Work doesn’t start for another few weeks, so I have a ton of time to figure this place out. All in all, it doesn’t seem too difficult. Compared to LA, this town is small.

My house is a pile of shit, of course, so Johannson Publishing has sent a team to assess the damages. “Squatters,” they tell me. “Though, we don’t get too many of those around here. Anyway, we’ll send some people in to clean it up today. We’ll repair the rest tomorrow.”

Great. Thanks for everything. I look up a coffee shop and it turns out, I’m fairly near a pretty good one. I can’t really be in my house right now, so I might as well sit and read one of Johannson’s finest, to get a feel of the editing process.

I walk inside and order my Americano. The woman tamps the grounds, the grinder roars, and the smell of coffee fills my nose delightfully. Everything is good. In a few days, my house will be as good as new, and I can start my new life.

I sit down, open up my book, and smile to myself. Life is good. Life is… wait a minute. “Seriously?” I mutter aloud. I look across the street and there’s an old-school diner with big, glass windows circling around it.

There he is. The unnamed man from the highway. Bigfoot. He glances up at me and rolls his eyes. “Oh, come on.” I laugh. “He’s rolling his eyes at me?” A woman who is sitting about three feet away from me looks over at me like I’m crazy.

I close my book and walk outside with my drink. To my surprise, he does the same. He looks good. I mean, better than before. He’s wearing a heather-grey undershirt, alongside his light jeans and work boots. Bigfoot might be a poor comparison. He cleans up pretty well, actually.

“You following me?” he asks, looking serious. He doesn’t smile once and that’s the first thing he does that really bothers me.

“I am not following you,” I laugh. “I was actually wondering the same thing.”

“Is that what I look like to you? Someone who follows women around?” He looks away, turning red in the face. “Look, if you could just give me some peace, that’d be great.”

He’s holding a bunch of bags in his hand. Some are from the grocery store, others from a hardware store, and some of them I have no idea what they are. But he has a lot of bags in his hand. It’s a bit weird.

“Preparing for the end of the world?” I ask him, laughing a little still.

“Not exactly,” he says. His voice is deep and gruff. When he speaks, it sounds like he’s too serious to ever joke around. Sure, he laughed a little when we were talking in the car, but not much. I can’t help but wonder, who is this guy, really?

“So you just go out and buy, let me see, bottles of whiskey, batteries, canned food, and a ton of non-perishable items?” I ask him.

“Is it weird to stock up on things when you first move somewhere?” he asks, but he quickly turns away from me. “Look, I don’t need your shit, woman. I came here for some peace, not to get berated by someone like yourself.”

“Woman?” I get heated, though in hindsight, I’ve probably gone too far with the mountain man comparison. “Is that how you talk to people?”

“That’s how I talk to women who have no respect.” He keeps walking, grumbling to himself something low.

“And what kind of a person am I? You said, ‘someone like yourself,’” I ask him. “What kind of a woman am I? Huh?”

He turns around and drops his bags in the grass. He walks back up to me, moving as close as he can. I start to tremble at his immense size and I actually feel my body betray me. My thighs grow warm and I… well, I get wet. I gulp down hard and close my eyes.

“You’re a hot piece of ass,” he says. “And you know you have the world in between your fingers. You can be anyone you want, yet you choose to shit on the world. You choose to think of people like me as less than.”

I open my eyes and see the deep anger and hurt. I don’t know what to say. I start to stutter and stammer, but of course, that doesn’t help the situation. “I, uh—”

“Save it, strawberry,” he says, touching my waist with gentle confidence. “I’m out of your league, anyway.”

I’m stunned. I can hardly even say anything. I’m left to watch him as he grabs his bags and walks into the distance. He turns a corner and that’s it. Mountain Man is gone and the inner-tops of my thighs are soaking. My god. Is he serious?