When We Met: A Small Town Single Dad Romance

by Shey Stahl

  Now you might be wondering, who is this girl?

  Kacy Conner. Nice to meet you. I’m at the worst point in my life. I’m sure of it. So where’d it start? I was born in a dungeon and waited for my prince charming to come rescue me. He never fucking came!

  Kidding, try Beverly Hills, but as far as I’m concerned, it was a dungeon guarded by a ruthless queen. And if my mother had ever caught me eating sugar, aka cherry slushy, growing up, she would have made me throw it up. No lie. On one of my birthdays, I snuck a cupcake, and she stuck her finger down my throat until I threw up.

  Are your eyes bugging out of your head?

  If they are, you’re in for a treat if you ever met the famous Camille Conner, CEO of Harlen Modeling Agency, and wife of music mogul and former drummer, Russell Randal. Don’t even get me started on having that man as your father, but Camille, she’s the devil. She smiles at you, draws you in, and then she’s like a glowworm. Do you know anything about glowworms? They entice their prey with their bioluminescent light, and once they have you stuck in their sticky hanging lines, they suck you dry. That’s the entertainment industry for you.

  Back to my road trip. I’ve never been on one, but somewhere between playing follow the leader behind an obnoxious cherry-red Corvette and a gas station taco I wished I hadn’t eaten, I realize this is my ticket out of California.

  I quit my job yesterday, packed enough clothes to get by, and left.

  California is not what it’s cracked up to be. Take away the stars and the beaches, and you’re left with droughts, wildfires, and earthquakes. Not to mention everyone you know is trying to become an actor or, at the very least, marry into wealth without a prenup. And what do they do to obtain that?

  Lose themselves to superficial modifications they think they need, to be who they aren’t. You’ve heard that saying “Fake it until you make it,” right? It should be Beverly Hills’ motto. I’m not joking. And it probably is. Or is that Nashville’s motto?

  When I graduated high school, half the senior class had nose jobs and Brazilian butt lifts before they hit eighteen, and boob jobs, yep. Nearly everyone I know.

  Not me. I’ll stick with my natural barely B cups. No shame there, and hello, I don’t have shoulder pain from trying to carry them around.

  That girl driving down the highway blaring Nirvana, she’s tired of fake people who only love you for what you can do for them. The ones who make girls feel like beauty is skin deep.

  I’m so much more than my appearance.

  You want to lose yourself? Move to California, and you’ll watch your life and dreams leak through your fingers as you cry into your palms every time you’re told you’re not good enough.

  I dream of the South. Not just the South, but the stillness of a starry night around a bonfire or the way a wheat field moves with the wind. I dream of turning off the blacktop onto the red dirt roads and a dust circle. I want to feel the humid air in my lungs and try collard greens and black-eyed peas. I wanna drink water from a hose, run around barefoot, and stack hay. Sweet tea and fried chicken? Sign me the fuck up.

  Cowboys?

  Um, yes, please. Anything over billionaires who whisper lies with a smirk.

  I want to feel the touch of calloused hardworking hands run up the inside of my thigh and men who don’t carry dick pics on their phones. The ones who don’t have social media and wake up on Sunday mornings to a sunrise and not noon because they spent all night out at the latest club looking for a piece of ass that didn’t come with a paternity suit and a questionable itch that doesn’t go away.

  I want the word “honey” whispered with a Southern drawl. I want hard-headed, the ones that right the wrongs and still turn that sexy grin on just before the wink and say, “yes, ma’am.”

  For as long as I can remember, I’ve written my thoughts on napkins. Thousands of them I’ve collected in my twenty-one years. Lately, they’ve all been about the South, but I do have some favorites. My favorite one?

  Between tangled sheets and you, I take the blame for the things that have nothing to do with me.

  – Lost.

  Do you know what it means?

  Abusive relationship? Cheating? Betrayal?

  All of the above because it’d be the truth. I actually wrote it at the laundry mat when I washed my red panties with my boss’s white, million thread count sheets by accident because I was operating on two hours sleep.

