Page 4 of Elijah's Hope
I turned over my pocket kings. Cal and Jackson turned over their aces. Jackson had the higher kicker, but none of that mattered because Ark had dealt a king on the river.
“Fucking lucky bastard,” Cal said as he tossed his cards away.
Jackson just sneered at me. What could I say? I was lucky at cards. Not so much at that other thing.
“So are we in?”
“I’ll set up the ad, see what it brings,” Jackson said.
“Yeah,” Ark agreed. “I want to see the types of crazies who would be willing to do this first before I commit to going on a date with one of them.”
I smiled. Suddenly there was something to look forward to in Hope’s Point. It wasn’t that I had any illusions about what might happen. Despite it being true that I was a member ofBachelornation, I didn’t really believe in all that stuff. Love at first sight and shit.
This was about having some fun. More fun than racking up a hundred bucks playing poker with the same guys every Friday night we were off.
If this all worked out, maybe in a month I would be sitting at this very table across from a nice, attractive woman who I could talk to. Who would talk to me.
And sure, if she let me fuck her, then that would just be gravy.
I lifted my beer and they all followed suit, even Cal.
I smiled. “Let the fucking Alaska Dating Games begin.”
2
Hope’s Point Airport—akathe runway.
Eli
It was ridiculous how nervous I was. It had been nearly six weeks since I’d had my brainstorm. We’d taken pictures of ourselves. Jackson set up the webpage and we each wrote some profiles. Nothing serious, mostly just stupid facts about ourselves. Something that would hopefully show the women this wasn’t meant to be too intense. Just some harmless fun.
As a precaution we did change our last names to avoid any disaster situations with crazy stalkers. But we all agreed that was also harmless. It’s not like full names were used on any dating sites.
Then Jackson created the ad which linked to our page if a person clicked on it. We ran it for five days at a hundred dollars a day, and the thing worked like magic. In that time, we probably got over three hundred responses. Of those, maybe a hundred and twenty were legitimate.
Then it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Ark and I had a blast looking at pictures, reading profiles, weighing the pros and cons of each woman. Not so much for Jackson. Truth was he’d been weird about the whole thing.
He would search through the profiles we received saying absolutely nothing. Then one day he picked a profile out of the pile of emails, printed it and immediately left to go to his room.
Ark had snorted and wondered if it was love at first sight.
I’d ended up picking the woman who was supposed to land any minute.
Shelby Reese. She was from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Twenty-four, just finished college and in between looking for a teaching job and deciding on grad school. Her mom was a nurse, her father was an accountant. She had two older brothers, neither of whom were thrilled she was doing this, but she’d never been outside Baton Rouge before and thought, why not have an adventure.
She was petite and blonde and pretty. But there was something about her smile that spoke to me. A genuineness I didn’t think could be faked. I emailed her, and we communicated back and forth until finally we made arrangements for me to send her a ticket. A P.O. box because she didn’t feel comfortable giving away her home address to a stranger. I thought that made her savvy as well as sweet.
I arranged my work schedule for my down time and we picked a date.
Today was that day and if I wasn’t mistaken, I was hearing the sound of a twin-engine Cessna heading our way.
“Why do I have this sudden desire to start shouting, ‘Da plane! Da plane!’”
I looked at Cal who was standing next to me. He was here for support for both me and Shelby. It was important to me that she feel comfortable. I wasn’t as badass-looking as Zeke, but I was large for a man. Some might call me intimidating.
“What?”
“Fantasy Island?” he asked.
