Rules for the Lodge

Carmen's car nearly didn't make the last stretch of gravel road. She pulled up to Lost Pine Lodge at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday in October, and the tires spat rocks the whole way, and she said out loud, alone in the car, "Well, this is it, I guess."

She was thirty-four, and she'd booked this room back in July, when starting hormone therapy still felt like something that would happen to a different person. A month of quiet before the testosterone. A month to sit with herself. That was the plan, anyway. She mostly felt she had paid good money to be nervous in a nicer location.

The lodge sat under the pines like it had been dropped there by a careless hand. Big log building, stone chimney, a stack of split firewood along the side wall. And a man at the woodpile with an axe, which seemed like a joke nobody had told yet.

He looked up when her car door slammed. "Hey! You made it up that road?"

"Barely," Carmen called back. "I think my suspension filed a complaint."

He laughed and set the axe down. He was tall, mid thirties maybe, flannel, work gloves. "Jackson," he said, walking over with his hand out. "I'm the other sucker staying through the off-season."

"Carmen." His handshake was warm and not too firm, the kind that doesn't try to win anything. "Data analyst. Which sounds more exciting than it is."

"Wildlife biologist, which also sounds more exciting than it is. I count elk. On paper it's very glamorous."

"Is it?"

"It's cold and I talk to elk in a baby voice. So, no." He grinned. "You want a hand with your bags? I've been here a week, I know which doors stick."

"You've been here a week and you're already chopping wood?"

"You run out of things to do fast out here. There's no wifi past the common room. The manager left a note that said, quote, figure it out. Very inspiring leadership."

Carmen got her bags and followed him up the steps. Inside, the common room was all rough beams and a stone fireplace and two sagging couches that had probably seen twenty hunting seasons. A narrow hallway ran off the back with six identical doors. Jackson pointed.

"You're room three, I'm room six. Far apart, so if you snore I'll only hear it a little."

"I don't snore," Carmen said.

"Everybody says that. Everybody snores." He said it lightly, and she liked that he didn't make a whole thing out of it, didn't ask questions about why a woman was here alone for a month. Not yet, anyway.

* * *

They ended up making dinner together because neither of them wanted to cook alone in a kitchen built for twenty. Jackson did chili from canned goods, and Carmen chopped an onion badly, and he didn't say anything about it, which she appreciated more than she would have said.

"So what brings you out here?" he asked over the chili, in the common room, fire going because he was apparently the kind of person who just builds fires. "Off-season at a hunting lodge, that's a weird vacation."

"Quiet," Carmen said. "I've got some changes coming up in my life, and I wanted a month to just. Be. Before it all kicks off."

"Changes like what?"

She could have told him. She'd been practicing deflection for two months, and she deflected now, because he was easy to talk to, in the way of people who don't lean forward too much when you answer, and that was exactly why she wanted to be careful.

"Work stuff. Life stuff. Stuff I'd rather not get into over chili on day one."

Jackson nodded and stirred his chili like this was a normal piece of dinner conversation, which, to be fair, it was. "Fair enough. Say it when you want to. Or don't. The elk won't tell."

"That's the nicest thing anyone has said about my secrets," Carmen said, laughing.

"Thank you. Also the wifi situation means I can't check my work email, which is probably the healthiest thing that's ever happened to me."

"See, we've got complementary problems. I've got too much quiet and you need more. We should split the quiet fifty-fifty. Ration it."

"Ration the quiet," Carmen repeated, and shook her head. "You're an odd man, Jackson."

"People say that," he said, pleased.

After dinner he washed the pots, which raised him further in her estimation, and then they ended up back by the fire with a bottle of red wine the manager had left in the cupboard with a sticky note reading EMERGENCIES ONLY. Jackson had held it up and said, "This is an emergency, right? A boredom emergency," and Carmen had said yes before he'd finished the sentence.

Two glasses in, he sat up straight on the sagging couch like he'd had an actual idea, which he announced with enormous ceremony.

"Okay. Hear me out. We should make rules."

"Rules?"

"House rules! For coexisting. Like a treaty. Two people, one lodge, thirty days, no casualties. There should be a document."

Carmen looked at him over her glass. "You want to write a treaty."

"I want to write rules, yes. Silly ones, mostly, but still rules. There's a notebook in the drawer by the puzzle, I checked. Come on, it'll be fun. When's the last time you made rules for anything?"

"When's the last time anybody asked you that question and you had a fun answer?" But she was already getting the notebook, so the point was his either way.

He found a pen and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the fire, and wrote RULES FOR LOST PINE at the top in huge letters, underlined twice.

"Rule one," he said. "No stealing the good snacks. I saw the vending stash in the kitchen, there's exactly one bag of the good chips and I have already emotionally claimed it."

"You can't emotionally claim chips, that's not how property works."

"It's how property works out here! Rule one, done. Rule two. Quiet hours after eleven, because I count elk at dawn and I need my baby voice in good condition."

"You talk to the elk in a baby voice?"

"They respond better. You'd respond better too, if I baby-voiced at you. Rule two, done. Rule three." He paused, pen hovering, and got a slightly careful look, like he was testing a door handle before opening it. "No flirting before 9 PM."

Carmen nearly choked on her wine. "Excuse me?"

"It's a real problem in shared lodges. People flirting willy nilly, all hours of the day, eggs getting burnt, nobody counting elk. It's a safety rule. Lodge safety."

"Uh huh." She was laughing, which maybe undercut the serious face she was attempting. "And what happens after 9 PM?"

"After 9 PM it's legal, obviously. I don't make the rules." He did, in fact, write the rule. "Rule four. Whoever builds the fire gets first pick of the couch."

