Chapter 4 Cam
Chapter 4
Cam
I both hated and loved how easy it was for me to take Dusty’s hand and run out of the Devil’s Boot—into its dirt parking lot with my wedding dress floating and rustling around me. It was cold as shit, but I didn’t really notice.
When Dusty looked back at me as we ran toward his Bronco, he had a lopsided smile on his face, and it reminded me so much of the boy I used to know, how much I missed him when I let myself think about him.
I pushed the thought down as we made it to his truck. He opened the door for me and asked, “You’re sure?” I wasn’t. But instead of answering, I grabbed on to the front of the door and hoisted myself up into the cab—like I’d done a million times before. Dusty helped me gather my dress and make sure all of it was inside the truck. “No offense, but this dress is fucking ridiculous,” he said.
“I know,” I said with a breath that turned into a laugh. After Dusty shut the door, he made his way to the driver’s side and hopped in.
“Any requests?” he asked as the Bronco roared to life.
I shook my head. “Just drive.”
Dusty gave me that tilted smile again, and I couldn’t help but smile back. My heart was beating in my ears; I could feel the blood pumping through my veins. My whole body felt alive, as if it had been dormant before.
He started driving and flipped on the radio. Charlie Rich started flowing through the speakers. We didn’t talk, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Normally, when faced with silence, my head felt loud. It had felt loud all day.
But right now, it was blissfully quiet.
I looked over at Dusty one more time—one of his wrists was hanging over the steering wheel and the other was tapping along to the music—before I leaned my head against the cool glass of the window and watched Wyoming roll by.
—
“Ash,” Dusty said softly a little while later. I lifted my head from the window, slightly disoriented. The landscape around me was no longer moving—we were parked somewhere. “You fell asleep. Feel okay?”
“Yeah,” I said groggily. “Where are we?”
“I thought you might like a change of clothes,” he said. “We’re at a gas station about an hour outside of Meadowlark.”
“Clothes from a gas station?” I said, arching a brow at him. My voice didn’t hold much weight, though, because my dress was starting to dig at me in all the wrong places.
Dusty looked amused. “Sorry. Nordstroms are in short supply around here.”
I sighed and pushed my door open. The full skirt of my dress started to tumble out of the truck. God, this thing was big and gaudy and awful. My mother picked it out—she had chosen every detail about today. The church (not for me), the florals (expensive), the food (I hate fish), the music (boring), and of course, the groom—well, I mostly picked that, but it was my parents who influenced the choice. I thought that if I married someone in their circle, I’d get some validation from them. Being their daughter didn’t get me any, but I thought Graham Rawlins might.
Rutherford Ashwood (or Ford, if you were his friend—I wasn’t) was the heir to the oldest and largest bank west of the Missouri River. His grandparents—old money, like Vanderbilt and Rothschild adjacent—came out west with the gold rush and established Basin Bank. If you lived in the West and had any sort of money, it was at Basin.
Enter Sherman Rawlins, owner of Rawlins Associates—one of the largest hedge funds in the country—and Graham’s father. Yeah, that Graham. The one who left me at the altar a few hours ago because he just “couldn’t do it.”
I shook all the thoughts about my family and Graham and my failed wedding out of my head. Not now.
Once I was out of the truck and on the ground, I went to pull my dress up, worried it might get dirty, but then I remembered I wasn’t walking down the aisle. I was walking into a random gas station off the side of a Wyoming highway that looked like it was the same age as the mountains surroundingit.
I let the dress drop and drag through the mud, slush, and gravel as I walked. Well, stumbled. The heels my mother had picked out to go with this dress were stilettos that probably cost as much as some cars and were not making this journey easy.
The gas station was small. It looked like it had been painted mint green a few decades ago. Out front, there were handwritten signs for homemade beef jerky and five-dollar cigarettes. There were only two fuel pumps, and I wasn’t convinced that they worked.
Dusty fell into step beside me—not too close, not too far away. Silence hung between us again, but this time, there wasn’t music to fill it—just ten years of space and time. Good thing I was an expert at pushing down my feelings or else the weight of this moment—any moment or memory with Dusty—could crush me.
