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  Fun in the Sun
Chapter One

by Maren
Copyright ©2007

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Note: This is not a complete story. For the entire story, please join our website here.

“Some fun in the sun,” Ben spoke, more to himself than into the cell phone he held to his ear.  “That’s all I want right now.  Time to myself.  To recoup, recharge, and get to feeling like the old me again.  Don’t worry, mom.  After a few months, I’ll come back to work and be better than ever before.”

His words rang so very hollow in his ears.  He had absolutely no intention of ever going back.  Not back to Eugene, not back to his three-story Willamette River-front home, and certainly not back to being a psychologist.  But his mother didn’t know that yet.  She had enough to worry about without his adding one burned-out son to the burden.

“Thank you for the check,” Jeanne told him, her voice sounding tinny through the cell phone.  “I’m so sorry for asking.”

“Don’t be,” he told her sincerely.  “How many years did you carry me, both financially and emotionally, after dad died?  While I went to school?  While I started my practice?”

“If you want to add physically, we can tack on another nine months,” his mother suggested, a spark of her usual good humor lightening her tone for the first time in months.

Ben smiled.  “Yeah, well.  I’m only too happy to help out.  I’m about to go behind the hills now, mom.”

“Call me when you get there.”

“I don’t know if the cabin has a land line, but the guy already said there was no cell service in the area.  If you don’t hear from me tonight, I’ll find a phone in town tomorrow.”  He bid her a fond goodbye, and then turned off his phone.  For the first time in eight long years.

Closing the wafer-thin cellular with a snap, he unceremoniously tossed it over his shoulder into the back seat.  He’d look for it again three months from now, when his vacation ended, and he figured out what he was going to do with his life next.  Hopefully.  At this point, he had no idea what ‘next’ might be, but he did know what it wasn’t.  It wasn’t going to be seventy-hour work weeks, helping others through the crises of their lives, both real and otherwise.  He’d done eight years of that, and the strain had more than taken its toll on him.

Ben was thirty-four years old, and his brown hair was flecked with pre-mature gray.  According to his mother, he ought to be happy just to have hair, but it wasn’t just the gray.  There were lines too, scoring the corners of both his mouth and eyes, making him look so very much older than he was.  Worse than that, he felt older.  He felt tired.  All the way down to his soul.

But now was his chance to change all that.  Now was his chance to revive the youthful part of him that he knew had to be buried under all the burned-out exhaustion that just made him want to go to bed and do Rip Van Winkle proud.  He might not know what his future held, but his old life was finished.  Done.  There was no going back, particularly since he’d spent the last three weeks guaranteeing he’d have nothing to go back to.

He’d sold his house and had moved all his things into storage.  His secretary had a new job already and would start work on Monday.  He’d paid out the remainder of his office’s lease, closed down his business, and referred all his patients to other therapists willing to take on the load.  He’d even shredded his degrees.  No, there would be no coming back to this life.

From here on out, nothing was scheduled on his calendar except rest and relaxation.  Fun in the sun, went the mantra running through his burned-out brain, and for once, the Oregon sun was even willing to cooperate.  Densely packed trees stood sentry at either side of the road; their gnarled and moss-laden branches formed a veritable canopy of green over his head.  And yet, undeterred, those golden rays of light fought their way down through tiny recesses in the foliage, splashing pockets of brightness periodically across the street.  Driving through them cut his visibility, but Ben didn’t mind slowing down.  He was on vacation, by golly; he could take all the time that he needed.  And anyway, slowing down on this road was nothing but a good idea.

The McKenzie Highway was a narrow and winding stretch of beautiful scenery and quite possibly the most lethal highway in the whole Pacific Northwest.  A lack of respect for the speed limit, and ignorance towards exactly how hairpin these turns could be, took more lives than Ben had clients.  Up until yesterday, that was really saying something.  And yet it wasn’t the accidents themselves that made the McKenzie so deadly.  It was the remoteness.  And, depending on which books you read, a spectacularly unpleasant apparition named Bandage Man.  But mostly, Ben was putting his money on the remoteness.

