Little Waves

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t be staring but… wow. I can’t believe I’m looking at the same person.”

That sly grin was going to give me all sorts of inspiration, her white teeth gleaming behind the soft pink lips I wanted to explore.

Jesus, get ahold of yourself, I thought.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Last time you saw me I was still fighting to get in shape.”

“I’d say you won.” I shook my head. “What am I saying? What am I doing? How are you? What the heck are you doing here?”

“Oh! I’m your neighbor! For at least a few weeks.”

“You’re with the college girls,” I said.

“That’s right. It’s Cheyenne’s place. Her parents, really, but you know.”

“I don’t. I haven’t introduced myself to them yet. But don’t tell me you’ve been living here this whole time and I didn’t notice.”

“No, no, it’s-”

About then, the rain started to fall. We both glanced up, and she groaned. I said hastily, “I’m closer, if you want to get out of this rain.”

“Please!” she said.

We ran for it. I wondered if she was uncomfortable coming to a relative stranger’s house dressed like that, a single man no less, but she didn’t seem to mind, especially not in that rain. It was like God was dropping water balloons on us, fat drops that smacked our bare skin even through the pines.

I kept my lakeside door unlocked when I was walking and we charged inside, Eva laughing, me trying not to stare at her spectacularly curvy ass in those shorts. I turned and shut the door just as the thunder started. It was just a dull rumble but it would intensify fast. I don’t know why but thunderstorms always sounded so much louder out there in the middle of nowhere.

“I love the storms here,” she said breathlessly, tugging her hair free of her ponytail. The way the frizzled locks spilled down her back and across her shoulder drew my eyes, and I was in some serious need of cooling down or else I was going to embarrass myself in front of her.

“Uh, let me get you a towel,” I said. “Do you want to call your friends and let them know where you are?”

“Why? Wait, are you the Jason Vorhees of Overlark?”

“No, uh, beautiful young woman, weirdo older man in his thirties…”

“Weirdo,” she mimicked me as we removed our shoes. “Mr. Bartlett, I saw you roll around on the Iverson’s lawn with their puppies. I think I’m pretty safe.”

I laughed. “I forgot about the Iversons.”

“Did you know she’s a pastor now?”

“I did. In, what, Arizona now, right?”

“That’s it.”

That entrance led into the ground-floor basement, which sounds like an oxymoron, but the house sat on a severe slope. “Wow,” Eva said, looking around down there. I loved a good workout as a break from writing and kept my free weights and a rowing machine in a corner down there. That was about it for the moment. “If you are a serial killer, this is the perfect murder room.”

“I was thinking I’d turn it into a library, but buying the place pretty much cleaned me out so it has to wait. Not a lot of furniture upstairs either.”

“I like the idea of filling it up slowly,” she said, running her hand over an exposed beam. “Make a home out of it, and give all the stuff meaning.”

“Hang on, I need to write that down if you don’t mind me stealing it for a book someday.”

“Oh yeah! Congratulations on the books! Holy crap, that’s awesome.”

“Thanks,” I said, and threw down what she said about filling the house slowly. “Your parents were one of the first ones to buy one of my paperbacks back when I was just getting started in the indie world. That always meant something to me. How are they doing?”

I headed towards the stairs and she followed me. “They’re good. Living in LaBelle now.”

We made small talk like that. Upstairs on the first floor, she took a seat on my couch, and I brought her both a towel and a throw. She thanked me and rubbed her hair and shoulders down with the towel while I grabbed some water for her and started the electric kettle for tea. When I returned to her, she was texting someone and finished it up quick.

“Letting Cheyenne and the others know I’m not out in this weather,” she said, and slid her phone back into an armband holster. “I love, love, love this house. Is it just you here? I heard about Hayley.”

“Oh jeez, that’s been a while,” I said. Hayley was my girlfriend before Eva and her family moved out of the neighborhood and Pike Bridge in general. “And yeah, it’s just me.”

“I can’t believe she’d cheat on you. She seemed so much nicer than that.”

“Yeah, it took me by surprise too,” I said, and shrugged. “The truth is though we’d been heading towards a breakup. I think walking in on her like that, it was kind of a relief.”

“You two were together a long time.”

“Yeah, three years.”

“Well, I still think she’s a bitch.”

I laughed. “Kind of hard to reconcile the girl who apologized for saying ‘damn’ to me once and you.”

“Oh, I swore a ton. I still do, under the right circumstances.”

