AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Influencers."
The single word is all that's needed as I hang my hat back on the peg by the door.
Oz grunts.
He's staring at me with his usual look; his sapphire blue eyes narrowed slightly, watching me like he's got something more important to say than--
"So what's in those cases?"
"Camera gear."
"Let me guess, Bigfoot?"
It feels good to share a laugh with him.
My stomach does a flip-flop thing that has me thinking back to the old days. Back when Ozzie was always out at the house, hanging out with my brothers. When his teasing made me feel ticklish inside and I liked the way it felt when he was up close to me.
Before he turned into an asshole and I had to tell Mesa to keep him away from me.
"Bigfoot," I confirm, forcing one more laugh that comes out as nothing but air and has me feeling as awkward as I did when I was fifteen.
We get a lot of Bigfoot hunters up in these mountains. Plenty of other towns like to call themselves the Bigfoot capital of the world, but Moonshine Ridge gets more reported sightings of Sasquatch and other unidentified creatures than any other area in north America.
Every year our mountains fill up with amateur monster hunters and, sometimes, even legitimate cryptozoologists and research teams. When I was growing up, my siblings and I would hike out past our family's property up at the hot springs resort to camp under the stars and scare each other stupid.
My brother, Glen, was always the first one to want to go back home.
"You see that last video though?" Oz asks. He sits in the other office chair at the desk, too close for me to pay attention to my work. "They're saying it's faked but it sure looked convincing."
"Haven't seen it yet," I mumble, checking on the smoke from the fire again and pretending to work on the report in front of me.
"You eaten anything today, Red?"
The note of genuine concern in his voice bothers me even more than the nickname.
I don't like this nice version of Oz; the one who's concerned that I've been too busy with the paperwork part of this job to eat, or the one who calls over the radio every night to make sure I'm safely in the tower after making any rounds I might have done on the ground for the day…or the one who lugs a box of books up the steps because I might get bored up here all alone.
Nice Oz makes it even harder to ignore the confusing way my body responds to his presence and even harder to remember that I hate him.
Osprey
"I'll eat after my shift," Red grumbles into her computer screen.
Gettin' to work with Red is a damn dream for me. When I found out she was going to be the new ranger assigned to this neck of our local woods, I thought for sure this was going to be my second chance to show her how I really feel about her. I thought working together was going to let her see that I'm all grown up now. I'm not the asshole kid that put lizards down her shirt and made fun of all the things about her that I actually adored.
I'm a grown man now. I still adore her and if she'll just open up and let me in a little, I'd make sure she knew how much.
Instead, our first week got off to a damn awkward start.
It's pretty clear she hasn't forgotten the way I treated her back when I was too fucking stupid to tell her how I felt about her.
Maybe we'd have been high school sweethearts if I hadn't been such a boneheaded bully to her. We could've gotten hitched right after graduation and started a family right away.
Of course, I guess it always was Meadow's dream to get one of the ranger jobs up here on the Ridge. There's no way I could have held her back from that.
I'm going to support whatever damn thing makes her happy.
Right now, I know that'd be something to eat. My girl gets hangry and I've spent enough time up here watching her work over the last few days to know that she's not good about making time for meal breaks.
