Dedicated to my friend Bellie444, who suffers from Arkoudaphobia
A strong fear of bears makes her vulnerable to manipulation
**
Michelle was freaked out. Someone had robbed her apartment. Whoever it was, he had gained entry somehow, and created a mess. He had been looking for something. Money? Jewelry? Both? She of course didn't know.
Michelle ran to her secret stash of money. It was all there. She next ran to her jewelry, and to her great relief, it was all there too, including the locket her great, great grandmother had passed on down to her grandmother, to her mother, and now to her. The black and white pictures of her great, great, great grandparents that were in it were taken near the beginning of photography being available to the masses. She heavily sat down. What was the thief after? Did he enter just to make a mess?
She spent hours carefully straightening up, making sure everything she treasured was still there: her television, her Bose radio, her French copper pots, her desktop and laptop computers, her favorite stuffed animal her beloved aunt had given her some twenty-two years ago, the silverware handed down to her from her grandmother. It was all there.
It was only when she finished that she realized, thinking back carefully, that only one thing was missing: Her personal journal. She kept her personal journal in the nightstand drawer of her bedroom. It was gone, but next to her journal she kept her vibrator, and it was left, untouched, in the drawer. How strange!
She had never trusted her computer. She knew how often computers were hacked, and she did not want to see her journal posted up on the Internet, somewhere. Therefore, she wrote out her journal entries longhand, on paper, the old-fashioned way. It never occurred to her that someone would illegally enter into her apartment and steal it. It was of no value to anyone else!
Unless, of course, the person who stole it was a pervert? All her most intimate sexual musings, fantasies, and history; all of it was contained in the journal's pages. She wrote it in French, but plenty of people in Missoula knew French. There were the French Canadians, for example, and the French Department at the University of Montana was active. Was some guy spying on her? Some guy who could read French?
Maybe he was stalking her? She knew it happened to young women, and she was relatively young (twenty-five), and she knew men considered her to be both pretty and sexy. She had never had sex since she moved to Missoula a year ago, directly from France, for an entry level position at the university. Missoula, and Montana generally, seemed to attract a mighty strange mix of people, she'd noticed.
She shivered as the full weight of what she realized sunk in. Intimate details of her life, of her fantasies, of her hopes and dreams, of her fears, were all detailed, in a haphazard rambling way, in her personal journal, and some stalker out there was reading it? Thank God almighty, the thief left her stash of Xanax untouched. She popped double the recommended dose. She plopped herself down in front of the TV and cried.
The violation of having been robbed freaked her out. Michelle was filled with impotent rage. She became much more careful about locking her doors, and windows, too. She began constantly to look over her shoulder, acting as if she were being stalked. She needed a break - she had to get away from this small city in which she lived and worked. Missoula is the second largest city in Montana (after Billings), with around 77,000 people, but it's only the 466th largest city in the country.
Michelle had chosen the University of Montana job offer precisely because it was in Montana. She had heard of its wide-open spaces, its "big sky," and she had studied numerous pictures and web sites. She loved the idea of being surrounded by rugged, untamed nature. She hadn't counted on the winter, but luckily it had been an easy winter the locals said, even if it had seemed anything but easy to her! She felt bad, however, that she hadn't yet really taken advantage of Montana's wide-open spaces, and Darrell's camping proposal came at the perfect time.
When Michelle agreed to go camping with Darrell, she had no idea what she was agreeing to. She really didn't care. She needed to get out of town after the robbery, and to go someplace quiet and serene, where she could think. Alone in the mountains, even if she'd be with Darrell, seemed like a pretty attractive option. When he invited her, she jumped at the chance.
Michelle had never camped in her life. Originally, Michelle's concept of camping was staying in a hotel that did not serve breakfast in the room . One time she actually did have to stay in a hotel with no services at all; it didn't even serve breakfast! That was in one of France's minor cities, and the hopelessly depressing hotel had the unlikely name of Hotel Terminus. Of course it did, she had thought at the time; it's where people go to die.
She went to the Hotel Terminus for three reasons. The first was that Mathieu, the guy she was with, had chosen it. The second was she had wanted to keep the guy happy. The third was convenience, it being across the street from the train station, in the center of town. Of course, maybe had she been willing to put out sexually, he would have taken her to a nicer hotel, but she wasn't, and he knew it. They would sleep together, and maybe he'd get to feel her up a little bit, but that was it.
The bed was old, the box springs worn, and the mattress thin. This made the mattress concave when someone slept in the bed, and all the more so when two people slept in it. Each person would inevitably roll towards the middle. Intimacy was impossible to avoid, and Michelle rolled into Mathieu repeatedly, until she just gave up and they slept with their bodies touching. She woke the next day with Mathieu spooning her. His hand was cupping her left boob, his fingers gently and lovingly playing with her nipple, right through her thin, silky ngithgown. His hard cock pressed against her ass.
She didn't linger in bed, and immediately got up and dressed, as Mathieu pretended to remain asleep, all innocent, and fooling nobody. Michelle went out for croissants and coffee, and being a sweetheart, she brought breakfast back to the room for Mathieu. She avoided the sexual trap Mathieu had laid for her, and emerged unscathed. He didn't get the girl, but at least he got breakfast in bed, and with a smile, too.
Michelle was not a sexual innocent. She was just fussy, some might say very fussy, with whom she let molest her. The Hotel Terminus guy came close, closer than most, but he didn't make the grade. She never saw him again after that night except awkwardly at work, which the guy had found frustrating in the extreme.
It really wasn't Michelle's fault, you know. They worked together, and they were thrown into this relatively small, French, romantic town to do a job. Man and woman, spending three days in Rennes, sleeping together (to save money!), it was natural for them to have sex. After all, Michelle was in her twenties and the guy was 30 or 31. They were adults, and Michelle is a babe; Michelle simply was not willing to be a consenting adult with her co-worker.
Going camping with Darrell was different. Michelle was naïve, and had no idea what American camping was like. She had no idea they would be sleeping on the ground, in a tent, in sleeping bags? Seriously? It was cold, and she had found it was prudent to slather herself all over in mosquito repellent. The only good thing about it, and Michelle was grasping at straws when she thought this, was that they cooked their dinner over an open fire, so it tasted good, even if it was hot dogs and beans. She kind of liked the hot dogs. They were the poor man's merguez. The mustard, though, could have been better.
The drive to the lake, with the unimaginative but hopeful name of Hidden Lake, was long, rustic, and beautiful. They ended on Highway 444, going still farther north, getting close to Canada. It didn't take long for the paved highway to turn to gravel, and then they turned off onto a dirt road. They had been driving for four and a half hours.
"How in the world did you ever find such a remote spot as this one?" Michelle asked.
"This is Blackfeet country," Darrell replied. "My Grandmother is in the tribe. As a child, I spent summers up here."
"In the tribe? I don't understand."
