Nothin' Town - 1. Chapter 1

As a general rule, people do not move to little nothing towns in the middle of shit-all and nowhere. Not unless they’re running away from something. I wasn’t running away from anything, I was trying desperately to hold onto my life in Boston. The people doing the running were my parents. My parents woke up on my sixteenth birthday and realised they’d been too busy with their big city lives and careers to notice their little baby was all grown up and kissing boys with tattoos and piercings, and getting brought home by the cops. That was the bit that really made them sit up and take notice. Getting hauled in by city police for being drunk, disorderly, and downright fuckin’ rude was plain embarrassing about five seconds after it stopped being funny. And it wasn’t funny for long.

So my parents quit their jobs. We had more than enough money saved up not to have to worry immediately. They sold the big house in the suburbs for an embarrassingly large sum of money, and I was forced to clear out my stuff, take the things I actually wanted, pack them into a U-haul, and move clean across the country. It wasn’t like we moved to San Francisco, or even Austin, or anywhere cool. We moved to a little podunk town in the middle of nowhere, Georgia. La Fayette had about ten streets, two schools, a grocery store and a Circle K, and more trees than actual people. If ever there was a place I didn’t want to hang my hat and call home, then this was it.

*

“Jesus, it’s boring around here.” I sat on the porch, a fuckin’ porch for crying out loud, on the phone to my best friend Mason. “There is n-o-t-h-i-n-g to do.”

“Rough man.” Mason sounded distracted. I’d been gone three weeks and Mason always sounded distracted on the phone. “You know Bobby Stringer dyed his hair pink?”

“I know! He looks like such a mess.” I’d seen the pictures on Facebook. Bobby had been a mutual ally at school, if not an actual friend. “I mean, purple and magenta can rock on some people but bright hot pink? He’s so not got the go-go dancer look.”

There was a long, hard silence on the phone.

“Actually, I helped him do it. Bobby’s a mate, Liam. He’s coming to V.J.’s parent’s cabin with us at Spring Break.”

“Oh.” Every year, a bunch of us go up to V.J.’s parent’s cabin in the spring or in the summer. Our parents used to come, and then V.J.’s older brother used to drive us up. This year, I’d been going to borrow the car and drive myself. The idea Bobby Stringer, of all people, was replacing me was wholly depressing. “Right.”

“Look Liam, I gotta go. Bunch of us are heading to the mall. See ya.”

“See you…” I waited until he’d hung up to press the red button on my cell phone. Somehow I knew Mason wouldn’t be calling me back. Checking through the status updates of my friends, I could see how happy they were, how excited to all be together in their giant cosmopolitan universe. Until recently, that had been my universe too. I wanted to throw my phone away, but I’d done more than enough damage to my life lately, so I simply put it down, and stared out at the world in which I’d found myself.

Nothing, and when I say nothing, I mean nothing, happened in La Fayette, Georgia. It was like a town from a fifties Western. There was one streetlight. Sure, there were more now, but it still felt like there was one street light, and about three thousand homes totalling a grand total of seven thousand, one hundred and twenty one people. Well, twenty four people now. Dad had driven me through the centre of town on our first real day here, and I barely needed to imagine the tumbleweed. Every other car we saw was either a Chevy station wagon or a pick-up.

School sucked, because being new in a small town was about as fun as eating broken glass. I was boring enough to slip rather quickly under the radar. Three weeks in, another three weeks until spring break, and I was the only junior with no friends at all. The days blurred together, and I hated every single one of them.

“Honey?” My mother had never called me anything other than my name until we moved here. She’d also never curled her hair, wore an apron, or ever cooked anything from scratch in her entire life. “Liam honey, why don’t you go for a walk?”

“Where to mum?” I glanced up at her, hardly recognising the woman my mother was obviously desperately trying to turn into. She was wearing a floral patterned dress. “There is nothing to do around here, and nowhere to go.”

“Here.” She handed me twenty bucks. The sort of money I used to lose and not notice. Nowhere around here seemed to take credit cards like they had in the city. “Go buy something. Stop moping around like someone killed your dog.”

I stuffed the money in my jeans pocket. This was more the mother I recognised. The one who thought all problems could be solved with money. There was nothing better to do, so I picked a direction I associated with the route the school bus took to town, and walked.

I hated getting the bus. Pretty much everyone around here seemed to get their first truck the day they got their learners permit, so it was just me, the odd alternative senior and a few freshmen too young to get licenses who took the bus in the mornings. People left me alone, and I was grateful for that.

