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Being in customer service wasn’t Cricket’s idea of a dream job, but her dream job was in short supply these days. There weren’t a ton of small family farms, or much in the way of affordable land to start her own.
Some day. Some day after she’d saved up a bit of money she’d be able to have the life she’d been missing since she was a kid. For now, though, Cricket stood and stretched, trying to wake herself up.
She’d been constantly exhausted for months. When she’d talked to her doctor about it, the man had said she should lose weight. That was his solution for everything, and apparently the only remedy he could fathom even though she’d been a curvy girl her whole life and this draggy, perpetually tired, run down, worn out feeling was relatively new.
She should find a new doctor—one who would listen to her instead of blaming everything on her weight—but it took time to research new ones who took her crappy insurance, and all her brain power was devoted to work these days.
By the time she got home in the evenings, she was lucky if she could eat something before she collapsed. Then her alarm would go off in the morning and she’d swear it felt like she hadn’t slept a wink even if she’d been in bed for ten or eleven hours. And her brain. Ugh. She’d heard it called brain fog, but fog didn’t seem bad enough. She thought she must have brain smog.
The next few customer calls passed by in a haze, like she was stumbling through a labyrinth filled with cloudy, noxious air and had been for hours. She had no real life experience with the tents and sleeping bags and other outdoorsy equipment she talked to callers about all day but it was easy enough to look up answers in her resources. Mostly customers liked her and that went a long way even when it took her a bit to track something down that she didn’t have at her fingertips.
She used to be able to remember just about everything they went over in trainings, but now she had post-its stuck everywhere that she kept meaning to organize but somehow could never find the time or the motivation to deal with. Cricket plopped back into her chair after a few stretches. Looking at all those brightly colored post-its gave her that familiar sensation of ambition mixed with dismay. She had been great at her job and could be again, she knew it. Someday when she wasn’t so tired…
The next thing she knew she was startled awake by someone shaking her shoulder. Crapsicles. That wasn’t the first time she’d fallen asleep, and by Nick’s stony features, her manager was well aware of that.
Cricket shoved her headset off and plastered a smile on her face. “Hey, Nick. Must’ve taken an accidental cat nap there. So sorry. Better get back to the queue. Those calls aren’t going to answer themselves.”
“No, they aren’t.” Nick sighed and her stomach dropped. This didn’t seem good. “Evelyn, let’s go have a talk in my office.”
That seemed a hundred times worse, and she felt like she was headed to the executioner as she followed Nick through the rows of cubicles. With its fluorescent lights, canned air, and drop ceilings, the office was already pretty miserable—and ironic for a company that made camping and hiking equipment—and that dreadful feeling intensified as they got closer to her boss’s office.
Plus it was a Friday afternoon, and that was classic firing time. She couldn’t lose this job. Especially not without a reference to help her get a new one. And if she was fired she wouldn’t be able to get unemployment benefits. She’d finally paid off her credit card debt, but didn’t have any savings to speak of, and her rent was due in a week.
Cricket’s stomach roiled as Nick indicated the chair in front of his desk. He was as dull as the office itself but he wasn’t a bad guy. Just boring and corporate as heck.
After he’d sat down on his side of the desk, Nick set his hands on the fake wood and laced his fingers together. “Evelyn. This is the fourth time you’ve fallen asleep at your desk in the past month. All of your call metrics have tanked over the last quarter, and frankly we can’t afford to keep someone on board who isn’t pulling their weight. I’m sorry, but we’re letting you go.”
Tears welled in her eyes and her throat tightened as Nick went on, but she couldn’t hear him anymore. She’d been fired, and she was in so much trouble.
* * *
The clinic had been surprisingly quiet today. Owen had been only too glad to take off when his co-worker said he’d handle the rest of the shift solo. Nice way to end his official time there.
Not that being a doctor up here—or anywhere really—came with nine to five hours, but there was still something psychologically powerful about getting out of work early on a Friday afternoon. What was he going to do with that time? Maybe give Taj Hovick a call to talk more about moving out to Enclave and whether that was going to be full or part time.
Owen had met Gavin Bayard and his wife Gwen at Covert, the kink club he belonged to, and Gav had introduced him to Taj and some other people in their group. A bunch of the mostly ex-military guys had bought an island in Cook Inlet and set up what was a cross between an Alaskan homestead and a kink resort. And Owen had been lucky enough to get in with that crowd.
They had a lot of muscles, brains, and know-how, but what they didn’t have was a doctor. Gwen was trained as a nurse, but she’d been in pediatric oncology for over a decade so she was a little rusty in the skills wilderness medicine often called for. Rook had some combat medic training as a Special Warfare Combat Crewman—what all the guys referred to as a SWCC which sounded like “swick”—but his role was really to keep a person alive until they could get to proper medical care. Which was where Owen could come in handy.
He’d been out to Enclave a handful of times, and it had quickly become one of his favorite places on earth. He was hoping to make that his home base, commandeer their pilot to take him to the isolated communities he favored serving. He’d already given up his time at the clinic in Anchorage, but if they couldn’t work out the details of Paul —who everyone called Apollo or ’Pollo because these military guys loved their nicknames—their resident pilot, being his on-call flyboy then Owen would probably be in Anchorage part time for now.
It would be phenomenal to make his dream of living in the Alaskan wilderness come true without abandoning his other love, which was medicine. Plus, he’d feel like a real asshole for spending all those years studying and training and taking coveted spots in med school and residency, taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans that he was still paying off, and then saying fuck it to go fishing. Seemed like living on Enclave with Taj and his merry band of men would be the best of both worlds and a dream come true.
The only thing that could make it better would be having a Little girl of his own to share a cabin and a life with. Someone to spoil and care for, discipline and fuck. Someone who would crave what he had to offer and would fulfill his own particular needs.
Aside from the practicalities of needing someone to fly him to his patients, that might be the only reason he was tempted to be on Enclave part time—it wasn’t like there were any single women there to speak of. Then again, the universe had a funny way of working things out. All you had to do to see that was look at Taj and his wife Jojo, and Knox and his Little girl Lulu to know that was true.
Owen was supposed to take a trip out to the island next week and he couldn’t wait. It was for pleasure, not for business this time, but honestly those guys seemed to think hunting, trapping, fishing, retrofitting old buildings, construction, and doing all sorts of other hard labor was fun. That was fine. A perk, really. He’d enjoy harvesting some of his own food and living a subsistence lifestyle as much as he could. Couldn’t wait to get back to it actually. He smiled to himself thinking about being on the land.
When he got into the stairwell, his balloon of excitement popped like someone had stuck it with a pin. Someone was crying. It sounded like a woman, and her sobs echoed loud against the cement blocks, metal railings, and concrete stairs. He wasn’t the kind of man to walk away from someone in pain, whether physical or emotional, and whoever was bawling in the hallway clearly had some shit going on.
It took a second to realize the sound was coming from above him, but then Owen was jogging up the steps, taking them two at a time until he rounded the corner and saw Evelyn sitting on the landing.
He’d felt bad before, but now a torrent of emotions came over him. He and Evelyn weren’t friends, exactly, but given the frequency with which he thought about her,fantasizedabout her, it was possible he felt an intimacy with her that wasn’t deserved.
Whether it was appropriate or not, his heart was breaking, and he wanted to break the face of whomever had hurt her.
Ignoring the hard concrete of the stairs, Owen knelt on a step in front of her.
