“It was fun. I needed to get my mind off stuff. This helped.”
“What stuff?”
“I don’t remember,” she said. “That’s how well it worked.”
“Glad I could help by putting you to work. If you need more distraction, you could clean the gutters.”
“You know what? I’m good. But thanks for the offer.”
“Dinner now?” he asked.
“Yes, please.”
Chris turned on the ceiling fan to help dry the paint more quickly. Joey went to the guest room—her room apparently for the next couple of weeks—to figure out what to wear for their date. Not a date. Not really. Well, sort of a date. She had two missed texts from Kira.
Text message one read, Have you banged him yet?
Text message two read, How about now?
Joey wrote back, No, we haven’t banged yet. He’s an old friend from high school. We are going out to dinner so stop texting me. If/when there is banging, you will be the first to know.
Then she sent a quick text to Dillon letting him know she made it to the cabin a day early and she’d see him tomorrow unless he was dying to see her tonight, which she knew he wasn’t because she still had a feeling he’d planted Chris here in the cabin for nefarious reasons. Seemed like something Dillon would do.
She cleaned up for dinner as quickly as she could. Chris had seen to everything in the house, every little detail. He’d even installed a rain showerhead and put new soft cotton towels in the bathroom linen closet. It was like staying in a hotel, a hotel that came with its own sexy contractor/concierge, which made this the best hotel she’d ever stayed in.
While drying her hair she realized she was smiling. That was good, right? She’d cried all Saturday night on Kira’s couch at her place in LA. Smiling was a huge improvement over gut-wrenching sobbing. She felt more human back in Oregon, back on the mountain and near the lake where she’d spent so much of her childhood. If she wanted to go to the lake she could walk there blindfolded—out the back door and down the cut stone path to the edge of the forest. Then five hundred and sixty-eight steps on the dirt path. She knew the exact number because she’d counted as a kid because kids did weird obsessive stuff like count their steps. It was also one thousand one hundred and thirty-seven steps to the main road and nine hundred ninety-one steps to where she and Chris and Dillon had set up their campfires in high school.
It had always been the three of them back then—her and Dillon and Chris. Dillon wasn’t the sort of brother to resent his sister’s company. He’d needed her, even wanted her, around. Part of it was fear. At age fourteen he’d confessed to her he was ninety-nine percent sure he was gay, and she’d kept his secret for him until he’d worked up the courage to tell their parents. He’d told Chris shortly thereafter, and she and Chris had been first his secret keepers and then his protectors when the secret got out. At the time it hadn’t seemed strange that Chris had guarded Dillon’s back after her brother got outed at their mostly rural high school. They’d been friends forever. Of course Chris watched out for Dillon because Dillon would have done the same for Chris. But only now, after so many stories in the news about kids and bullies and suicide and school shootings and all that, did it occur to her that Chris had put his life on the line by protecting Dillon. Dillon’s life was on the line every single day just for being Dillon, but Chris had been right there with him, throwing punches when needed, and sadly, those punches had been needed.
Thinking back she was so grateful both Dillon and Chris survived those two ugly terrifying years of high school with their bodies and spirits intact. Still, she had to wonder if her constant worrying for her big brother was the reason she never got around to noticing how hot his best friend was?
By the time she finished blow-drying her long, dark hair and dressing in clean jeans, her knee-high leather boots and a red sweater, Chris had finished up in the master.
“Your car or my truck?” he asked as he pulled on his jacket. “Or should we go separately?”
She paused before answering. If they went together in the same vehicle, that meant they’d both have to come back to the cabin tonight. If they drove separately, Joey could come home alone and Chris could return to his place, wherever that was. Driving separately made sense. Driving together made it a date. Chris had left it up to her, like a gentleman. She liked that.
“Your truck,” she said. “The only small cars the rental place had left were Miatas. I don’t trust rear-wheel drives in Oregon rain.”
“I’ll drive, then. Truck’s a little messy, fair warning.”
“I can handle it.” She pulled up her jacket hood and opened the front door where she promptly received a slap of frigid sleet right in her face.
She stepped back inside the house and closed the door.
She wiped the sleet off her face and looked at Chris.
“Nice weather we’re having,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
THEY ATE IN, which was fine. More than fine as Chris had filled the fridge per Dillon’s request with all the basics. She threw together a salad while Chris cooked chicken on the George Foreman grill. It wasn’t haute cuisine but it tasted a lot better than that mouthful of icy rain and sleet had earlier. While they ate she flipped through her pictures on her phone and showed Chris photos of the beach and her last whale-watching excursion. None of the pictures in her phone were of her and Ben together. He was camera shy, he’d told her. Another red flag she ignored.
Chris took out his phone then and showed her before, during and after pictures of the cabin as he’d cleaned it up and remodeled it. She couldn’t believe how thoroughly he’d transformed it.
“This place used to be such a dump,” she said. “Remember?”
“It was a nice dump, though,” he said. “Lots of good memories here. It was fun working on the place. It needed help.”
“How much is all this costing Dillon?” she asked, waving her fork around the newly remodeled cabin. Now that Chris had fixed the place up so beautifully, she was half-tempted to see if Dillon would sell it to her. Although with all the renovations, it was probably out of her price range.
“Not as much as it should. I gave him a discount on the labor. The interior work was about five. The exterior another five.”
“That’s not much for this kind of makeover.”
“You can swing a lot of bargains if you know what you’re doing.”
“And you definitely know what you’re doing.”
“I do now.” He took a bite of his salad and it appeared he was trying to cover up a smile. Of what? Pride? Pleasure in her compliment? Because this felt like a date?
“Is Dillon selling the place?”
“Did he say something to you about it?”
She
