Authors: Ever McCormick
"Enjoying your hike?"
"Yes," I said too fast, happy for the subject change. "Which is the best trail?"
"Well, the trail names hint at their level of challenge. Hummingbird is short, quick, not likely to trip anybody up. Bear is the toughest hike. Eagle is a lot of uphill climbing, but the view at the summit is worth it."
Something I'd been wondering about came to mind. "I haven't seen another soul since I've been here—well, no one but you. Are the other cabins rented?"
"No, this early in the season is always pretty slow. You're the only renter for the next couple of weeks."
"Hmm." I was genuinely surprised. The cabins were beautiful, comfortable, reasonably priced. The air was a bit chilly, especially at night, but cool and pleasant in the afternoon. For hikers, fisherman, kayakers, the weather was ideal. "Maybe you need to advertise more."
He grinned at my suggestion. "I do all right," he said.
"Oh, no," I didn't mean to imply—"
Shut up
, the inner voice demanded,
please.
He stared at me for a second. He reached for a water bottle, unscrewed the top, and took a big swallow. He offered it to me, but I signaled to my own. "If you're hiking Eagle, you'll need to do about a mile on the main road in. Be careful. I post no cars signs on the road, but I still get some people who don't listen and don't always pay attention to
who’s walking on the road."
I snorted. The way I jumped every time a bird chirped,
I found it humorous that he thought I could miss a car coming at me down that bumpy road. Plus, I was one of those idiots he was talking about. "Yeah, I'll try to stay out of the way of speeding cars. I wouldn't want to get killed by some idiot who can't follow directions."
He flinched and I worried that my joke
—meant to poke fun at myself—wasn't very funny.
"Okay then," I said walking away from him farther down the trail. I turned back once and caught him checking out my butt, his eyes trailing up my body and meeting my eyes. He wasn't intimidating though. He seemed interested, rather
, and not just in the obvious, lusty way that I was interested in him. He shook his head again. I looked back ahead to the trail, trying to get him off my mind.
I told myself to stop thinking about Adam and more specifically, Adam’s firm muscles glistening in the sun.
I was supposed to be minimizing distractions, but this mountain had a really big distraction that I couldn't seem to avoid.
*
At dusk, I stared up to the pink and purple sky and then down to the empty bottle in my hands. The ice-cold beer had been like heaven after my long day of hiking. My eyelids felt droopy, and I realized it'd been only 24 hours since I arrived at the cabin. In that time, I'd managed to have several embarrassing run-ins with the only other human in something like a fifty mile radius, several freak-out moments in response to normal nature sounds, and I'd developed a serious case of horniness that was distracting me from the book I was trying to read—a romance novel.
I sat up in the hammock and reached for another bottle of beer from the cooler at my feet, cracking it open and taking a large gulp. I laughed
out loud. At some point you had to laugh at yourself; otherwise you'd go nuts.
I set the bottle on the wooden table I'd drug over and leaned back into the hammock. I'd found some WD40 under the si
nk and sprayed it on the hinges so I could swing in the breeze silently. I'd brought out a thin old-fashioned quilt that was thrown over one of the chairs inside and pulled it over me as I got back to my place in the book. The heroine was trying to ignore the magnetic pull she felt toward the bad boy, but I could hardly concentrate. My mental eye kept wandering back to that tanned, muscular chest and those biceps flexing as Adam swung the ax. Next thing I knew, I'd find myself looking at the sky again, daydreaming.
Michael and I had eventually taken care of my virginity, and we had some great, loving moments, but the one thing I could say I never really had with Michael was mind-blowing, lose
-control-of-myself sex. In fact, I honestly thought the kind of sex in romance novels and movies might be a myth.
I'd convinced myself of this fact until I heard my roommates and other college girlfriends talk about actually experiencing it. The truth of the matter was that one of my biggest fears was that the problem with sex wasn't sex, or Michael; the problem was me. Maybe I just couldn't lose control enough to feel
the euphoria I'd heard about from others. Maybe I was sexually challenged.
I dropped the book onto the ground
with a thump and let my hands travel under the quilt. I skimmed my fingernails down my smooth stomach and unzipped my jean shorts. I slid one hand down into my panties and let my fingertips explore the wet skin. I straightened out my body, bent my knee, and kept trying different positions until I felt a twinge.
I squirmed
and moaned under my own touch, but I knew I wouldn't be able to finish out here. I was already feeling that eerie sense that someone was watching. I couldn't relax enough to let go. I zipped my pants and folded my hands behind my head just as I heard someone or something walking through the brush.
I sat up and spotted Adam in the trees, walking toward the hammock. He wore a white t-shirt that
emphasized his tan. He smiled, not seeming at all like he had just seen an x-rated display of my sexual frustration, so I relaxed and decided to play it cool.
"Hey," I called, slapping my arm in response to a bug landing on it. I scratched at the
new red bump that raised from my skin and then at all the others around it.
Adam had walked right up to me and grabbed my bare arm, str
etching it out and examining the bites. "You didn't use the salt mixture, did you?"
I scratched again. "Nope."
He made a face.
"What are you doing out here?" I asked.
"I was headed home, and I saw you out here enjoying the hammock." He smiled knowingly and my whole stomach dropped. A moment passed before I let myself realize he’d seen me.
My face burned. My fists
clenched. Had he seen me? Had he stood there and watched?
I
remembered the feelings I'd been having ever since that first night—the unshakable sense that someone was watching me. He and I were the only people on this mountain. He could be playing some kind of sick cat and mouse game, playing with his prey before he pounced on it.
"Have you done that bef
ore?" I asked.
"What?"
