I answered the knock at the door, and she just let herself in. The she I'm talking about was a coworker named Alesha that everyone called Lee. I barely knew her. Now she was there in the cheap motel room that I temporarily called home... Sitting on the edge of my bed, awkwardly trying to taunt me into making the first move.
Less than two weeks earlier I had spent a harrowing day in my car making my way along the steep winding roads of the Rocky Mountains through a driving snowstorm. On a sunny day driving those twisty roads to that mountain town would take at least six hours. A winter storm could easily make the trip take twice that. Luckily I was able to make the drive in a little more than nine, arriving at the job site just before my new crewmates knocked off for the day.
Alan didn't fare so well. He finally arrived around four PM the next day. His car looked like he had driven it through a demolition derby. Most of the crew assumed Alan drove that dented piece of shit to save money, but I knew that wrinkled car looked like new just a week ago.
Alan skidded on the ice and rolled on a hairpin coming over the pass. The wall of snow left by the plow crews was all that saved him from certain death at the bottom of a cliff. A grizzled old mountain man in a four by four helped him winch his badly beaten car onto all four wheels before the cops came to give him a ticket. How that thing ran after that crash was beyond me.
Alan and I worked for a company that did large scale electronic system installations. We were both on loan to the mountain division that specialized in small town and mountain jobs. This job was in just about as remote of a place as one can think of, and it was a complete retrofit. It turned out to be the biggest job that division had ever done. That's where Alan and I fit in. We were big system specialists.
It was on this job that I first met Lee. The day I arrived the job boss introduced me to her. She was sitting cross leg on the floor with her head buried in the back of an equipment cabinet connecting wires. She merely looked up for a moment and smirked, then went back to what she was doing. Apparently she was unimpressed.
I don't actually remember saying hello to Lee that day. I know she didn't utter a single word to me. Maybe I didn't say anything either. I wasn't really paying attention anyway. I was hungry and my mind was fixed on finding a place to stay.
I'd been told before I left it would be tough to find a place to stay in this town. The place was full of roughnecks, there in numbers for the big push in shale oil exploration. I grabbed a phone book and started calling motels, and took a room in the first place I found with a vacancy called the Wagon Wheel.
The Wagon Wheel was a cheesy old west themed place with equally cheesy old west decorations. The lamp bases where shaped like chuck wagons and the shades were stitched to their frames with plastic cord that was supposed to look like leather. Tiny horse shoes made up every knob and handle, and peeling faded wall paper with alternating prints of bowlegged cowboys and feather headed Indians covered the walls.
All of this stuff was no doubt left over from a bygone era when this town was still on the vacation route to Yellowstone. Even the bed's head and foot boards had once been splintery old wagon wheels, and the moment I walked in I was overtaken by an odd smell that seemed as old and musty as the décor.
The worst part of my room at the Wagon Wheel was the bathroom floor. It had broken away from the wall and there was an eight inch gap to the outdoors. With nighttime temperatures near minus twenty a permanent block of ice filled that gap stretching from the sink to the shower. I thought I'd freeze to death in my sleep staying there, and after seeing that broken down wall I knew why they had a vacancy. This place should have been condemned.
After a week at the Wagon Wheel, Lee told me that a room had opened up at the Mark Inn. Most of the crew stayed at this place because it was an easy walk across the street and down an alley to the job site. It wasn't much further of a walk to the town's only bar.
The Mark Inn was owned by a no-nonsense mountain of a man that once played offensive guard for the Cincinnati Bengals. My room at the Mark became available because said owner had thrown out a drunken roughneck who wouldn't stop singing a Willie Nelson song at the top of his lungs in the middle of the night.
Yup, he literally threw the drunken fool right out into the snow, leaving the guy with no place to go on one of the coldest nights of the year. That's the way I heard it anyway. Whether that roughneck got thrown into snow or not, I appreciated having a better place to stay. I also knew damn well not to lock horns with this place's owner.
It's not like the Mark Inn was the perfect place to stay. Not by any means, but it was head and shoulders above that crap-shack called the Wagon Wheel. The room at the Mark was small, even by cheap motel standards. There wasn't room for a chest of drawers, just a foldout stand for your suitcase. The TV was a tiny old black and white on a shelf above the stand, and it brought in a whopping three stations as long as you could keep hold of one end of the rabbit ears. None of that mattered to me. I didn't need a big room just to sleep, and I rarely watched TV.
The only real complaint I had about the Mark Inn was this permanent gap in the cheap motel curtains that let a long sliver of light stream in from the motel's parking illumination. All night long my entire room glowed with the eerie pale hue of sodium vapor orange, as if the place was radioactive. On the plus side I had no trouble seeing when I had to get up in the middle of the night to use the can.
