After I do my last few tasks and lock up for the night, I set an alarm for six. Throwing myself onto the couch with a blanket, I try not to think about Willa Sutter sleeping in my bed.
It takes me a very long time to fall asleep.
Willa
Playlist: “One Way Or Another,” Blondie
I stir from sleep groggily, moaning in pleasure. The scent surrounding me is obscenely arousing. I’m dreaming about misty pine forests and a blond-haired guy in flannel who has to start slowly unbuttoning his shirt when it comes time to fell a tree.
Wrenching awake, I sit up and realize I am neither in my bed nor in my apartment. If I go by the spruce and cedar scent infusing the air, the neurotic tidiness of my surroundings, I’m in Ryder’s bedroom, tangled in his sheets. His naked body has slept here.
Not that I’ve tried to picture Ryder’s naked body or anything. Not that I’m doing that vividly now.
Don’t. Just don’t, brain. Don’t go there. Don’t think about it, about the solid slab I’ve felt beneath his shirt every time I poked his stomach, about how much I’d probably enjoy dragging my fingers through his dirty blond bedhead hair. Definitely don’t think about those bulging biceps, always straining as he moves. Don’t think about them flexing while he braces himself above me, thrusting—
“Whoa!” I tumble off the mattress, scrambling upright. I have to get out of here. I’m drowning in hormones from my sexy lumberjack dream and this room is quicksand. The longer I stay, the harder it will be to escape its tug.
I hustle through straightening his bed, then quietly tiptoe out and scoop up my bag. A crisp pile of papers sits on the table, along with a note in his tidy scrawl.
The semester’s notes. All yours. Take the container with your name on it in the fridge.
– Ryder
My heart turns gooey and slinks down to my stomach. He printed the notes for me. A huge wave of relief that I finally have everything I need for this class is quickly replaced by suspicion. I’m not used to genuinely nice gestures from the lumberjack. I should run a little quality assurance on these bad boys in case this is his jackass idea of a funny prank. I flip through each page carefully, waiting for them to switch to hieroglyphs, but they prove to be in English and organized in chronological order.
First the delicious meal, then the hospitality of his bed, now these notes. The lumberjack is full of surprises.
Carefully, I slip the papers into my bag, sweeping up his note once again. Take the container with your name on it. “Bossy,” I grumble. He might be bossy, but this time I’m doing what he says because those were some damn good Swedish meatballs and twisty noodles he made. Container in hand, I pad softly toward the door, stepping into my tennis shoes, when I steal a glance toward the couch. Ryder snores softly, one hand draped off the edge of the sofa. What does he look like, asleep? When his defenses are down, is he just as maddening to stare at?
Don’t do it, Willa.
I’m at a fork in the road and I know it. It’s that moment in many of the books I’ve read, with two paths before the heroine. One is shadowy. An owl hoots. Leaves rustle. The other is sunlit. Birds twitter. The path is wide and well-trod.
A snort of self-amusement sneaks out of me. Well-trod. I may be a tad overdramatizing this.
Still, a sinister breeze whispers on the shadowy path I can’t stop eyeballing. This way danger lies. It’s the truth. I can feel in my bones that nothing safe will come from what I’m tempted to do. Problem is, I’m me: I tend to do what I want first, then regret it later.
“Eh, fuck it.”
Ignoring my own warnings, I walk back toward the couch and bend down, inspecting Ryder’s features. I don’t really mind the idea of a beard, but his frustrates me. I want to see all of his face, to know if he has dimples or soft lips. I want to see when he blushes and watch his throat bob as he swallows.
His hair’s in his eyes. Carefully, I brush it back, then freeze, when I see something curled around his ear. His right ear. His good ear.
A hearing aid?
Shock tightens my stomach. Has he always had it? I wrack my brain. Unfortunately, I pay a little too close attention to Ryder’s features. So much so, that I can confirm I’ve never seen this hooked around his ear before.
“You son of a bitch,” I whisper.
By now, I’ve gotten comfortable with mumbling to myself in front of Ryder, because I know he can’t hear me. Maybe that sounds insensitive, but those are just the facts: he can’t hear me, and I tend to be a mutterer. If I can help it, I prefer not to ramble my private thoughts in front of somebody else for them to hear, but when I feel safe to do so, it helps to think out loud.
All last night that trickster was eavesdropping on my personal musings, acting all chivalrous, feeding me dinner and pulling out my chair, leaving me to sleep alone in his bed and preserve my dignity.
And it was all a ruse. Anger churns my stomach, embarrassment heats my cheeks, as I think about the countless private thoughts he overheard. That asshole. That tall, sandy-haired, smirking, flannel-wearing, asshole, lumberjack, son of a bitch.
“Oh, it’s war, now, Bergman. It’s war.”
Conveniently, Ryder and I have class together today. I have thirty minutes between my morning literature recitation and Mac’s lecture. Just enough time to set retribution number one in place.
I’ve had some time to think through plausible explanations for why Ryder wore his hearing aid last night and didn’t tell me. I have to say, I’m quite proud of myself. I managed to coax my temper from explosive rage to a simmering level of irate, thus clearing my head enough to do some logical deducing.
Ryder’s good ear is his right ear. The first time I sat on his right side in class, and we talked, he acted…differently. His eyes followed my lips as usual but they also roamed me curiously. His whole face lit up as he leaned in. Maybe he liked hearing my voice and hadn’t exactly known what to do with that, except explore it further.
He said in his terse-texting way that hearing aids aren’t a cure-all, and they don’t make speaking easy for him. His response, and many other moments I have thus far, unfortunately, had to endure with him, have led me to a hunch: Ryder Bergman, beneath all his formidable, silent intensity, is shy.
And if he’s shy about being deaf and not speaking, why wouldn’t he also be shy about when he tries to wear his frustrating hearing aid, too?
That still doesn’t answer the question of why he wore the hearing aid around me. Why me? I’ve thought of two possible motivations for his behavior:
One, he wants dirt on me, and he’s a sick jerk with no qualms about how he gains that material. Pretty grim option, but not outside the realm of possibility. He is an asshole lumberjack, after all.
Two, he wants to know what I’m like without the impact of his deafness, and the tool he needs for that is one he’s shy about admitting he still dabbles with.
But why would he want that?
I have no idea what Ryder thinks of me, but I know that in his surly way, he doesn’t always seem to find me a ball-busting nuisance. What I do know is that he got a little gruff and shooed away his flirtatiously curious friends last night. I know that he might have pissed me off to high heaven as we discussed the final project specifics, but he took care making our meal, brewed herbal tea after dinner, and served tiny Swedish thumbprint cookies that I blissfully overconsumed.