Page 50 of Wild, Wild Cowboy

“I’m fine. I slept really well last night.”

His chin dipped to consider me, and then he pulled his gaze back to the road. “Did you?” He sounded smug.

I supposed that was fair. I had slept like the dead for a solid six hours, thanks to his magic tongue. I still didn’t entirely understand it. I had given myself plenty of orgasms over the years. Not a single one of them had been likethat. So…intense. It made me wonder if I was actually gaslighting myself. It was like someone spending their whole life living in Alaska, believing they knew what heat felt like, then suddenly moving to Arizona in the middle of summer.

“How did you sleep?” I asked, because I knew rest didn’t come easily for him.

“No worse than usual.”

I decided not to take that personally. Instead, I took it as a challenge. Everyone should get to experience the deep, restful sleep that came from a fully satisfied body and, by god, I was going to make that happen for him, one way or another.

He turned on the radio and spun the dial until he found something that wasn’t static. A country station, of course. That was about all there was out here. Country, classic rock, and conservative talk shows.

That same song we had already heard a million times yesterday came on again. I hummed along and watched rural Montana go by out the window. White-peaked mountains hugged the distant horizon. Mostly it was just wide-open fields with the occasional cow, but every now and then we would drive through a cluster of small houses, some in various stages of dilapidation and some as pretty as a postcard.

Regardless, I had questions. I always had questions.

“Where do you think they work?” I pondered out loud.

“Who? The people who live here?” Zack peered out my window, then out his. He shrugged. “The ranches, mostly. Gas stations, hospitals, schools. There’s probably a dollar storearound here somewhere, too. And we’re close to a few different national forests and parks that might employ a lot of them.”

“A national park. That might be a fun place to work.”

“Sure,” Zack agreed. “Except for all the people.”

I looked at him in surprise. “But you like people.”

“I like entertaining them. Cleaning up after them? Not so much.”

I laughed. I had done my fair share of cleaning up after people in the library. It wasn’t always a great experience.

We passed a woman sweeping her front porch like she was teaching it a lesson. “She has oatmeal every day for breakfast,” I said. It was a compliment. “Also, her husband is a jerk.” That was self-explanatory.

Zack snorted. “Maybe he ate the last of the oatmeal yesterday and forgot to put it on the grocery list.”

I shook my head. “No. Margaret would never live so close to the edge like that. She’s got a full month’s worth of oatmeal in the pantry. I bet he forgot their anniversary.”

“Oh, her name is Margaret, is it?” Zack kept his eyes on the road, but I could see the smile lines crinkle. “All right, then. But Jimmy didn’t forget their anniversary. He used her favorite spatula to unclog the toilet, and now she can’t look at it the same way anymore.”

“No!” I squealed, laughing. “Why would hedothat?”

“He swears it’s clean now,” Zack said, completely straight faced. “But she says it’s tainted. And it still smells like shit.”

“Ew! No!” I covered my mouth with my hands, still laughing so hard my eyes stung.

“It’s her special spatula, the one she uses to mix up the batter for cakes and waffles.”

“Zack,” I wheezed.

We were long past Margaret and Jimmy’s house now, but eventually we passed another row of houses, and we made upstories for them, too. I had always been like this—or, at least, I had been like this ever since I’d left the compound and realized that people led all sorts of lives that I had never considered. I wasn’t all that interested in the big adventures or the shattering catastrophes; it was the mundane parts that fascinated me the most because that’s what life was, really. Ordinary moments strung together like pearls on a string, and it was only looking back, after time had polished them up a bit, that you could see how richly they gleamed.

It was funny, having an ordinary moment of my own, imagining the ordinary moments of people I would never see or probably even think of again.

But with Zack it felt extraordinary.

As planned,we arrived at the horse processing center before Reliable Trucking. That was the last thing that went right.

“What do you mean, he’s not for sale?” Zack demanded.

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