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***
That night I skip drinks with Lacey although she does insist on a recap of my first night with Owen 2.0. I tell her its intensity was matched only by its fury on the Richter scale.
“I’m not a bit surprised,” she says.
I hear a murmur in the background under her voice.
“Is that the maître D?” I say.
“Ugh. I wish. Different guy. Seemed like he was going to be fun, and he was. Once. Now he can’t leave fast enough. Hey, don’t you give me that look, I told you what this was!” she yells at the man who I only assume is on his way out of her apartment. “So what’s new with you, otherwise?”
“That’s why I’m calling. I’m going to be out of town for a couple of weeks.” I give her the rundown.
“This doesn’t surprise me at all. I was reading my horoscope and I saw a couple of things that didn’t make sense for me, but I was pretty sure they were right for you.”
“We’re not born under the same sign.”
“Yeah, I know, but since it’s all bullshit anyway I figured I could do what I wanted with the info. Well, I think it sounds like an adventure. And just to prove it to you, I’m going to come out and visit you in a week. You know what? I bet you’ll find all kinds of lumberjacks out there that you can bang. Oh man, they are so hot right now. Every catalog has some guy with a beard and flannel on the cover right now. They’d look like idiots on the street here, but in real life? Yes please. Yeah, I’m coming to visit you. Don’t think you can keep them all to yourself.”
“Please do. I could use your company. How should I handle Jarom?”
“Either full force or at arm’s length. If he can’t persuade you, don’t try and persuade yourself.”
That wouldn’t be a problem.
CHAPTER TWO: HUGH MADDOX
If you want to remove all traces of masculinity from a man, plunk his ass down in the middle of a big city, then just sit back and watch. Pretty soon he’ll be covered in silk ties and satin doublets, ordering cous cous for every meal and thinking that getting a callus on his hand is as bad as leprosy.
This is exactly the opposite of what I’m doing right now. There are storm clouds rolling in. Out here, at my cabin, you can see more sky than you ever knew existed. It’s both exhilarating and desolate in a way that you can’t appreciate until you’ve seen it.
Solitude is almost everything to me.
Almost.
Unfortunately, what I consider solitude most people would consider isolation. It took me a year out here to realize that I didn’t even have a mirror. When I finally saw myself again I was pretty much the same: 6’4,” buzzed brown hair, blue eyes, broad as a barn door, and sporting a beard that was headed for Grizzly Adams territory.
When I was about to leave New York for my Walden-esque sojourn into the wilderness, I considered going to Alaska. Nothing big like Juneau or Fairbanks, but somewhere kind of off the grid. I had been reading a relocation website that literally said, ‘People who will do best here are those who tend to thrive in harsh climates more closely resembling third world countries than the continental US, and who can adapt to situations where the rules are unwritten.’
Sounded like the Deadwood of the Wild West, just with more snow and Eskimos. I was all set to go, having left the rough and tumble world of professional mixed martial arts, where I had been the welterweight champ in the biggest league before departing under circumstances of pain and loss that were mysterious to everyone but me. Everyone wondered, but it was no one’s business but mine.
Still isn’t.
There is a rumble in the distance. The Vikings would have heard Thor’s hammer. I just hear a ferocious melancholy that sounds like the world is growling along with my own heartache. Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong millennium. I would have been right at home on some ancient battlefield.
With no true company here other my own, I’m far better off than I ever was in New York. Those damned fights. Fucking double crosses and shady deals. They were people I was never going to see again because of what had happened.
Darkness and death. It was enough to… well, it was enough to make a man leave an extremely lucrative profession with his banked millions, go out into the middle of nowhere to escape his secrets, and do what I was doing.
It’s my business. Mine. Maybe this isn’t the most glamorous, high-octane life, but that’s no longer what I need. I need this.
I split another log and add it to the pile as another roar of thunder echoes across the valley. Once the rain starts I’m going to be trapped in here for a while, which suits me fine.
I’m already trapped, when I feel honest enough to admit it.
The week before I was supposed to come to Alaska, an email came through from an old friend who had gone into the military. He decided to give up the family cabin that his father left him when he died. His siblings didn’t want it and my friend decided to stay in Okinawa where he was stationed. All I had to do was say the word and he would relinquish the deed to me. Of course, I could afford to get a decked out luxury cabin with a sick view overlooking the mountainous landscape, but a small reclusive cabin in the middle of nowhere was just what I wanted.
I knew the place. It was as desolate as Alaska, and nearly as far away, on the Washington and Canada border in the northwest. It was miles from town and, while the rules weren’t quite unwritten up there, they weren’t spelled out on stone tablets either. I took the offer in a heartbeat, told my agent I was leaving town and had no plans to ever return or fight again, and got the hell out of dodge.
