Two Cabins, One Lake: An Alaskan Romance Read online

  Two Cabins,

  One Lake

  Shaye Marlow

  Two Cabins, One Lake

  Shaye Marlow

  Copyright © 2015 by Shaye Marlow

  All Rights Reserved

  This story is a work of fiction. All of the characters, places, and events in this book are the products of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  Chapte

  r One

  ‘She came.’ No, I’d used that one about a thousand times already. ‘Exploded’ and ‘climaxed’ were out. ‘Orgasmed’ was too clinical. ‘Peaked’? No, too soft-core vague. I needed something fresh, something new, something crazy-hot.

  I was drawing a blank. There probably wasn’t just one word for what I needed. Okay, so what about a simile or metaphor? ‘Rapid decompression’? Too technical. ‘A million fiery shards of pleasure lanced at her innards’… The phrase failed the wince-test, so, no; too painful.

  ‘The earth shook.’

  For a wistful moment, I thought I might actually be having an orgasm, because damned if the earth wasn’t shaking. Wait, that was my chair.

  I finally surfaced enough from my word processor to remember that earthquakes were the most common cause of shaking in Alaska. So I did what any good Alaskan would do: I sat, and waited to see if it was going to get bigger.

  My pots and pans were rattling on the rack over my kitchen sink when I realized this ‘earthquake’ was accompanied by a thrumming, pounding roar. Or was that in my ears? Hell, maybe I am having an orgasm. I’d been enjoying that scene, but…

  But then the noise and vibrations reached their peak and a helicopter came into view, having flown directly over my cabin. I leaned forward, watching out my picture window as the helicopter crossed the lake. It set down on my neighbor’s front lawn, a couple hundred feet down the shore from mine.

  Three people stepped out onto the grass, and then the helicopter lifted back into the sky. The wind of its passage rippled the glassy water, and as it roared by overhead, my pots rattled again. The people disappeared into the cabin.

  When they came back out, I indulged my burning curiosity, and engaged my binoculars. I’d purchased this set for birdwatching, but as I looked through them, I confirmed they worked just as well on potential new neighbors. The three men looked innocuous enough—no hunchbacks or scissor-hands, at least—and I wondered if one of them was the new owner.

  Or was my new neighbor the helicopter pilot? It hadn’t looked like any flight-service aircraft that I was familiar with. Besides, who would pay to charter a helicopter at over a thousand dollars an hour, when a float plane was infinitely cheaper and could carry more?

  No sooner had I finished that thought, than a plane on floats dropped below the treetops on final approach. The DeHavilland Beaver was sporting familiar flight-service colors, I saw as it skimmed across the water, kicking up waves until it settled into a slow glide. It drifted up to the neighbor’s dock, and the pilot unloaded five passengers. And then, a bunch of stuff. Boxes, a cooler, a barbecue.

  Four of the guys began carrying things up to the cabin as a fifth helped the pilot get the Beaver turned around. The pilot gunned it, and with an ear-splitting roar, the float plane charged across the lake. It lifted up out of the water, and then the aluminum contraption was thrumming away over the trees.

  I frowned. That was eight people now. What was this, one of those families that had as many children as possible because each one meant another permanent fund dividend? The permanent fund dividend was an annual oil royalty payment that each resident in Alaska received, usually one to two thousand dollars. There were reports of homesteading families with over a dozen children for this reason, some of them very much resembling the Craster’s Keep situation from Game of Thrones.

  But, I confirmed with my binoculars, none of these were children. They looked to be all in their twenties and thirties, clean, well-dressed types. I watched them crack open the cooler and start passing around beers. After their initial flurry of movement, they just milled and drank, and I lost interest in spying on them. I had misgivings about the mass consumption of alcohol on my little lake, but watching them do it wouldn’t change anything.

  The fact was, I needed to write. I had a deadline for the juicy little story I was working on, and that deadline was tomorrow. I’d gotten started on it first thing this morning, and was hoping to get it done—or at least very close to done—by evening, so I could go to the neighborhood Fourth of July party.

  Not that this was much of a traditional ‘neighborhood’. There were no roads to speak of, the main thoroughfare being the Kuskana River, and my next closest ‘neighbor’ was a mile downstream.

  A flash of orange next door caught my eye. Flames leapt three feet up out of the grill, and a couple guys were laughing and patting each other on the back.

  Aha! ‘Her nerve endings flared like they’d been drenched in lighter fluid.’ ‘Douched’ with lighter fluid? No, bad. I fiddled with it a bit, and continued on with my scene. My sexy, ladies-first hero had his head buried between my main char’s milky thighs, and he kept her fire burning for several decadent sentences.

  I was just getting back into the flow of things when my pots announced the helicopter’s return. Three more people jumped out onto the grass, and the helicopter took off and thundered overhead. Again.

  I was starting to get a little annoyed. One would think, if you owned an aircraft that loud, you’d have the common courtesy not to fly directly over a building. In fact, I was pretty sure there were regulations to that effect.