The sky was blue, dotted with fluffy white clouds like spring born lambs. It was the sort of sky we never got back home. At night I had lain in my new room, unable to sleep, and stared out of my skylight at the immense number of stars. It was dark at night, something else I wasn’t really used to, even in the ‘burbs, and the sky seemed to go on forever.

I found town, eventually, and went into the Circle K to get a coke. There were some other kids in there my age or there about, and a couple of girls flicking through magazines smiled at me. Girls had confused me back home and they still did here; total contrasts of either fluffy hair, tiny shorts and glossy lips, or jeans, cowboy boots and ball caps supporting the Georgia Bulldogs. There didn’t seem to be much in-between. I nodded back, grabbed a coke from the chiller and a packet of jolly ranchers before heading to the till.

Outside, I sat on a bench advertising some real estate guy from the next town over with ridiculously white teeth, and wished to be anywhere else but here.

“Hey.”

I blinked.

There was a truck, a beat up pick up I couldn’t name in a colour once-blue, idling by the curb, and a boy leaning out of the window. He smiled, big and broad and bright.

“Can ye talk?” His tan hand ran through his curly blond hair. I noticed the way the sunlight sparked off the hairs on his well-muscled arm. “Do they not talk to people where you’re from?”

“Hi.”

“See, that wasn’t hard.” He had that way of talking everyone seemed to have around town, long and slow, like minutes would last longer than they did in other places. “You’re Liam Macaulay, right?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“My old man’s helping your dad fix up the little shop he bought. And your mum asked mine for directions to the grocery the other week.” His smile widened. “And you sit in front of me during World History.”

“Oh…”

“Everybody knows everybody around here Liam, you’ll get used to it.”

“I hope not.” The words were out of my mouth before I’d even thought about how they might sound. “I mean…” I stared up at him glumly. “There’s nothing to do around here.”

“Don’t let all this nice calm stuff fool ya Liam. There’s always something going down in this nothin’ town.”

“I’m still sort of hoping that this is all a joke and we’ll move back to Boston next week.”

“You can hope for that.” My strange companion started up his engine. “I won’t. Bye Liam, see you at school.”

As I watched him drive away, I realised I didn’t even know his name.

*

Over the next week, dad got his new business set up. We had made money on the sale of our house back in Boston, and dad had decided the route to a quiet life was one in which he could dictate his own work hours and didn’t have to get on a train to get to the office. So he was putting all his technical know-how to good use, and starting up a computer business. Macaulay Computer Systems was going to help the whole of La Fayette and the surrounding area get au-fait with getting online and connected. The bloke who’d sold us our house had already given him a list of clients as long as my arm who all wanted help with a PC that wouldn’t run, or was slow, or had some virus or other. When the sign went up over the door, I knew this was it. Until I turned eighteen and left for college, I wasn’t getting out of there. For the first time since my birthday, I stole a tumbler of bourbon out of my dad’s liquor cabinet, and got quietly drunk in my room.

I kept my head down at school, and prayed to get hit by lightning or something. No such luck.

“Hey Liam.”

I closed the door of my locker to find the blond, tanned boy with the beat up truck from town leaning against the row of lockers, thumbs hooked in his leather belt, grinning at me.

“Hi.”

“Tyler Williams.” He held out his hand, and I shook it automatically. “So I’m betting you never did a day’s hard work in your whole life.” He rubbed his thumb in circles over my palm. “You got real soft skin.”

“Yeahhh…” I snatched my hand back, because his touch was doing dangerously interesting things in the region of my crotch. “So you live around here?”

“Outside of town. We’re horse people.”

I knew nothing about horses.

“Hey, why don’t you come along and meet some of the guys. Everyone’s been a bit shy of getting to know you, what with you being so broody all the time.”

“I’m not broody.” I followed him along the hall and out into the sunshine of the quad. Glancing down at my outfit though, I saw what he meant. Black jeans and a black t-shirt for some city band that none of them would have heard. “Not usually anyway.”

‘The guys’ turned out to be what I thought of as a motley collection of young cowboys in the making, all checked shirts, jeans, cowboy boots and big grins. I smiled, and stuck my hands in my pockets.

“Don’t worry Liam, they don’t bite.”

“Often.” A very tanned senior with black hair chipped in. “We don’t get a lot of new people around here.”

