Page 77 of Fake Date with the Mountain Man

“When is it?” I ask.

“Tomorrow at noon.”

I stare down the hallway, trying to think of any reason at all why I can’t make it. Too long goes by without an answer, but Marlow doesn’t press for one. We both stand there silently, cautiously. When my eyes meet hers again, Marlow’s expressionis pure misery. Her icy wall is cracking in front of me, taking me down with it. I can’t tell if she wants me there or not, but I also can’t stand to tell her no right now.

“I’ll be there,” I finally say.

Marlow’s face lights up for the briefest moment as she nods. I should turn and leave, but the words slip out of my mouth before I can wrangle them back. “Are you doing okay, Marlow?”

She doesn’t answer right away. In fact, she barely answers at all. It’s just a minuscule nod and a tiny, unconvincing ‘yes’ spoken under her breath. She takes a step back toward her office, patching the cracks in her icy wall and retreating. I do the same.

When I get in my truck, my cell phone chimes again. Eventually, I’ll have to deal with all the unanswered messages. Emmett’s name pops up on the screen and I swipe up to reveal his message:Hey man, thanks for setting me up with Bonnie. Been texting her all week. Invited her to the BBQ tomorrow so we can meet in person. Just wanted to give you a heads up.

Well, fuck. This will be interesting.

I’ve been avoiding happy hour ever since the breakup. The last thing I need – or want – is to drown my sorrows between the legs of some woman that I couldn’t care less about. The idea of one-night stands has lost its appeal completely ever since Marlow. But I also needed to talk to Bonnie to make sure she didn’t have any misconceptions about me and her. I asked her to meet me last Friday for a quick drink at a different bar.

I left out some of the details – like the fact that it was my girlfriend who overheard her saying that we were together, which subsequently caused us to break up. That’s not on Bonnie. She doesn’t need to feel guilty or worry about what happened. It won’t fix anything to bring her into this because the truth is that Marlow and I had issues that were way deeper than that.

Bonnie apologized over and over again. She was obviously embarrassed that someone had overheard her conversation with Eric. Apparently, he’s been harassing her for another date ever since their terrible first date, which involved him getting sloppy drunk and trying to grope her. The next time she saw him, she got flustered and blurted out that she was dating me to get him to leave her alone. Understandable. And the silver lining in all of this is that her tactic seemed to work. Eric was leaving her alone now.

“Why don’t you just stop going to the Grumpy Toad?” I asked her.

Bonnie shrugged. “I don’t really know many people in town. The regulars there are the closest thing I have to friends here, I guess.”

Bonnie dipped her head, hiding the flush of her cheeks under a wall of brown curls as she took a long sip of her drink. I’d never really given it any thought before, but now I realize that she is always there alone on Friday nights. She always sits at the bar top where it’s easy to be lost as the crowd swells around her. She smiles at people as they come and go around her, ordering drinks and sometimes making small talk with her while they wait. That’s how we met, as a matter of fact.

“Well, we’re friends,” I said.

Her head lifted and she smiled up at me.

“And I have another friend that I think you might hit it off with. He’s one of the rangers at the station, named Emmett. He’s a good guy. Would you mind if I gave him your number?”

“Not at all, I would love that,” Bonnie says enthusiastically.

When I gave her number to Emmett the next day, I didn’t explain the situation with Marlow. It’s not anyone else’s business anyway. But now I can see the fatal flaw in my plan. Unfortunately, it’s too late to do much about it and, frankly, I’m too exhausted by this whole thing to figure it out.

Chapter 29

MARLOW

Saturday morning is a mad dash to throw together the barbeque. Since it’s being held at a public park, I have no choice but to wait until the morning of the event to put up decorations and set up the tables. Abby came to help, dragging Hunter along because, as she says: “This is his damn event.”

Hunter started out on streamer duty, but it was abundantly clear that the man had never so much as seen a streamer in his entire life. He was ripping off tiny shreds and taping them up around the gazebo like pieces of confetti. Abby banished him to the grill once it was time to start cooking and laughed as she did what she could to fix Hunter’s creative attempt at streamer distribution.

By the time the guests start arriving, it looks like a passable end of summer barbeque party. A banner is strung up between the trees which reads: ‘Thank you summer interns and volunteers’ and a tiered table of cupcakes in three different flavors is displayed under the gazebo.

Guests start filtering in. The elderly volunteers are the first to arrive. They buzz around the beverage table, periodically stopping by to tell Abby and me how great the decorations look (before they notice Hunter’s streamers, of course).

Linda and Vickie are among the next to arrive, followed by more of my coworkers. Even though I swore to myself that I wouldn’t, I’m watching like a hawk for Ryan to arrive.

This doesn’t go unnoticed by Abby, who nudges me in the ribs and whispers in a sing-song voice, “He’s here!” as soon as she spots him.

I look over from the streamer that I’m retaping for the millionth time. My heart thumps against my chest the moment that I see him, like it’s waking up from a long nap. It’s going to take me some more time to train it to stop doing that. The other day in the office, I didn’t even need to see him. All it took was the familiar thud of his heavy boots on the squeaky hardwood floors to elicit the same reaction. I knew I should have let him leave that day, but my feet moved across my office almost involuntarily. I needed to see his face, needed to know if it still gave me the same reaction.

It did…and I knew that seeing him again so soon was a mistake.

My stomach flutters when I realize that Ryan’s eyes are fixed on me from across the park and he’s walking toward me like he’s on a mission. He’s storming over like he might kiss me and, yes, I very much want that to happen.

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