A bell rang on the rickety door as Dusty opened it for me. The middle-aged man at the checkout counter did a double take at the two of us—me in my wedding dress and Dusty in his normal attire—faded jeans, black T-shirt that was cropped a little, just enough to give me a glimpse of his abdomen every time he moved, black cowboy boots, black leather jacket. I looked over at him just as he pushed a hand through his blond waves.
I looked away immediately.
“Hey, Stan,” Dusty said. How did he know this guy? We were far out of town.
“You got something to tell me, kid?” the presumed Stan responded. He was still eyeing me and my wedding dress.
Dusty chuckled. “Nah, but do you still have T-shirts?”
Stan nodded and jerked his chin. “In the back.”
“Thanks, man. If you have any new jerky flavors, leave them up here for me,” Dusty said as he put his hand on the small of my back and softly guided me farther inside.
Don’t think about it.
As soon as we were headed in the right direction, his hand moved. I missed the comfort of it immediately, or maybe I just missed his hand on me—like I had for the past decade.
Not thinking about it.
At the back corner of the store, there were two clothing racks—one of them held together at the corner by duct tape—full of mismatched T-shirts. There were folded sweatpants and shorts on a cardboard box next to them.
I started looking through the shirts on the racks. There were lots of wildlife options, a few generic Wyoming ones, one with a jackalope, and…
“If you get this one,” Dusty said as he reached for the dark green shirt I was currently looking at and pulled it off the rack, “we can match.”
“?‘Show me your Tetons’?” I asked, reading the white text on the shirt, and a smile tugged at the corners of my mouth.
Dusty grinned back at me. “Only if you show me yours.”
“In your dreams, Dusty Tucker,” I said on an eye roll, trying to stifle a giggle. He’d always been able to make me laugh, even when I didn’t want to.
He gave me an exaggerated wink. “You have no idea, Ash.”
“Stop flirting with me while I’m still in my wedding dress.” Leave it to Dusty to make me feel comfortable enough to make a joke about something that should not be remotely funny yet.
“We better get you out of it then.”
I huffed in mock exasperation. “You are ridiculous,” I said and then shoved the shirt into his arms. “Hold this for me. I need to find some pants.”
“Do you?”
“ Yes, Dusty,” I said. “Or should I call you by your legal name?” Dusty’s gray eyes widened, but he was smiling, like he was thrilled I was playing with him.
“You wouldn’t,” he said.
“Try me, Tuck,” I responded, the nickname rolling off my tongue for the first time since he came home last year. His eyes glittered.
He took the shirt from me, and I stepped toward the shoddily folded piles of sweatpants. They were all basic drawstring sweatpants. My color choices were gray, navy blue, and hot pink.
I went with the navy blue that had the Wyoming Bucking Horse on the hip. My eyes scanned the rest of the clothing—looking for a sweatshirt or jacket or something, but the only one I found was an extra small that looked like it would fit Riley.
“I have an extra coat and a pair of boots in my truck,” Dusty said, reading my mind. “The bathroom is out the back door”—he pointed down a hallway to our left—“but we have to go get the key from Stan.”
Changing out of my wedding dress in a backwoods gas station bathroom felt like a step too far. “Can I just change in your truck?”
Dusty looked down at the floor, suddenly bashful. “Oh…uh. Sure,” he said. I watched his Adam’s apple bob, and it made my cheeks heat.
“Great,” I said quickly. This space suddenly felt too small for both of us, so I started walking back toward the front. I tripped over one of the uneven floorboards. In my periphery, I saw Dusty reach for me, but I righted myself before he could touch me again.
Once we reached the counter, I set my sweatpants near the register, and Dusty put my shirt next to it, along with three plastic water bottles that he must’ve picked up on the way. There were also clear plastic bags of beef jerky there, too.
“There’s honey jalapeno, brown sugar bourbon, and dill pickle,” Stan said as he pointed at each bag before scanning the rest of our items. Dill pickle beef jerky? I could get into that. “Forty-two seventy-three. Do you need a bag?”