That’s because no one ever moves to the middle of nowhere, I wanted to say, they only leave. I said nothing though, because I had seen the look that passed across Tyler’s face when I’d belittled his town before, and I didn’t like that I’d done it.

“Dude,” Tyler grinned at his friend. “You missed a good one on Saturday. We went to go watch them tear down the old grain silo on ol’ Mayhew’s land. Where were you?”

“Calving started early, I was on duty.” The black haired boy smiled. “It’ll be all go around here any day now.”

Their conversation drifted into farming, and I was brought back from staring into the distance by the heat of Tyler’s hand on my shoulder. He was like a radiator.

“Hey.”

“You guys had a party in a grain silo?” I hated that I sounded jealous. After all, I’d spent the evening getting drunk myself, with only my right hand for company.

“Well, not in it. They were tearing it down. But we had a little fun, yeah.”

“Oh.”

Tyler looked like he wanted to say more, but he didn’t. After a moments silence, I decided that if I was going to stay in this town, I really was going to need some friends.

“So, I don’t know where anything is in town, and I don’t think black really works in this heat. You think you could show me around?”

“Sure.” Tyler grinned. “You want me to pick you up or do you wanna drive out and see the ranch first?”

“I don’t have a car.” I tried not to meet his eyes when I spoke. Not having my own car was slightly embarrassing in the suburbs of Boston, though taking the subway was fun, but not having my own vehicle out here in the middle of completely nowhere was really dumb. And it wasn’t like I had any brownie points left to spend with my parents to try and get one, because all the good work you do over sixteen years gets sort of forgotten about when the police show up at three am.

“You don’t have-? OK then, I’ll come pick you up. I have to run home for like an hour first, but then I’ll be there. Which is your house?”

“Um…” Truth was I still couldn’t remember my new address. “Chestnut street?”

“Wait on the porch.” Tyler’s expression was soft and understanding, “I’ll find you.”

The rest of my day passed in a bit of a blur, because after the first time I smiled in English class and raised my hand to answer a question, it was like the lid had been blown off my shell of anonymity and privacy. People spoke to me, introduced themselves, and asked questions about where I was from and why we’d moved here. A lot of them already seemed to know, because they’d been past dad’s new shop, or their parents or grandparents wanted to become customers of his. For the first time in nearly a month, I left school feeling something other than utterly lonely.

In the hour I had before Tyler turned up, I got changed into my only pair of blue jeans, and found a green and white t-shirt I had got on a sports camp when I was thirteen. It had been baggy then, and was still a bit loose now, because unlike Tyler and his rough work-ready physique, I was skinny and not especially tall. At least I wasn’t wearing black, though I figured my excellent collection of coloured chinos might never see the light of day again. Guys round here did not wear bright pastel-tone pants.

I sat on the porch, having scored sixty bucks for my new wardrobe from my mother, and stared up at the clouds. The house smelt like sugar, because mum was trying to make jam and it wasn’t going well, and I was glad to be going out. More glad still to have escaped my mother’s delight that I had made a friend.

Tyler Williams was a dangerous sort of friend for me to have. He was really cute, drop dead handsome, and almost probably one hundred percent straight. Him being friendly, willing to give me a second chance, and agreeing to come pick me up in his truck just made the whole situation more risky. I doubted country hospitality extended to boys from out of town who tried to make out with straight sons of the home town. On the other hand, I had managed to fix in my mind the picture of him laughing at lunch in the quad, and delightful way his t-shirt had ridden up when he stretched to reveal an inch of taut, tan skin.

I was still daydreaming when the beat-up pick-up rolled up outside my house. Tyler smiled out of the rolled down window and beckoned me over.

“So you do own something not black.”

“Mean.”

“Nah.” He popped the door open and I climbed in. I flinched when Tyler pulled off his Georgia Bulldogs ball cap and dumped it on my head. “Now you look a bit more like you live here.” He reached around and pulled a cream cowboy hat off the back seat. “Let’s roll.”

I tore myself between watching out of the window to see where we were headed and watching Tyler drive. Something about the way he shifted gears was undeniably sexy. I didn’t need to say much, because I was much too busy listening to Tyler’s soft, slow monologue. He seemed to know everything about the town and its inhabitants.

