Lodge Bet

The dock at Ibarra Lodge is just two planks and a rope rail. I set the Cessna down easy, though, because I'm a better pilot than I am a person. Wind off the ridge, little chop on the water. I taxied in and tied off, and that's when I saw him.

Sergei. Jeans, red flannel, arm around some woman in a puffy vest.

I'm twenty-three and I fly rich idiots into the middle of nowhere for a living, and I still felt my stomach drop like I'd lost an engine.

"Well, hell," I said, out loud, to nobody.

You should know this. Sergei and I dated for two years. Then I caught him in my apartment with a woman from his gym, and he had the nerve to act surprised that I was surprised. That was eight months ago. I've had time to plan.

I hadn't planned on the puffy vest woman, though.

I hauled the gear bags up the path to the main hall. Pine and whiskey, like always. Brendan was there filling a cooler, and he lit up when he saw me, which he usually does. He's thirty-two, owns the place, shoulders like the doorframe. We've been circling each other for a season now and neither of us has landed.

"You didn't mention the guest list," I said, dropping a bag by his boots.

"Which guest?"

"Don't play. Sergei Novak. He's on my dock."

Brendan winced. "Honest, I didn't check names close. Group of six from the city booked months back." He set the cooler down and looked at me straight. "You want to fly out tonight, I won't hold it against you."

"No!"

"No?"

"No. I want to stay!"

He studied me a second. "That's a look on your face, Nora."

"It's my face."

"It's a look." He laughed, wiped his hands on his jeans. "Fine. Then you're working. Welcome party tonight. You're hostess. Keep Sergei away from his hunting group, they get chatty when they've been drinking and he books the good weeks. Can you do that?"

"Bossy," I said.

"Very," he said, and held my eye a beat too long.

That beat affected me. I'm not proud, but there it is.

So the afternoon went sideways fast. We got to talking in the kitchen while he sliced onions and I pretended to help. Then he backed me into the counter, and I won't say I complained.

"Tell me to stop," he said, low, hands on my waist.

"Don't you dare stop!"

He kissed me like he'd been rehearsing it for months. Probably had. I got his shirt up, he got my jeans unbuttoned, and then he lifted me onto the counter by the cutting board like I weighed nothing, which I don't. He pulled my pants down past one boot, which is as far as they needed to go, and went down on me right there among the onions. His beard, his tongue on my clit, two fingers working me. I came fast and loud and had to bite his dish towel.

Then he stood, freed his cock, and fucked me slow at first, then not slow. Counter edge digging into me. My shirt still on. He watched my face the whole time, which is a thing Sergei never once did.

"Whose are you," he said.

"Yours," I said, and meant it for the next hour, anyway.

He pulled out and came on my thigh, then cleaned me up with the same dish towel like a gentleman. We fixed our clothes. The onions never got sliced. Nobody in that lodge knew, and that mattered to me, because I had a plan, and Brendan was now somehow inside it and outside it both.

The party started at eight. Stone fireplace, mounted elk heads judging everybody, twelve of us in the main hall. Joan, it turned out, was the puffy vest woman's name. Thirty-one, pretty, laughed at everything Sergei said. She laughed at a lot, because Sergei talks constantly.

I poured drinks. I played hostess. I kept Sergei's hunting buddies supplied so they wouldn't wander off with him. Brendan watched me across the room the whole night and I watched him back and Joan watched me watch him, sharp little thing.

By ten somebody brought out dice and we were into drinking games. Heywood, the head guide, forty years old and built like a fence post, kept the shots honest.

"Rules," Joan announced, standing on a chair. "You lose, you drink, you answer a dare. No cowards."

Sergei was three shots deep and glowing with confidence. He saw me across the table and raised his glass.

"Nora. Come sit by me, it's rude to hover."

"I'm working."

"You're hovering."

Heywood grunted. "Sit down, kid, party rules."

So I sat, not by Sergei, across from him. Brendan drifted over and stood behind my chair. Joan clocked that too. Everyone clocks everything at these things.

