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DEVO
Deputy Lee grabbed the passenger-side door handle and yanked it open, then jumped into my truck. I swore I caught a whiff of honey when her hair fell over her shoulder. Under her brown cowboy hat, she’d worn it down, which was unusual. Normally, she kept it tied back in a tight pony at the base of her neck.
I hadn’t tried very hard to hide my annoyance when she begged me for a ride. I’d been starving all day, so I’d changed after work and driven straight for Punky G’s. Extra cheese pizzas with extra pineapples could put me in a happy food coma any day of the week, and bonus if it came from Punky’s. I couldn’t wait to get home to eat the pie currently resting on the deputy’s lap. Okay, fine, so I had been planning to devour a couple pieces on the way home, but now with her beside me, I wouldn’t, because I would most likely embarrass myself by sounding like a pig rooting through mud for a rotten tomato as I scarfed down a piece or four.
Plus, I really wanted to check on the little green pepper plant I’d potted and nurtured. Two months of babying it and no peppers yet. Hopefully, it wasn’t still in the throes of death. I’d watered it, sung to it, and set it in the sunniest spot in the backyard. What more could the damn thing want from me? Was one tiny green pepper I could put in a salad for my mom so much to ask?
But Deputy Lee had caught me in a lie. It was a little white one. Big deal. Did she plan on locking me up for that too? Obviously, I wasn’t working—my shorts barely covered my thighs. Truth be told, I was still mad at her for almost arresting me. Twice. But I knew if I said no to her, my boss would hear about it, and Theo wanted the community center I helped run, Ace’s House, to have a good working relationship with the sheriff’s office.
Fine. Whatever.
“Thanks,” Deputy Lee said, a little bit out of breath from jogging to catch up with me before I drove off and left her stranded. “And before you start in on me, lemme say again, I’m sorry.”
“You were right, Deputy Lee,” I said grudgingly, keeping my eyes on the congested traffic around Town Square as I backed out of my parking space and we joined the barely moving queue. The people offering horse-drawn carriage rides to tourists were one block ahead of us, stopping the flow of cars and casting downtown in a red brake-light glow. “You were just doin’ your job. Besides, Theo says I have to be nice to you. Where’s your sheriff-y truck?”
Snapping her seatbelt into place, she chuckled and said, “At my house. And just call me Abey, please.”
“Okay, Abey, how’d you get to town if you didn’t drive?”
“My date picked me up.”
I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. I refused to look directly at her because then I’d see how attractive she was, and I would not bow down to that fact, even inside my own head. If I looked at her, I couldn’t stay mad at her. “You wore that dumb hat on a date? With a woman?”
Still reeling from learning that, in fact, I was not the lone lesbian in Wisper like I’d thought, my jaw had dropped to the floor of the sheriff’s station when Abey told me she was gay after she arrested me the first time. She’d even looked proud of making me speechless.
That was almost a year ago, and I’d spent the last twelve months trying not to notice her. Just ’cause we were both lesbians in the same small town where there were no others did not mean we had to hook up.
“What in the world is wrong with this hat?” She flicked the underside of the brim with two fingers. “I wear it every day at work, and nobody ever kicks up a stink. It ain’t like I wore it inside the restaurant.”
“It’s dumb,” I said, staring straight out the windshield, still working hard not to look in her direction. I definitely hadn’t noticed how it really wasn’t dumb, and in the right light, the shadows from the hat made her eyes seem to glow with a blue light that could’ve come straight out of some poem about the starry cosmos.
“Well, thanks for that. My ol’ granddaddy gave it to me ’fore he died.”
“Really?” I squeaked, finally turning her way a little. Shit. “I’m sorry. But you’re… You’re prettier without it.”
Okay, fine. She was gorgeous, her naturally highlighted blond hair and tan skin absolutely flawless. And that was to say nothing of those eyes. Neverendingly deep, beautiful pools of blue that lit up like happiness itself when she smiled. Which she did a lot. She was funny and sarcastic, and had we not been “frenemies,” I would have been charmed by both.
“I was just kiddin’,” she admitted with a not-at-all-cute, throaty chuckle. “Sorry, that was kinda mean. Bought it out at Bob’s Feed and Tack.” Tipping the hat up with another touch of her index finger, she turned in her seat toward me. “But you think I’m pretty?”
I shrugged one shoulder. “You’re the only other gay woman in Wisper, or Barton, for that matter. Can you blame me for checkin’ you out?” Like, literally every single day. I rolled my eyes at myself and immediately hoped she hadn’t noticed.
“I thought you were just tryin’ to figure a way to set me on fire. Wait, you know we’re not the only two, right?”
“No, I didn’t know that. Who?”
This time, she shrugged. “Not my place to say. But I will tell you”—she wiggled the same two fingers she’d flicked her hat with in the air—“there’s two, and they’re both considerably older than you and me.”
I lost the fight I’d been having with myself not to stare at her. “Really?”
“Yup.” She smiled so big when I finally gave her my full attention. Jeez. Her smile was bright and electric, and an errant thought flitted through my head: what would it feel like to have that smile aimed at me every day?
I shook it off with a little shudder. “Okay. I respect that, but that’s cool. So then you’re still the only other lesbian in town, at least the only one around my age.” Like we had our own little club.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Twenty-seven. Almost twenty-eight. I’m surprised you don’t remember that from arrestin’ me. Twice.” I harrumphed. “How old are you?”
She laughed, biting the inside of her pale pink lip to hide a smirk, like maybe she was lying and she had remembered but was trying to act innocent. “You’re a young thang. I’m thirty-two. And you were never under arrest. Not technically. Not yet.”
