The Frog Prince (15 page)

“Like what?” he says. “Just be yourself.”

He starts plying me with little bites of Lamp Carpaccio and Poached Pear, and I forget to tell him that the worst thing I could ever be around his mother is myself.

Chapter Thirteen

“We should do something this week,” Kat says. “Maybe see a movie.”

The two of us are on my back deck sharing an enormous shrimp salad and a bottle of wine. I think about the bag of frozen peas I’m sitting on after caving into pressure from her and getting a full bikini wax. I narrow my eyes at her. “I’ll be lucky if I can walk by the end of the week,” I say. “There’s a reason I’m working from home today.”

“I thought you were doing intensive dance classes with Roman,” she says. “How’re you going to accomplish that particular feat?”

I shake my head while I chew and swallow a mouthful of lettuce. “He’s out of town this week.”

“He’s been out of town a lot…what’s he doing?”

“Building a treehouse for someone in Seattle.” I cringe at the word “treehouse.” Just saying it embarrasses me.

“Christine says that he build these really huge treehouses,” says Kat, leaning forward as if she’s eager to hear more details.

I am keen to change the subject. “If I am actually mobile in the next day or two, what did you want to do?”

“Julia is doing one of her burlesque shows on Friday at Lannie’s,” says Kat. “You want to go?”

Kat is referring to Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret, a downtown club where our incredibly fit and hot girlfriend, Julia, gets on stage and rides around on a tricycle while at the same time contorting her body into Cirque de Soleil positions and stripping nearly naked. I don’t know if it’s entertainment, but it’s definitely a testament to women’s superior multi-tasking abilities.

“Roman invited me to his new house on Friday,” I say to Kat. “He’s making me dinner.”

She stares at me over the bowl of salad. “You realize what that means don’t you?”

“I’m not sure,” I say, “but I
think
it means we’re going to eat dinner at his house on Friday.”

Kat rolls her eyes. “You are so stupid, Leigh.”

“What…you think he meant that he’s having
me
for dinner?”

“God, I hope so,” Kat grumbles. “It’s been, like, three months.” She stabs another forkful of lettuce.

“It’s been three
calendar
months, but not three
dating
months,” I say, gingerly shifting my weight on the bag of peas. “I’ve seen him for maybe sixty-five out of ninety days, and thirty of those days have been spent in accelerated dance instruction. I feel like I’m training for Dancing with the Stars.”

“I’m just saying that if you go to his house there’s no way you’re coming home the same night. He lives up in the mountains somewhere.”

“Yeah, I know. He told me that he has a guest room.”

Kat starts convulsing with laughter. “He…told you…guest room,” she says, still shaking with mirth.

“Hey, if I decide the day-of that I don’t want to jump into bed with him I have preemptive strategies available to me,” I say peevishly.

“Like what?” says Kat, wiping her still-smiling mouth with a napkin. “Pepper spray?”

I shrug. “I just won’t shave my legs for a few days beforehand.”

“How the hell does that help you?”

“Would
you
let a guy see you naked for the first time looking like
Homo habilis
?”

“Depends on how horny I was, how dark it was going to be, and how much I’d had to drink,” says Kat.

“Well, I know there’s no way I’d do it.”

“So that’s your plan…to go one hundred percent gorilla legs on him?”

“For a hairless woman you’re remarkably critical of women with fully-functioning adrenal glands,” I say.

The bleat of my cell phone makes us both jump. I look at the screen and my breath catches –still!–when I see who’s calling. I fumble with the buttons and swing the phone to my ear. “Hey, Roman,” I say. “How are you?”

“I’m good, I’m good,” he says. “I just landed in Seattle. I’m going to grab some dinner. What are you doing?”

“Uh…” In a panic I look at Kat, and then down at my lap. “Steaming some vegetables,” I blurt out. Kat makes a choking sound across the table from me, and springs from the chair to wharf out some spinach leaves over the deck rail. “Me and Kat are sharing a bowl of salad,” I add in a hurry before he has any follow-up questions about my asinine vegetable comment.

“Nothing like a little bit of roughage,” he says, obviously in high spirits. “Well, I don’t have any real reason for calling other than to tell you that I was thinking about you.”