“Dee lives on your street. Hers is the pink house at the end of the row. She runs the craft supplies store in town, I’m sure your mom has been there already. Out to the west of town are a couple of smaller farms, our ranch is in the south, past Town Creek Pond. We’re Red Horse Ranch.” He gestured to the RHR embroidered on the left breast of his t-shirt. “I dunno how much of town you’ve seen, but there are a couple of good diners and a Dairy Queen. The Waffle House is pretty good, Billy-Jay’s older sister works there and she always given us extra ice cream.” I had already forgotten who Billy-Jay was, though I was sure I had already been told. “There are a bunch of Dollar stores out on Main, but I figured we’d need to get you something quite practical for your first shopping trip. There’s a place that sells feed and farm equipment out of town, but the sister store sells clothes and tack and boots an’ stuff. How much have you got?”

“Sixty?”

“Enough for a new wardrobe, but not enough for westerns. You got a birthday coming up?”

“No, just had one.” I couldn’t imagine asking my parents to buy me cowboy boots. They had bought me everything I had ever asked for, near enough, but then I had always asked for designers labels, new technology and concert tickets. I had asked for a puppy when I was six, and I was told we didn’t have the time for a dog. After that my parent’s had given me everything a boy could want.

“You’re seventeen?” Tyler pulled off the single track road and into the parking lot out front of a store that looked exactly as it had probably done forty years ago.

“No, sixteen. Late birthday.”

“Cool. C’mon.”

*

My parents thought I looked good in my new wardrobe. All work-sturdy blue jeans, plain and useful t-shirts and a couple of check shirts that Tyler insisted I had to get. He’d driven off without his ball cap, and my mother told me I looked like I’d had fun.

Tyler turned up at my locker Thursday, just as I was scrolling through my Facebook status updates, and wishing I still had lots of friends. Oddly, I had to wish a lot harder than I had a few days ago. Sure, I was still jealous of the fact they were off to gigs and parties, and getting ready for going up to V.J.’s parent’s cabin at spring break, but when I looked up from my phone, Tyler was grinning at me, all soft and hard and super friendly, and it was hard to be annoyed about the life I was missing.

“Hey Liam.”

“Hi.” I touched the brim of my cap, ready to hand it back.

“Nah, you keep it. Looks good on you.”

“Thanks.” I grabbed my World History books and shut my locker. We walked shoulder to shoulder towards our shared lesson. “So do I fit in now?”

“Yeah, we just gotta get some a’ that Georgia clay on you now.” He kicked my trainer with his boot before we took our seats. “I’m sorry.”

“Huh?” I turned around to face my new friend. “What have you got to be sorry for?”

“The party at the grain silo. I was gonna invite you to come along.” Tyler chewed his lower lip, looking guilty. “But then you were real mean about town and sayin’ you didn’t wanna stay, and I didn’t want you there. It was real inhospitable of me.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Normally not being invited to a party would have stung, but he was right, and I’d been downright rude about his town. It wasn’t a nice habit I’d gotten myself into.

“My mom would be ashamed if I told her. ‘S not the way I was raised up.”

“I’m sorry too. I should have been nicer about La Fayette. After all, I get to live here too.” I smiled at him to soften what I said, and because I really did feel crap about what I had done. Tyler felt guilty for something I hadn’t even though of as a slight. Compared to him, I was a dick. After that, class started, and I turned front to find out all about the wars that had raged between the English and Dutch over some tiny island in Malaysia which had ultimately dictated what language we all spoke.

About halfway through class, Tyler tapped me on the shoulder. I leant back to hear what he said, and I would have sworn I could feel his warm breath on my ear.

“You wanna come to the ranch tomorrow? Be cool to hang out some more. We can get you dirty.”

“Really?”

“I’ll even lend you boots.”

I grinned to my book, and prayed that I wasn’t blushing enough for him to tell.

My mother was so excited I was going out with friends on a Friday that she hugged me. I never remembered that happening before. She said if I wasn’t going to be home before midnight, to call and let her know where I was staying. The new freedom confused me until I realised I lived in the middle of nowhere without a car – there was only a certain amount of bother I could get into.

Tyler was waiting for me outside my last class and walked me to my locker. I couldn’t help but smile at him.

“How do you do that?”

“Special cowboy powers.” Tyler winked. “Stow your gear and come on bud.”

I shoved my books into my locker, and checked the brim of my baseball cap before I followed him. I tried not to look at the perfect way his old jeans frames his ass, but I failed.

“How was your afternoon?” I asked. We didn’t have any classes together on Fridays after lunch.

