CHAPTER 2
Forrest
I downshift as I pull up the hill passing the gravel runaway truck ramp where I just sat parked for over thirty minutes.
I sat in that spot for thirty minutes watching the store through the high powered hunting binoculars I’d picked up weeks ago. Nobody comes up this hill anyways so I didn’t have to worry about anyone spotting me. Not that I cared anyways.
The only thing I cared about was seeing her. And I wasn’t about to waste my weekly trip to her shop without making sure she was working.
The schedule hangs right by the entrance to the employee break room just past one of the far aisles. I always eye it quickly when I push my cart past it so I can plan my visits around her. But in lines of work like this I know that employees change shifts, reschedule, or just show up late.
I always try to come in at least an hour after her shift has started, but I always double check with my binoculars to confirm she’s there before I make my way down the last bend in the road and into her store.
If anyone saw me sitting up there looking into her shop with my binos they’d think I was some crazy mountain man lunatic. Some fanatic stalker living up in the woods. At this point they might be right, at least partly.
I was going crazy for that girl. Maple was her name. I figured it out from glancing at the schedule each week. Didn’t take me long. I already knew she was different and once I saw her name on the schedule I knew it was her. My thoughts proved to be correct.
Who names their kid Maple? Somebody who knows their daughter is special. Unique.
She’s someone else’s daughter, but she’s young enough to be mine.
She’s too young. Too innocent. Too sweet.
There’s no way she could handle the things I want to do to her.
Has she ever been with a man before? Has she ever been touched?
Maybe by a boy her age, but certainly not like anyone like me. That’s for sure.
I roll down my window and let in some of that crisp, cold air. I don’t even have the heater on in my truck and I’m burning up. I unbutton another button on my flannel, but wish I was unbuttoning the buttons to that Henley she had on this morning. The way that thing hugged her chest took my erection to the next level. I was hard the minute I saw her, and I was harder when I looked at that body of hers.
I almost gave “cleanup on aisle nine” a whole new meaning. I was so horny for her I thought I was going to have to take my dick out right then and there and release the pressure that was practically preventing me from walking. I sure couldn’t focus. I don’t even know what I bought this week. Doesn’t matter. I’ll eat in as quickly as I can so I can get back down there next week and see her again.
But next week it’s going to be even harder. I’m already imagining grabbing her and doing her hard right there against the aisles. Her skin is so soft and she looks so young, but it just turns me on even more.
I never had a thing for younger girls, but then again she’s not just a younger girl. She’s wise beyond her age. I can see it.
But what I never see is other people in that shop. Does she work there alone? Is it run by her family?
How hot would it be if I took her right there on the counter while her dad was in the back doing the family business’ paperwork? Then again with the way she’s got me sprung, it would be smarter to just walk back there straight away and ask her father’s permission to have his daughter’s hand in marriage.
Girl like that comes along once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky enough to live a few hundred years.
I know. I’d been surrounded by women my entire life. I was the best delivery doctor in the entire state. “Doctor Delivery,” they used to call me. It was a blessing and a curse. I was damn good at what I did, but what I did also involved staring into certain parts of the female anatomy all day long. Kind of kills your sexual drive when you see what I see day in and day out.
Or what I used to see.
The last delivery. Damn, it’s still stuck in my head. That one hit me hard, so hard I got locked up for what I did afterwards.
Jail. I should be embarrassed, but I’m not. I’m proud of what I did. Sometimes justice needs to be served in different ways, and I was just the guy to deal it out.
And that’s why I moved all the way up here. To get away from it all. I had enough money to live forever. I used to be married to the job. On call 24/7/365. I didn’t even have the time to spend the money if I wanted to, and I never did.
I don’t need much. Just a roof over my head and a place to sleep. That and the joy of handing newborns to their mothers. What a rush that was.
But now that’s all gone. Taken away. Can’t work as a doctor when you have a felony charge levied against you. Guilty or not, you’re already fried in the court of public opinion.
But I don’t need their opinions, when I’ve got my own. And I don’t waver in my beliefs for nothing.
If faced with the same circumstances I would have done the same thing again, even knowing the consequences.
But now there were other consequences I had to deal with. Keep playing this game with that girl at the shop or man up and make her mine.
But who wants to live with a recluse up here in the middle of nowhere?
I’m not about to offer that up to such a beautiful young woman like her. She doesn’t deserve it. Her life’s just getting started like the sunrise over these mountains.
Mine’s like the sunset with no hope of a ray of light in sight.
I might live another forty or fifty years, but since I’m locked away up here by myself I’m already dead to the rest of the world.
But she makes me feel alive, and that’s a problem.