Chapter Three
Cindy
Monrovia, Indiana – December 25th, 2015
Cindy put her Jeep in park and stared at the cabin as though it was a middle finger. Her face was red from the cold, despite the heater being on and the snowsuit and snow boots she wore. Tears swelled in eyes kept safe from winter glare by sunglasses. She slipped her slim fingers beneath the frames and wiped the tears away. A sizeable chunk of snow fell with a thump from the metal roof of the cabin. It echoed in the cold midday air.
Cindy hadn’t been to the cabin since that eventful Thanksgiving. She had kept in touch with her parents of course, but never visited. She was too busy growing her career. It was her career and her mother’s attitude that kept her from visiting. A career her mother deemed, ‘The devils work’. She couldn’t take her mother’s snide comments, stares of disappointment, and her poor pity me nonsense. Dawn was a prude in Cindy’s eyes. Cindy was thankful every day that she was the exact opposite.
Cindy wrote erotica. She didn’t do that Harlequin Romance nonsense either. She wrote the real deal. What set her apart from the rest was that she blended explicit sex with spellbinding stories. She wrote sexy who-done-its and sexy sci-fi novels. But Cindy was burnt out. There was only so much sex one person could write. She wanted to try her hand at writing a proper mainstream story. Her royalties were fine. She was a millionaire in truth, though barely. But she was dismissed by mainstream writers as quickly as a bad plot. That made her sad. She was skilled. She knew it, her fans knew it, but no one else cared. Then an idea struck her a couple of weeks ago in the bath: What if a middle-aged and overweight drifter woke up beneath the overpass he often slept under suddenly twenty years younger and in better shape than most professional athletes. What intrigued Cindy most about that plot was, what if the drifter found out he was an experiment and sought out the man, or men, responsible. The blossoming idea gripped her and wouldn’t let go.
Now all she needed to do was write it. Which is easier said than done.
What looked like two winters worth of logs was stacked neatly beneath the roof of the car port. Cindy’s father, as he did every winter when he got too old to do the work himself, had hired someone from town to do the cutting and stacking. Sighing, Cindy shut off the car and got out. Snow attempted to consume her legs, only to fall short just below her knees. She pocketed the keys and stood looking at the cabin. “Come on Cindy,” she said aloud, forcing herself to pull her eyes away from the cabin. “You don’t want to go in there but you have to. The house is yours now. It’s either move in and move on with life or let some dipshit move in and take away what belongs to you.”
Cindy turned her back on the cabin to begin unloading her bags.