"That couch is a lump of lumps."

"That's what makes it a prize. Rule five, nobody plays their music loud in the hallway, this is a hallway of rest."

"This is a hallway of six identical doors, Jackson."

"Six identical doors of rest."

They were four rules deep and a glass and a half deep, and Carmen realized she felt lighter than she had since July. Since the appointment where she'd asked all her questions and gotten answers and then gone home and sat in her car for twenty minutes because the answers were real now. He was still writing.

"Rule six," Jackson said. "No asking invasive questions before the asker is prepared to answer the same question back."

Carmen looked at him. "That one doesn't sound silly."

"No," he agreed, and shrugged. "It kind of snuck in there. But it's a good one. Fair's fair. You told me your big thing tonight, and I told you I count elk. The trade's a little lopsided."

"You could tell me more than elk counting."

"I could. Later. Rule six covers it, see, it's self-executing." He capped the pen with a flourish. "Rule seven. No dying."

"Strong rule. Hard to enforce."

"Historically it enforces itself."

Carmen took the notebook and read the list back, and it was ridiculous and she wanted to keep it. She said so. Jackson said the notebook lived in the drawer, so it was now lodge property, technically owned by nobody, which he declared the correct way for laws to work.

"Emergency wine, a treaty, and a fire," he said, leaning back against the couch with his glass. "Day one of the off-season is already beating every day I've had this month."

"Don't get sentimental on me, we've got twenty-nine days left."

"Twenty-nine days, six rules, and one emotionally claimed bag of chips," he said. "I like our odds."

The fire cracked. Somewhere outside an actual elk made an actual noise, and Jackson pointed at the window like he was taking credit for it, and Carmen laughed and reached for the notebook again to add rule eight, which was that rule eight had to be a good one, and they argued about what made a rule good for another hour, and neither of them noticed the time, so technically the 9 PM rule never even came up.

Carmen broke rule three on a Wednesday morning, technically, because she'd been up since six and found the coffee situation unacceptable by eight.

"Jackson," she called down the hallway, and then remembered rule five and lowered her voice. "Jackson. Your coffee setup is a crime scene. There's no filter, there's a funnel, and there's what I can only describe as a sock."

He appeared at his door, room six, hair going everywhere. "The sock is for straining. It's a documented method."

"It's a documented method for making me write a rule nine. Also, good morning, you look like a man who lost a fight with a pillow, and I'd like to formally announce that your elk voice is wasted on a coffee criminal such as yourself."

He stopped halfway to the kitchen and pointed the sock at her. "Hey. Hey. Is that flirting? It's not even 9 PM. It's not even 9 AM. That's fifteen hours early. You're a rule breaker, Carmen. Day two."

"I said your elk voice was wasted. That's an insult, not a flirt."

"It was a compliment wearing an insult costume. I know flirting when I hear it, I grew up with sisters." He grinned the whole way into the kitchen, and she grinned at his back, and it was settled. Rule three, broken, and neither of them made a big deal of it, which was maybe the point of silly rules. You broke one and the world kept spinning and the coffee got made, sock and all.

* * *

The jacket thing happened on Friday. Carmen had planned a hike up the ridge behind the lodge, checked the weather on her phone as a responsible adult would, and then walked out the door at ten in the morning into a wind that came straight off a glacier apparently. Halfway up the trail her fingers stopped working.

She turned around, hiked back, and stood in the common room, dripping and pathetic, where Jackson was doing something complicated with a clipboard and a thermos.

"No jacket?" he asked.

"I own a jacket. It's in my closet in the city, being useless. Who checks weather for a place and still gets it wrong?"

"Everyone. Everyone gets it wrong, this is the foothills." He disappeared down the hallway and came back with a fleece, dark green, enormous. "Here. It's not fashionable but it's warm."

"I can't borrow that, that's rule breaking adjacent. There's no rule about it yet but there will be and then we'll both be criminals."

"Then we write the rule and break it immediately. That's how we do things here now, I thought you'd learned that." He held it out. "Take the fleece, Carmen."

She took the fleece. It was warm and it smelled like pine smoke and like him, some kind of ordinary soap, and she pulled it on and it swallowed her whole and she stood there in it feeling like she'd been caught in something she didn't have a name for yet.

"It's huge," she said.

"You're compact."

"I'm average sized."

"You're compact," he repeated, absolutely delighted, and picked up his clipboard. "I've got transect four. The fleece suits you better than me anyway, I look like a green tent in it. Bring it back whenever."

She wore it the rest of the day. She wore it to make dinner, and to read by the fire, and when she finally gave it back, hanging it over his doorknob at a reasonable hour, she caught herself sniffing the collar first like a weirdo and then stood in the hallway of six identical doors feeling extremely glad that nobody had walked in on that.

* * *

Saturday night was cards and the second bottle of wine, which they'd decided also counted as an emergency because Saturday is technically an emergency of the soul. They played rummy at the little table by the window, and Jackson kept a running commentary on her card strategy that was honestly worse than no commentary, and around the third hand Carmen ran out of small talk.

It happened naturally, which was the strange part. She'd been rehearsing this conversation for a month, in the car, in the shower, in her room three with the door shut. She'd had four versions, and two of them had exit strategies.

"Hey. Invasive question, rule six applies. Are you prepared to answer back?"

Jackson set his cards down, which she'd learned meant he was actually listening. "Prepared and ready. Fire away."

"I start testosterone next month. Like, November. It's why I booked the lodge back in July, I wanted somewhere quiet to think before it all starts. And I've told maybe four people in my whole life, and now I'm telling the elk guy, and I don't even know why except that you're easy to talk to and you made chili and you didn't