act normal, but I fail, somewhat, because about fifteen minutes later she says, without looking up. "Are we doing this?"
"Doing what?" I ask, acting like I’ve no idea what she’s talking about.
"Pretending you didn't kiss me against my front door last night."
I go still, but she hasn’t noticed as she’s still looking at the file.
"It was a mistake," I say.
She sets the file down. "Funny," she says. "It didn't feel like one."
I sigh. "That's the problem."
She looks at me for a long moment. I hold her gaze and I watch her nod.
"Okay," she says finally. "Fine." She picks the file back up and I go back to the weather report.
Neither of us says anything else. But the air in the room is different, more tense, more charged and I have no idea what to do about it.
My cell rings, and Darnell’s name flashes across the screen.
I answer before the second ring. “What’ve you got?”
“I’m on upper ridge,” he says. “Access route’s still open, but it’s getting slick.”
“How’s the bridge?”
“That’s the problem, the drainage channel’s running hard from last night’s runoff. There’s debris near the repair.”
That’s not good. “Near it or against it?”
I hear his deep sigh. “Can’t tell without getting closer.”
“Then don’t.”
“I wasn’t planning to.” Wind cuts through the line. “The bank’s too slick, but the state file’s flagged for that repair, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it needs eyes before the storm hits properly.”
I’m already reaching for my jacket. “I’m coming up.”
“I can wait for Corey,” he tells me.
“No. Stay where you are, keep eyes on the runoff, but don’t go past the marker.”
“Copy.”
“If that shoulder starts moving, get back in the truck.”
“Already in it.”
I am pulling my jacket on when Elsie says, "I'm coming."
"No."
"Hugo."
"The upper ridge road is icy, the site is remote, and visibility is going to drop this afternoon. There is no reason to put you on a mountain in this."
She stands up, the file checklist in her hand, the one she built herself, every site coded and cross-referenced.
"I have the documentation checklist," she says.
"I know what photos need date stamps and what angles the state team wants and what the supplementary weather note needs to say.
You know the site, and I know the file. You need both. "
"I can handle the documentation."
She raises a brow. "You said that about the filing system too."
I sigh, she’s right, but I don’t want her on the mountain in this weather.
"You keep saying you're protecting me," she says, quieter now. "But sometimes it feels a lot like you're keeping me where you don't have to deal with me."
"This road isn't safe," I say.
"Then why are you going? If it’s not safe for me, why is it safe for you?"
I sigh, I know her well enough by now to know that she’s not going to give up on this. If I’m going, she is too. I pick up my hard hat and grab the spare one from the cabinet and hold it out to her, she takes it without smiling.
"You stay where I put you, you don't step past barriers, and if I say we're leaving, we leave. No arguing."
She nods instantly. "Agreed."
"I mean it, Elsie."
"I know," she says. "So do I."
The upper ridge road is worse than I expected. I knew it would be bad, but I didn’t know it would be this kind of bad, the road looks passable, but I know better. I can see it. I’ve worked this business long enough to see the trap.
I drop the speed and put more weight on the brakes, and the truck steadies.
Elsie doesn’t say anything, she’s watching the road out the windscreen with her file checklist in her lap and her jaw set.
"Are you always this calm in bad weather?" she asks.
"Being calm saves lives."
"That didn't answer the question."
"It did."
She looks at me for a second. "You know, a normal person would say something like 'yes, I'm very experienced and we'll be fine.'"
"We'll be fine," I say.
"Now I don't believe you."
The road narrows, the trees close in on both sides, branches have been bent under ice, a few already snapped and are sitting in the ditch. The radio crackles with Darnell confirming he is heading back down. The main crew is off the mountain. Good. I want them off before the front moves in.
"The bridge abutment repair," Elsie says, looking at the file. "There's a reference to a secondary drainage outlet on the east side. Is that the one that was most affected by the runoff?"
"Yes."
"So that's the one that needs the photo. The state team is going to want to see that the outlet is clear and the repair is holding."
"Right."
"And we need a note that accounts for today's debris without making it look like the repair failed."
"The debris is surface runoff from overnight snow melt, it’s nothing to do with the structure."
