Danielle Engle - Lavender Excursions

Tears stinging their eyes, Taylor and Camarin had difficulty seeing as they groped their way through the smoke. Each one wanting to check on the other, they collided in the middle of the yard. Camarin's fly was hanging open and her shirt was unbuttoned. She sat up and offered Taylor her hand. "Are you okay?" she asked.

Still gasping for air, Taylor nodded her head. She was coughing so hard she could barely catch her breath.

Thinking Taylor had done something stupid, such as leaving the stove on and the oven door open, Camarin scowled at her. "You and your cookie baking could have gotten us killed!" she yelled. Before Taylor had a chance to defend herself, Camarin covered her mouth and nose with the tail of her shirt and rushed back inside the cabin.

The smoke was so thick she could barely make out the cabinet where the fire extinguisher was kept. Although she managed to find it, she could not find the fire. "Oh, great," she muttered. This was going to be a little more complicated than she'd thought.

Taylor burst through the back door just as Camarin was starting down the hall. "Camarin!" she yelled. Her throat still choked from the smoke, Taylor's voice was barely audible. She started after Camarin, following her into the master bedroom. They spotted the remains of the smoke bomb at the same time.

"Damn it!" Camarin exclaimed, coughing from the sudden inhalation of the smoke-filled air. "Why would someone do something like this?" she asked, looking about the room as though expecting to find someone sitting there, watching them.

"Who knows we're here?" Taylor asked, a puzzled expression on her face as she, too, tried to figure out who might have done this.

"I don't know," Camarin muttered. "Maybe someone followed us up here. Most people who know me know my car, so it wouldn't be hard to find us. I just can't understand why." She had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. "I suppose it could always be a client, someone who got pissed at one of us but didn't have the nerve to confront us directly.

"Wow," Taylor said. "They'd have to be awfully mad to go to all this trouble." She looked around the room, frowning when she saw the closet door standing open. "Oh, great!" she growled. "Now we're going to smell like a smoke factory."

Camarin started opening the windows, trying clear the smoke. "We better get this mess cleaned up before the smoke settles in too much.

If Taryn gets billed for damages, she'll have a fit."

"Okay," Taylor said. She started sweeping pieces of broken glass from objects that had been jarred to the floor. The glass swept into a tidy heap in the center of the room, she followed Camarin down the hallway. She watched as Camarin scurried about the cabin, opening doors and windows to air out the cabin. It seemed an awful lot of smoke for such a tiny mechanism. Taylor started to pick up pieces of metal scattered in the hallway.

"No!" Camarin screamed. She dived for Taylor's hand just as she started to grasp a piece of the metal. "It may be hot," she explained.

"Oh," Taylor replied, too embarrassed to think of anything else to say. She watched as Camarin used a pen to roll the metal onto her shirttail. She gathered it up and carried it very gingerly to the kitchen sink. She dropped it into the sink and turned on the cold-water tap.

Steam started rising.

"Yes, I'd say that's hot," Camarin said. She turned the faucet off and looked around the room for a container to gather the pieces from the hallway and the bedroom. An empty cereal box was sitting by the refrigerator. She grabbed it and instructed Taylor, "Bring a hot pad to pick up the pieces."

Obediently, Taylor took a hot pad from over the stove and followed Camarin down the hallway. The two women spent the next twenty minutes coughing and wheezing while they searched the cabin for glass and metal. If they'd been in the living room, they might have recognized Taryn's car driving past. As it was, they got into an argument about whether to call the local law enforcement. Camarin was trying to pry the cordless phone from Taylor's hand.

"Stop it!" Taylor shouted. Frightened by the incident, it made perfect sense to her that they notify the local law enforcement of what happened. "We are not the ones committing the crime here," she exclaimed. "Now either you give me the phone or I'm going to drive to the service station and use the pay phone."

Camarin was not in the mood to argue. "Do whatever you want,"

she told Taylor. "But remember one thing. Lavender Excursions prides itself as a place where women can expect complete confidentiality. If you bring law enforcement into this, they're going to start asking a lot of questions and snooping into our business.

That's the surest way I know of scaring off clients, especially if it gets written up in the paper."

Taylor sighed, a hangdog expression on her face. Suddenly her work at Lavender Excursions didn't seem very much fun. "Okay," she muttered. "You go ahead with whatever you're doing and I'll finish cleaning up."

Camarin watched for a moment, wanting to make certain Taylor wasn't going to do something stupid when she left. But Taylor seemed resigned to the situation and was dragging cleaning supplies out from underneath the kitchen sink. "I need to run an errand,"

Camarin said. "But first I'm going to get a change of clothes from my car and take a shower at the recreation center. If you promise to behave, I'll find something for you to wear until we have a chance to wash our clothes."

Taylor scowled but nodded agreeably as Camarin started out the door. This was one of those times when she was acutely conscious of her immaturity and lack of experience. She sighed and finished gathering the cleaning supplies. Deciding to start with the kitchen, she gave vent to her childish anger and emptied the cookies into the trashcan. "So much for domesticity," she muttered.

By the time Camarin showered and changed, she'd calmed down a little, but she still didn't feel like going back to the cabin. It was too depressing. On a whim, she decided to walk to Kimberly's cabin and return her gloves. She went to the guest register and asked for her cabin number. "Thanks," she told the clerk as she pressed a ten-dollar bill into his hand.

As she left, Camarin realized how easily someone could have gotten the cabin number for where she and Taylor were staying. If someone had a grudge, what better place to take it out than this remote section of backwoods? She made a mental note to mention it to Taryn. It might be time to have the company's private investigator do a little research on their customer database. There might be some clients worth investigating, although she couldn't imagine who it could possibly be.

She strolled very leisurely across the lobby, her eyes darting back and forth, searching for signs of a suspicious character. By the time she arrived at Mark and Kimberly's cabin, she was amused by her antics. Laughing at herself, she removed her glove and knocked on the door of their cabin.

Mark was poised over Kimberly's nude body, his penis glistening with her wetness. He growled when he heard the knocking at the front door. "Fuck!" he muttered. He thrust his penis deeply inside Kimberly one last time. "It might be Uncle Bob," he grumbled. "I better go see." He withdrew himself from Kimberly and reached for a tissue on the bedside table. After wiping Kimberly's cum from his penis, he pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt. "This better be good, Uncle Bob."

After Mark left the room, Kimberly curled herself into a tight ball on the bed. She felt so miserable and confused. She wanted to go home and curl up in her own bed with her three cats and a good book.

However, she was here and she couldn't think of a way to get out of it.

The first tear was threatening to fall when she heard Camarin's voice at the front door.