Wait a minute. I glanced down at his hand and raised a brow at the bandless ring finger. Maybe he was one of those guys who didn’t wear a wedding ring for fear of losing his finger in an industrial accident? If so, he had no business flirting with me, forthrightly or otherwise.
“We didn’t get married,” he assured me.
Apparently I was less subtle in my finger-staring than I thought. “Because you resented the fact that you changed jobs?”
“No, because she decided she liked the lodge’s golf pro better than me.”
I gasped. What a bitch!
“Well, Jen had her good qualities. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have stayed with her.”
And in addition to finger-staring, I was also bad at containing my internal dialogue.
“Sorry,” I said hastily. “No, you know what? Screw her. She made you change the course of your life and then she decided it still wasn’t good enough for her. She knew what you did for a living when you were dating. It was exceedingly crappy to look at a great guy like you as a fixer-upper. Trust me, I know from fixer-upper, and you are not it. So I don’t take it back. She was a bitch and if she were here, I would gladly slap her in the face with a salmon.”
He stared at me, alternating expressions of wonder and muted irritation crossing his face. “With a salmon?”
“I would follow with cream cheese,” I told him. “My vengeance is best served with bagels.”
He slipped his free hand into mine and gave it a squeeze. I missed his warmth when he dropped his hand back to his side. “You’re an incredibly strange girl, and I mean that in the best possible way.”
“Trust me, I am aware.”
“Well, I’m still a ranger with all the privileges that rank gets me . . . which is not much. I do all the research and patrols expected of me. But in the off hours, I run the lodge’s nature appreciation programs, give lectures on conservation and demonstrations. There’s a great little nature center about four miles from here, and I help with the youth education programs there. We have a bunch of native owls, snakes, and deer. The kids love seeing them up close.”
I swear, my ovaries just did some sort of somersault. Good-looking, sweet and guileless as a golden retriever, and he liked kids? Maybe it was time I changed my type. There was something to be said for brawny and all-American. But I seemed to have enough romantic complications at the moment.
We opened the stairwell door to the lobby and I breathed a sigh of relief. Luke leaned in close and whispered, “I did have a reason to look for you earlier. Can you give me a hand with the dinner shift? I have a surprise for you.”
“It’s not possum-related, is it?”
“I can guarantee you that it’s not.”
“Then I will help you.”
6
In Which I Discover the Romantic Power of Cheap Frozen Pizza
I was happy to help Luke with dinner, not only because of the promised possum-free surprise but also because it kept me from the Boggle game Sadie was organizing. I expected to meet Luke in the kitchen, but I spotted him outside through the dining room windows, dragging one of the massive gas grills from the kitchen storage area to the wide veranda. I pulled my fluffy red hat over my head and poked my head out the door. “It seems like the wrong time for a barbecue.”
“There is a method to the madness,” he promised, pulling the cover from the grill and cranking up the propane tank. He lit the pilot and closed the lid with a flourish. “Heat source, heavy lid, effectively creating an oven. Redneck ingenuity at its finest.”
“Awesome!” I exclaimed. “What are we baking?”
“That’s the surprise.” Luke very carefully picked his way across the icy porch and into the kitchen. He emerged with a stack of green-and-yellow Auntie Nina’s boxes. “We are going to attempt the heretofore unknown propane-powered pizza oven.”
“Oooh, exotically prepared cardboard pizza,” I said, clapping my hands. “I love novelty dinners. You’re a genius.”
“As much as it pains me, I have to give credit where credit’s due. The Professor came up with this one.” His cheeks flushed. “He heard me tellin’ Sadie about you waxin’ poetic over a bunch of frozen pizzas and came up with the gas grill–pizza oven idea. It took me a while to find a full propane tank in one of the storage sheds. We don’t have much need for them in the winter.”
I swear, my heart just skipped. Charlie had gone out of his way to engineer an oven for my favorite cheap frozen pizza. It may have been the most considerate, romantic gesture a guy had made for me in a while.
That was possibly the saddest statement ever.
Carefully, we unwrapped the partially thawed dough disks and threw them onto the iron cooking grates. We stood on the porch, hopping from foot to foot, waiting for the smell of cooking pizza to drift out of the grill cover. I giggled, Lord help me, I actually giggled. Smoking a pizza in the middle of frozen nowhere was the most fun I’d had in months.
And we were going to be eating Auntie Nina’s, which I hadn’t had in almost three years. Auntie Nina’s was the cheapest pizza available at the Safeway near my college campus, and I’d stocked up on them as if imitation pepperoni were about to be declared illegal. College was the first time I’d been allowed to purchase and plan my own meals, so Auntie Nina’s full range of products was stocked in my mini-fridge/freezer. My meals had been pretty restricted through high school, since my mother had somehow gotten it into her head that she could diet the curves off of me. I may have gone a little crazy on the carbs. My freshman fifteen was more of a freshman thirty, but given a choice between a size six and a life that included bacon, I was a hell of a lot happier dancing with the divine swine.
“See, scary snowpocalyptic start aside, today hasn’t been all bad,” Luke insisted as he slid the first pizza from the grill. The pizzas were a bit singed but evenly cooked, and they smelled like home. “Interesting company, questionable pizza. I know how to show a girl a good time!”
