Page 17 of Trapped with the Mountain Man

I’ve never found it very easy to talk to people, especially women. It’s not that I’m shy or stupid or completely uninterested in human interaction; I just find a lot of conversations tiresome or flat-out annoying. People want to fill up every little moment with noise. They can’t appreciate the quiet, even for a second. I like my spaces wide open, even in conversations, and few can understand or appreciate that.

Abby is easy to talk to though. She leaves room for the quiet parts. She never seems to be put off by my grumpiness either. She just rolls her eyes at me and moves on. It’s a weird feeling to be at ease with someone the way I am with her.

Rain turns to hail by mid-afternoon. It hammers away at the roof for the better part of an hour. Gusts of wind whip loudly around the cabin and thunder rolls in directly overhead. I’m beginning to wonder if this storm will ever end.

I brew another pot of coffee to warm us up while Abby stretches across the foot of the bed reading about the cow thief.

“Done,” she announces a few minutes later, closing the book triumphantly and tossing it aside on the bed. “What else you got?”

With a steaming coffee cup in each hand, I make my way over to the bed and nod towards the nightstand.

“I think there are a couple more books in the nightstand.”

Abby rolls over and reached for the nightstand. I don’t catch my mistake until I hear her open the top drawer and then rapidly close it a second later. All that’s in there is a box of condoms.

“Bottom drawer,” I say.

She opens the second drawer more cautiously. I sit on the opposite side of the bed listening to her rifle through the contents of my nightstand and watching the rain come down outside the window.

“Um, Hunter?” Abby says tentatively. She’s perfectly still beside me. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No,” I say, confused. I wouldn’t have touched her if I was seeing someone else.

“An ex?”

“Not one that you’ll find any trace of in my nightstand.”

When she repositions herself on the bed, she’s holding a photo of me and Harlie. It was taken last May when I visited her in North Carolina. We are standing at the summit of a mountain together after a day of hiking. It’s a selfie that Harlie took and later tucked inside a birthday card that she mailed to me.

“That’s my sister,” I say.

She flips through the small stack of photos underneath, including years of school photos and some from way back when we were kids. I go back to sipping my coffee, trying to skip the stroll down memory lane.

“Are you guys close?” Abby says, studying the last photo for a minute.

“Sort of, I guess.”

It’s true. I’m as close to Harlie as I’ve ever been to anyone. For me, that means a monthly phone call and maybe a few texts in between.

“Does she live here?”

“No, she’s in Charlotte.”

“Is that where your family is from?”

This is edging dangerously close to a conversation I don’t like to have. Ever. I try to think of some response that might put an end to it, but in the process, I stammer out a few syllables and a sigh. Abby glances over at me. Her expression softens and she shuffles the photos back into a tidy pile.

“Sorry,” she says, “we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

I take the photos from her hand and flip through a few of them. Something tugs at me, telling me that I owe it to Harlie to at least tell people about her. To tell my friends – if that’s what Abby is – that I have a sister and a fucked up past.

“Harlie’s the only family I have. We lived in a small town up near Johnson City growing up. She moved to Charlotte with our aunt after our parents passed.”

I know exactly what look Abby is giving me. The sympathetic furrow of her brow, the downturned edges of her lips. It’s hard to watch someone else feel the sorrow I’ve never felt over the loss of my parents, so I don’t look directly at Abby.

“I’m so sorry, Hunter.”

“Don’t be. My parents were never very good to us. Weren’t abusive exactly, just very neglectful. They didn’t want to be parents, which makes you wonder why they had two of us. Two accidents, I guess.”

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