“Good. I hate maths, but Advanced Shop was fun. I like welding.”

I stared at him in horror.

“Why am I surprised?” Tyler laughed. “Don’t worry Liam, you hang around here long enough and you’ll pick up all sorts of skills.”

It was easy to chat in the pick-up on the way out to the ranch, and as surprised as I was, the more time I spent with Tyler, the easier he was to talk to. There was so much I didn’t know, and so many things he was open to talking about as well. We had basically no music in common, but he’d said to burn a couple of CDs for the converter in the truck and we listened to Fall Out Boy on the way through town, and then Johnny Cash on the track out through the ranch. I was a little scared by how much green I could see.

Tyler parked the pick-up outside a building that looked like it had come straight out of an old Western movie, a red and white barn with a peaked roof, and I followed him in. The air was thick with the scent of hay and sweet horse feed.

“Where are the horses?” I asked, feeling stupid. All the stalls I could see were empty.

“Stock horses live outside this time of year.” Tyler smiled like I hadn’t just asked a really dumb question. “Most of the riding horses will either be out working or hitched up by the main house.” He whistled so loudly that I flinched. “Except mine.” At the end of the row of stalls, a pale golden horse head appeared, shortly followed by another black glossy figure in the next stall along. “I’m guessing you’ve never ridden before.”

“Oh god…”

“Don’t worry, we’ll save riding for another day. Gotta get these two groomed and turned out.” He began handing me various brushes and combs. “And then we’ll take feed up to the stock horses.”

Feeding the stock horses involved hitching a low trailer to the pick-up and driving out past a dozen small fields to a large pasture which rolled across the land, dotted with trees and horses. The herd was about fifty strong, and we dumped out a huge amount of hay along the fence line. Tyler watched the stock eat with satisfaction.

“What happens to them?” I frowned at the huge number of large majestic animals. “I mean, what are they all for?”

“Sale.” Tyler grinned. “These guys are all only about two years old. We sell them to trainers who turn them into riding horses. Dressage, Western Pleasure, Jumping: whatever they’re best suited for. Some get sold to ranchers who want a young horse to train up, or for their kids to train up. We get them head collar and ground work trained, but we don’t break in the ones we sell. Dad reckons green horses sell better. Some people wanna do it all themselves, and professional trainers certainly do.”

After feeding the stock horses, Tyler drove us back down to the main ranch just as the cowboys were coming in with their tack and horses. Some tied up outside in the afternoon sun, while other’s used the stalls to rub down their hard working steeds. Tyler chatted easily to all of the ranch hands. After all, they lived and worked at his home, and petted the horses as they walked past. Even after having brushed the big black horse down, I was still too nervous to get too close to any of the others. I helped Tyler make up the dinners for the horses, multi-coloured flexible buckets of chaff, oats, pony nuts, molasses. A few of them had other supplements and different amounts of different feeds, and I was trusted to stand and soak the feed with a hose while Tyler went to talk with a tall blond man in a straw cowboy hat and full fringed leather chaps.

I didn’t really want to eavesdrop on what they were saying, but when the big man cuffed Tyler round the head and grinned, I couldn’t help myself.

“Yeah, you can take a couple of bottles as long as you don’t drive after.”

“Thanks pop.”

“So how’s he been? You scare ‘im yet?”

“I don’t think so sir. He works hard, and he listens.”

“That’s good.” Tyler’s father tipped his hat in my direction. “You boys have fun now.”

Tyler came back over to me with a smile.

“Dinner time for this lot, then for us. Come on.”

*

Tyler drove to the diner right on the edge of town, and we had burgers, fries and cokes in a little red vinyl booth

“That was your dad?”

“Yeah. He likes you.”

“He does?”

“Dad likes anyone who works hard and takes instruction and direction.” Tyler shook his head. “Too many guys show up and think they know everything. They don’t tend to last long.” Tyler turned from me and gestured out of the window with a lone French fry. “Look at that.”

The sky was awash with colour, as though the sun had finally found a way to set fire to the sky. The red sky faded to indigo at the zenith, and the land on the horizon was softly gold before it went black. The sun sank down over our Friday night, and I’d never felt so tired it all my life. It wasn’t until I sat down that I realised how much work I’d done on Tyler’s ranch.