Between Springfield and Bend, there was nothing but a hundred and twenty-five miles of wooded seclusion, a natural forest, and six small towns, the largest of which boasted a population of just under a thousand.  The other five were little more than stations, too small to have much of anything in the way of on-call emergency services, much less hospitals. 

When Ben had first cracked his map, he’d closed his eyes and landed his finger on McKenzie Bridge, Oregon, a town too small even to show up in the index.  It was just a tiny little dot of a place that catered to summertime campers, fishermen and nature buffs who wanted to get lost for a while.  With a residential population of less than two hundred people, to Ben it offered the promise of refuge from the world, and he just couldn’t wait to get there.

He’d called a local real estate agent, who knew a friend of a friend, who knew someone who had rental cabins along the river.  In the middle of the off-season, there was no trouble finding a small place right on the McKenzie.  He could fish, if he wanted.  Or go canoeing.  Or lounge about all day in his underwear.  He could even lounge about in his underwear on the back porch, and no one would be around to see him or care. The friend of the friend of the real estate agent had promised.  He then proceeded to give Ben some of the oddest driving directions he’d ever received. 

1.) Go fifty miles down the McKenzie until you come to McKenzie Bridge.

Check.  That part was okay.

2.) Turn right at the grocery.

The grocery was also a gas station and a feed store, and if the sign out front could be believed, then next Tuesday it would also be selling goats at auction.  It was also the only building in town that had an adjoining road attached to it, so that’s where Ben turned.  Again, check, and that part was still fairly normal.  Having never seen a goat outside of a petting zoo, he wasn’t opposed to stopping by next Tuesday for a look around... if he wasn’t too engrossed in his underwear lounging.

3.) Go four miles.  Watch out for the dip.

Here’s where, pardon the pun, things got bumpy. 

The ‘dip,’ as Ben discovered, was where the road had washed out at some point during the last winter, creating a miniature Grand-Canyon-like ravine.  Muddy water in the bottom disguised the exact depth of the dip, but judging by the width, it could safely eat a car’s tire without much difficulty.  Thank goodness, he’d brought his truck.  Switching into four-wheel drive, he inched into the dip, wincing when first his front and then his back tires reached the lowest point, and the bottom of his truck scraped the blacktop.

4.) Go another four miles, the road will narrow.  Try not to hit the trees.

Ben wanted remote, and that’s what he was getting.  The road didn’t narrow so much as the concrete ended and a worn set of tire tracks continued on into the woods.  Again, slowing down to a crawl, he shifted back into four-wheel drive just in case he hit mud, and did his best to navigate the truck through the dense underbrush.  Whistling a one-sided dueling banjo, he bid good-bye to his paint job and tried not to cringe while the scraping of bare branches clawed down the length of his vehicle.

5.) Turn left at the tree stump.  You might not see the road, but trust me.  It’s there.

Ben almost missed the stump, half passing it before he realized the moss and fern-covered mound on his right was the landmark he was looking for.  On his left, however, what had once been two worn tire-tracks leading into the woods was almost completely overgrown.  Small tree shoots stood hip-high in between the uniformly-spaced paths, and as Ben backed the truck up to turn onto that ‘road’ which was only one in the absolute remotest possible sense of the word, he said good bye to his transmission, oil pan, and both axles.  He also reset his odometer.

6.) Go 1.8 miles exactly and STOP.  1.9 will have you in the river.  1.7 has you in front of a skunk’s burrow, and he doesn’t much care for visitors.

At 1.5 Ben started looking out for the skunk, and he stopped his truck when the odometer clocked 1.8 exactly.  So far, all he could see were densely packed trees, green leaves, and shrouds of moss.  The occasional beam of sunlight still filtered down to the fern- and shrub-covered ground, but he couldn’t see a river, or a cabin, or a skunk for that matter.  Ben cracked open the truck door and took a quick peek around the ground.  Although he’d brought a case of tomato juice with him, he honestly hoped he never saw the wee beastie.  Even more importantly, he hoped he never had to smell him.