“Really?” I say, then cringe. Can I be any more pathetic?

He laughs. “Yes,
really
. I’m looking forward to seeing you Friday. I can pick you up after work on my way from the airport. You’re still planning to come over, aren’t you?” he says when I don’t answer immediately. He sounds absurdly worried, like I might have changed my mind. The odds of that are about equal to me ever getting another full bikini wax.

“Of course I’m coming over. Should I bring anything?”

“Just bring yourself.”

“Okay, I can do that.”

“Alright, well I’ll let you go,” he says. “Have a good week and I’ll see you Friday.”

“You too.” I hang up and point an accusing finger at Kat. “Since this waxing debacle is your fault, go fetch some frozen corn from the freezer.”

Chapter Fourteen

Roman drives west on Hampden Avenue out of the city and into the mountains. The sun is dropping like a stone behind the autumn Rockies, a faint line of orange smoldering behind the peaks, backlighting the gold leaves of the aspen trees.

Roman has known me long enough to know that the best way to have a conversation with me is to basically do all the talking yourself, and wait for me to randomly inject semi-intelligent remarks throughout your monologue. It’s less stressful for me this way. Right now he’s trying to sell me on going with him to Austria for Christmas, and then to some dance in Stockholm on New Year's Eve called the Snow Ball.

We’re well into the foothills now, passing the town of Deckers, which I only know because it is surrounded by national forest and I've gone backpacking here a couple of times. Suddenly Roman turns left into the parking lot of a diner—one of those mom and pop operations that serve local residents and the occasional summer hiker. He slides the car into an unmarked space next to a Jeep Wrangler that looks like it was caught at Ground Zero of a nuclear attack.

“The owner is nice enough to let me park here,” says Roman, turning the car off. “We'll have to take the Jeep from here.”

It is not a warm night. There are no doors on the Jeep, so I just crawl into the passenger seat and cross my arms against the chill.

Roman digs in the back and appears at my side with a scratchy-looking plaid blanket. He shakes it out over the ground, covers me from the tip of my toes to my jaw line, and then sort of tucks in the edges around my legs and arms. “These last few miles are a little chilly,” he says.

Within a half a mile of the diner we’ve left paved roads, and are now bumping along a dirt track going up and deeper into the trees. If it weren't for the high clearance of the Jeep, we would be plowing the road with the undercarriage.

“This road doesn't get leveled very much,” Roman bellows over the herky-jerky thrashings of the Jeep. The headlights bring a bank of five or six mailboxes into view, and then they’re gone, swallowed by the darkness in our wake. The nose of the Jeep turns higher as the incline abruptly increases. Roman slows it to a crawl to navigate the steep trail. Our seats are tilted at some crazy angle, like astronauts in a launch capsule.

“Are we going camping,” I yell, “or is there a house up here somewhere?” The words rattle out of my mouth both from the violent shaking of the Jeep and because I'm entering the last stages of hypothermia, the part where you start to go mad, tear off your clothes, and run shrieking into the snow drifts.

“Almost there,” he yells back. A narrower path juts from our road at a right angle. Roman turns onto it and the Jeep begins to level out. I'm straining my eyes to see something, anything beyond the reach of the headlights, but there’s nothing but dirt road and a hint of trees beyond. We enter a clearing, a half circle of dirt and wild grasses. I make out some autumn wildflowers still clinging to life just as Roman kills the engine and everything goes black.

Roman fumbles with the glove box, and mutters an apology as it pops open and strikes me on the knee. I move my legs, turning my knees to the right just as he closes it. The Jeep bounces as he jumps out of it, and I hear his footsteps fading and coming closer as he circles around to my side.

“This is it,” he says, grabbing my bag with one hand and my hand with the other. I slide my feet out and jump onto the ground, my flats crunching on the dirt. I stand there in the dark and wonder if by “this is it” he means “this semi-circular dirt patch is my home,” or “this is it” as in “now I’m going to slay you and leave your body for the wolves.”

Suddenly two landscaping lights come on near our feet, illuminating a path through the wildflowers. “Come on,” Roman says, grabbing one of my hands and pulling me along. “Gotta get you inside before you freeze.”

