“There you go.” Lana smiled at her warmly, giving Zoey the coffee and her makeup case. “Thank you, dearest. Now, make me beautiful.”
Even in her post-inebriated state, Zoey couldn’t help but chuckle at that. “You’re always beautiful.”
Growing up within driving distance of the suburbs of Chicago had its perks. Unable to remember a time when she and her family hadn’t been strapped for cash, a teenage Zoey had taken an extra job at a local department store in the makeup department. Somehow spritzing expensive cologne in unsuspecting patrons’ faces turned into perching on a stool next to the makeup counter.
She’d never had any formal training, but her hands were steady, and she had a good eye for what palettes brought out the color and sparkle in someone’s eyes. As jobs went, it hadn’t paid as much as she’d hoped for, but as life skills went, her ability to draw a line of liquid eyeliner with surgical precision benefitted her far more often than she would have expected.
Zoey learned what she needed to keep the women in her seats happy, but as a shy teenager with thick glasses and a single outfit nice enough to work in, she had been surprised to find how much she enjoyed it.
Somehow, in her detailed and determined interrogation of all things Zoey, Lana had discovered her past and put it to full use whenever she really needed a “spiff.”
Spiffing Lana for a date often took hours, the socialite nothing if not determined to look her best on the rare occurrences someone managed to catch her eye for an entire evening. But since this was just an afternoon rendezvous, whatever that entailed, Zoey made quicker work of her canvas.
“So what’s he like?”
“Hmm?”
“The person you’re having drinks with.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t catch his name. I was more focused on his hands.” Lana sighed lustily. At Zoey’s raised eyebrow, Lana added, “During my massage yesterday morning. Don’t be such a prude.”
“I’m not a prude.”
“Really?”
“I’m not a prude,” Zoey clarified. “I just don’t love being squished and squashed around by strangers.”
“Oh, you do not know what you’re missing.”
Maybe she didn’t. It had been a long time since Zoey had been squished, let alone squashed, by anyone, stranger or no.
Making Lana beautiful wasn’t hard. She’d look great with a soggy paper bag over her head. But since Zoey loved her, she did her best to make Lana as fabulous as the resort in which they were staying. Then, when Lana rushed off to her breakfast, Zoey moved to the window.
Lana had been kind enough to leave the blackout curtains drawn, but Zoey braved the bright light peaking around the edges of the curtains, drawing them aside. She was met with a vibrant blue sky backdropping rows of mountains, jutting up like gorgeous, ragged teeth.
The part of Illinois she came from was flat as a pancake. Back there, she could see for miles, no matter where she looked. Adrift in a sea of cornfields and soybeans, broken up only by subdivisions and strip malls. Here, Zoey felt anchored in place. The mountains and the valley below were all she could see. She’d been in Moose Springs less than a day, and she’d already fallen in love with this tiny Alaskan town.
“Best vacation ever,” she whispered to herself. “Worth every penny.”
* * *
Hannah hadn’t let Graham buy her a drink. She had, however, let him pay her back the money he owed her.
It bothered Graham that he hadn’t remembered the two hundred dollars, although in his defense, New Year’s was his holiday to be the drunk one. To surround himself with his friends and family and take comfort in the oblivion of his own concoctions, knowing they had his back if he got too stupid.
“Too” was a relative term. Graham was well aware of the reputation preceding him.
Even though his night had run later than expected, with a sloshy little tourist to blame, Graham pulled himself out of bed early, determined to make full use of his morning. The Tourist Trap didn’t open until eleven, and Graham was an expert at not showing up a minute beforehand.
Even though his body wanted to hide under the covers for a few more hours, he had things to do. Chainsaws to oil. Large chunks of wood to carve.
The thirty-acre stretch of land lining the southern edge of the resort property had been in the Barnett family for generations. His parents had traded life in the woods for a nice condo near the inlet in Anchorage, closer to his mother’s job. Graham could have stayed in the main house, but they visited a lot, and he preferred his space.
Thankfully, the tiny log cabin just off the dirt access road was all Graham’s own.
Between the two of them, Graham and Easton built the cabin with their own hands. And okay, maybe the first time around, they kind of botched it up, and the second time, the woodburning stove caught the living room on fire, but the third time around, they crushed it. Maybe if Graham had known that his diner was going to be a financial success, he would have invested more in the size of his house, but interior walls seemed a little too complicated for a first home.
One of these days, if life let him stop making Growly Bears for a living, Graham was going to pack up his belongings and move north of Denali, where no one would ever—ever—ask him to take a selfie with them again.
Behind the cabin was a twenty-foot-long steel shipping container, inside of which was the meaning of life and all things that mattered to Graham. The reason why he could spend his days serving food to tourists and nights prying them out of his personal bubble.
His wood.
His glorious, magnificent wood.
The improvised workshop was full of it, from tiny chunks of scrap wood to logs as thick as a man’s torso, all in varying sizes and shapes. On one side of the workshop, a long table held Graham’s tools, his grandfather’s tools, and some bizarre torture-like instruments he assumed were his great-grandfather’s tools, but he wasn’t willing to put money on them. But the pièce de résistance of his collection was his set of carving tools.
Graham might be stuck in the body of a diner owner, but in his heart and soul, he was an artist, and he chose to express his artistic tendencies using high-powered chainsaws.
Several of his larger pieces wouldn’t fit in the shipping container, spilling out with deliberate disorganization in front of the workshop, including Graham’s pride and joy: an upright ten-foot-tall cedar log, complete with a five-foot-wide stump base. The piece dominated his carving area as if the tree had always grown there, just waiting for him to shape it into a masterpiece. The gnarls on the log were unique and complicated and could result in either a work of art or a chunked-off piece of junk. The log had stood in front of his workshop for the last six months, staring at him, daring him to have the guts to make something amazing from it.