The two best things about the Mark Inn was if I paid by the week the rate was a full two dollars a day under the company per diem, and that mountain of an owner had an exceptionally pretty teenage daughter named Melissa that occasionally worked the front desk.
Once I got settled in I started getting to know my new coworkers, and it didn't take long to figure out Lee was kind of different. There's just no other way to put it. Lee was a nerd. Each and every morning she slapped on her company provided safety glasses, complete with tape on the bridge to cushion the fit. During her off time an equally nerdy pair of horned rim glasses adorned her chubby cherub like face.
Lee wasn't tall, in fact she was maybe a tic over five feet. She wasn't thin or plump, and there wasn't anything remarkable about the young freckled face that peered out from her wavy mop reddish brown hair. She was just a girl and everything about her from the way she dressed to her social insecurity just screamed nerd.
Lee was a year older than I was, but if I hadn't been told that I never would have known. Most people were surprised when they found out how old she really was. With her smallish stature and her nerdy shyness, most people had her age pegged somewhere around sixteen.
Lee could have easily been the poster child for the overly shy, the super conservative, and the hopelessly introverted. Behind her back, the guys joked that she had filed the original patent on blue balls, not that anyone was interested in fucking her anyway. I have to admit, I was one of those disinterested guys. A tall outgoing brunette like Melissa was more my speed. It was just too bad that she was still in high school.
A few of the guys teased me because Lee and I were close in age. In their minds that little fact somehow required to try and, as they so crudely put it, "tap into some of that." That wasn't going to happen. She just wasn't my type. Alan pretty much put it all in a nutshell the day he came to me and said, "I wouldn't bother with the nerd girl if I were you. Everyone knows that she don't fuck."
I had been at this job just short of two weeks. The work was satisfying and the crew was a blast to be around, but I barely knew what to do with myself wile I wasn't working. It was way too cold to want to do anything outside, and I had far too much respect for myself to become one of those old curmudgeons sitting in the bar slowly getting plastered every night. Some romance would have been nice, but the only two single woman I knew were a nerd that didn't fuck and a high schooler whose father probably would have pounded if ever touched her.
I mentioned that the TV at the Mark only got three stations. One of which was like watching ghosts wander around through a snowstorm of static, and all three had a dark bar that rolled up the screen every fifteen to twenty seconds if the TV had been on for more than 45 minutes.
The owner's wife knew the TV in 2C didn't work. She admitted to as much the night I checked in. She told me that if there was something I wanted to watch I could sit with her family and watch it on their big 25 inch color set. I was a little bit uncomfortable with that, feeling like I would be an intrusion.
One evening when I went to pay for my room the wife was emphatic that I come watch TV with them. I reluctantly agreed and she showed me to a place on the couch where I could sit. I wasn't there for five minutes and Melissa came and sat next to me. There were plenty of other places to sit, but she chose to be right next to me. I figured Melissa probably always sat there and her mother put me in the seat next to her on purpose.
As the TV show went on Melissa's mom slowly got drunk and started do the 'you should date my daughter' hard sell, in that sneaky sort of way only mothers know how to do. She went on and on about how Melissa was the prettiest cheerleader, was as smart as they come, and how she was on her way to becoming a very good cook.
All the while her mountain of a father kept looking over to make sure I wasn't trying to touch Melissa. Talk about feeling uncomfortable. I didn't want to be rude, but I couldn't wait to get the hell out of there. So when the show ended I thanked them for inviting me into their home and made up some excuse about having to look over some wiring diagrams before work the next day.
Melissa's mom slurred out an inebriated, "Thanks for joining us," then practically ordered Melissa to show me out. Melissa seemed as relieved as I was to be getting away from her parents. Melissa got up and walked with me to get my coat. I was surprised to see her put on her jacket as well. Then I followed her to the door.
As we walked outside Melissa took hold of my upper arm with both hands and apologized. "I'm sorry about my mom. She drinks too much, and she hates my boyfriend. I also think she wants to date you." Then she laughed.
I didn't think it was all that funny, and it was even less funny that Melissa was hanging on my arm, seemingly walking me to my room. All I could imagine was the two of us doing the nasty and her dad bursting through the door to beating the living shit out of me for violating his daughter.
We were half way to my room when Melissa added to her previous comment, "I have to admit, you are the cutest guest mom has tried to set me up with." At that point I thought I was in serious trouble, but right after she said that she let go of my arm and branched off to go knock on Lee's door. As I unlocked my door I looked back at Melissa. She smiled and winked at me, and then disappeared into Lee's room.
So hanging around the motel in the evening with a drunk woman and her jailbait daughter was more than a little weird. Fortunately one of the world's top rated ski areas was just forty miles up the road, so at least my weekends weren't a complete bust.