Sergei lost the first round and drank. Lost the second and had to do an impression of Heywood, which was actually funny. Then he got that look. I know that look. It's the look he gets before he does something stupid on purpose.

"New game," he said. "Nora. You used to shoot. We both know it. Rifle range out back, tomorrow morning, fifty yards. You against me."

"Pass," I said.

"Hear me out." He leaned in, grinning. "You outshoot me, I check out of this lodge tonight, my money wasted, no hard feelings, you never see me again. I drive home."

"And if you win?"

He spread his hands, all innocence. "You kiss me. One kiss. In front of everybody."

The hall went quiet. Even the fire popped at the right moment, like a stage effect.

"You're married," I said.

"Engaged," Joan said quickly, and her voice cracked on it, which told me everything about how secure that engagement was.

"She's right here, Sergei," I said. "Asking me for a kiss in front of her."

"Joan doesn't mind," he said. "Do you, babe?"

Silence. Joan's face went through three expressions in two seconds and landed on a smile that fooled nobody. "It's just a game," she said, too bright.

Brendan's hand landed on my shoulder. Warm, heavy. "She doesn't have to take bets from guests," he said. "House rules."

"She used to take them from me all the time," Sergei said. "Nora. Come on. Scared?"

I looked up at Brendan. He looked down at me. Neither of us said a word and a whole conversation happened anyway.

"Scared of what," I said. "You?"

"That's the spirit."

"Fine. Tomorrow, eight a.m. Fifty yards, my rifle, house ammo. Heywood spots."

"Done," Sergei said, and stuck out his hand, and I shook it, and the room cheered like I'd just agreed to something fun instead of something I'd been dreaming about for eight months.

He didn't know. That was the beauty of it. He thought this was him winning. Tomorrow, if I outshot him, he'd pack his bags in front of Joan and the whole party and I'd walk away clean. That was the plan.

It stayed the plan for about ten more minutes.

Because after the game broke up, Brendan steered me into the hallway by the coat rack, out of sight of the hall, and put both hands on the wall either side of my head.

"You're not kissing him," he said. "Win or lose."

"It's a bet, I can't back out, he'd look like an idiot."

"Let him look like an idiot. You're not his to kiss."

"Jealous?"

"Furious," he said. "There's a difference. I hired you out here, I put you behind that bar, and I'll be damned if he walks off with a kiss he didn't earn."

"Then what do I do if I lose?"

"You won't lose."

"But if..."

He was quiet a second. His thumb moved on my jaw. "Then I take the kiss instead. Right there at the range. In front of all of them. Let him chew on that."

I laughed, I couldn't help it. "That's insane."

"It is," he agreed. "Works though, doesn't it."

It did. It really did. Somewhere behind us the party roared at something Joan said, and I stood in the hallway with Brendan's hands on the wall and thought, this is either going to be the best weekend of my life or a disaster with a body count.

History says both.

Morning came gray and cold, the way it does up there. I slept about four hours. The rest of the night I lay in that thin-walled bedroom listening to Sergei laugh at something down the hall, and thinking about triggers.

Eight sharp, we were at the range. Fifty yards, paper targets on wooden frames, snow squeaking under our boots. Brendan had the lodge rifle out for me, a .308 with a scope he'd dialed in himself. Sergei had his own rifle, some expensive German thing he'd bought after we broke up, probably to feel better about himself.

"You remember the safety, right?" he said. "It's been a while."

"I flew you to your range trips, Sergei. I watched you miss a lot."

Joan stood by the fire barrel in a fur-lined hood, arms crossed. Heywood ran the line with a clipboard, of all things. Brendan leaned on the rail and didn't look nervous at all, which made me a little nervous, honestly.

"Five shots each," Heywood said. "Closest group wins. Nora, you're up."

I fired dead center. All five. One hole, basically, the size of a quarter, right over the X. The paper didn't lie. I stepped back and racked the rifle and didn't smile, even though everything in me wanted to.