  The body count next door was up to eleven, and I picked my binoculars back up to see if I could figure out what was going on over there. As I gazed though my high-powered lenses at the people, and the beer, and the barbecue, I finally put it together. It was a party. Housewarming slash Fourth of July party.

  Having solved the riddle didn’t make the activity next door any less distracting. For the first time ever, I considered turning my writing desk away from the window. It was sunny and already getting hot, even a little bit before noon. Seeing bare male chests begin to emerge from beneath their shirts finally decided me. There was no way I could write with that as my view.

  It was as I was turning my desk that the Beaver touched down again. Another five people emptied out onto the dock, along with another load of boxes and a big flat-screen TV. Same drill; to the cabin with the stuff, to the beer with the people.

  I stared blankly at my screen for a few minutes, and decided I’d break for lunch. The plan was to eat, and hopefully my new neighbor would complete his friend-ferrying, and then I could write.

  One of the things I loved most about living in the Alaskan bush was the quiet. I slept with my window open at night, listening to the sunset birdsong, the breeze rustling the leaves, the gentle lapping of the lake twenty feet below my window. There were no highway sounds, no
neighbor dogs barking, no train crossings or lawn mowers or kids shrieking with glee.

  There was just me, and the wilderness.

  And now, apparently, there was my neighbor and his couple dozen friends, whom he continued to ferry, all afternoon. The helicopter flew in—whomp whomp whomp—and out, and in—whomp whomp whomp—and out, about a dozen times over the course of the day. With each new trip, he brought a handful more people.

  So, as the summer sun meandered its way across the sky, the noise level got higher and higher. The sounds carried with crystalline clarity across the water—the boom boom boom of a quality speaker emitting heavy bass, the drunken laughter and shrieks as people splashed in the lake.

  I stuttered through another couple hundred words—trash, all of it. In frustration, I went and sat on my deck, wondering if I should just go to my own Fourth of July party instead of being tormented by my neighbor’s.

  But how could I enjoy myself, with three thousand words hanging over my head? Three thousand words, and only the rest of tonight and two to three hours tomorrow to do it in. And that wasn’t counting editing. No, I couldn’t go.

  As the evening wore into a deeper, louder evening, and I still couldn’t concentrate, I contemplated the merits of shooting my neighbor. On the one hand, there’d be no more loud, drunken parties.

  On the other, I’d have to dispose of the body—dumping it in the river would probably be my best bet. That would likely be easy enough, but I was pretty sure my new neighbor was the helicopter pilot, so shooting him would mean I’d be stuck with his friends thrashing through my woods for the next day or so, looking for food or phone. And that was unacceptable, because I was absolutely sure the first thing they’d blunder through with their ignorant city feet was my blueberry patch.

  I also thought, briefly, about going over to join them. It would be the neighborly thing to do—uncork the Baileys that’d been sitting in my pantry, and go introduce myself. I knew if I was drinking with them, I wouldn’t mind their debauchery quite so much.

  But the idea was repugnant to me. I was an introvert, and I was already half-way to spitting mad. I knew if I went over there, the first thing out of my mouth wouldn’t be a Pleasantville “Hey neighbor, welcome to the neighborhood!”, but rather a “Shut the fuck up, you inconsiderate asshole Outsider!”

  Okay, and maybe I was PMSing just a wee bit.

  I’d owned this land since I was seventeen. I built the cabin with my own two hands and the help of my brothers when I was twenty-one, and I’d been living here full-time ever since.

  The cabin across the lake had been there before I ever built mine, but it had been owned by an elderly couple who only ever came out on the weekends, and then rarely. For the last four years, it’d basically been just me on my quiet, peaceful lake.

  And now?

  Whomp whomp whomp.

  I watched as the shiny red fucking thing—I don’t know a damn thing about helicopters, other than that they are expensive, and some of them moonlight as ambulances—landed for the umpteenth time that day.

  This time, the pilot cut the engine. The doors swung open before the blades had even slowed, and another group of people belched out onto the once-carefully-manicured grass. I watched closely, trying to get a lock on my miserable neighbor—surely karma had made him a tiny, bald, pock-marked, pot-bellied lump of a man—but he must have exited the other side and quickly blended into the crowd.

  Watching so many people having so much fun while my writing suffered was only making me angry, so I slammed my way back inside. I breathed deep of the lingering plywood smell in my cabin’s interior, and willed myself to calm down. Now that the helicopter was done, I’d take a few minutes, eat dinner, and then see if I could finish up my story.

  I had lights, compliments of a generator and a small battery bank, so I turned them on. Compliments of a well, I had running water, so I ran some into a double boiler steamer and started dinner. I wasn’t some Julia Child out in the woods, whipping up delicate French confections, but I had had a recent shipment of fresh vegetables, so I steamed some broccoli, and as it was steaming, I decided it would be even better with cheese melted over it. Because everything is better with cheese. Life is better with cheese.

  It was as I was watching said cheddar melt that I began to hear the boom boom boom of those speakers from inside my cabin. My nails dug into my hand-planed birch countertops as I restrained myself. I didn’t know what I’d do if I gave myself free rein, but I knew my retaliations tended toward poetic justice. So it’d be loud, and probably disturbing.

