Nexus Interludes- A Diva's Diva
CE Savage
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Late Morning
Near the Nexus Ranch
Harborton Washington
“Sunavabitch! What the fucking hell is happening now?” shouted the leggy brunette as she pounded her clenched fists on the leather wrapped steering wheel. The sleek new Mercedes shuddered and shimmied violently like a 5-dollar hooker during Fleet Week as she eased off the gas and looked for a wide spot on the shoulder.
Constance knew her sorority sisters at Wellesley would have been shocked at her language but this was the last straw. Not a single thing had gone right since she’d agreed to this ill-fated trip to the ass end of nowhere. Even though the client was the big whale of her accounts, she could have refused because this particular whale was also a dear friend who had helped her start her talent agency and wouldn’t have insisted. Constance had made her business by listening closely to her clients though and the client thought that she needed to be present to fully understand the situation. That put Constance on the first available New York to Seattle flight.
Ironically, Constance didn’t have to work at all in fact, it was quite a society pages scandal when she’d struck out on her own instead of wallowing in the ‘Old Money’ wealth of her family or marrying an inbred lout with more money than sense. Yes, she was a Clevenger, of the Boston Clevengers. Her family had been on both sides of that grand tea party in 1773 and managed to wring wealth out of both Tory and Patriot, but she refused to be imprisoned by that role. They’d all waited for her to fall flat on her face and scurry home to her family's Brookline mansion but instead through sheer guts, talent, and determination, she’d managed to scratch her way to the top levels in an overwhelmingly male dominated field in a few brief years.
That same grit had Constance wrestling her car onto the shoulder with a determined look on her face. ‘Great’ she thought, there weren’t signs of civilization anywhere near, and right here there didn’t even seem to be a house. She rummaged through her oversized shoulder bag until she could snag her cell phone.
“Shit,” she shouted as she threw her phone back into the bag. No signal.
Constance turned the car off and stepped out to survey the damage, not that she would have the faintest idea of how to fix it, but she had to try something, she had never missed an appointment and today wasn’t going to be the day she’d started.
Sure enough, her right front tire was shredded and it looked like metal had been scraping the road. There had to be a spare somewhere. Cars came with that sort of thing, didn’t they? She nearly despaired when she realized that even should she find it and figure out how to apply the ‘spare’ she was not dressed for it. Her heels alone were $2000 Jimmy Choo’s and her short silk skirt barely let her sit, fixing a car herself was out of the question. Why couldn’t she have worn something more practical? She chided herself- of course, she knew exactly why she wore the skirt and heels.
Constance had been told that the man in charge would be at the meeting although she’d mostly be dealing with women. In her experience that meant that he would be some sort of ‘seagull executive’. In other words, he’d flap in, crap all over everything the woman had put together and then fly off without a care. But she’d dealt with these sorts of men before. A look at her long toned legs and a flash of cleavage and he wouldn’t be able to focus on anything besides trying to figure out how to get a peek at what was under her short skirt. Meanwhile, while he was distracted, she could probably hammer the details of the deal out with the women, who by all accounts did the real work in their nearly billion dollar business.
Constance squared her shoulders. She would do what it took, even if that meant showing up for her meeting looking like a street sweeper. Hell, from what she’d seen on the way here, anything more than a pair of work boots and overalls was overdressed by local standards.
She’d just beeped open the trunk and started to rummage inside when she heard a series of solid sounding ‘whacks’ coming from somewhere just off the road to her front. Was that an axe? Who the heck still used an axe these days? She felt like she’d been dropped into an episode of “Little House on the Prairie”.
Curious, Constance walked back around to the front of her vehicle. Looking more closely she could see where a set of muddy tire tracks left the hard surface and led into the tall grass and down a gentle swale.
She was hardly dressed for hiking but she wobbled her way down the grassy embankment a few yards to where a beat-up old, blue 4-wheel drive vehicle came into view. The sad looking vehicle sat on a bench just above a steep drop into what appeared to be a muddy ditch where some trees had fallen. There was another ‘whack’ and then Constance spotted the source.
Nearly hidden by the branches some sort of farm laborer was standing knee deep in the mud apparently trying to clear the trees away from the ditch. From what Constance could see he was a deeply tanned, wiry looking man of about 40. She shook her head. It was sad that a man that old still had to do manual labor for a living. She carefully made her way to the edge of the embankment.
“You there! Man! Yoohoo! I need some help. Come here!” she shouted and waved.
The man turned slowly and walked out of the ditch to where he could see her better. Then he lifted his baseball cap scratched his sweaty head and just stared at her like she was some sort of alien. Shit, just her luck. He probably couldn’t even speak English. Maybe she could make him understand anyway.
“Do. You. Speak. English,” she said slowly even louder than before.
The man grinned a little bit then carefully sunk the axe in a stump and carefully made his way up the steep bank until he stood a few feet away.
