Here's how it went:
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DSW: Lexie. That's a pretty name, and it rhymes with the word sexy. Are you sexy, Lexie? Do people call you Sexy Lexie?
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Me: Only sarcastically. I could be sexy if I wanted to, maybe. I have long legs, and I guess some guys like that.
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DSW: I like long legs. I like everything. I'm not married, by the way. I hope you don't mind, but sometimes I think about you…
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Me: You have really nice clothes. I bet you're cute. I already know that you have blond hair, because I saw it on the brush in the bathroom. I've never had a boyfriend. Ever. I'm eighteen, by the way, and this is just my summer job. I'm not going to be a housekeeper forever.
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DSW: Lexie, I found your last note extremely disappointing! Here I was hoping you were about sixty years old, with crooked, gray teeth, and a shitty attitude about life and men. How am I supposed to get any writing done when I'm thinking about you?
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Me: You could split up your day and only think about me half the time. I'm wearing a really cute outfit today. It's a shame you aren't here to see it. The skirt is super short and when I lean over to pick things up, you could probably see my panties.
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And that was the last note exchanged.
So you can probably understand why I was so nervous about seeing the guy. He was probably old and ugly, and I was going to have a very uncomfortable talk with him, where I let him down gently. Or—and this seemed unlikely, but still terrifying—what if he wouldn't take no for an answer? Carridee knew where I was, but she wasn't there to stop anything.
He called out, “Lexie?”
I put on my brave face, over top of my scared-shitless body, and walked into the cabin. I'd worn the same short skirt that day, and I tugged at the hem, scared to make eye contact with DSW.
“I'm David,” he said, reaching out his palm.
His hand didn't look old and gross, or rape-y, so I shook it.
My gaze roamed up from his hand, along a well-muscled arm covered in gold hairs, to a shoulder, and then the bottom dropped out of my world as I was sucked into sapphire-blue eyes.
My mouth went completely dry, and I could barely choke out my own name.
“Lexie. Nice to meet you.”
“Finally,” he said, his eyebrows moving in a playful way.
“You're not old.”
“I'm older than you.”
I tore myself away from those beautiful eyes and stared down at my hands, one twisting within the other.
My voice squeaked as I said, “I guess I should start cleaning, right?”
“How are you at typing?”
“What?” I had to replay his question a few times in my head, because I hadn't been expecting anything like that. “About seventy words a minute. I can go faster, but I make a lot of mistakes.”
I looked up as he smiled, and I noticed some things about him besides his eyes. He had a sexy nose, long and straight with a pointed tip. His lips were full, and his broad chin had one of those superhero dimples in it. His hair was thick and long, tied back in a ponytail. So that explained the super-long hairs I'd found in his bed. I'd suspected those hairs were left by a girlfriend, but apparently they weren't.
As for his age, he was definitely a man—early thirties, and certainly not a boy—but he didn't seem that old. Too old for me, though.
“You won't be cleaning today,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Come on. We both know the cabin doesn't need cleaning today. It's still spotless from the last dozen times you were here. What else are you good at?”
I stammered and looked at my hands.
“Lexie. What else can you do?”
“I'm very organized. Last summer, I worked at a store, and I came up with a whole new system for organizing the stock room.”
“That's all very admirable, but I don't need a professional organizer. Like I mentioned, I could use some help typing. My fingers distract me when I'm writing. I think one thing and my fingers type something else. I swear they're trying to sabotage me. I was thinking that maybe if you typed while I dictated, I might be able to get somewhere with this novel.”
“The detective novel?”
He grinned, his smile lighting up the whole room, and my heart. I'd had crushes before, on guys at school and on movie stars, but this guy, David, ran laps around my beloved Freddie Prinze Jr.
I agreed to try typing for him, because I figured my time was already paid for, and it sounded like more fun than cleaning. I tried to put the flirty notes out of my mind and ignore his intense gaze on the hem of my little skirt.
Upstairs in the bedroom set up as an office, I sat in a hard-backed chair facing the computer monitor, and David sat next to me. He immediately started explaining the gist of the novel to me. Some of the elements were familiar, because I'd taken more than a few peeks at the index cards in the drawer, but finally he noticed the blank expression on my face and said, “Lost you, haven't I?”
“How about we just start wherever you are, and I can take the previous part home to read and get up to speed?”
“But I haven't written anything down.”
“Not a word?”
He blinked, those blue eyes captivating me once more, sending a buzzing excitement down my spine like a mouse on the run, ending up trapped between my legs. I could feel myself swelling for him, swelling in anticipation of pleasure, which was my own damn fault, for training myself to associate the whole cabin with multiple orgasms.
He said, “It's basically all outlined and in my head. I can see it happening, like a movie.”
“Then you should write a screenplay.”
He got a grumpy look.
On the computer, I pulled open a new document and started creating a title page—something we'd just covered in school before I'd graduated.
I asked David, “What's your full name?”
“That's part of the problem.” His face got even grumpier, frown lines on his forehead and his sexy lips protruding.
My spirits, which had been high, plummeted, flattened by how difficult this typing business was proving to be. In the minute of silence that followed, I actually fantasized about cleaning. Scrubbing toilets would be less painful than bearing witness to this man's writer's block.
“David Smith Wittingham,” he said.
I typed the name on the page.
“But there's another David,” he said. “Not the exact same last name as me, but it's close enough to be confusing. He writes detective stories, too, so I have to come up with a whole new name.”