Page 173 of Blue Moon

Over these past few months, I’d come to learn that “good” was relative. At least there weren’t any strangers with cameraphones in this godforsaken corner of Utah. One time at a festival, I’d been desperate enough to try peeing alfresco, and long story short, I discovered there was one exception to Mom’s “no publicity is bad publicity” rule. She ended up paying some little ratbag ten thousand bucks to delete the pictures.

“Oh, there’ll definitely be spiders. Do you need tissues? I brought tissues.”

I stuck my head in through the doorway and quickly regretted it.

“Yeuch.”

“What?” Kacie asked.

“It stinks in there. I think something died.”

“Like a person?”

“More like an animal. There are bones and fur on the floor.”

“That’s gross.”

As well as the carcass, the hut contained a battered wooden table; two chairs, one of which had a leg missing; and a rusty metal contraption that could have been mining equipment or a torture device. There was no bathroom, not even a primitive one, and Kacie was right about the spiders. My bladder was ready to burst. In one more indignity, I now had to pee in a freaking bush. Go into showbiz, they said. It’ll be wall-to-wall glitz and glamour, they said.

Liars, all of them.

I grabbed the package of tissues from Kacie and sniffed back tears as I headed for the trees. I just wanted to go home.

Right after I squatted, I heard a whirring noise. A helicopter? I squinted up through the branches, but the sky was empty. The sound was too quiet for the helicopter to be close by, but for a brief moment, I toyed with the idea of running naked across the clearing and waving my arms in the air. Whenever I did something stupid, people had an uncanny knack of spotting it.

Then Kacie shrieked.

“What? What happened?” I yelled.

“Rocky took a bone!”

Half a second later, Rocky shot past me with his prize, which wasn’t just a bone but several bones attached to something tattered and leathery that had probably once been skin.

“Rocky!”

Even in the freaking wilderness, I couldn’t pee in peace.

Another shriek.

“What did he do now?”

And how had my not-so-beloved pooch circled back without me seeing him? The next time I adopted a pet, it was going to be vegetarian.

Now Kacie ran past me as I fought to pull up my underwear.

“Men with guns!” she screeched. “I didn’t see your ass, I swear.”

Guns? Oh, hell. I’d thought that sign was just an empty threat. I stumbled forward, but rather than making a hasty escape, I tripped over a tree root and faceplanted in the dirt. Then it was raining men, and not in a fun “Weather Girls” way. Men in black dropped out of the sky and landed all around me with enough hardware to start—and win—World War III. This time, I didn’t even have Rocky to protect me. Good thing I’d peed already.

“We just got lost, I swear!”

“Moon, you scared the shit out of me.”

My limbs turned to jelly. The strength I’d fought so hard to hold on to left me as Ryder hauled me to my feet, and I sagged into his arms as relief washed through me.

“I knew you’d come. I knew it.”

He kissed my forehead, untucked my dress from my panties—oops—and wrapped me up in a tight hug. Who cared about the Super Bowl? This was the best feeling in the world.

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