“We’re good,” Dusty said. He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and dropped three twenties on the counter. “Thanks, Stan. Appreciate it.” I waited for a second for Stan to get Dusty’s change, but Dusty had already gathered up the items and was waiting for me to lead the way toward the door.
“See ya, Dusty and…” He looked at me, waiting for my name.
“Cam,” I said with a smile.
“Dusty and Cam.” Stan rolled our names around in his mouth, and I rolled them around in my head. I forgot how…easy they sounded together. “Thanks for stopping by.”
“And, Stan, I’ll come back up as soon as I can, and we’ll get that fallen tree out front taken care of, all right?”
“Appreciate it, kid,” Stan said, and Dusty gave him a nod before we went out the door.
“How often do you come here?” I asked.
“Once a month, probably.” Dusty shrugged. “Stan’s a good guy—gas station has been in his family for generations.” When we got to the Bronco, Dusty leaned up against the side of it, arms folded across his chest. “He actually retired a few years ago, and his son took over, but his son passed away last year, so he had to come back. He’s the only person left in his family.”
“Oh,” I said. I wasn’t expecting all of this information, but I guess I should’ve. Dusty liked people. He could talk to anyone.
“He has a hard time managing this place, so I help when I can.”
“What happens to it when he’s gone?” I asked.
Dusty looked sad as he shrugged. “Places like this—the ones that are tucked away and outdated—usually die with the people who love them.” He said it like he’d watched it happen before.
“That’s…depressing,” I said.
“Better enjoy them while we can, eh?” I loved that grin. That mischievous and devilish grin. I nodded. “I’ll start the truck and get the heater going, and then the dressing room is all yours.”
“Thank you,” I said, realizing then how freezing I was. I got in the passenger seat right as the Bronco roared to life. God, this thing was so loud.
“I’ll get your boots and coat out of the back.”
He opened the driver’s-side door and was about to get out when I said, “Wait.” I couldn’t believe I was going to have to ask this, but I couldn’t do it myself. The back of the dress was too high. “Can you…” I paused, stumbling over my words a bit. “Can you, um, unzip me?”
I didn’t look at him, but I heard him swallow.
“You know what,” I said. “Never mind, I can figure it out.” Even though I knew I couldn’t. It had taken three people to get me into this dress, so it was going to take at least one other person to get me out of it.
“It’s fine, Cam,” Dusty said. His voice was strained. “It’s just a dress.”
Just a dress. Right. If you would’ve told me ten years ago that Dusty Tucker would be unzipping my wedding dress, I would’ve probably said, “Duh.” I never could have imagined it would be a wedding dress I was wearing to marry another man who didn’t show up to the altar.
Back then, the future I saw for myself was intertwined with his. Now, we were basically strangers. I always thought it would hurt less over time.
It hadn’t.
“Okay,” I whispered. “Thank you.” I turned my back toward him. When his fingers came to the clasp between my shoulder blades, goosebumps rose on my skin. I felt him grip the fabric on each side of the hook-and-eye closure to undo it. I closed my eyes, telling myself it was because I didn’t want to think about Dusty touching me, but really, I was basking in it.
His fingers moved to the zipper, and I heard him take a deep breath before he started pulling it down—achingly slowly.
A noise came from Dusty’s throat when he saw what I had on under my dress—a powder blue lace bustier. It was the only thing I’d picked out myself for today. I had thought that if I could just make this one choice, maybe I’d feel more confident as I walked down the aisle and married a man I didn’t love. Now, it felt stupid.
My wedding dress started to loosen around my ribs and waist as Dusty dragged the zipper down until it stopped. One of the straps slipped off my shoulder.
“A-all good,” Dusty said. His voice was shaky and low. “Knock on the window when you’re done, and I’ll grab the boots and coat out of the back.”
“Thank you.” The inside of his truck was completely devoid of air, and my heart was beating in my ears again. Suddenly, I felt one of his knuckles dragging up my spine and stopping at the nape of my neck. I wanted to turn to him, see his face, but I didn’t. I stayed where I was and kept my eyes closed.
I felt his breath on the back of my neck, so he must’ve leaned in, and before I could give in and let my head fall back on his shoulder, he said, “I’m sorry,” got out of the truck, and shut the driver’s-side door.