  Following that Corvette hours outside Amarillo, Texas, the sun is high in the sky, but I notice the weather changing, an ominous dark cloud ahead. For what seemed like a hundred miles, I’m not sure which poured more, the clouds or my tears—afraid I wasn’t making the right decision. Or the fact that I was following a Corvette and he couldn’t maintain a speed to save his life.

  Then, suddenly, Mr. Corvette decides to slow down. I’m not talking about a few miles per hour. He goes from seventy-six to fifty-five in two seconds. I swear. Enough time that I nearly rear-end the dude, and he pulls off the highway as if he was about to miss his exit. Only there is no exit. We’re in the middle of nowhere. The nearest exit is a ditch with a deer carcass in it.

  Not more than a minute later, I see the red and blue lights in my mirror.

  Argh!

  The next five minutes are filled with me trying to flirt my way out of a ticket and failing miserably. “Don’t mess with Texas” goes for the cops too.

  “Where you going so fast?” He gave me that once-over cops do, giving my vehicle and my suitcase a side-eyed look. “Heading somewhere?”

  “My heart’s on the run. Unraveling and coming apart at the seams,” I note and then realize that’s not an answer.

  “Excuse me?” He stares at me, his head cocked to the side as if I’m speaking a foreign language to him.

  Sighing, I rest my hands on my steering wheel. “Amarillo. For the night, then I have no idea.” I really didn’t have an idea. When I left LA, I didn’t set out with a plan. East and south, where the weather turns colder and the men talk slower.

  He focuses on my license, probably wondering if I’m old enough to be running away. With a sigh, he hands me back my license. “Drive slower, ma’am. These highways can be dangerous.”

  “I will.”

  Just before I roll my window up, shivering and turning my seat heater up higher, that damn cherry red Corvette speeds past us, flashing his headlights, as if to thank me for taking one for the team.

  “Asshole,” I mumble, hoping the cop didn’t hear me, because it wasn’t meant for him.

  Still shaken by my encounter with the state patrol from hell, my phone starts ringing over my music and forces me back to reality once more. You can run, but you can’t hide. From Tara, that is.

  Ring. Ring. Ring.

  Why is a phone ringing so obnoxious? Probably because I know who’s on the other end. I have her name programed into my phone as Tantrum Tara. It’s the truth.

  For reasons I’m not sure, maybe to give myself the satisfaction of hearing her panic that I’m not there for her, I click the button on my steering wheel and take her call. And before you meet this chick, keep in mind, I used to work for her. I quit yesterday. So I can imagine this conversation isn’t going to be friendly. There, you’re all caught up.

  “Kacy?” comes the voice on the other end. “Where the hell are you?”

  Told you she wasn’t going to be pleasant. “Leaving a city that never fit me.”

  “What?” she yells. “Where are you?”

  I hate the sound of my name lately. Don’t even form the words around the K. You’ll only piss me off. I hate the words “I’m sorry, Kacy.”

  Even more, “It wasn’t what it looked like.”

  Oh, but Mother, it was.

  “What do you want?” I seethe into the space inside my very cold car, swearing I won’t pick up the next time and knowing I will. “I said I quit and I mean it.”

  The line is silent. I still hear her breathing, so I know she hasn’t hung up. If I had to guess, she’
s insulted that me, Kacy Conner, the girl everyone runs to when they need help, quit two days before her engagement party.

  “Kacy! Where the hell are you? I have so much to do, and I need you here.”

  I exhale deeply. “I’m in my car. Somewhere between Flagstaff and fuck you.”

  Tara draws in a quick hissing breath. “How dare you speak to me like that!”

  “I can speak to you any way I want,” I snap, reaching for my package of candy on my passenger seat next to my one suitcase with all my belongings. I left everything else for my neighbor, who just lost her job and is supporting her teenage son on a waitress’s salary. Fancy furniture my parents bought to show me they loved me but didn’t want me living under their roof. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in clothes and shoes I never wore but took from shoots because they gave them to me. All hers. I don’t want any of it, and I won’t miss it. I take that back. I might miss my comfy bed.

  “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Tara asks, as if I hadn’t thought this through.