Figuring the coast was clear, he switched off the truck and let the sounds of nature begin his vacation.  There were jays and robins and chickadees singing hidden in the trees above, all of which were almost completely canceled out a half second later by the bluster of some really rude crows.  A very soft wind rustled through the treetops, shivering the leaves and making the ferns sway.  And straight ahead of him he could hear the bubbling flow of the river.  He still couldn’t see it through the lush green brush, but he could definitely hear it now.  What he couldn’t hear, though, is what made him smile.  No traffic noises, no barking dogs.  There were no car alarms, or shouting neighbors, or screaming kids.  Except for the sounds of the surrounding nature, everything was quiet.  Peaceful.  Relaxing.

He was home.

7.) The cabin is to your left.  I’ll put out clean towels.  After that, you’re on your own.

“This is going to be great,” Ben said, the sound of his voice setting off the crows again. 

Ben reached back into the car to get the duffel bag that held his clothes, his radio, and a camping crate full of canned foods from the truck’s backseat.  Everything else could wait.  For now, all he wanted was to stretch his legs, fix up some ravioli for lunch, and get started on some of that long-awaited relaxation.

He pushed through the trees and ferns with no landmark to guide him, but trusting implicitly to the directions that hadn’t yet steered him wrong.  Just as he caught a glimpse of brown deck railings and bright sunlight flashing off of sliding glass windows, above the sound of the wind, the birds, the crows, and the river, somewhere off to his right he heard his first man-made sound.  Woman-made, really.  He heard singing. 

He didn’t recognize the song, but he knew country and western when he heard it.  Probably because of the southern-drawled ‘Yee-haw!’ thrown in between lyrics too distant to clearly make out.  It wasn’t loud, and it certainly wasn’t obnoxious, although most of it was sung in an off-key manner that suggested of headphones, and curiosity got the better of Ben.  He turned away from the house and pushed through the foliage towards the river.  No harm in getting to know your neighbors, he told himself, wading through a huckleberry bush.

Within twenty yards, the trees began to thin, revealing the dark blue-grey, sun-speckled river.  A hundred and fifty yards, at least, parted one shore from the other, but in the center was a rocky island, skirted by reeds and cattails.  And that’s where he saw his off-key songbird.  Or at least, he saw her bottom.

It was a very nice bottom, covered in cutoff shorts so sparing in material that while bent over--as she currently was--a good expanse of bare bottom flesh was revealed.  Pink, nicely rounded, bare bottom flesh.  Rosy pink, even, which contrasted nicely with the paleness of what part of her thighs that he could glimpse between the short shorts and the tops of the thigh-high wading boots she was wearing.  If left to guess--his burned out mind having no difficulty whatsoever in switching over into a guessing mood--he’d have almost suggested that those criminally short cutoffs were doing their best to cover a well-spanked bottom.

In other words, that bottom belonged to some local man’s mischievous, jailbait daughter, which meant he’d darn well better start averting his eyes!  Unfortunately, it took leaving his job and driving all the way out to McKenzie Bridge for Ben to discover he was a dirty, old man at heart.

Exactly what she was doing, he really couldn’t tell.  With a bucket in one hand and a long shish kebab spike in the other, she swished and jabbed her way through the water as she danced, slowly making her way down the length of the rocky sandbar.  From the riverbank, it looked as if she were spearing reddish-brown leaves off the bottom of the river, the McKenzie’s very own water clean-up crew of one.  It was several long minutes before he realized she was crawfishing. 

And here he was, unable to tear his eyes from her.  When little Miss Jailbait burst into another rousing off-key chorus of ‘Achy Breaky Heart’, complete with bottom-shaking dance steps, it got even worse.  Rousing became arousing, particularly when she started line-dancing, bent over as she was, her bright pink bottom bobbing like a baton to the beat of the music.

