26 - Melissa

26

Melissa

“You’re an idiot, Melissa,” I grumbled to myself while taking the easy route down by myself. “He was clearly uncomfortable talking about prison, and you had to keep pushing. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

I passed one rider who had pulled off to the side, who was looking at me like I was a weirdo for talking to myself. Whatever. I didn’t care what some stranger thought.

When I reached the bottom, Ash was nowhere to be found. The guy behind the desk in the office apologized to me and claimed Ash had a family emergency, and offered me a voucher for another lesson. I accepted it, although I didn’t really care about learning how to mountain bike. I’d only done this to try to get closer to Ash.

Riding down the mountain was significantly easier than going up it. I would have enjoyed it, if not for the sting of embarrassment that wouldn’t go away.

It lingered even after I’d gotten back to my cabin, showered, and eaten a burrito for dinner. I felt a little better after two glasses of wine from a bottle purchased from the camp’s general store, but it only masked my guilt rather than banishing it.

I was bored. I didn’t feel like reading my book, and Noah was working late at the clinic. I glanced out my window hoping to see Jack around the camp, but he was nowhere to be found. Overall, it was a pretty quiet night.

I wondered where Jack was. It was only eight, so he was probably out somewhere. On a whim, I grabbed the half-drank bottle of whiskey I’d bought my first night in camp and carried it over to Jack’s porch. Two cats were lounging around, so I sat in a rocking chair, poured myself three fingers of whiskey, and waited for Jack to get home from wherever he was.

“Cats are good judges of character,” I said to the nearest one, an orange tabby with a notch in one ear. “You all seem to like Jack, so he must be a good guy. Right?”

The cat looked away from me.

“I’d love to see how you all act around Ash. That dude is terrifying . I thought I was beginning to get him to relax around me, but then I fucked it up by prying into his personal life. Which is the exact thing I hate when people do it to me.” I shook my head at the cat. “Stupid mistake to make, huh?”

One of the other cats jumped up onto the railing next to the chair, checking to see if I had any treats. I scratched her behind the ear, and she purred and pushed her head against my fingertips.

“Do cats overthink things the way humans do?” I asked. “Probably not. You seem to pick up on each other’s vibes and act accordingly. I should learn to do the same. In fact, I did that with Noah—I stopped analyzing things to death and jumped into things with him, and it has been great for me. Just goes to show you, humans aren’t very consistent. Life is easier as a cat. Trust me.”

Suddenly the door flew open and Jack lunged out onto the porch with a baseball bat held in both hands. When he saw it was only me, he relaxed.

“What the fuck are you doing on my porch at this hour?” he demanded.

“This hour? It’s barely past eight!”

“I was sleeping.”

My eyes left his bat for the first time since he appeared. Jack was wearing boxers and a gray tank top, his arms bulging out of the sides in the porch light. To my alcohol-influenced eyes, he looked good . He was also wearing wire-framed glasses.

“I didn’t realize you wore glasses,” I said to cover the fact that I had been ogling his biceps.

“I wear contacts. Most of the time.” He pointed with the bat, eyebrows rising. “You didn’t answer why you’re on my porch.”

I raised the bottle. “I was having a drink. I thought I would catch you coming home. Seriously, you’re in bed by eight? I thought you were cooler than that, grandpa.”

He sighed and lowered himself into the other chair. “I have to wake up at three. I’m clearing a section of trail about two hours east of here, near Mount Princeton.”

“Three? Shit, sorry for bothering you.” I started to rise, but he held out the bat to stop me.

“Slide that bottle this way,” he said.

“You don’t want to go back to bed?”

“I hadn’t fallen asleep yet. And it’s rude to let a woman drink alone.”

“How chivalrous of you.” I pushed the bottle in his direction, and he took a long pull directly from it. “How big is Mount Princeton?”

“It’s a fourteener.”

I stared at him. “I don’t know what that means.”

His brow rose in surprise. “You’re hiking the Colorado Trail and you’ve never heard of the fourteeners?”

“I’m from Ohio. And I didn’t do much planning for this trip.”

“There are fifty-eight peaks in Colorado above fourteen thousand feet of elevation,” Jack explained. “They’re known as the fourteeners. People like to climb them.”

“So you’re getting up early to climb the mountain?”

“I’m being paid by the Colorado Parks Department to clear away debris from the trail,” he said dryly. “That storm last night knocked down a lot of trees.”

“Storm?” I asked.

Jack blinked at me. “It was loud. Tough to miss.”

“I guess I was sleeping pretty soundly.”

“I’ll bet you were,” he muttered.

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he muttered, taking another swig of whiskey.

The grumpy tabby jumped up into Jack’s lap, kneaded with his claws for a moment, then curled into a ball and fell asleep. I stared at the cat, then looked up at Jack with a grin.

“Don’t,” he warned.

“Seems like the cats like you,” I said casually. “Like you’re more than just the guy that puts food out for them.”

