Page 38 of Grumpy Bear

He blew out a breath. “The veneer’s a little lumpy on the edges in a few places. Hopefully it’s just cosmetic. I won’t know for sure until I can restring it and see how it sounds.” He tried to put a hopeful spin on it. “It could be a lot worse.”

“You said it would take a couple of days to dry out.”

“Yeah. Maybe I’ll know by the time I leave.” He forced a laugh.

The thought of him leaving depressed me, but we were still at the beginning of the weekend. I had to get through the next few days first.

The hike to the swimming hole was barely a quarter mile. We scarfed down the sandwiches while we walked, chewing in silence. The incline got steep pretty quickly, and the creek on our right became noisy with whitewater. Luke kept stopping to admire the view, breathing the word “Wow” over and over again, elongating it.

I kept catching myself admiring the sheer look of wonder he got on his face over the simplest, everyday things in my world. “You act like you’ve never seen a creek before. I thought you were from Alabama. This ain’t nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. It’s fucking breathtaking.”

It was. Every time I came up through here, I thought about how Wayne and Jim and at least half of the staff only bitched about the hike. It annoyed the fuck out of me that some people didn’t get it because the truth was, even though I was rushing Luke along due to the urgency of the situation, I usually stopped to check out the view too. In the same spots. Still. After all these years. “Well then, you’re gonna love the waterfall.”

His head whipped around so fast his bun came undone. “There’s a waterfall?”

“Come on,” I said for the twentieth time, even though I couldn’t keep from grinning at how damned excited he got. “Clock’s ticking.”

I glanced back every now and then to make sure he was keeping up with me and to watch him in motion. On this final stretch of the trail, the rocks and tree roots were like a staircase built for a giant, and… Luke’s thigh muscles were seriously popping out, straining and flexing. I ground my teeth, imagining them wrapped around my waist, crushing my hips.

When he finally saw the swimming hole, his face lit up like a kid’s at Disney World.

“Wowwww.” His hair waved in the cool breeze blowing off the water.

Watching him take it all in, I was glad for the excuse to bring him here and show it off. It was by far the most impressive place on the property.

“Pretty nice, huh?”

“Dude. It’s major.”

The waterfall wasn’t enormous, but even on the worst day the setting was idyllic. On average, it was nothing more than a small trickle like a shower with shitty water pressure. Today, given last night’s storm, it was postcard worthy. Whitewater tumbled down shelves of ink-black rock, falling twenty feet into a small pool as deep and wide as the manmade one down the holler. Trace copper deposits turned the water an insane blue-green. Nobody could build a pool that looked like this. No amount of chemicals could mimic that color.

It was my favorite spot on Bear Mountain, but it was also the biggest threat to my business. Every time I came up here to reinforce the dam, I thought about the ridiculous metaphor of it all. I felt like I was living in some epic, tedious, Old Testament-level fuckery. Like a book they’d make you read in high school.

“Wow.” For about a minute longer, it remained the only thing Luke could say, but then his tendency to babble returned in full force. “It looks like something out of a movie. Like a movie where some kids find fairies near the creek at the edge of their backyard and follow them through a tunnel of mountain laurel into Narnia. Ooh! Rivendell.”

I chuckled, but I had to agree. “It is very Rivendell, isn’t it?” I cocked my head and studied him. The fantasy references were like a coded language. With a single word, we could share pages of imagery and memories. All the hours alone, reading, living in other worlds in my head. It was like meeting someone in a foreign country who spoke your native tongue, one you hadn’t been able to use in forever. “You know, you remind me a little bit of one of Tolkien’s elves. Especially right now.”

“Whatever.” He blushed, but he couldn’t stop grinning. “I’m not that blond.”

“No. Seriously. You’re like Legolas with a guitar case and a body wave.”

He snorted. “Who’s that make you? Strider?”

“Aragorn’s no slouch. He’s the fucking king.”

“I’d bet good money there’s some homoerotic fanfic out there with Legolas and Aragorn under a waterfall like this.” His smile faltered. He must have realized too late what he’d just admitted out loud—that he might be imagining us in such a scene—but he didn’t look away.

It was a pretty bold fantasy. Maybe I was wrong about his lack of interest. “There’s actually no telling how many videos of this place you can find on Pornhub.”

Luke started to laugh. “Wait. Are you kidding?”

“I never kid about unapproved porn shoots.”

“People film themselves up here?”

“Hell yeah, they do. We had to run off a production crew last year because they fucked up my dam. I blame them for the creek being in the pool right now.”