Page 55 of Fake Date with the Mountain Man

Ryan laughs off the awkward moment and watches as I stir some sugar into my cup of coffee.

“How was your weekend, Marlow?” Ryan asks in a quiet, playful tone.

“It was fine.”

“Fine?” he laughs. “You really know how to boost a guy’s ego.”

“Well, if your ego gets any higher, it will probably orbit off into space. Besides, we shouldn’t be talking about this at work. It’s unprofessional.”

When I look over at him, Ryan seems genuinely confused, maybe even a little hurt. I’m letting my emotions get out of hand and bring out the worst in me. My goal was to be even-keel and nonreactive. Instead, I’m acting like a lunatic.

I need to remove myself from the situation. It’s too fresh. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Maybe then I’ll be able to walk normally and answer simple questions about coffee.

As I turn to walk away, I hear Ryan say my name, but I don’t stop.

Around noon, a call comes into the station about a group of nudists setting up camp right off a heavily traveled section of trail.

It’s a little-known fact that it’s perfectly legal to be naked in a national forest, as long as it’s not a developed recreation site. Unfortunately, this information has fallen into the wrong handstime and time again. Most often, it’s a group of older men meeting up for sex while their wives think they are at work. They even have a special area of the forest where they like to go, which we call the Dark Forest and avoid completely unless there’s absolutely no getting around it.

Apparently, the group that’s out there today is just your garden-variety nudist colony camping out. Technically, there’s nothing wrong with that, but most parents don’t love it when their kids are randomly exposed to a group of naked people while they’re out on a nice, little family hike. So, we have to get the nudists out of there on some other technicality.

When I overhear Ryan grumbling to Hunter about how this will probably take up the rest of his day, part of me is tempted to join the conversation. Who doesn’t love talking about rogue nudists in a forest? But a bigger part of me is just happy that I won’t have to worry about running into Ryan for the rest of the day.

When he passes by my office door, he glances my way but doesn’t stop or smile. In fact, he looks miserable.

The rest of the day ticks by slowly. My thoughts keep veering off toward Ryan and I’m admittedly not too quick to course correct.

The interns also keep popping into my office looking for their next task. The only one who seems to understand the idea of seeing something that needs to be done and just doing it is Beth. And the thing that she’s decided needs to be done? Boring tourists to death with information packets that she’s printed off the internet about some sort of turtle that is specific to this region.

I’m still not convinced that these interns are real humans. I’m waiting for the hidden cameras to pop out any minute now. How did my life become one big, strange joke?

Long after everyone else has gone home, I’m tucked away in my office trying to finish my work. It’s nothing that couldn’t wait until tomorrow, but at least it’s some sort of distraction from my thoughts about Ryan. If I go home, I’ll just wallow in my own sadness.

I’m reading over a contract for one of Abby’s vendors for the hundredth time when I hear footsteps in the hallway. When I look up, Ryan appears in the doorway.

“What are you doing here so late?” I ask.

“I saw your car outside when I came back to grab by personal truck after the whole nudist debacle. I was hoping we could talk.”

He’s already closing the door behind him before I can begin to think of a reason why now is not a good time.

“What’s going on, Marlow?” he says as he sinks into the chair across from me.

“Nothing.”

Ryan lets out an exasperated sigh. “Seriously? Are you going to make me drag it out of you? Everything was great between us Saturday night – way better than ‘fine’ – but then it was like a switch flipped in you on Sunday morning. I’ve racked my brain trying to figure out what I did wrong, but I’m coming up short. You’ve got to help me out here. Obviously, something went wrong.”

I glare at him for a minute, knowing that if I start talking, I’m likely to start crying. And I really don’t want to cry at work, even if it’s late and everyone else has gone home.

With a slow, steady breath, I finally manage to say, “It’s exactly what I warned you would happen: I’m not any good at separating sex from emotions, and now I just need some time to – how did you put it? – recalibrate my feelings. It’s not easy for me, Ryan.”

“Wait…why?” he asks, sitting forward and knitting his eyebrows.

“Why isn’t it easy for me? I warned you about this already…”

“No, why are you trying to separate the two?”

I stare at him, flabbergasted. Is he seriously asking me to explain his own stupid dating rules to him?

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