“I mostly ignore the cats, which apparently draws them to me,” he said dryly. “That doesn’t mean I like them.”

“Sure,” I said doubtfully. “What did you mean just now? When you said I’ll bet you were?”

Jack looked down at the cat in his lap, took another pull of liquor, then slid the bottle back at me like he was done with it. “What are you and Noah doing?”

I gave a start. “If you want the steamy details, you’ll have to ask him.”

He shook his head in annoyance. “I don’t want the fucking details. I mean what are you doing with him? What are you trying to get out of this?”

“Why do you think I’m trying to get something out of it?”

“Because that’s how the world works.”

“I don’t want anything.”

“Bullshit,” he replied.

“I’m serious. It’s just a fun little fling until my ankle heals. It doesn’t have to mean anything. As soon as I start my hike again, it’ll be over.”

But even as the words left my tongue, it didn’t feel like the truth.

“How soon until your ankle is healed?”

I extended my leg and flexed my foot. “However long it takes for me to move it like this without pain. Noah says a few more days, a week at most. Why? Eager to get me out of that cabin?”

“It’s not about the cabin.”

“Because if you want to rent it out to customers, I can leave…”

“I don’t give a shit about the cabin!” he snapped.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Then what is it about?”

“Noah doesn’t know how to do casual . And I don’t want you hurting him.”

Hearing that gave me a thrill of excitement, but I tamped it down. “Noah is a grown man. He knows our fling has an expiration date.”

“What the head knows, and what the heart feels, are completely different things.” He leaned forward in the chair, arms flexing in the porch light. “Don’t you fucking hurt him, Melissa.”

“Excuse me?” I shot back. “You seem a little too obsessed with what I’m doing.”

“I care about my friend.”

“Is that it? Your friend? Or is it something else?”

His eyes flared with anger. “What are you implying?”

“You’ve shown an awful lot of interest in me since finding me on the trail last week.”

“Because you’re an inexperienced hiker who has no fucking idea what she’s doing. If I didn’t help you, you’d probably be fucking dead.”

“So you dragged me down from the mountain out of the kindness of your heart?”

“I didn’t drag you down at all. Ash carried you.”

“He did the physical dragging,” I clarified. “But you’re the one who stopped and insisted I needed to see a doctor. And then drove me three hours to your town. And offered me a free place to stay a dozen yards from your own cabin.”

Jack kicked back the chair as he rose to his feet, the cat nimbly leaping away. “This is why I don’t help strays. It always bites me in the ass.”

“So you don’t like me?” I asked, fueled on by the alcohol’s buzz. “You didn’t help me in the hopes that we would hook up?”

His eyes widened with surprise, then rage. “I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.”

“You had an erection,” I blurted out before I could stop myself. “On the ATV ride home.”

He rolled his eyes and stabbed his fingers in his hair. “Your ass was pressed against my crotch. You could have been the ugliest woman in the world and I still would have gotten hard.”

“So you’re admitting I’m not ugly?” It was a desperate angle, one I didn’t really want to pursue, but I felt committed now.

“You know you’re not ugly,” Jack replied.

I stood and moved closer to him, pressing into his space. I wasn’t sure why I was doing it, what I was trying to prove, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Single men don’t help attractive women without ulterior motives.”

He clenched his jaw and bit off his words: “Fuck. You.”

Jack grabbed his baseball bat and stormed back inside, slamming the door and engaging the lock. I stood there on the porch, trembling with anger and disappointment and a handful of other emotions I couldn’t place.

I left the bottle on the table and retreated to my cabin, but I struggled to sleep. I tossed and turned, replaying the argument in my head over and over.

I’ll bet you were , he’d said in response to me sleeping soundly. That was a jealous comment if I’d ever heard one. Maybe he did care about Noah’s emotions and whether or not I would hurt him, but there was more that was bothering Jack. I was certain of it.

The way he had growled at me, eyes full of emotion, his physical presence impossible to ignore… it turned me on. I was embarrassed to admit it even to myself, but it did.

There was something about Jack that intrigued me, even though he was kind of an asshole.

Eventually I managed to fall asleep. I hadn’t bothered to set an alarm, so the sun was shining and birds were chirping when I finally opened my eyes. I went to the kitchenette to make a cup of coffee. While it brewed, I heard footsteps outside on the porch.

Then someone knocked on the door with a heavy fist.

I immediately knew it was Jack. It shouldn’t have been him, since he was supposed to be at Mount Princeton today, but there was an urgency to the knocks that matched his mood last night. All my emotions came back, intrigue and frustration, so I left my coffee brewing and threw open the front door.

“Listen, if you regret what you said last night—”

I cut off. The man standing on my porch was not Jack. It was Ash.

“Oh,” I said, flustered to be suddenly faced with a taller, wider, more terrifying man. “What are you doing here?”

“Get dressed.”

“What? Why?”

He held up a helmet and climbing harness. “You have a via ferrata to finish.”