"I'll write that into the weather condition note. The date, the conditions, the debris source, and the structural status confirmed." She makes a note. "Do you have the site code for the east abutment?"
I tell her and she writes it down, all the while I continue to watch the road.
The site is cold, wet, isolated, and beautiful.
The bridge is a single span over the upper ridge creek, a repair job we finished in October when storm runoff had scoured one abutment enough to compromise the footing.
The repair held through winter. I can see it from the approach, the new concrete clean against the older stone, the drainage outlet clear, the shoulder graded properly.
I get out and go straight to work. Elsie’s right behind me, hard hat on, high-vis bright against the grey and white of the mountain, and her boots planted properly on the icy gravel.
She photographs the abutment first, date stamp visible, then the drainage outlet, then the surface of the road shoulder on both sides.
She asks me to confirm the site code on the marker post, finds it has accumulated ice and can’t be read, photographs it anyway and notes in the file that ice obscured the marker, but site confirmed by foreman on-site, which is exactly the right call.
I check the repair, then test the abutment, and check drainage flow. The outlet is clear, the repair is solid, the debris is sitting on the road shoulder, not in the channel, exactly where I thought it would be.
"East outlet," I say. "Get a wide shot first, then close on the channel."
She crouches and gets it without my asking twice.
"There's a drain marker over here," she says, stepping carefully toward the edge of the shoulder. "Partially buried. Is that in the original repair log?"
I walk over.
She’s right, the original survey had a secondary drain marker that we logged in October but is not in the photo file.
"Good catch," I say.
We’re packing up when the wind changes. It’s just suddenly coming from a different direction, harder, and the snow that has been falling steadily starts moving sideways instead of down. I check the sky and then check the road behind us.
"We need to go," I say.
She doesn’t argue, which I’m grateful for.
She closes the file folder and tucks it under her jacket.
We get to the truck fast. I get it turned around on the narrow road, which takes longer than I want with the shoulder soft on both sides, and we start back down.
The visibility has dropped by half in twenty minutes, the trees are loud with the wind, and the radio is cutting in and out.
Then I see it, a tree, not small, across the road in front of us. It must have come down while we were at the site, too much ice weight on the upper branches, the whole thing down sideways across both lanes.
I stop the truck and get out. I walk to the tree. It’s not a small-branch situation, it’s a full trunk, three feet through, sitting on both shoulders and going nowhere without a chainsaw and a crew.
I radio down, even though the signal’s bad, I manage to get enough signal to get through.
I walk back to the truck. Elsie’s watching me through the windscreen, and I can see from her face that she understands what’s happened.
"We're not going back," she says when I get in.
"Not tonight."
She is quiet for a second. "What do we do?"
"There is an emergency maintenance cabin. About half a mile back toward the site. Road & Ridge keeps it stocked for situations like this."
She looks at the road ahead, which is getting worse by the minute. "Of course there's a creepy storm cabin," she says. "Why wouldn't there be a storm cabin?"
"It's not creepy," I say.
"That is exactly what someone says about the creepy cabin."
My lips twitch at her words. "It has a stove and blankets and emergency supplies. It’s practical."
"Sure." She pulls her jacket tighter. "Lead the way."
We make it to the cabin in the truck, barely.
The access track is unmarked and I only know about it because I’ve used it twice in fifteen years, but it’s there.
The cabin is there at the end of it, a squat stone and timber structure that has been sitting at the edge of this ridge since before I started on the crew.
I get us inside. There’s one room, with a low ceiling, an old iron stove, a woodbox beside it with dry timber, there’s a narrow cot along one wall, with a folded blanket on top of it, along with shelves with emergency rations, a first-aid kit, stored water, a hand-crank radio, and a toolbox.
I get the stove going first, the wind hits the door behind us. Thankfully, the fire takes, slow at first, but then it takes off and I know that as long as I keep it feed, it’ll last all night.
I turn around and see Elsie standing in the middle of the room, looking around the space of the cabin.
"Well," she says, voice a half step too bright. "This seems like a terrible idea."
She’s right, because outside the storm is getting worse and inside there’s not much space, I can reach her within two steps.
I’m in tight quarters with Elsie for the night and I have a feeling that tonight could change everything.