“Oh, yes, you have game for days, Ranger.”
We brought the pizzas into the kitchen and Luke offered me the first slice of the bacon cheeseburger pizza, holding the gooey, greasy treat up to my lips. Giggling a bit madly, I bit into the thick yellow pseudo-cheese and cracker-like crust. And then I moaned in what could only be considered an indecent manner.
I opened my eyes to find Luke staring at me, wide eyed and openmouthed. “Yep, we should call the others for dinner.”
“Never mind,” he said. “I’m just going to go stand outside for a little while. It will be good for me. I need to, uh, calm down. “
“Go get the others!” I told him, tossing a dish towel at his back as he exited the kitchen. Laughing, I sliced the rest of the pizzas and carried them out to the communal dining room table. Humming happily, I placed the food out among the dishes Bonnie had set, eager to share my treat with my coworkers. I turned to find Charlie leaning against one of the booths, his arms crossed over his chest, watching me with a little grin on his face.
“Charlie!” I exclaimed, throwing my arms around his shoulders. “Thank you for redneck-engineering the pizza oven! It worked so well! I am so excited about dinner.”
“Well, it’s important to keep you in the luxurious lifestyle to which you have become accustomed,” he said, gesturing at the ooey, gooey cheese. “Do you have a minute?”
I set the pizza cutter aside and covered the pizza with foil. “Sure.”
Charlie led me out of the dining room, through the lobby, and into the hallway, behind the blanket door that separated the lobby from the residential floors.
“Earlier, you said that you broke up with Darrell.”
“It took you that long to process that, huh?”
Charlie shrugged. “Well, you have to admit, it’s more than a little shocking, Kelsey. I mean, I—we—everybody has been trying to convince you to break things off with Darrell for ye
ars. And then suddenly, you break up with him and say nothing for weeks? What’s that about?”
“I don’t want to rehash it. I’ve wasted too much time and breath on Darrell already. It’s over, enough said. And I’m glad.”
“I’m glad, too. I couldn’t stand to hear you talk about him, make excuses for him when I knew how unhappy he was making you. I want you to be happy, Kelsey, no matter what. That’s all I ever wanted.”
“So why have you been so . . .”
“Yes?”
“I’m searching for the right word,” I told him. “Inconsistent. You’ve been inconsistent with me. I thought we were friends, but there are times when you’re so distant, and it’s like you don’t even want to look at me. And it hurts my feelings, Charlie, really it does. And then, out in the woods, right after the possum thing, it was like you were going to—”
Just then, we heard a loud click behind us. The door to the changing/shower room opened. Sadie’s face appeared in the darkened doorway.
I clicked my flashlight on, shining it in her face like something out of Cops. She hissed, covering her eyes with her arm. Sadie’s wet hair was disheveled and her cheeks were rubbed raw. Given the distance at which Josh was following her out of the changing room, I guessed the damage had been done by beard stubble.
And then I noticed that Josh’s zipper was down.
I scoffed. “Really, you snuck away from the group to have sex in a secluded area of an abandoned hotel? It’s like the two of you have never seen a horror movie.”
Josh’s and Sadie’s faces were both red now, but I got the feeling that it was blood being redirected to their cheeks from . . . other places. I glanced back at Charlie, who seemed caught between giggling hysterically and passing out.
“Damn it, Kelsey, unless you’re planning on using excessive force, get that flashlight out of my eyes,” Sadie snarked. “You’re going to blind me. And we weren’t having sex. We were just checking blankets over the doorways in the hall. You know, making sure the heat stays in the dining room.”
“From the changing room? Where the shower is?” Charlie asked skeptically.
I giggled. “Sinners.”
Josh pinched the bridge of his nose. “Shut up, Kelsey.”
“You will never lecture me about appropriate behavior at work functions again,” I told them both.
“They don’t do that anyway,” Charlie reminded me.
“I like to hedge my bets.”
“Coming, Bonnie!” Sadie yelled suddenly. “I think I hear Bonnie calling me.”
“No, you don’t,” I told her.
“I think I would hear it, too,” Josh told her, shaking his head.
“No, I’m pretty sure I do,” Sadie insisted, before yelling, “I’ll be right there!” as if answering a call from the lobby. She smiled sweetly before disappearing through the blanket curtain.
“So you’ve found time for clandestine trysts in strange places, but not to propose?” I asked Josh.
“First of all, that wasn’t a matter of time management, that was water conservation,” Josh told me.
“No, no details, please,” Charlie protested. “It will be hard enough making eye contact with Sadie as it is.”
“Please don’t say ‘hard,’ ” I told him, holding up one finger in his face without even looking at him. Charlie shuddered.
“And second,” Josh continued, as if Charlie hadn’t spoken, “I haven’t found the right moment yet. I want Sadie’s proposal to be romantic and memorable . . . for good reasons.”
“It’ll work out,” I promised him. “But until then, I do plan on mocking your illicit shower sex, marking you for abandoned-hotel-horror-movie death at every opportunity.”
“I would expect nothing less,” Josh assured me.
