I had just finished putting on my lipstick when I heard a truck pull into the driveway. I had the window open, and I would have been lying if I said it was to let the cool air in. I hoped it would let something else in. Even though I was just as confused as before about Jesse and me and what, if any, future we could have together, I did have some explaining to do. I had some apologizing to do as well.
I stuck my head out the window and waved at Josie so she wouldn’t blast the horn in case Jesse was upstairs resting. Knowing he could be a floor above me, asleep in bed, didn’t make me want to head downstairs and ride off with Josie, but I’d promised her.
She’d called again the night before to make sure I was still on for the dance, and a girl who went so far out of the way to be friends with me was someone I wouldn’t ditch in the eleventh hour.
Josie waved back, then made a Come on! motion with her hands.
Coming I mouthed before ducking back inside. I grabbed my purse and jogged out the door. Neil and Rose had left with the girls, so the house was a rare quiet and I didn’t even get ten seconds to enjoy it. Before I’d made it out of the living room, Josie’s truck started thumping with music.
My ears were already bleeding before I’d closed and locked the front door. If there was a God, I knew one thing: He’d been on vacation the day someone invented country music.
“Hey, girl!” Josie shouted at me from the driver’s side window.
“Hey, yourself!” I shouted back. Only because she wouldn’t have heard me otherwise. “Did you know that every time a country song is played, a cute little puppy keels over dead?” Again, I had to shout because Josie was really blaring the honky tonk.
And we still had the actual honky tonk to get to.
“Aww, that’s sweet,” Josie said, cranking down the music to a level where I could be relatively certain my eardrums wouldn’t burst. “Is our little girl making jokes about country music? I’ve never, ever heard one of those.” She rolled her eyes at me.
“You know what they say about jokes,” I said, bounding down the porch steps. “There’s a kernel of truth in every one.”
She gave me a look, then scanned my outfit. “Hot mama!” She was back to shouting again. “When you’re not wearing pants or those shredded legging thingies, a person can actually see you’ve got some killer legs.”
I stopped in the driveway, leaned over a bit, and scanned my legs. Nothing but a couple of knees and freckles.
“But, girl, do you have vampire in you or something? Because I’ve never seen skin that white.”
“This is tan.” I examined my arms. Yeah, they were at least a shade and a half darker than normal. I skirted around the front of her shiny truck and climbed up into the passenger seat.
“No, Rowen, this is tan.” Josie held her bare arm against mine. Sure enough, I looked see-through compared to her golden goodness.
“Two words, Josie,” I said, moving my arm from hers. “Skin. Cancer.”
She laughed as she hit the gas. And by hit the gas, I meant we hit forty before we’d made it out of the driveway. “Two words, Rowen,” she said, taking the corner the way she’d taken it last week. “Vitamin. D.”
I double-checked my seat belt. “D isn’t really a word. It’s a letter.”
“Oh, dear God!” Josie shouted out the window. “Get me to the honky tonk and get me there quick!”
“The way you drive . . .” I said, checking the speedometer. Yeah. We were going as fast as I felt we were. “You could be in Idaho ‘quick.’”
“I knew there was a reason I was drawn to you, Rowen,” Josie said as she skipped to the next song. The next one sounded exactly like the previous one that sounded like every single song ever sung in country music. “You have as wicked a sense of humor as me.”
“And here I thought it was because you loved those shredded legging thingies of mine.”
She tilted her head back and laughed loudly. Josie looked amazing, even more so than the night I’d met her at the rodeo. Some girls are pretty because they put a lot of work into it, and some girls are pretty when they wake up in the morning. Josie was in that second group. She had the glow that a beauty cream company would kill to replicate, and her hair was so shiny it looked like glass. She had on a short denim skirt, a floral sleeveless blouse, and a pair of candy-apple red boots. She’d be beating the guys away like flies.
Which made me wonder again what had happened between Jesse and Josie. Really, those two were the dream couple.
Before another song came to its twangy end, Josie pulled into a packed parking lot.
“The party’s hopping tonight,” she said, making her own parking spot in the front. Everywhere I looked, there were trucks. Big ones, little ones, old ones, new ones. Trucks, trucks, and more trucks. Maybe a few SUVs like the Walkers’, but there was not a single car to be seen. I didn’t know what those Montana people had against cars, but obviously gas mileage wasn’t a concern around there.
“You ready for this?” Josie unfastened her seatbelt and examined herself in the mirror.
“Nope,” I answered, swinging open my door. “But I promised you I’d let you be the one to pop my honky tonk cherry, so let’s get this thing over with.”
Josie shoved my arm before we leapt—I wondered if I should call for a footstool—out of her truck. “You city girls sure are crass.”