  I alternated bites of broccoli with some long, slow breaths. I finished my meal, washed the dishes—which was not a natural inclination of mine, but I’d learned the hard way to keep things clean and put away so as not to attract bears—and I went back to my desk.

  I stared at that cursor for over half an hour. The noise was still a problem, but even more than that, now, was my mood. A good word for me right at that moment would have been ‘incensed’. And an expression? ‘Fit to be tied’ seemed accurate. Not nearly in the right frame of mind for generating pillow talk.

  The blaring gaiety next door seemed to be reaching its peak, and I finally abandoned my laptop to see what shenanigans could possibly require such a decibel level.

  I didn’t see the answer to my question.

  What I did see was two drunken assholes carrying my light-weight Kevlar canoe toward the water. The last time I’d let someone borrow my canoe, it had come back decorated with bullet holes, after I dredged it from the lake. And those guys hadn’t even been drunk. Of course, ‘those guys’ had been my brothers, and they were in a category all their own.

  “Ah, hell no.” I ran back through the house, shoved my bare feet into a pair of boots, and clomped down the front steps. I flew across my little yard and down the three steps to the rocky beach. The light was dying outside as I ran up to the two men. They were just starting to shove the canoe into the water before climbing in.

  “Stop!” I bellowed.

  They jumped a bit and looked up with big, sloppy-drunk smiles on their faces. “What’s up, pretty girl?” one of them slurred.

  “That is my canoe, and I do not give you permission to use it,” I said, stopping a few feet away with my hands on my hips. I was going to give intimidation a try before I got into an all-out tug-of-war with them. Two men against one woman, with my precious canoe as the rope—yeah, I didn’t like them odds.

  One of them—he had floppy blonde hair, and looked and sounded suspiciously like a surfer—glanced at the tree line, and then back at me. “It was on Gary’s property,” he said.

  So that’s the Devil’s name. Gary. I turned it over in my mind, villainizing it.

  “No,” I said, drawing out the word, “it was on my property. See that tree over there? The one with the orange tape on it? That’s the edge of Gary’s property. So I’d appreciate it if you’d leave my canoe, which you found on my property, alone.”

  They looked a little stunned by my vehemence. Or maybe it was the alcohol—one lifted a fifth of whiskey and took a long chug as I watched. A hundred dollars said that bottle would either be left in my canoe, or at the bottom of the lake. Or—

  I winced as it slipped from the blonde idiot’s grasp and shattered on the rocky shore. “Whoops,” he said with a chuckle.

  “All right, no need to get upset,” the darker one said. “You wanna come party with us, pretty girl?”

  What I wanted was to beat the hell out of the blonde for littering on my beach, and then smite the brunette for calling me ‘girl’, when he looked barely old enough to drink. “No,” I gritted, “I really don’t. Now unhand my canoe, and get off my beach. And tell Gary to turn it down.” I was proud of all the spots in those sentences I’d managed to omit the F-bomb.

  They laughed—which didn’t sound like consent—but then turned their sloppy-drunk selves around to wander back in the direction of my evil neighbor’s cabin. They shot glances back at me as they w
alked and laughed, leaving me with an almost-launched canoe and a beach full of broken glass.

  I grimaced as I felt my emotions tip toward self-consciousness. I cleaned up okay, but as a general rule, I wore whatever I wanted when I was at my cabin, the more comfortable the better. Today I was wearing a baggy, tie-dyed T-shirt without a bra, and fleece pajama pants dotted with purple hearts, the ragged hems of which gathered over my mud-stained leather boots. I wasn’t a fashionista by any means, but I was aware enough to know my clothing couldn’t have been less in style, or clashed harder, if I’d been trying.

  As for the rest of me: My long blonde hair—undyed, un-highlighted, and most recently trimmed by yours truly—was up in a messy ponytail, and I had no makeup or jewelry on, not that I usually wore any. My nails were short, un-manicured, and unpainted, on fingers that no one would call graceful; damaged by water, burned by fishing lines, and ripped by hooks.

  Of course, in the Alaskan bush, style didn’t matter. The goal was simple functionality. Keep it covered, keep it warm, keep it dry. The old folks next door—even my neighbors downriver—hadn’t made me feel self-conscious a day in my life. They understood the score. But these young dicks? They had no clue.

  Cussing them for making me feel awkward, I pushed the canoe the rest of the way out into the water, and then pulled it along the shore toward my cabin. There, I walked out onto my little dock and looped the bow line around a mooring cleat.

  When I straightened to cast one last glance at the neighbor’s partying cabin—every light in the house was on, and judging by the off-key howling, I suspected someone had hooked up a karaoke machine—I saw the would-be canoe thieves talking to someone on the lawn. They turned and pointed at me.

  I returned their regard across the couple hundred feet of water separating them from my ire. I couldn’t see much in the way of detail, but everything female in me acknowledged that the third man was beautifully shaped. Besides being terminally drunk and stupid, the first two hadn’t been bad-looking, but this one…