The Lake House Had One Bed Left for Our Parents' Wedding Week, So I Shared It With My Soon-to-Be Stepbrother novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Cedar and Steam

The tent company came at two, unloaded forty poles and a mountain of white canvas on the lawn, and left at two-twenty with my signature on a clipboard.

Then the lake house was ours.

Everyone else had piled into three cars at noon for the cake tasting.

Judy had waved from the passenger window of my father's truck.

"Don't let the dog eat the tent," she called.

The dog was asleep under a maple, and the tent was safe.

Jack and I stood in the middle of the lawn looking at each other.

"We have four hours," he said.

"The tasting is lemon, then chocolate, then something called a Michigan Cherry Dream. Judy will make them do each twice."

"Three hours, then."

"Two and a half," I said. "My father will want to stop for ice cream."

He took my hand.

He led me down the path past the boathouse to a small cedar hut at the end of the dock road, with a stovepipe, a tiny window and a door cut for a shorter man.

"Judy's father built it," he said. "My mother told me about it over the phone. She said your dad wired it and nobody has had the nerve to use it since."

"My father wired a sauna?"

"With a switch on the outside. It's the only part he was proud of."

I opened the door.

Inside was a cedar bench in an L, a bucket of stones.

A wooden ladle, and it smelled like a hundred years of heat.

Jack flipped a switch beside the door.

Something hummed, and the stones began to tick.

Twenty minutes later I sat on the upper bench in a towel with sweat running down between my breasts.

He sat beside me, leaning back against the wall with his eyes half closed.

It was 160 degrees and the air was thick and gold.

"I'm going to die," I said.

"You're going to live."

"I'm going to melt."

"That's different," said Jack. "Come here."

I looked at him.

Sweat shone on his chest and ran down the line of his stomach into the towel at his hips.

His hair was plastered to his forehead.

I dropped my towel.

He didn't say a word.

He looked at me, long and slow, and the heat in the little room doubled.

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