Stephen dropped the handful of mugwort.
“Might‘a been nice if you told me that first,” he muttered.
She laughed and bent close to another sprig of mugwort.
“You didn’t exactly give me time,” she retorted.
She touched the leaves, allowed her fingers to trail over the stalk and rest on the soil. Warmth seeped into her palm. After a moment, she dug into the dirt and, leaving the roots intact, pulled a stem of the plant from the ground. She wrapped it loosely in cloth and handed it to Stephen.
“Do I eat it?” he asked.
She smiled.
“I’d go for a satchel under your pillow, unless you’re dealing with some digestive issues.”
“Thanks,” he said. “You know, since I met you, the woods have changed. They seem… alive now.”
She smiled and stood, brushing dirt from the seat of her shorts.
“They are alive.”
Chapter 3
Mack
“I need a few days to think, is all. That’s what men do at the cabin; they think.”
Tina snorted and glanced up from her breakfast, a half grapefruit and a cup of green tea. Same breakfast every morning. The most god-awful, not to mention meager, breakfast that Mack had ever seen in his life.
After their first night in bed, he’d tried to make her pancakes for breakfast, and she looked at him like he’d offered to serve up the back leg of his dog, Misty. Apparently, pancakes belonged on the side of Tina’s food book labelled BAD in large red letters.
“And here I thought you men sat down there looking at girlie magazines and chugging beer,” she quipped, poking at her grapefruit with a fork. She lifted a tiny pink chunk to her mouth.
Mack frowned. Sure, they did that too, but he wasn’t about to tell Tina that.
“Well, don’t think too long, Mackey. I’m not exactly hard pressed for a date,” she added.
He gritted his teeth, bit back ‘the name’s Mack,’ and offered her a one-handed salute.
She twitched her long red fingernails in a half-wave, and he tried not to think of them digging into his shoulders as she cried out in bed. At the heart of things, Tina in bed was the reason he’d ignored the good, long think that had been coming for six months. Ever since the first night he took her home.
He’d met her just weeks shy of the one-year anniversary of his divorce, during a drunken night of bowling. She waited tables on the restaurant side of Marv’s Bowling Alley.
As he walked by, Tina dropped her pen on the worn patch of red carpet that ran the line between the rows of tables.
Mack, oblivious that Tina had intentionally dropped her pen, flung himself to the ground to save the poor waitress with the tiny yellow skirt the effort of bending over to retrieve it.
He’d bedded her that night, shutting himself in the bathroom after the deed to stifle the cries bubbling in his gut. He was a big man, not the kind you’d expect to cry, but he blubbered like a baby that night.
“Pull it together, you dipshit,” he’d whispered into the smoky glass mirror above his sink. A mirror his former wife Diane had bought at an estate sale. Diane used to leave him lipstick notes on the glass when she snuck out early for work.
Despite a year’s passage since his divorce, and a handful of one-night stands, Mack still felt sick to his stomach every time he made it with another woman.
He missed his wife — ex-wife, he silently chastised himself.
“Did ya fall in?” Tina had called from the bed, and when he went out, he found her propped on her side, naked and ready for seconds.
Sex muddled a man’s mind, probably more than anything else - especially if you added booze.
He fell into a Tina addiction and didn’t come up for air for two months. Rather than return to his big Diane-less farmhouse, he moved into Tina’s little Cape Cod on Harper Road, stuffing his duffel bag in the sliver of space he found not crammed with dresses in her walk-in closet.
For a while, he believed he’d moved on. But disillusion, like alcohol, was a creeper. And disillusion wore no more beautiful mask than lust.
The lust wrapped him in shimmery gauze. It set up a quaint little apartment in his brain, replete with satin sheets and lace underwear.
Then one morning, he looked over, and the gauze had faded. It looked more like a tatter of burlap full of holes and prickly spots. That beautiful apartment had grown dark, and a little ugly.
He wanted to move out, but the shimmery lust-turned-burlap-sack was hiding something nasty, something slobbering and flashing its pointed fangs.
The only way to escape was to kill it, and the death would be a slow one.
There’d be harsh words, more like screams, broken dishes, possibly a keyed pickup truck. He dreaded the confrontation.
Despite his size and girth, Mack was a peaceful man. He didn’t want a scene with Tina. He wanted to slip out of their dark little dream as if he’d never been there at all.
But he knew better.
“Tina let you out without a leash? Or did you jump over the fence again, you bad dog, you?” Mack’s friend David asked when he opened his front door.
“Very funny,” Mack told him. “I’m here for the fish, baby, nothing but the fish.”
“Ah, damn,” David grumbled, hanging his head. “I meant to call you. I’m out for the cabin. My sister’s planned a fortieth wedding anniversary for my parents, and she’s guilted me into hosting.”
“Here?” Mack pulled a face, but as he gazed around David’s living room, he realized it looked clean. The usual stack of magazines that littered the coffee table were nowhere in sight. The beer can pyramid had been wiped from the top of the bookshelf and replaced with sturdy paperbacks butted by two Abraham Lincoln bookends. Even the ever-growing pile of laundry outside the utility room had vanished.
David, a self-proclaimed bachelor for life who cleaned for the first date only, had succumbed to his sister’s badgering.
Having grown up down the street from David and Nancy, Mack knew she was a worthy opponent. Nancy never lost an argument, and she used all that God gave her to get her way, whether that be tears or fingernails.
“Why isn’t Nancy hosting? I thought her and Leon bought one of those Victorian monsters downtown?” Mack asked.
David nodded.
“They did and promptly unleashed a gang of construction guys who are tearing up floors and walls as we speak. They’re staying in an apartment until spring, when hopefully, the house will meet my sister’s highfalutin standards.”
“Wow, poor Leon. Can you imagine five months in an apartment with Nancy? She probably vacuums over his feet when he’s watching TV,” Mack sympathized.
David laughed and cocked an eyebrow.
“You think she lets Leon watch TV?”
Mack shook his head in commiserate misery, thinking of his own better half, who at that moment was likely sifting through her closet for a hot dress to wear out with her girlfriends that night.
When Mack returned on Monday - if he returned - he’d likely find a scattering of men’s phone numbers displayed on her bedside table.
Tina liked her men angry, possessive, and ready to fight for her. Mack could only imagine her perpetual disappointment at his unwillingness to take the bait. In truth, he hoped she’d call one of those guys, and he’d come home with a cooler of fish to find his bags packed on her front porch.
Mack grabbed a beer from David’s refrigerator and plopped on the couch.
“If you put your feet on that table, my sister will drive down to the Stoneroot Forest to chew your ass.”