Four
Travis
She thought she was being quiet, but she wasn’t. The moment she stood outside of my door, I knew she became curious about the place. I was glad her body had thawed a little bit, but I wasn’t appreciative of the fact that she was snooping around last night. I would’ve been more than happy to give her a tour of the place.
I understood her reservations. I knew what I looked like and how I came off to other people. I had no intentions of hurting her, but I also had no way to prove that to her. She was a scared young girl trapped in a storm she had no idea how to deal with, so it only made sense that she would be on high alert.
But I did get nervous when I heard her turn down the hallway last night.
What was behind that door was for my own personal use. It was a room that didn’t get used often, but when it did it was a way for me to lose myself. A way to escape the fights my family battled over this land. It allowed me to release the anger and the hurt I had endured at the hands of so many people, including the woman I once loved. I had added that room on as a later addition after my father had this cabin built for me, and it was under lock and key. Even if she had tried to open the door, she wouldn’t have been able to open it.
The mere fact that she was curious, however, was why I stood and listened.
I listened to her explore the cabin. I listened to her run her hands along the wall. I listened to the little gasps I was sure she had no idea she had made, and I listened as her footsteps walked down the damn hallway. I rolled my shoulders back and readied myself to intervene, just in case she started looking around for a way to open the door. I kept the key on the top of the doorframe. Easily accessible but hidden away in case the door needed to stay closed.
But if she went searching for it, I was ready to step out and get her to stop.
There was silence for a little while before her feet ran her back down the hallway. She ran past my bedroom and I heard her collapse back onto the cushions. I hated that she was so afraid. There was nothing to be scared of in my cabin. She seemed brave enough, but her emotions were getting the best of her.
What was a young girl like her doing racing off to California by herself?
I tossed and turned while I slept as dreams of a former life plagued me. When my eyes finally shot open, it was still dark outside. The sun hadn’t yet broken through the trees of the forest that surrounded us, but there was one sound I expected to hear that I didn’t.
Rain.
It was no longer raining outside.
I got out of bed and pulled on some clothes. No use in taking a fucking shower when I was about to fix a damn car. I promised this young woman that I would help her get back on the road and that was what I intended to do. The sooner I could get her on the road, the sooner I could have my fucking house to myself.
I walked toward the front door and grabbed a coat to throw over my shoulders. The fire had dimmed to nothing but sparkling embers as Ava laid there on the couch cushions. I saw her pants hanging over the couch and something in my pelvis roared to life. There was a young woman with no pants on wrapped up in my blankets and lying in front of a fireplace.
In another place and time, I would’ve slipped right underneath them with her and pulled her close to me.
Shaking the thought from my head, I opened the door. I set out the same route I had walked last night, my eyes searching for her car. I walked a little farther than I had last night, but when I came across the car I felt the slightest bit of relief flood my body. The water had washed it down the ditch that followed the road until the ditch disappeared and became level with the trail. It sat on its tires on the side of the road as if nothing had ever fucking happened to it.
Man, this young woman was lucky.
I opened the car door and took stock of the inside. Nothing seemed to be damaged and there wasn’t any trapped water on the floorboards. I sat down in the seat and tried to crank the car, but it took me a few tries before I could get it going.
The engine wasn’t completely waterlogged, but there were some things that would need work.
I drove the car back up to the cabin and got to work on it. I went and rolled my toolbox out into the driveway and popped the hood of the car. There were a couple of busted pipes and a lot of the parts under the hood were still wet from the rain. I took off my jacket and removed my flannel shirt, so I could start soaking up some of this water.
I hunched over her car as the sun began to rise above the trees and got to work. I cleaned out the engine and made sure it was still good to run. I changed out the busted pipes and cleaned down the alternator. I had to loosen up a belt in order to get it back on its track and there was a small dent in the fender I worked out with my bare hands. The car just needed some tough love to get it back in working order, and I was just about to slide into the driver’s seat and crank it up when I heard the door of the cabin open behind me.
I looked over and saw Ava standing there in the clothes I found her in last night. My eyes scanned her body as I turned her name around in her head. The name “Ava Lucas” had hit me like a ton of bricks the night before. I wondered if she had any relation to the Lucas family who was trying to scout this area for a gas line. If she was related to them, then they owned half the fucking town in the first place. A family out of Seattle that owned property scattered all over the Washington State area. Her name had thundered through my mind all through the night until dreams of my previous life surfaced, but seeing her standing on my porch renewed my sense of fear.
I had to get her out of this fucking cabin just in case she was a trap.
“How’s the car?” Ava asked.
“Not as bad off as I expected. About to crank it up and see how the engine runs,” I said.
She nodded her head and I cranked up the car. It sputtered and roared to life as a grin crossed my cheeks. The look of shock on Ava’s face turned into a broad smile, and she clasped her hands over her mouth as her eyes sparkled. She looked positively radiant at the fact that her car worked. Such a simple thing for someone to be this overjoyed about. There was a slight twinge of something in my chest.