  “I don’t work for you anymore; therefore I don’t care what you think I’ve done.” I’ll never have to scrape dog shit off your shoes again. Literally, a true story of mine. I have many. All of which involve others taking from me and leaving very little left. If I were one of those sands of time tubes, there’d be only tiny grains left before I’m lost completely.

  “Kacy, really? Do you realize what quitting will do to your career in fashion?”

  “Career?” I snort. “Do you really think I want a career being someone’s bitch? When was the last time you made a decision for yourself? You can’t even choose what you eat for dinner. Or who you fuck.”

  Yeah, I threw that one in there. Tara has certainly slept her way to the top. She’s twenty-four and well aware of the fact that most models’ careers begin to dwindle by the time they’re twenty-five. Because of that, she’s dating and recently engaged to playboy model and actor, Harrison Wayne.

  She doesn’t love him, at least not any more than she loves money and fame. Hell, she still loves her ex-husband. Or should I say husband, because he’s yet to sign the papers for her.

  I don’t know a lot about her husband, other than he’s from Texas, and they have two kids she hasn’t seen since she left the ranch he lived on. And you know, I can’t blame him for refusing to sign the papers because she’s a cunt and trying to fuck him over.

  The first year I worked for Tara, I didn’t get paid. Not a dime. I was eighteen, wanted in the modeling industry because I thought it’d make my mom love me, and met Tara in the process. She was just starting out, and it seemed like a good fit. Turns out I’m not modeling material. Too sassy and have stretch marks on my ass and hips. Somewhere along the lines of picking up her laundry and delivering her Coke Zero on Sonic ice, I started getting paid. And my duties went from an assistant to very nearly God. She thought, and though I’m amazing, there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do for her.

  And there wasn’t. Wanting to prove to my parents that even though I wasn’t the stick-thin model they wanted, I was really fucking good at my job. I also didn’t want my parents supporting me.

  But Tara was unlike anyone I ever anticipated. Working eighty-hour weeks and operating on four hours of sleep, I’d have to wake up early to make sure she’s awake at the time she needed to be up, waiting with Egyptian coffee.

  Towel waiting for her as soon as she stepped from the shower?

  I did that.

  Running to the CVS to get condoms for whoever was occupying her bed?

  Again, me.

  I once had to sniff her armpits before she went on the runway to make sure she didn’t have BO. Sadly, that’s not even the worst part of the levels to which I went to assure she liked me. And she never did. I’m the kind of person, or, used to be, who wanted to be friends with everyone, especially Tara Thomas. Everyone wants to be her friend because it means they’re part of the crowd.

  Until now. Until I snapped. Thread severed. Line crossed, I’m done.

  Do you know why?

  Found my mom in bed with my boyfriend. You know who else had been sleeping with him?

  Tara.

  Though I’m not surprised, somewhere between my mom saying “it’s not what it looks like” and Tara laughing in my face when I confronted her about it, I decided I was done living for Camille.

  And Tara, I can’t stand her. Sure, she’s everything this industry wants. Tall, beautiful, and sold her soul to the devil, and he doesn’t wear Prada. His name is Felix, her agent, and he owns her ass whether she wants to admit it or not. Sure, the parties are nice, the free clothes and the mansion, but at what cost?

  She can’t even change the color of her hair without asking, and forget about eating a cheeseburger. Nope. They measure her body fat, and if she gains an ounce of it, no food for her.

  Listen, I’m not a quitter. I’m not, but I draw the line at some things. Like being peed on. Yeah, that happened, too. Not by Tara, but other models. Long story and not worth telling. But it certainly explains why I’m five hundred miles from the Hollywood hills and that familiar Sunset Strip I grew up on, and planning on never returning.

  I don’t want that life any longer. I’ve been lied to, shamed, blamed, and cheated on. Robbed, sprayed with pepper spray, puked on, all before I turned twenty-one. Welcome to being a personal assistant. It’s awful. I don’t recommend it to anyone.

  “Kacy!” Tara yells. “I swear to God, if you’re not here within the hour, you will never work in this industry again.”

