Peak of Love (Wildflower #1)
Chapter 1
Chapter One
Skylar
“Updating the dating apps with a new bio. Ugh, that sounds redundant,” I muttered, pacing the unvarnished, creaky wood floors of my very cool new place. “Twenty-eight, gay, bottom mostly, but not a sub. Mono, will date a poly guy.” I paused like I was giving a speech or doing a comedy routine, even though there was no one here to listen— not anymore, that cheating bastard . “Will date you if you can bake. Or if you like to get baked, which I can legally do now that I’m in Colorado instead of Florida.”
Stopping next to the rustic-chic fireplace I wasn’t allowed to use, I blew out a breath.
“Moved to Colorado two months ago for grad school. Found the shitstain who was supposed to be my forever on the faux fur rug I bought him as a gift, getting spit-roasted.”
I seriously considered using that as my intro. It perfectly expressed my state of mind, but also my quirky sense of humor. You couldn’t keep me down for long, even if you could make me mad enough to slander your sexual skills vaguely across social media.
But okay, maybe I wasn’t ready to swipe right yet.
If I was in Florida, I would go to the salon and paint my nails a violent red, then my squad would come over to burn all of the crap the shitstain had left behind. It was a lot of crap because I’d booted his ass out within twenty minutes of walking in on him, telling him whatever he didn’t take with him in the rideshare was mine now.
If I was in Florida, my squad would tell me I was so much better off single, they’d always hated him, and who cared about him because I had a killer career as a fashion editor. I wouldn’t have corrected them for the millionth time that I wasn’t a fashion editor, I wrote commercial white papers, which my squad didn’t think was sexy. They didn’t think coming here for a two-year masters program in comparative literature was sexy either.
Tragically, my squad was a thousand miles away and thirty degrees warmer.
I zipped over to love and comment on their latest photos, but my thumbs froze a millimeter above my screen. Before we left Florida, I’d bragged non-stop for weeks and weeks about how amazing and life-changing moving here was going to be. I’d bragged about how we could have sex in hot springs—or next to them, I still hadn’t researched the hygienics—and ski and not have to shave my chest because it wasn’t always beach season.
“Fucking fuck ,” I hissed.
New plan.
“Start grad school and make tons of new friends. Have big adventures like mountain biking or hiking mountains that are fourteen thousand feet tall. It can’t be that hard, I did that class once where you ride the stationary bike but stand up on the pedals half the time.”
Feeling inspired, I kept up my monologue aloud to no one.
“Go to hot springs for a weekend, because yes I fucking can go to romantic getaway destinations alone. And if I happen to find some super rugged, hot cowboy to call my bucking bronco and ride until I fall off, that would be the feather in my cap.”
Yeah, I wasn’t going to let the shitstain ruin this for me.
I’d been talking about leaving Florida to see what else was out there in this big world since I was a ditzy, dreamy, English lit major in undergrad. A drafty, uninsulated attic on the eighth floor of a Victorian house with no elevator where I wrote ‘angsty’ poetry had been the most exotic thing a gay boy from Tallahassee like me could have ever imagined.
So I wasn’t going to squander this chance—and it was going to be even better to do it single in a place where no one knew me or had any expectations. This cute little town named Wildflower, with trendy shops, farmers markets, and oddly post-modern apartment buildings, surrounded by farmland and those oil things that looked like a hammer on a pole lazily pistoning. There were gun racks on trucks parked at coffee shops with pride flags, and the cleanest country bar to exist outside of movies had monthly drag shows. I couldn’t pass up the chance to figure out what the hell was going on.
Maybe it was all the weed?
I didn’t know enough people yet to have gotten an accurate picture. Maybe Colorado was like Amsterdam, where everyone came for the marijuana and the locals made tons of money off it, but didn’t really partake. Or maybe the state was shaped like a square because it was constantly hot boxed. I snorted at my own joke… and I wasn’t even high.
My fate decided, I went back to the dating apps and dove into updating them for real.