Something almost akin to pride.
I turned the car off as she came down the porch steps, her feet carrying her as fast as they could. She came around the door and reached into the car, popping the trunk so she could get to her things. I heard her rummaging around as I got out of the car, holding out the keys for her as she pulled a new outfit from her suitcase.
I got just enough of a look into the trunk of her car to see that it was stacked to the brim with her things.
“How long will you be in California?” I asked.
That quizzical look in her eye soon came back, pushing away the gratitude and happiness that had just been there seconds before. But her wariness was right. It was none of my business where she was going, why, or for how long. And taking an interest in her life might make it seem like I wanted her to stay.
Which was the farthest thing from the truth.
“You really wanna know why I’m heading to California?” Ava asked.
“None of my business,” I said.
“It’s because of my family,” she said.
I handed her the keys to her car as she wandered back over to the stairs of the porch.
“They want me to live a… particular lifestyle I don’t agree with,” she said.
“Sounds rough,” I said.
“It is. I’m heading to California because they announced that they would be marrying me off to a wealthy banker. Twice my age, too.”
“Is that a thing that still happens?” I asked.
“Apparently so,” she said. “My parents expect me to marry young and have children and make a home for a man to come back to. I stopped going on their blind dates they were setting me up on, so they gave my hand away to the next man they thought would be good for me.”
“A man twice your age,” I said.
“Yeah. Comes from a well-off family. My mother said he would make a wonderful provider for the children I would raise, and it made me sick. When I argued with them, things got rough, and I was told I could either follow along with their plans or continue to go on the blind dates.”
“So naturally, you ran,” I said.
“Look, you might live up here in your cabin away from the world, but down there money doesn’t make everything better. We live in the twenty-first century, yet I’m expected to operate as if we still live in the stone ages. Where women are property and marriage are a business transaction. And you know what? Dating in high school wasn’t really an option. I’ve got three overprotective older brothers that were ready to beat the shit out of any boy who looked at me funny.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You should be. Judging me the way you are.”
“I wasn’t judging you,” I said.
“Well, it felt like you were. You wanna know what I think it is?” she asked.
“What?”
“I think my parents are tired of supporting me. I can’t work a job, but they’re tired of paying my bills. They don’t think it’s appropriate for a woman to be working, so they’re marrying me off so I’m someone else’s problem. Even though I’m a problem they willingly created. And against my will, at that!”
“Have you ever thought about college?” I asked.
“What?”
“It seems like you don’t have a plan for when you get to California. Have you thought about college?” I asked.
“Of course I have a plan for when I get to California. I’m going to start my own business helping women like myself get away from families like the one I grew up in.”
“Is that a sustainable business?”
Ava’s eyes shot up to mine as I leaned against her car.
“What?” she asked.
“Is that a sustainable business? Would you have enough clientele to keep yourself afloat?” I asked.
“What do you know about business?” she asked.
“More than you think. I know the first rule of thumb is to provide something to the public that they need.”
“Women like me need resources to escape the lives they were bred in,” she said.
“Then the next question you need to ask yourself is this: is there a big enough market for what you’re selling?”
The blank stare on her face told me she hadn’t thought any of this through. And I felt bad for her. I really did. She was a product of a family that had failed her, and the more she talked about them, the more I knew it was that same Lucas family. They were born out of Seattle but owned half of Kettle as well as other smaller areas of the Washington State area. Our families weren’t really rivals, but they were a family that had been putting bids in to buy the rest of the Kettle area. They got ruthless there for a while, trying to dig up dirt on my family and blast us in the media. They tried to rally the town around them in order to force us to sell.
But the strong-armed tactics didn’t work with my father and they finally backed down.
Her family had been one of the several we had battled against for this land over the years. And with the way it sounded like the Lucas family operated, Ava probably had no idea who I was. She probably had no idea that she was looking at the son of the man her father tried to bury with lies, deceit, and dirt. Her helpless stance on life was born from her family’s own helpless disposition and anger, and she was scrambling. I could tell Ava didn’t want the life her family had set out for her to have, but she hadn’t been raised with the tools to create a life of her own.
She packed up her shit, left, and hoped she could learn things along the way.
It took a great deal of confidence and courage to pull some shit like that. And part of me admired her for it.
“No,” she said. “I haven’t thought about college yet.”
I suppressed the grin trying to grow across my cheeks as she backtracked into the cabin. I felt sorry for her and the position she had found herself in because of her family, but she had a fire in her that drew me in. She came from a wealthy family, but wanted nothing to do with it. She knew what it was like to have money and she was willing to leave all of it to start a life of her own. A life she could be proud of and smile at whenever she got up in the morning.
In some ways, Ava Lucas was stronger than I had ever been.
Funny how tables easily turned like that.