"Have you watched me, but not said anything?"
His eyes guiltily shot to the ground and in that moment, I knew he had.
4
I stood up from the hammock without too much embarrassmen
t. All I needed was to fall on my ass while already feeling like a major ass. I stood up almost gracefully, slipped my feet into my flip flops, grabbed my full beer, and held my head high as I marched toward the cabin.
"Wait," he called. "I'm not
a stalker or anything. My cabin is right up this trail. I take care of the whole mountain. I can't help but see you when I pass."
I stoppe
d, but didn't turn around. "What did you see?"
He didn't answer, which led me to believe the answer was bad. "I saw you just now, but it's okay.
I'm not judging you. I'm not. I happened to be walking by. Seemed odd not to tell you I was here—that’s all—so I tried to make a joke of it."
I turned around
to face him. He had those crystal clear eyes focused right on me. They were intense and determined. He seemed to be honest. The white shirt was so clean, so bright in the sun. It should be dirtier for all the work he claimed to be doing. Then the image of him cutting wood filled my head and I understood him a little better. I'd done it, too—innocently come upon him thinking he was alone, and I'd watched for longer than I needed to. I hadn't come out of the woods on my own like he had either. I'd been exposed by my own lack of coordination. Still, this wasn't a moment for me to be the bigger person. I was too mortified.
"N
othing to be embarrassed about," he said, and he smiled in a friendly way, not a leering way.
"I'm not," I lied. "I'm pissed. I ca
me here to be by myself. My friends called me their modern-day Thoreau. But there is no place where a person can be by herself in nature anymore. That doesn't exist, so I'm pissed I can't have that. It has nothing to do with you." I walked to the side of the cabin. Before I turned the corner so I could retreat to the safe place behind my dead bolt, I said—trying to ensure my voice didn't shake during my delivery—"Please, leave me alone tonight. I'm not kidding. Take another trail."
I went inside the house, slammed the dead bolt shut, and gulped the beer, hoping to incite a mind-numbing drunk. I returned to the romance novel, reading by the oil-light with all of the curtains and windows closed. After the second love scene, I took the book to that huge bed and finally reached the release I'd been clamoring for since I woke up this morning. Some of the frustration left
me, but I could still feel most of it there unresolved, bubbling in my core like a simmering pot.
One thing I hadn't even considered when conceiving of this trip was the idea that I would become a total horn ball and be perpetually distracted by the sexy mountain man landlord
—who would see that coming? But that's exactly what was happening. There was no way I was going to figure out the big mysteries of my life if all I could think about was sex on a stick up there chopping wood a quarter mile away from me.
*
When my phone chirped, I jumped out of my seat. I stared at it vibrating on the counter, where I'd left it that first night. It hadn't made a sound until now. I looked at the clock and realized it was my old alarm from school reminding me to prep for the lab I had to go to on Monday. I'd turned all of the notifications off, and surprisingly, I'd finally stopped thinking about texts, emails, and Facebook. I clicked through now, slipping on my flip flops and opening up the dead bolt and door to let in the fresh morning air. I took the short walk up the trail until I felt the vibration of messages coming in, signifying I had reached the sweet spot where I could get service.
I had about a million Gap coupons and Ulta discounts, a few likes on Facebook for my announcement that I was going off the grid, a missed call from my mom, and a request for a donation from the alumni group of my school. Jeez, could you wait for me to get a job first with my big expensive degree? Michael still hadn't tried to reach me, but I was feeling less surprised by his lack of communication, and therefore, slightly less hurt
by it.
On my way back to the cabin, I spotted a bright blue stone on the side of the path. I bent down to pick it
up and inspect it, realizing that it matched the stones from the mosaics on the porch of my cabin. How neat it would be, I thought, if I started a project while I was here. I could create two mosaics like the ones on the porch, using them as my guide. I could leave one here, something to put my mark on the cabin, and another to take home to remind myself of the mark my time at the cabin had left on me. I smiled at that thought, and bent to study the stones at the side of the path. The stone I had found stood out from the others. It was smooth, and on closer inspection, I noticed, it was navy blue with white streaks through it that resembled smoke. No wonder someone had been inspired to make art with these stones. They were beautiful.
I spotted a similar
stone farther down the trail and then another. I bent to scoop up each one, rub the dirt off their surfaces, and slip them into my pocket. By the time I reached the cabin, I had a handful of the stones, and I laid them out on the banister of the porch where I'd be able to examine them in the sunlight. It'd be nice to make my mosaics on the porch. It was just what I needed: a cool project to occupy my mind and keep it off the locals.
I was spacing the stones out evenly on the banister when I heard a sharp thump somewhere around the cabin. My eyes swept the surrounding woods for a trace of Adam. I was beginning to know the trails better so I knew just where to look for him. But apparently, he'd honored my request to leave me alone. I dusted my hands off on my shorts and walked around the cabin to see
if Adam was on the trail in back. Now that I'd had the night to myself and most of the morning, I was sort of missing my only current source of human contact and wouldn't mind a hello. Maybe I'd even apologize for being so dismissive last time we spoke. It wasn't his fault I wasn't born in the 19th century and couldn't have my Thoreau experience.
As I turned the corner, I swore I saw a person going around the opposite corner of the cabin as if heading to the front. I first assumed it was Adam, and then I got chills.
The eeriness returned. Even though I'd caught only a glimpse of the person's back leg, it didn't seem like Adam—something about the way it moved made it seem strange.
I stopped behind the cabin and took a deep breath. I was doing it again. I was unnecessarily freaking out. I bowed my head and squeezed my eyes shut, pushing the dropping stomach feeling away.