It had been almost two years since Ben had last gotten laid, and the more he watched his off-key river lark unwittingly putting on a show, the more keenly he began to feel the pinch of abstinence.  Maybe while he was up here, it would do him good to get out and meet someone special.  There was the goat auction on Tuesday....

Maybe not.

“All right, knock it off already,” he told himself firmly.  “It’s cabin time.  Go.  Move.”

Except that he didn’t move.  He was too blinded by the sun as it shone down squarely upon the girl, haloing her in a shimmer of sparkling water and setting the bright pink of her bottom on fire.  That well-spanked baton that kept perfect time with the music she was listening to.

"Knock it off," he told himself again, even more firmly than before.  "You came out here to relax, not become a lecher."

This was a kid for crying out loud.  With a little pink heart on her shorts’ pocket, a pink belt around her waist, and a little white tank top that accentuated her narrow waist and revealed just a hint of breast when she swished her arm and turned in the water.  Everything about her said 'underage', including her long blonde hair, bound up into a ponytail and hanging so far off one shoulder that the tips dangled in the water.

Definitely underage, he told himself firmly.  Jailbait.  Probably only fifteen years old.  Sixteen, maybe.  Seventeen, at the very outside of probability.

Eighteen, his southern brain chimed in hopefully.

Shut up, he argued, and then added for good measure, "Dirty old man."

And then she turned around.  The sun may have been somewhere over his shoulder, but Ben was damn near blinded.  This was no kid; this was a beautiful, slender, and--thank you, God--one hundred percent legal young woman.  Her age he placed somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, and her breasts he gave a solid ten on the scale of near perfection.  Not too big, not to small, and that little white tank top showed quite clearly that she wasn’t a big believer in bras.

As beautiful as they were, however, they came in a definite close second to that lovely pink tempo-keeping bottom.  Just what, he wondered, his pulse quickening and his mouth running dry, was a twenty-five to thirty year old woman doing with a bright pink, freshly spanked bottom?  His hand tingled to find out, and the next thing Ben knew, he was leaving the dense, sheltering woods and stepping out into the open of the grassy riverbank. 

His movement must have caught the corner of her eye, because the young woman looked up, her baby blue eyes widened in surprise when she saw him, and her mouth froze mid-Achy-Breaky. 

With a friendly grin, and a 'Hi, how are ya?' poised on the tip of his lips, Ben took that final step out onto the grass that lined the very edge of the McKenzie.  That's when he discovered a lone, cruel fact about Mother Nature and optical assumptions.  While the grass looked like it covered firm-footing earth, the grass lied. 

His foot came down with all his forward-moving weight behind it, but he had overshot the bank by a good eight inches.  Ben hit the water like a hundred- and eighty-pound man with a heavy duffel bag and backpack thrown over one shoulder and an even heavier crate of tomato juice braced against his hip. 

Even worse, the really cruel thing about optical assumptions was that a man was not limited to just one at a time.  While his singing water sprite was standing in water that was just over knee-deep, right beneath that lying riverbank grass was a section of the McKenzie deep enough to drown a six-foot man.  He knew because it tried.

As the shocking cold engulfed his body, Ben went straight under, and his feet never once touched the river’s bottom.  At that point, the tomato juice could fend for itself.  Ben abandoned the crate to its fate and tried to swim.  A half a dozen large cans drifting past his feet towards the watery depths, Ben kicked like mad for the surface.  It might have been a warm and sunny afternoon on land, but the river was barely warmer than ice.  The cold stabbed through his limbs like knives, actually hurting as it sucked the heat out of him.  Thrashing to reach the surface made every single one of his fingers hurt.  Ache, as if those knives were real and cutting him to ribbons. 

He almost sucked an involuntary gasp, it hurt so sharply, but Ben kept his lips locked tight together.  He fought to swim back up where the air was, but already his limbs weren’t moving the way they should have, and the duffel bag and backpack were fast becoming waterlogged and heavy. 

