Friday
It was supposed to be a cottage, but it didn't deserve such an evocative title. For one thing, a cottage should be perched on a hill, with a lake or babbling brook flowing nearby, soothing everyone with the swoosh, swoosh, swoosh of water on rock. For another, a cottage should be brightly painted, with a proper wooden porch and pegs near the door to hang up sweaters or swim toys or fish caught in the nearby babbling brook. A cottage should be welcoming, with big windows and several doors and room to move about and get away from it all, even if "it all" included the person who brought you there.
This place had none of those expected features. No, it sat at the bottom of a hill, in a valley between some hills in fact, hunched down like a small child hiding from his mother. There was no water to be seen or heard. And it was painted a dark, drab brown, a color indistinguishable from the pine tree trunks that towered all around it, the kind that were bare of branches until you looked thirty feet up, and even those were sparse and filled with painful-looking needles. And, on this side at least, there were no windows and only a single door, without a window, a metal one like the kind you'd find on the filling station rest room. With two deadbolts.
She tried to decide how to describe it. Not a shack, because the roof appeared sound and there was a stone-crafted chimney rising up to the peak. Not a hunting lodge or even lodgette, because it looked as though someone at sometime had attempted to create stone edging for a garden around the perimeter. Not a writer's retreat, because writers needed windows and things to gaze at thoughtlessly while waiting for the words to come together, and here all a writer would be gazing at was the bottom of some generic pine trees, sans branches, needles or cute woodland animals.
A cabin would be the closest, best description. One room, probably, unless some sadist had decided to put walls in what was probably only a 20 foot by 20 foot space. A cabin carefully secured from hunters, writers and other riff-raff by deadbolts on the steel door and tightly locked window shutters, the kind you see in hurricane country. A square cabin, plopped on a square foundation, sitting at the bottom of a non-scenic valley, surrounded by towering pine trees, hidden from direct sunlight, unporched, unremarkable, unwelcoming.
This is where he brought her? If privacy was what they sought, then privacy was what they'd gotten. It was, he'd explained, a favor given by a friend who owed. He hadn't explained what he'd done to get the favor. Nor who the friend was. Nor why said friend would have a cabin hidden in the woods, at the bottom of a valley, literally five miles from the nearest pavement that could even be considered a road. It's off the beaten track, he'd said. Yeah. They'd turned down one of those unpaved dirt tracks that the telephone workers use to repair the lines that cut through the woods. The kind that aren't maintained, aren't flat and aren't ever traveled by anyone other than telephone workers. Then, they'd turned down a path that was a path only because its existence was marked by a very small reflector nailed to a birch tree. He'd used a compass – a compass! – to navigate due south from the reflector, in between the towering trees, picking his own path for the 4x4, until by some miracle they'd spotted the chimney poking up from the valley. Then came some intricate maneuvering to drive the 4x4 to the entrance to the little valley so they could park next to the cottage/shack/cabin.
She stood, carrying her small overnight case while he struggled to find the right key to unlock the brown metal door, and assessed the trip so far. The story she'd concocted for her husband was messy and complicated. A combination of a girls' weekend away for a reunion with college girlfriends – no, he wouldn't know any – at a cottage one of them owned on a lake to the north. Probably out of cell phone range. Certainly not the kind of place a husband could or should pop in for a visit. Only girls allowed. She'd even set up multiple contingency stories in case that one didn't hold up, which she was sure it wouldn't. Her husband was as prying as he was insecure. He always needed to know everything about her plans.
The lock clicked open, accompanied by a small shout of success. His cover story was everything hers was not; elegant in its simplicity. As far as his wife knew, he was traveling up to a cottage deep in the woods to write a draft for a story. He might not have cell phone reception. And he'd call her when he got back to civilization. That was it. That was all. No questions. No prying. No calls to the National Guard. And to give his tale full credence, he'd already written a story draft, which he'd simply give to her to read when he returned home.
For her part, she was unsure how she would act if faced with that much trust from her husband. Somehow, his distrust made this act of rebellion easier to contemplate, and less likely to create a guilty conscience. She glanced over at her friend as he propped open the door. She'd wondered on the trip up what he thought of all of this. He'd never second-guessed their plans. Never warned her of what would happen if she revealed their secret. In fact, he trusted her the way she wanted her husband to trust her. But then, if her husband trusted her that much, she might not even be standing here. But then... ah, shit, a person could go crazy over thinking like that.
Shaking her head, she headed over to the now open door. After seeing the outside, she could barely wait to see what the inside looked like.
He waited by the door for her, wondering for the hundredth time that day what was going through her head. Even after ten years of friendship, they knew so little about each other. Yet he would bet money that he knew more about her than her husband, who, once he'd captured her, seemed to have little interest in getting to know more about her. One man's loss was another man's gain, he though wryly. But that was only a cynical way to look at it. He was, to use an old-fashioned term, enraptured of her. And it wasn't hard to see why. Curious eyes set in delicate features gave her the look of a quizzical cat, the kind of animal that could be playful, serious and exasperating, all within the blink of an eye. She was quick to smile and radiant when she did, her smile as sunlit as her short blond hair. Thin, lean, lithe, athletic, maybe even skinny, her angular limbs only served to accentuate her full breasts and curvaceous hips. On the ride to the cabin, he'd had to physically force himself to concentrate on the road; his eyes kept straying to her cleavage, where the seatbelt strap neatly divided her breasts and pressed her sundress down against her, giving them even more prominence.
Not that she minded the attention. He'd flirted with her the whole ride up, and she flirted back, a lot more freely than during their previous times together. It had been a very pleasant ride, except for those times when her husband had called. And called. And called. He'd been tempted to disparage the man's insecurity, but that would only be stating the obvious. And it wouldn't stop the calls from coming.
Finally, in the last semi-civilized town, the cell reception began to fade, just as the cabin's owner had warned. He stopped the car at the local Starbucks – the damn places were everywhere – and bought her a latte frappe café flaffe banaffe, or whatever it was that she liked. And paid for extra whipped cream, until it towered almost as high as the cup itself. Then, back in the car, spoon-feeding whipped cream to each other as well as can be done in a moving vehicle, he'd driven around town until they found a live, actual pay phone, complete with the little blue phone symbol, so she could call her husband and once again reassure him of...whatever it was he was worried about this time.
