Page 18 of Forever Wild

Bryn

“Bryn!”

“What?!” I turn back toward the fairway where my sisters and Becca have all stopped to look at me.

They look like they just stepped out of a candy shop. As usual, Iz is in all pink from her hat to her skort. Kelsey, the more restrained of the bunch, is in a pair of black shorts and a light blue shirt. Becca, the real wild card, since she doesn’t play golf, is in black yoga pants she is passing off as appropriate golf attire. As her collared shirt is Barbie pink, I can only assume she borrowed it from Izzy.

“Your ball is way back there!” Kelsey shouts while shielding her eyes from the sun so she can see me.

My head falls back. Ugh. Could this round get any worse? How did I possibly have the shortest drive of the group and end up in the rough?

My game this afternoon has been complete and utter shit. Luckily, I’m not the only one feeling the grueling combination of heat, booze, and a walking-only golf course.

The little hairs around my face have started to curl with the heat, and my baseball hat is soaked through around the band. I’ve added my sunglasses because the sun decided it needed to shine as bright as possible today. Real asshole vibes, the sun.

It does not escape my notice that my game was great this morning with Jameson. The weather was perfect, and I was having fun. And, while I hate to admit it was anything other than coincidence, it may be the lack of a tall, muscular man that has turned my afternoon into a raging dumpster fire. Either that or Mother Earth suddenly developed a vendetta against eastern Colorado.

As I make my way through the rough for what feels like the millionth time, I can’t help but think about my encounter with Jameson yesterday. God, he was such a dick. But last night and today? Definitely not a dick. Though I’m not opposed to getting acquainted with—

Okay, I may be a bit distracted by my thoughts of Jameson. The man is hot. I need not offer excuses as to why my brain wants to focus on him at the most inopportune times. But just because a hot, successful, professional golfer hung out with me this morning does not mean that I need to lose this round to my sisters. Sisters who will never let me live it down.

I sullenly walk back to where they said my ball was, finding it next to yet another yucca. I swear there are a million of them on this hole itself. As I punch my ball back out into the fairway, my mind drifts back to my final conversation with Jameson at brunch. I thought we’d both had fun this morning, so it stung a bit when he said no. It’s not like he can have anything else he’s doing today—he’s literally in the middle of nowhere so he can work on his golf game.

As much as I hate to admit it, I wanted to keep spending time with him. He is so fun to heckle, and after that first time, he has taken my sarcasm and joking well, something that can’t be said for all the men I’ve encountered in my life. It was definitely one of the reasons Peter’s mom didn’t like me. The number of times he reminded me to “tone the sarcasm down” before we met with his mom should’ve really clued me in to the fact that she wasn’t my biggest fan.

But after the day I had with Jameson, I really thought that, even if we were both very clear about the fact that we aren’t looking for something serious, we were at least becoming friends.

Kelsey walks over to me on the green after tapping in a three-footer. “Are you okay? You’ve been a bit in your head this morning.”

I give her a smile that quickly turns into a grimace. “Totally. Just had one too many shots last night, I guess.”

“Same. Why did we think that golfing after a night like last night would be a good idea? It’s really the last thing I want to do.”

Izzy joins us as we pick up our bags, saying, “We should’ve opted for a hot tub morning, though the extra dehydration may not be what we are looking for.

“Well, there is a handsome lad currently in residence that I wouldn’t mind seeing in a swimming suit.” Izzy waggles her eyebrows at me, and I pretend to gag.

“Eww, Iz. Why would you call him a lad? It makes him seem like a twelve-year-old Scottish boy,” I joke, hoping to distract her.

“Atch, well, the lad may be a bit more o’ a man than a wee laddie o’ twelve,” she replies in a truly terrible accent. “I, for one, would be much more likely to want to see what’s under his kilt, at least…” At that, Izzy falls into a fit of giggles, pulling laughter out of the rest of us.

When she finally gathers her breath, she says, “Okay, fair. Lad may not be the right word for it, but you know I’m re-reading Outlander again. It just happens.”

And it does. Every time Izzy re-reads that series, she starts using random Scottish words.

Becca picks back up the conversation before I can get Izzy going on one of her Outlander dissertations. “But really, Bryn, when are you going to tell us about how you ended up playing a round of golf with not only a professional golfer, but one you actively insulted yesterday?”

Avoiding the question, I set up on the tee box of hole seven, a short par three that requires a good tee shot or your ball will be lost forever.

They all remain quiet as I swing, but the silence is short-lived.

“Soo…are you really not going to tell us? Because this is possibly the most exciting thing to have happened to you in a long while, and you’re being oddly quiet about it.”

“What are you talking about? I have exciting things happen to me all the time. Just last month, I had another girl all up in my lady-business.”

I see the look of surprise flash across Kelsey’s face before Izzy grins, saying, “Gyno appointments don’t count as exciting, Bryn. In fact, if that’s the first thing that popped into your mind when forced to come up with something exciting, I’m concerned about you and the status of your life.”

“Oh, like you have any more excitement happening? You live in Wild Bluffs. Nothing exciting ever happens here,” I shoot back, knowing my sisters live just as work-centric lives as I do, even if they do it from our small town.

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