“So what’s the plan?” It was the sentence that heralded so many nights out. The Plan, the scheme of what we would do. It wasn’t like we always stuck to it, but we always started out with one. We would plan parties, shopping trips, jaunts into the city. The parties I was used to going to were planned weeks in advance.

“We jus’ make it up as we go Liam.” Tyler grinned. “You wanna take advantage of the fact we got a Friday night sunset and some beer that needs drinkin’?”

“Um…”

Tyler’s phone rang, and I drew patterns in the remnants of my ketchup while I listened to half a conversation.

“Hey. Yeah, done for the day. Uh-uh.” A long pause. “Sure thing. We’ll meet you out there.” Another pause. “Liam’s here man. Cool stuff” He hung up, and dropped his phone into his boot. “C’mon y’all.” He smiled at me and drawled. “Billy-Jay and Hunter are out by the river bank, figure we’ll go join them.”

Hunter was the senior with the dark hair and the cattle ranch, and Billy-Jay was his tow-headed cousin, covered in freckles. There were a half a dozen pick-ups by the river bank when we got there; a little fire burning in a ring of broken bricks and someone’s stereo pumping out country music that I didn’t know into the still-warm evening air. Boys and girls, all around my age or slightly older were sitting on tailgates or dancing a little bit, singing and laughing and talking and smiling. Hunter shouted a welcome to us when we got there, and everyone who I knew from school feigned shock at my transformation.

“Yer a real country boy now!” Hunter shook the back of my neck briefly. “Look at you.” He swiped at my jeans. “Covered in dust and hay-chaff already. Our Ty sure works quick.”

“Hunter…” Tyler rolled his eyes, and handed me a cool long necked beer bottle “He keeps tryin’ to give me this bad reputation.”

“An’ it never sticks. Damn.” Hunter grinned. “Liam, this is Melody.” He introduced me to a pretty, very curvy girl to his left. She wore cut off blue jeans and a t-shirt with lots of curly blond hair. “I think you guys have the same Chem class.”

“Oh yeah, hi.” I sipped my beer to cover the fact that I had never looked at her twice. “Liam.”

“I know.” She had the slowest southern drawl. “I can’t believe Tyler’s been making you haul ass in that beat up old truck a’ his. C’mon sugar.” She grabbed my hand. “You come see my Chevy, she’s much prettier.”

I glanced at Tyler in panic, but he simply shrugged, and I allowed myself to be pulled away. Following Melody’s lead I hopped up onto the noticeably cleaner and less dented tail gate of the big, black and shiny Chevy. She smiled at me, and I managed a small smile back before glancing at my feet. I was still wearing Tyler’s boots.

“Hey.” Melody touched my shoulder gently. “You don’t have ta be scared a’ me honey. I ain’t gonna hurt ya.”

“Um…”

“Tell me about your new house, do ya like it?”

“Well enough I guess. It’s pretty similar to our last house, expect the porch. I’m not sure I can ever get used to that.”

“I dunno how y’all folks up north live without a porch. It’s so useful.” She crossed and uncrossed her bare ankles, swinging her long tan legs. “You can sit and do your homework on ‘em, or sleep out there with a mosquito net when it gets too hot inside, or sit there and watch the world go by while you peel peaches. They’re dead useful. Tyler’s house has got a porch that wraps around the whole thing. We all had a camp out there last summer, but his pop said we were too noisy.”

“You know Tyler well?”

“All my life.” She giggled. “And well enough to know he ain’t taken his eyes off you since the moment we walked over here.”

“What?” I snapped my gaze up to look, but Melody grabbed my shoulder and spun me round. She leant close to me, smiling conspiratorially.

“Jus’ make him wait a lil’ longer sugar. I knew I was right about you.”

“What about me?” I frowned, trying to navigate my way through what she was saying. My brain was busy jumping to the sorts of conclusions. The kinds that feel horrible when thwarted.

“You don’t care about me, not like that. But you do care about him.”

“Umm…”

“It’s not a problem.” She smiled, and I could see in-between being cute and girly and probably tough as old boots, that Melody was also smart. “He’s been waiting a damn long time for someone like you.”

Tyler was watching me from across the little fire, smiling softly with his chapped lips and tanned skin, his eyes bright under the brim of his cowboy hat.

“I hope you can live up to all his expectations.”

I gulped as I slid down from Melody’s Chevy tailgate and started across to where Tyler was standing with his thumbs hooked in his pockets, looking like a Wild West daydream.

I hoped I could too.