  I laugh and chew on the Sour Patch Kids I’ve been eating for the last hour. “Honey, do you know who my parents are? Last time I checked, they’re bigger than you on all levels, and besides that, I don’t want anything to do with another model in my life. You were enough to ruin me.”

  “You’re so dramatic.” She sighs. “Whatever. You’re fired.”

  “Cute, but I already quit.”

  And then she hangs up on me, and my first smile since I left that shit-box apartment above that Indian restaurant that made my clothes smell like curry graces my lips.

  This might be random, but I used to wonder what birds felt when they flew through the sky.

  Freedom?

  Contentment?

  Surely with the wind in their wings and everything in view, they felt something.

  When was the last time I felt anything other than discontentment?

  Probably the day before I walked into a room full of men and was told I’d never be what the world wanted. I wouldn’t be the princess they thought I would be. Since my parents are in the industry, this wasn’t acceptable to them. I starved myself for years, developed a serious eating disorder that left me with kidney failure at one point, and at five foot nine, I barely weighed a hundred and ten pounds. And after working for Tara Thomas, I have post-traumatic stress syndrome.

  If you worship materialization, models, actors, singers, anyone residing in those hills, don’t. They’re all a bunch of addicts. Their drug choice is just a little different.

  Fame.

  It’s just as deadly and kills silently when no one’s looking.

  And that’s the difference between my life and theirs. I wouldn’t silently slip into the shadows and become the version they wanted me to be. This girl, she has wings and longs for the Southern sunsets where boys kiss your forehead and call you darlin’ just before sunrise.

  I despise fairytales. I don’t believe them to be true, but rather an account of someone else’s retelling, and probably fictional account, of the love they wish existed.

  Where’s the part where he cheats on her with her mom and then calls her crazy for overreacting? Huh? Where’s that in your fucking fairy tale?

  This might have something to do with this being my life and not a fairy tale.

  But when I was little, growing up in a beautiful mansion in the hills of Hollywood, I thought that would always be my life. I thought everything would be perfect. I thought I would l be accept
ed by the ones who brought me into the world because, after all, I’m their only daughter.

  I thought… wrong. I thought, well, I never thought I’d catch my boyfriend in bed with my mother.

  So, California, I outgrew you.

  I created these meatballs. Literally.

  BARRON

  Camdyn frowns at the meatballs I take out of the oven. “I don’t like meatballs.”

  Believe it or not, I can cook. My kids eat my food, but that’s not saying much. They’d starve if they didn’t, and believe me, Camdyn’s tried this in protest before, and it didn’t end well for her.

  “I don’t like red,” Sevyn tells us, obnoxiously beating the spoon against the pot. I fight the urge to rip the spoon from her hand and break it.

  I look to the cat at my feet, who’s hoping to catch an ounce of bison meat. He’s a meat-eater. “Any demands from you?”

  I swear to God, he shrugs. Or shifts his weight from one leg to the other. Either way, I take it as a shrug. Stirring the sauce in the pan next to me, I reach down and turn the knob to start boiling the water for the noodles.

  Beside me, Camdyn stares at the water. “Tanner told me if you put a frog in water, it doesn’t jump out.”

  “Well—” I pause and reach for the box of noodles. “They like water, but if you’re asking, will he jump out of water you bring to a boil, the answer is yes. Morgan and I tried it.”

  We both turn when we hear the door open and the rush of wind that follows.

  “What did we try?” Morgan asks, opening the front door and setting his hat on the rack next to his coat.

  “Boiling frogs.” Camdyn jumps down from the stool, her bare feet slapping against the old wood floors I milled down myself from a live oak that fell the year Sevyn was born. Took me two years to build this house, but I take pride in the fact that I did it. With the help of my dad and brother. It’s small, but it’s paid for. Everything I made went into building this place for the girls. It’s a three thousand square foot pole building. Half of it is living quarters, the other is a shop. With vaulted ceilings and an open-concept design (essential with two naughty kids. Nowhere for them to hide), the entire thing is built out of steel and concrete to withstand our wicked winds, and there’s a storm cellar for the occasional tornado.