Desperately needing air, he abandoned them both and kicked as hard as he could for the surface.  It was surprising how fast the cold sapped his strength.  But just as the newspaper headline "Lecherous Doc Drowns Ogling Cute Country Girl!' flashed through his mind, Ben felt fingers weave into his hair, and he was yanked the rest of the way to the surface.

He came up, coughing and sputtering, shaking he was so cold.  Colder than he had ever been in his life.  "Oh Jesus!" he gasped, hardly feeling the pain in his scalp as the woman hauled him roughly backwards through the water.  Never mind the slow, numbness of his limbs. When his feet hit rocks, he clumsily turned around and, with the help of his no-longer singing water sprite, crawled up onto the sandbar. 

Unfortunately, the water, icy cold as it was, was also the only thing keeping him upright.  The further he managed to get onto dry land, the heavier he felt, until, in water only shin-deep, his legs gave out completely, and down onto the rocks he went.  He grabbed instinctively when he began to fall, catching the girl by one arm and shoulder, taking her down with him as well.  She landed fanny-first in a wet part of the tiny island’s shore, gasping in pain and shock as icy water splashed over the top of the waders and began to fill her boots.  Had Ben not fallen face-down across her legs, she’d undoubtedly have scrambled to get them off.

"I'm s-s-sorry," he gasped, teeth chattering violently as he tried to push back off the young woman who had saved his life.  The best he managed was to roll onto his side.  Her arms came around his shoulders, drawing him back against her as she tried unsuccessfully to pull him the last foot or so out of the cold river.  But he was wet and heavy, and the best that she could do was to steady him before he sagged face-first into the gravel.

The sun may have been shining, but through his sopping wet clothes he couldn't feel a bit of the heat.  He did, however, feel the warmth and softness of one lovely and very perky breast pressing against his shoulder.

"Well," the young woman said, thoroughly unimpressed.  "That was damn stupid.  Just what were you trying to do?"

"S-s-say h-hel-lo."  He tried for a sheepish smile, but his teeth were chattering too hard.  "T-that w-water is r-r-really c-c-cold!"

"It's glacial run-off.  Any Oregon native would know that; where are you from?"

"C-C-Calif-f-fornia.  Orig-g-g-inally."

"Figures.”  She looked even more unimpressed than before.  “You must be that city boy Walter has renting the old junker place."

"J-j-junker?" he stammered.  It was bad enough that he had just made a fool of himself in front of this lovely lady, but he couldn't bear to think of spending his three month vacation in a run-down, falling apart cabin.

The woman angled her head, directing his gaze back across the river to where he caught his first clear look of his new, if temporary, home.  The cabin was as close to perfect as four hundred dollars a week could get him.  And it wasn’t just a cabin; it was a log cabin.  Windows sparkling in the sunlight, the single-story structure rose above the river, half on stilts and built back into the wooded hillside.  A wrap-around porch, complete with BBQ grill, lawn chairs and two fishing poles leaning against the railing, hung out directly over the river.  A stone chimney rose along the southern side of the cabin, a thin line of dancing smoke drifting up to be dispersed by the wind.  Not only had Walter set out some towels and fishing poles, but he’d started a fire to warm the place.

"Not much of a junker, anymore, but you should have seen it before Walter started fixing the place up.”  She pressed her lovely fingers first to his cheeks and then to his hands.  “Come on.  You need to get inside and warmed back up."

Ben looked first down at his legs, and then back over his shoulder at her.  "W-w-would you mind g-giving a city b-b-boy a hand up?" he asked, doing his best to give her another of his shaky, teeth-chattering smiles.  “M-my legs w-won’t m-m-move.”

She was, in an instant, thoroughly irritated.  But then her unimpressed glare gradually softened, and the corners of her mouth tugged almost unwillingly into an answering smile of her own.  She shook her head at herself.  "So much for crawfishing," she muttered under her breath, and began to heave him into a sitting position better suited to attempt standing.  “All right, fine.  I'll take you home."

 

To Be Continued...