Charlie peered up at the shadowed ceiling, chewing his lip. “Still not able to make eye contact . . . because your fly is still down.”
I clapped my hand over my mouth to prevent an inelegant, honking laugh from escaping. Josh pushed through the blanket barrier without looking back at either of us. But before the blanket swung shut, we both heard the distinct rasp of a zipper.
“So Josh is going to propose to Sadie?” Charlie asked. “That’s . . . well, it will be interesting to watch.”
“Yeah, if he manages to get through this without losing it or having a stroke, it will be a miracle. Someone has to supervise those two before they hurt themselves. So, I was saying, earlier, you’ve been sort of distant and—”
Suddenly, Josh reached around the blanket and yanked Charlie through. “Yipe!” Charlie cried.
“Josh, what are you doing?” I demanded, shoving the blanket aside. “I need him!” Charlie’s dark slashing eyebrows rose. “For a conversation!” I added hastily.
“Just had a brilliant idea,” Josh said. “Charlie, Will’s one of those creative thinkers, and you’re one of those people who sees the property damage and injuries that could be caused by creative thoughts. You two are going to help me come up with a romantic, memorable moment that will shock my lady-friend into promising to marry me.”
“Wait, wait,” Charlie said. “I want to talk to her.”
“You guys can talk later,” Josh promised. “My state of desperation is now.”
And just like that, Josh pulled Charlie through the lobby blanket door and left me alone in the dark hallway with no resolution to my romantic quandary. Sighing, I wiped my hands over my face and then looked up at the ceiling. I was starting to think I was being lady-blocked by a higher power.
“That was really mean.”
I was going to need two slices of Auntie Nina’s to deal with this.
7
In Which Everything Gets Much, Much Worse
To say our time in snow lockdown moved at a glacial pace would be an insult to both time management and puns.
Life became much more complicated, but somehow simpler. We were hygiene conscious, but attention to eyeliner tends to fade when you’re drying your underwear and socks over a utility sink. The beard-growing contest got off to an abrupt start, with Tom waking up the next morning with what looked like a full Amish scruff. Apparently Tom was half werewolf.
I captured our struggles on film, documenting each day’s beard growth, the meals we cobbled together, the expressions on my coworkers’ faces when they realized I had my camera. So far, it was a study in ill-kempt people who were alternately amused and irritable in each frame.
The idea board grew exponentially as earning the coveted gift cards became the most entertainment we saw all day. Some suggested campaign themes were better than others—frankly, “Kentucky: At Least We’re Not Arkansas” seemed sort of mean-spirited—but the work kept us distracted and productive. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel that there was some reason we were stuck up here together, stretching a weekend out into an indefinite sentence—er, experience. There had to be some lesson to learn or future robotic world takeover I could prevent in order to free us from Work Retreat Groundhog Day.
I made a more concerted effort to get to know my “fringe” colleagues, the people I hadn’t bonded with as closely as Sadie and Bonnie. We always felt so rushed at the office that I didn’t bother making conversation with them. I managed to pry out Jacob’s worst work-related memory, which involved his trying to power through the flu because a senator was expected to visit the biodiesel company he was working for and vomiting on the senator’s shoes. I found out that Tom used to work for Apple and had once survived a project supervised directly by Steve Jobs, but he had moved home to Kentucky when his wife’s parents needed more care. I talked more to Theresa and Dorie Ann, who always seemed a bit standoffish at the office, like their own little clique of two. It took me a few days to figure out that they weren’t a clique, they were a couple, and they weren’t quite ready for the others to know. I felt a little ashamed that I’d misse
d this development, and that I’d mistaken Jacob’s nerves for cockiness and Tom’s disappointed hopes for premature crotchetiness. I’d thought I shared important, close relationships with my coworkers, but I’d only skimmed the surface with some of them. I resolved to change that and asked more involved questions of them during our downtime.
I chastised myself thoroughly for how much I took my electronics for granted. My phone might as well have been a plastic paperweight. I couldn’t charge it. I couldn’t send e-mail. I knew I didn’t necessarily need those things. They weren’t as essential as keeping warm or clean or fed. But I missed them. Clearly my chances of surviving a zombie apocalypse would be hindered by my attachment to technology. It’s hard to run from hordes of the undead if you’re pining for Wi-Fi.
Then again, the upside of being trapped in the middle of nowhere with no phone was that I couldn’t check my voice mail, e-mail, or text messages. So I couldn’t be bombarded with “Oh baby, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it” messages when Darrell figured out that his latest squeeze wouldn’t put up with his bullshit. It was like detox, only less painful. Eventually, I barely noticed the absence.
It took me days to get over the sensation that I should be doing something work-related instead of chores. I’d been working to support myself since I was twenty. I worked holidays to stay away from home. I couldn’t afford vacations, thanks to Darrell’s spending habits. I wasn’t used to this sort of downtime.
Behind closed doors, I watched Sadie slowly but surely lose her freaking mind. At first I thought it was just the isolation, the cold, and the stress of trying to keep it together for the rest of us. But then I found her in the dining room going through Josh’s bag, throwing his stuff around like a crazy woman.