Sergei shot next. He was decent. Better than decent, four of five tight, but one drifted left and he knew it the second it happened. I watched his jaw do the thing.

Heywood walked the line, looked at both targets, looked a long time at Sergei's left drift.

"Nora by two inches," he said.

The hall crew cheered. Joan clapped, sort of, the way you clap at a funeral.

"She flinched," Sergei said. "Second shot. I saw it."

"You didn't see anything," I said.

"I saw it. Heywood, call it."

"Two inches," Heywood said, flat. "I don't call flinches. I call holes in paper."

"Brendan. Tell her."

Brendan came off the rail slow. "Winner's the pilot. The bet stands. Pack your gear, you're checking out."

"Or what," Sergei said. "You'll drive me down the mountain yourself? She can barely land that Cessna in wind."

"I land fine," I said. "You watched me land yesterday."

Sergei looked at Joan. Joan looked at the fire. "She flinched," he said again, quieter, like if he said it enough it'd turn true. "I'm not leaving."

"Bet's a bet," Brendan said. "Heywood."

"Guest paid through Sunday," Heywood said, shrugging. "House can't eject a paying guest over paper targets."

"He can stay," I said. "It's a big lodge."

That landed wrong and I knew it the second it landed. Sergei smiled like I'd handed him a key. Joan studied me for a long moment, then at Sergei, then back at the fire. Brendan's jaw worked but he didn't say anything, and I filed that away.

I found Sergei in the gun room an hour later. It's a small room, off the hall, racks of borrowed rifles, a deer head over the door, one lamp. He was cleaning his rifle even though it didn't need it.

"You flinched," he said, not looking up.

"Come on, Sergei. I shot a quarter-sized group at fifty yards."

"That's not the point." He set the rifle down. "You came up here to gloat."

"I came up here to talk."

"Then talk."

So I did the thing I'd been planning since the airport, the thing I'd told Brendan nothing about, because Brendan's plan was exile and my plan was something worse. I crossed the room, put a knee on either side of his hips, and sat down on his lap in that creaky wooden chair. His hands came up on pure reflex and landed on my waist.

"Nora," he said, and his voice did the crack thing Joan's did last night.

"Shut up for a second."

I started moving. Slow, rocking, my hips against his through two layers of denim. His cock was already half hard, which took about four seconds to become fully hard, and I felt every inch of it through his jeans against my pussy.

"Jesus, Nora, the door!"

"It's shut. Nobody comes in here before lunch."

I ground down harder. His hands tightened on my waist. His head tipped back against the chair.

"This is a trap," he said. "I know this is a trap."

"Then why are you holding on to me?"

"Because," he said, and stopped, and swallowed, and I rocked again and he groaned. "God. Because I missed you. Okay? I drove up here hoping you'd be here. Joan was supposed to be a, I don't know, a reason to come."

"You drove up here with your girlfriend to see me."

"You're not going to let that go, are you."

"No," I said, and rolled my hips, slow and mean, and felt him throb against me. "Keep talking."

"I think about you," he said, breathing rough now. "I think about that trip to the lake. When you, when we did it in the truck with the windows down and you bit my shoulder so hard I had a bruise for a week."

"I remember. You cried a little."

"I did not cry."

"You made a sound."

"Nora." His hands slid down to my ass and pulled, pressing me down onto him, and I let him, because a fish that fights the line tears loose. "I want you. I'll do whatever you want. Cancel the drive home, I don't care. Just tell me what you want me to do."

"What I want," I said, right against his ear, still moving, "is for you to keep thinking you're winning. Joan, the party tonight, all of it. Can you do that?"

"Whatever you want. Just don't stop!"

I stopped. Sat still. He made a noise like a dying animal.

"Tonight," I said, standing off him, adjusting my jacket, leaving him hard and wrecked in a chair under a mounted deer. "Lodge party. Stay close to Joan. Be a good boy."

I got to the door before he said it. "You were going to leave me here, weren't you. The bet. You were never going to keep your end."

I turned around. He sat there with his shirt untucked and his cock pressing up against his fly, and his eyes