Wait, was that… was Eva flirting with me? Nah. No way. Of course not.

Right?

“How about you?” I asked. “Got a guy in your life?”

“No, not for a while now. I had a steady boyfriend my sophomore and junior year, but we wanted different things. How about you?”

“No one for a while,” I said, and that was true. I had some fun dates and a few flash-in the-pan relationships but no one had really snagged me in a while and the last couple years had me focused on my publishing deal and writing, “But you. You were saying you’re staying here the next few weeks?”

“Oh right! Yeah. Cheyenne’s parents own that place. She’s working this summer at a horse ranch about ten miles north of here, so they’re letting her stay there. It’s a pretty good-sized place too so Cheyenne invited a few of us to come stay. We all go to college together.” She shook her head and gave me a sheepish grin. “Or we did, anyways. I graduated.”

“Oh hey, congratulations. And here I was thinking to myself if you were a freshman or a sophomore.”

She laughed. “No, bit older than that. Twenty-two. Anyways, I’m going to be starting at CovetCo in a few weeks. I’m living it up here and trying to find a place to stay long-term.”

“Oh wow, CovetCo?” I asked. CovetCo was one of the biggest up-and-coming big retailers, notable because unlike other competitors they didn’t allow third-party sellers and kept a rein on the price of everyday goods. They weren’t saints, but they also weren’t selling six rolls of paper towels for twenty dollars like their competitors

The electric kettle flicked off and I stood. “What are you going to be doing for them?”

“Translation work. Spanish, French, and Portuguese. That was my major, Portuguese. I planned on getting a business degree but my advisor found out I was fluent in Spanish and trying to learn French. She told me how much translators can make, at least until technology makes us irrelevant.” She shrugged. “Same as everyone, I suppose.”

“Amazing,” I said. “I always knew you were bright, but that’s incredible.”

I poured oolong tea for both of us and offered her lunch. She confessed she was starving. I started to pull the stuff out to make some Philly cheesesteaks, which was what I’d been planning for lunch anyways, then paused when my hand landed on the hoagie rolls.

“You okay to have carbs? I don’t want to wreck your diet or anything.”

By that point she was leaning against the countertop, and when I looked back at her, I had the strongest urge to lift her up onto it, spread her legs, and take her. I fought it down.

“I appreciate that. I went through a whole no-carbs thing my last couple years of high school and I was miserable with it. I found out I do better in moderation. All I had this morning was some yogurt and fruit, so I’m all yours.” She hastily added, “I mean, I’m all good. I’m… I can have… you know what I mean.”

“Glad I’m not the only one stammering here.”

She laughed nervously. “Yeah, I’m all over the place today. Were you working on something on your walk? A new book?”

“Yeah, notes for a scene I’m trying to hammer my way through. It’s not going so great. I wrote the heroes into a corner they can’t escape from.”

To ease her nerves — and yeah, okay, my own too because holy hell Eva was an incredibly sexy young woman — I rambled on about the scene I was writing and the buildup. By the time I finished, I had the roast beef finely chopped and frying in a pan along with some onions and we’d both finished our tea. Eva flicked on the kettle again for more, then looked at me, shy and nervous again.

“Um, is that all right, Mr. Bartlett?”

“Alex, please. And make yourself at home.” Thunder boomed and I winced. “As long as we have power, anyways.”

I put the hoagies in the toaster oven to crisp up a little. Eva watched, and said, “You know… that toy store, are you basing that on Gilbert’s?”

“I am! Good catch.” Gilbert’s was a big toy store in New Bainbridge, an hour’s drive from Pike Bridge, the small community where Eva and I were both from. It closed its doors around twenty years ago and had never been bought or demolished, leaving it the source of a lot of gossip and ghost stories. It was a really cool building, with Roman-esque columns built halfway into its walls and topped with a gigantic metal structure festooned with a cartoon cowboy and a dinosaur. It wasn’t as scary as it sounds, but I planned on fictionalizing it a great deal to make it seem almost apocalyptic.

“If that’s the case, and you wanted your people to have an escape route, what putting a small building on the back end, towards the employee parking lot? Then you could have the heroes climb up to the second floor and jump out on top of that. Then they’d only have to deal with a few bad guys, maybe take one of their cars, and they’re gone.”

The solution was simple and elegant. I gaped at her and muttered, “Gordian Knot” before darting for my notepad and scribbling that down. She laughed throatily and pulled the buns from the toaster oven before they could burn.