Page 2 of The Uncut Wood

Two and a half years living and working together.

Deep in the friend zone.

But today was more than a contest. I’d finally worked up the nerve to reveal that I was secretly head-over-heels in love with Gunner.

Yesterday’s snow was thick on the ground, but the sunshine turned Gunner’s red hair to copper and gilded his beard. It was warm enough that some of these clothes would be coming off. The Jackolympics was a show, and we were the headlining act.

To prove the point Gunner shrugged out of his plaid jacket and when the crowd voiced their approval he dropped into a curtsy.

My window to say something to Gunner before the competition started was closing fast. Jim was showing the prize to the audience—a pretty decent one this year—a Gränsfors American felling axe. We usually made a private bet too with some ridiculous hazing or humiliation as an alternate prize.

Heart pounding, I caught Gunner’s eye and blurted out, “How about a little wager?”

His eyebrows shot up and he smiled, waiting for me to say more.

Gunner and I turned everything into a competition. From racing UTVs to constant drinking games to seeing who could hook up the most.

Some of these I regretted more than others.

Last summer we kept a tally from Memorial Day to Labor Day to see how many men we could bag. Gunner came up with the criteria: one-on-one hookups only; group sex didn’t count. It was too easy to rack up numbers without having any real game. Just because three other men were having a spit-roast on the other side of the room didn’t mean you’d actually hooked up with them. Also, you had to make the other guy come.

“But you don’t have to kiss,” he’d specified.

Gunner had a reputation for not kissing. It hadn’t made sense to me that someone who professed to be so free and open with sex didn’t kiss. I’d challenged him on it.

“Nothing gets me harder than kissing,” I’d said. “Kissing is the best.”

“Kissing is the best,” he’d agreed. “But it’s a helluva lot more intimate than sucking and fucking. I reserve it for someone special.”

The whole idea for the hookup competition had grown out of a discussion of the origin of the expression notches on a bed post. We’d discovered marks made by some prior inhabitants of the bunkhouse. Gunner was the top bunk to my bottom—there might have been some euphemism there—and we’d agreed to discreetly add our own tally on a part of our shared bed frame closest to the wall so we’d be less likely to get busted for property damage.

Every weekend when there’d been a large number of guests, I’d check his tally against mine. It was hard to tell among all the existing notches which ones he might have added. We should’ve officially counted them before we’d started. I knew I’d added a whopping zero. Although I’d convinced myself I was motivated by the sheer competition itself and an inability to say no to Gunner, by the Fourth of July my heart hadn’t been in it anymore.

I’d started to experience awful physical sensations like my heart was either rising up into my throat to choke me or dropping into a pit in my gut. I hadn’t known if my heart was malfunctioning or actually starting to break. It had definitely been an alarm of some kind.

I’d been way too cavalier about it. I’d wanted to impress Gunner and convince him I was like him. Before getting a job at Bear Mountain Lodge, he’d lived at a Radical Faerie commune in Tennessee where gender labels and heteronormative concepts of relationships were considered boxes for the simple-minded. He’d always espoused polyamory and open relationships, and I’d turned myself into a pretzel trying to be the kind of guy he’d want to be with.

So I’d gone along with it. Bear Camp wasn’t exactly an environment known for exclusivity and monogamy anyway. Before I met Gunner, I’d had only a vague notion of what kind of relationship I wanted to be in. I’d figured I’d know it when I saw it—him, because he would be a person, after all, not a concept—and until then, I’d play the field. It was the most used tagline on hookup app profiles: Playing until I meet The One.

I’d known him when I saw him all right. Gunner was The One. And I was done playing.

“So, what’s the wager?” Gunner asked, bringing me back to the present.

My heart was fucking beating out of my chest, but I was going to do this. I couldn’t go another season, another year, watching him—even thinking about him—with other men.

Somehow I managed to blurt it out. “If I win, you have to go on a date with me.”

“A date?” His brown eyes squinted in the sun, but there might have also been a bit of a twinkle in them.

“Yeah,” I said, emboldened by the sudden curl of his lips. “An actual romantic date.”

“An actual romantic date, huh?” Gunner smiled outright now, flashing his teeth. “Like… a candlelit dinner and shit?”

“The works,” I said, so elated he hadn’t said hell no I was in danger of bursting into tears.

“All right.” Gunner nodded, glanced away shyly, and then looked me right in the eyes. “You’re on.”

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