Kyland

"So how's life?" I asked, leaning my hip on the counter.

Dusty finally looked up at me, a blank expression on her plain face. "Life sucks," she said.

I nodded to the magazine in her hand. "Not for those Kardashians."

She narrowed her eyes, smacking the gum in her mouth before glancing quickly at the magazine and then back at me. "Khloe and Kourtney are taking over the Hamptons," she offered.

I nodded slowly, running my tongue over my front teeth. "Must be nice."

"Yeah," she said. "Must be real nice." Then she grinned, showing me a mouthful of rot—commonly referred to in these parts as “Mountain Dew Mouth.” Then, as if to make my point, she picked up a half-full bottle of Mountain Dew and took a big swig. I struggled not to flinch. She finished ringing up my items, I paid, took my bags, bid her farewell, and walked to the door. As I was walking through, Dusty called my name and I turned around and looked at her questioningly.

"Rusty is a rat-faced motherfucker," she said.

I blinked at her and tilted my head. "Yeah," I agreed. "He really is."

She gifted me another brown and yellow grin, stuck her hand up and gave me a thumbs-up sign, and then plastered the magazine back up to her face. I left the store.

I started walking back toward home, lost in my own world, trying to decide what I'd do today. Marlo was working and then she had plans with some guy she'd met at Al's. I really wished she wouldn't have anything to do with the guys she met there—most of them were far from worthy of her. I thought Marlo and I had good reason for distrusting men, but while I had sworn them off, Marlo had decided that dating lots of guys she didn't care about meant she was the one in control.

Marlo had opened her heart once, and things hadn't gone well.

A few years before, she had met Donald, a young, handsome executive in town for some big corporate meeting at the mine. He'd come into Al's every night for a week just to sit in my sister's section and watch her work, talking about fate and destiny, which swept her right off her feet just like he was her prince charming come to rescue her from her dreary existence. As if any prince was ever named Donald—that should have been her first clue right there.

She kissed him up against his shiny, red BMW and he made all sorts of promises to her about moving her out to his condo in Chicago. Then three minutes after she'd given him her virginity, he drove her to the base of our mountain and dropped her off at the side of the road. When she asked him what happened to the condo in Chicago, he laughed at her and told her he'd never bring an ugly, bucktoothed hick home with him. And then he'd sped off, splashing mud up on her new, white sweater, the one we'd walked six miles into the Evansly Wal-Mart to buy, the one I could tell made her feel pretty. At least up until then. After that, Marlo never seemed to feel pretty, and she'd started laughing with her hand over her mouth to hide her teeth. Truth be told, they were sort of bucked, but not in a way that was ugly, in a way that showed off those full movie star lips of hers, in a way that was sweet and endearing. In a way that was Marlo.

Whenever I thought back to the day we excitedly walked through the aisles of Wal-Mart, talking about how her night would go, squirting testers of perfume on our wrists, and spending the last of our money on a sweater for her date, it made me so angry. Angry that we'd allowed ourselves to include Donald in our dreams, that we'd spent even one second giving him the power to dash our hopes. And most of all, that Marlo had given something precious to a loser who didn't deserve it.

Marlo had told me the story of Donald that night when she'd come into our trailer, muddy, shivering, and defeated. She'd cried in my arms and I'd cried, too, for her, for me, for dashed dreams, for the pain of loneliness, and the deep hope that someone would come along and save us. And the fact that no one ever did. Of course, we both should have known better after what happened to our mama, but I guessed the promise of love is about the strongest pull there is. I didn't blame Marlo. Our father had been the first one to teach us that men were ultimately selfish and uncaring and would put themselves before anyone else, regardless of who depended on them. And even still, for me, it was so hard not to dream that somewhere out there, there was someone strong and gallant who would dance with me under a starlit sky and call me his beloved—and mean it.

"Hey."

I let out a small scream and jumped back, dropping one of my bags, my groceries rolling out onto the ground. When I looked up, it was Kyland. "This is funny to you, isn't it?" I asked.

He held his hands up in a surrender gesture. "Sorry, sorry. I swear, this really is a coincidence. I was walking back from Evansly. I saw you come out of Rusty's." He bent down, picked up my bag of groceries, and then gestured for me to give him the other one. I almost resisted, but then I decided he should at the very least carry my bags after giving me a mini heart attack for the third time in a week.

"Hmm, likely story," I said, cocking an eyebrow.

He grinned when I handed the bag over and some sort of strange tickling feeling moved through my ribcage. I frowned.

"Still holding strong, huh?"

"It's been quite the effort, let me tell you," I said.

He laughed and my stupid heart flipped. Evidently I was kind of bad at this swearing off men thing—a few smiles and I had a full-blown crush. Truthfully, he hadn't even worked that hard to get me to this point. How completely annoying.