“Si. A leedle,” the man said in a heavily accented voice with a hand gesture holding his thumb and forefinger an inch apart.
Constance was a tiny bit afraid, but not really. No one would dare lay hands on her, and this man as rough as he looked in his muddy t-shirt and jeans didn’t seem the type. He had almost kind eyes.
“Mi el carro is mucho sicko. Comprende? said Constance gesturing widely to mime her predicament.
Unfortunately, that was just enough to cause her to teter unpredictably right on the lip of the slick plunge down the grassy bank. The man crossed the space between them quicker than she would have believed possible and his hand shot out to steady her by grabbing her forearm She was shocked almost breathless that this common laborer would dare touch her person!
“Let go of me you lout!” she shouted as she began beating on the man’s chest and shoulders with her free arm and trying to pull away.
The man simply said “Hokay” and let go stepping back slightly to give her room to recover.
The heel of one of her Jimmy Choos decided just at that moment that it had reached its design limits and snapped. Her left leg flew out from under her, sending her plunging bass ackward down the slope with her arms pinwheeling madly. Constance felt a piercing shriek escape her lips right before she did a nearly perfect roll with a half twist that flipped her end for end and caused her skirt to flare up over her face. A split second later her long perfectly sculpted legs embedded themselves solidly in the mud at the bottom of two feet of cold dirty water.
_______________________________
A few minutes earlier
“What the hell is that godawful racket?” said Ben to himself as a sound resembling a cement mixer full of pots and pans being rolled down a hill emanated from the highway above him.
He should probably go check it out, Ben thought as he rested his axe on the trunk in front of him, but the crows didn’t seem to be alarmed and they would let him know if it was anything he needed to worry about. It was probably just Old Man Johnson pulling his 50-year-old tractor out onto the highway again. Ben smiled. The old fart only did it to annoy people who couldn’t get around him on the narrow road.
Ben felt a little guilty but he hated to break his flow. Other people had gyms, weights, treadmills, stationary bikes- whatever. Ben had this. There was always something around the ranch that needed doing. He could have easily hired an outside crew. The Nexus Ranch had the money a million times over. But it seemed a waste especially when he needed the exercise anyway. And it got him outdoors and truthfully it got him a little alone time away from his girls. Not that he didn’t love them more than anything on earth, but sometimes it was nice to have a brief respite from an overload of female energy.
Another plus was this gorgeous spring day. The Pacific Northwest didn’t get a lot of them. The pink and white crocus and the white star-shaped trilliums were poking their heads out from the forest floor. The grass in the pastures where the young deer and elk played was getting tall and thick. Sap was rising in all the trees and the sharp scent of fir and pine pitch overlaid the sweeter scent of the large cedars scattered about the moister locations on the ranch.
Actually, trees were a part of the problem he was fixing today. A spring storm had downed a few of the more precariously placed alders that lined part of the ranch property that paralleled the county road. In falling they had partially blocked the runoff ditch that channeled water into one of the small streams that ran through the ranch. The backflow was making a muddy pond out of one of the lower pastures.
As he took another few strategically placed whacks at the 10-inch thick trunk in front of him he reflected that in past years this might have been a problem caused by nature’s eager engineers, but the ranch had come to amicable terms with the local colony of beavers and they seemed quite content to build their structures in the areas set aside for them for them where they didn’t unduly impact the resident humans. Ben smiled. A little later today Ben was hoping to use his new 2-weight fly rod on one of their ponds to see if he could fool a few of the native cutthroats they’d planted last year.
He’d just planted himself for another swing when he heard the crows laughing at something.
“Oh, man you’ve got to see this,” Ben heard from the murder leader.
A second later Ben felt the approach of a stranger near where Old Blue was parked on the bench above the ditch.
“You there! Man! Yoohoo! I need some help. Come here!” a strange woman called imperiously to him in a rather plummy accent.
Ben stepped out from the branches to get a better look at the female anomaly and all he could do was scratch his head. She looked like one of the hot female leads from one of those lawyer shows the girls liked so much, the same ones Ben pretended not to watch. What Ben knew about women’s clothes could be written on a pinhead, but you couldn’t live with five women and not know expensive and this gal was wearing a ton of it.
She was pretty well setup thought Ben. There were long legs that led all the way to where he shouldn’t be looking, a classically beautiful patrician face framed by shoulder length thick, rich brunette locks, pert but full curves on top and ice blue eyes with ridiculously long lashes that right now were trying to glare holes in him. This filly was pure thoroughbred.
“Do. You. Speak. English,” she said slowly even louder than before. Somehow his lack of immediate response to her demand must mean to her that Ben was either deaf, dumb, or a non-English speaker, probably all three.
Ben struggled but successfully kept the smile from his face as he made his way up the bank. He couldn’t help himself, he was going to fuck with her a little.