I follow him blindly, and have just stepped past the lights at the head of the trail when they abruptly go out. Before I can say anything, two more lights pop on a few feet further along. As soon as we pass those, they blink off and another set ahead of us comes on.

“Short range motion sensors,” Roman says by way of explanation as he leads me along. “I originally had them set up on sequential timers, but that created a problem on nights when I got home and had to make a run for the bathroom.”

I don't reply. I'm too busy scanning the way ahead looking for a house, a lean-to, a chicken coop, anything that will provide shelter from the cold air which has now begun to move and is torturing me with random, biting gusts.

The last pair of lights goes out and nothing comes on to replace them. Roman keeps walking forward into the dark. My sense of self preservation finally gets the better of me and I stop dead in my tracks. Roman drops my hand.

“I had a sensor arranged for the house lights,” he says, his voice a little further away than before. “But the deer and elk would sometimes get close enough to the house to set it off, scare the crap out of me in the middle of the night.” I can hear his feet edging a little at a time towards some unknown destination in front of us.

I am just about to say “what house?” when another light comes on right in front of Roman. It’s a lamp post—one of the old-fashioned kind you find in daguerreotypes of Denver in the early nineteen hundreds—only this lamppost is just sitting here in the middle of the forest without a house in sight.

“Finally!” says Roman. He closes the distance to the lantern, opens a panel on the pole, and jabs a finger at something inside.

And then I absolutely cannot believe what I’m seeing.

Beginning at the base of the tree a staircase lights up, one rise at a time, winding around the trunk of the thickest aspen tree I have ever seen. Up, and up, and up until they illuminate the sharper edges of a porch and a wraparound deck. Soft accent lights pop on one at a time along the circumference of the deck and eaves. Between the top of the doorway and the peak of the roof, there’s nothing but glass in the shape of two enormous triangular windows. Through them a crystal chandelier hanging from the exposed wood beams of the cathedral ceiling blinks on, stoking the interior walls to a warm yellow, and under-lighting the canopy of golden aspen leaves above.

My mouth is sort of flopping around in a localized seizure as I try to react to seeing a small ski chalet in the trees. The entirety of the sight is overwhelming, a light-filled crown topped by a golden halo of leaves. It is too beautiful for words but I stutter a few anyway. “Oh my god—how did you—oh my god…”

Roman smiles mischievously. “Want to go play in my treehouse?”

I nod dumbly, and only tear my eyes from overhead when I feel him pull me to the base of the stairs. I focus all my concentration on my feet as we climb around and up.

Roman pushes the door open for me and I step into the treehouse, grateful that whatever heat source trees use is apparently up and running here. The air is rich with the scent of apples and cinnamon, a perfect complement to the smell of freshly-cut wood that permeates everything. I’m a huge believer in aromatherapy, so I inhale deeply and feel happier. Roman is facing me, his hands forced into the front pockets of his jeans like a nervous middle-schooler, looking at me expectantly.

“When you said ‘treehouse’,” I say, “I was sort of expecting a platform with a drop-down ladder and a sign that said NO GIRLS ALLOWED.”

Roman laughs. “Yeah, I guess that's what most people think when I tell them that I build treehouses.”

“How did you
do
this?” I say, looking around, marveling first at the three-feet wide, ash gray aspen trunk intersecting the middle of the room. The entire space is only about thirty feet by thirty feet, but the way the furniture is laid out in the open floor plan, combined with the oak wood floors and picture windows on every wall, it feels twice as large.

“Me and my crew only finished it about a month ago,” he says, walking into the kitchen. It’s small, one row of colonial cherry cabinets up top and below, but the triangular granite-topped island prevents it from feeling closed off.

Roman reaches into a cabinet for two mugs, and pulls a bag of coffee from the freezer. “I know you’re not a coffee fan,” he says, “but it’s all I have. I meant to buy some tea for you but it just slipped my mind until now.”

“That’s fine,” I say. “Anything hot will do.”

“Anyways, I’ve been too busy on some of my other projects in Washington and Oregon,” he says. “That’s why I’ve been staying with Christine and Earl for the last few months.”