He’d considered going down to the diner. Sherona would make him something tempting. Maybe if she gave him that warm, inviting smile, he wouldn’t refuse the offer this time.
Yeah . . . that was what he should do, he decided. He should drive down to the diner. This time he wouldn’t politely refuse Sherona’s overtures. Why should he? He’d let her take the edge off. There was a tight, uncomfortable pressure in his balls, a sensation that wasn’t being adequately assuaged with his own hand.
It wasn’t just his cock that was bugging him, though. He felt edgy, like he wasn’t at home in his own skin.
It was all Katie’s fault.
He wandered into the kitchen and made himself a sandwich, forgoing sex and home cooking without ever making a conscious decision to do so. Afterward, he took a long, strenuous walk. He rambled around a lot in the forest. His hikes distracted him. Navigating the sometimes-challenging paths cleared his head. The fragrance in the forest today had been rich and peaty.
When he returned, he went to the side of the house to the woodpile. A definite chill had entered the air. Fall had finally arrived. He only dimly recalled last autumn in Vulture’s Canyon. It’d been as though he’d been color-blind. Today, the vivid colors of the trees blazed against the clear, cornflower-blue sky, the vision scoring his consciousness.
He hauled a load of firewood into the house and stacked it near the fireplace. Last year, he’d rarely lit a fire. It was too difficult, and it wasn’t as if he’d been capable of enjoying lazing around by a cozy blaze.
Where the fuck was she?
He tired of pacing on the front porch, looking for her car in the drive. He entered the kitchen and pulled a pot out of the cabinet and filled it with water in preparation for making pasta.
He’d tried to call her three times over the course of the afternoon, but she apparently didn’t have her phone turned on. Either that or these hills obliterated the signal. Phone coverage around here could be spotty at times.
It would be getting dark soon. Katie may fancy herself a hotshot driver, but she’d grown up a city girl, used to wide, perfectly paved roads, multiple lanes and well-lit streets. The twists and turns on the narrow forest roads and the pitch-black hills reminded him of driving in Ireland, which could be downright perilous for those not accustomed to it.
She’d likely get herself killed playing speed racer on the forbidding, dark hills.
Thinking about car crashes made him think of Eden, of course. He thought of what Katie had said several nights ago about his wife hating Vulture’s Canyon if she ever saw it.
Katie’d been right. Eden would have hated Vulture’s Canyon. She would have been very polite to the residents, but privately found them ignorant and strange. Why in the world would they stay in a place like this? He recalled her saying something similar of the people of Malacnoic, the village where he’d been born. Her face had been shadowed with amusement, but also puzzlement. Eden couldn’t understand how people would choose to isolate themselves from culture and facilities of higher learning.
When it came to Malacnoic, Rill shared Eden’s opinion. Vulture’s Canyon wasn’t much better, but at this point in his life he’d learned to appreciate the value of a place where you could lose yourself. One couldn’t forget the past in a place like Los Angeles, where reminders and regrets were constantly leaping up to pummel you in the face.
The pasta was finished and drained. He tried to call Katie a fourth time as he paced around in the front yard. Maybe she was purposely ignoring him. Probably pissed at him for his frigid hospitality and rudeness.
Good.
He’d go inside, have a drink, eat his supper and then call Stanley and Meg Hughes. True, he didn’t particularly want to talk to Katie and Everett’s parents. He respected Stanley and Meg a lot, thought of them as family since they’d welcomed him into their home during his college years at UCLA. It’d be awkward, talking to the friendly couple after so many months of isolation.
But Stan a
nd Meg needed to know about their daughter’s latest flighty adventure. This was just another in a long series of impulsive decisions for Katie—like the time she’d threatened to drop out of college when she was a freshman to join the Peace Corps or the time she decided to completely redecorate her apartment in furniture rehabbed from trash in garbage dumps (Rill swore the glass coffee table retained a subtle odor of pickles).
Maybe he’d even drop a hint to the Hugheses that Katie wasn’t safe there with him.
That’d motivate them to call Katie and talk some sense into that stubborn brain of hers.
He built a fire and sipped at a glass of Jameson on the rocks. The drink didn’t mellow him, though, so he poured another once the logs caught flame. All the while, he had a sinking feeling the whiskey wouldn’t numb him like it had in the past.
Piss won’t do the job anymore, he thought bitterly.
It hadn’t since Katie had come to town.
He turned on the light in the pantry and just stood in there for a moment, staring at the mostly empty shelves. For a brief second, the image in front of his eyes struck him as surreal. Where the hell was he? What was he doing, standing in a musty pantry that looked as if it’d been built in the American Civil War?
It was as if some old, foreign film clip had been sutured into two sides of the movie that was his life. He stood there, his hand frozen in the motion of reaching for a jar of pasta sauce on the counter. Nausea suddenly rose in his belly; vertigo caused his vision to swim.
For a few seconds, he was terrified.
He abruptly put his hand on his cock, grimacing when he squeezed with his fingers. Perhaps it was a strange thing to do at such a disorienting, existential moment, but he was just a guy. If there was one thing a man knew was real, it was his cock. He grasped onto that thread of lust, that bright flare of the familiar.
He ripped at his button fly impatiently and struggled with his clothing. All the sharp arousal he’d experienced so unexpectedly yesterday at seeing Katie, all the need, roared through him in a potent flash. He slammed shut the pantry door and fisted his cock.