first match. I could almost smell the smoke, hear the explosion as the varnish ignited. Dialing my cell phone, I shook my head as if waking from a strangely satisfying fog. I muttered, “We could say it was an accident… Like I tripped and the gas just spilled out of the -”
“Samantha Shackleton.” My lawyer picked up on the first ring. And from the tone of her voice, I could tell I was taking her away from valuable after-hours downtime.
“Hi, Sam, it’s Lacey,” I said. How exactly did one broach this subject with their attorney, I wondered. “So … uh, that thing they say about possession being nine-tenths of the law … if something’s in my possession, I can’t really get in trouble for damaging it, right? Because nine-tenths of it is mine anyway.”
“Oh, Lord,” she muttered. “Lacey, whatever you are thinking of doing, first of all, don’t tell me about it. And secondly, just don’t. I want you go into your bedroom, get a pillow, and punch it. It will make you feel better.”
“It would just be a little fire.”
“Am I going to have to declare you a danger to yourself and others?” she demanded. “Lacey, I can’t represent you if you’re going to do things like this. Destroying Mike’s property particularly with arson, is what we call, in legal terms, a bad thing, all right? It won’t make you feel better in the long run and it will just make things more difficult for us. Mike could get all kinds of injunctions and damages and there’s the chance you could hurt someone -”
“I was speaking in the hypothetical!” I protested.
She was silent on the other end of the line.
“Okay, it wasn’t entirely hypothetical,” I admitted in a small voice.
“Have you been drinking?” she asked.
“Not … yet.”
“Are you alone?” she asked. “Is there at least one sane, sober adult with you?”
I handed Emmett the phone. “She wants to talk to you.”
With Emmett occupied, I wandered toward the boat. After my Realtor related hissy fit convinced Mike that I wouldn’t budge on selling the cabin, he tried to talk me into replacing the dock with a huge boathouse /workshop. His buddy, Charlie, had just added something similar to his lake house. Mike figured that if he couldn’t get the cabin he wanted, he would have a brag-worthy place to house his future seaborne penis replacement. While my refusal was rooted in my attachment to Grandpa’s dock, I appealed to Mike’s money sense. What was the point of having a waterfront cabin without a dock? How would that affect the potential resale value?
So Mike built the workshop around the dock, grousing about the added expense the entire time. He was unhappy about the cost, but got what he wanted. I was unhappy about having a pretentious faux Cape Cod mini- building ruining my view, but I got to keep my dock. And somehow both of us felt that we’d proven our points.
While I hoped that putting the workshop near the cabin would encourage Mike to want to go there more often, the cabin’s location and undesirability gave Mike yet another reason not to work on the boat. And according to Mike, it was my fault, because if we had a better lake house, he’d want to go to the lake more often, and he would be finished with the boat by now.
“No problem, Sam,” Emmett was saying. “I’ll keep an eye on her. I look forward to meeting you, too.”
“You, eat this and think happy thoughts,” Emmett said, shoving the ice cream back in my hands. “Sam says you are not to be left unsupervised for at least twelve hours or until your destructive urge passes. She said chocolate should speed that process along.”
Behind us, I heard the rumble of Monroe’s truck as he pulled up to his cabin. I looked out the window to see him pause and watch Emmett dragging me toward liquor and, hopefully, improved sanity. Monroe rolled his eyes and began hauling his groceries into his cabin, as Emmett, distracted by the sight of my grumpy, rumpled neighbor, gasped, “Oh, my God, who is that?” He screeched to a halt and stared after him. “I don’t normally go for the scruffy, taciturn lumberjack type but - wow!”
“That’s Wolverine,” I said, my words garbled by a mouthful of ice cream.
He grinned at me. “What?”
“That’s my neighbor, Lefty Monroe,” I said as Emmett shoved me onto my couch. “Despite the hotness, he’s a jerk. I think he’s got an internet porn addiction, possibly online gambling. In a choice between his being over- sexed or broke, I think I’m rooting for gambling.”
“I can work with either,” Emmett said, shrugging. “Wait, did you say ‘Lefty’?”
I swatted at his hand as he attempted to dig a chocolate chunk from my ice cream carton. “Yeah.”
Emmett grinned. “I wonder where he got that name. Oh, the possibilities are endless.”
“I don’t know, but if you start to make guesses, I will leave,” I told him.
“He’s just got so much potential,” Emmett told me. “Lacey, I think that tall drink of water is exactly what the doctor ordered.”
“For what?”
“To help you banish the memory of Mike the Moron. You know what they say, ‘The best way to get over one man is to get under another one,” Emmett said, bowing his lips into a pert moue as he poured the makings of his famous chocolate vodka milk shakes in the blender. “It’s a life philosophy I whole-heartedly embrace.”
“That’s because you’re a man-whore,” I told him.
Smiling sweetly, Emmett hit the frappe button. The grinding noise of the decrepit motor covered the stream of profane insults he sent my way. I could read his lips well enough to tell he was denigrating my intelligence, wardrobe, general hygiene, and ability to color coordinate a room. I let him vent. After all, he was providing the liquor.
“Believe me when I say you deserve a piece of that cranky beefcake across the way there,” he said, cutting the blender off with a metallic groan. “It will be like therapy, only without the couch. Or, use the couch. That could be a learning experience for you.”
“I don’t think more bad sex is the solution to my problem. Besides, he could be a serial killer for all you know,” I cried. “And he’s a potential serial killer who has zero interest in me. He’s made that abundantly clear.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that the other night he made it very clear that he has no interest in seeing me naked ever again.”
I lifted my face from the pillow and immediately regretted it. Someone had let a polka band loose in my cranium.
I groaned, rubbing my hands over my eyes to shield them from the unforgiving sunlight pouring through the window. I smacked my lips, cringing at the dry, sandpapery sensation of my tongue scraping the roof of my mouth. It tasted like a small rodent had nested there overnight. Given the cupcakes and circus-colored candy I had consumed, I suspected Mickey Mouse.
I rolled on my back, exhausted by the monumental effort that seemed to entail. Something felt wrong with my head, and not just the massive hangover. It felt too light. There wasn’t enough dragging weight between my head and the pillow. I gasped, reaching up to lace my fingers through my hair and finding nothing but sheet.
Cursing spectacularly, I stumbled into the bathroom and flicked the light switch. Squinting into the mirror, I screeched, “Damn you, Emmett!”
Obviously, my brother had cut my hair at some point during the evening, which he was wont to do when his sister was smashed. I should have known better. I woke up the day after my twenty-first birthday with sassy layers. I cursed the years Emmett spent dating the head stylist of The Right Tangle Salon. It had convinced Emmett that he knew more about my follicles than I did and he had just enough skill with the scissors to be dangerous. Now, instead of long curls that settled between my shoulders, I had a short, sunny cap of blond with a fringe of bangs across my brow. I looked like a pixie, a hungover pixie, but a pixie all the same
After plying me with an indecent amount of vodka, carbs, and fats, my brother had tucked me into bed and slunk away into the night. Emmett, ever practical, had cleaned up the mess before he left. When I woke in the morning to the sound of inhumanly loud jet Skiers whooping their way across our little cove, the only evidence that Emmett had been there was a collection of movies that he left to keep me entertained. The Strangers, Friday the 13th, Cabin Fever, Evil Dead, Sleepaway Camp - all movies about people who isolate themselves at cabins and end
