Love & River Songs by Daisy Gold

Author:Daisy Gold [Gold, Daisy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

Turns out Ty’s favorite spot is a little cove on the Arkansas River. We get there by way of a bass boat he hauls on a trailer behind his truck. There are plenty of high-end bass boats in Allenville, but Ty’s is modest.

“I just use it to catch fish,” he explained after we hit the drive-thru, where he donned monster sunglasses and pulled his hat down low. “Ain’t got to be fancy.”

I’m wearing a hat now, too. It’s a big, orange styrofoam trucker’s hat Ty pulled out of his back seat. I’ve got a life jacket, as well. It’s yellow. All together, I look like a box of crayons.

The water rocks the boat gently, and a gray heron sits on an old cedar log about thirty feet away, eyeing us suspiciously as Ty readies two fishing rods beside me.

“Tell me about your viral shame,” he says, and I cough on my egg muffin.

He winces. “That bad?”

“It was a pretty serious lapse in judgment.”

“Well, now you have to tell me.”

I roll my eyes. “Teaching doesn’t pay that well, especially at first. And Little Rock is expensive. More expensive than Allenville anyway.”

Ty nods, still focused on the rods, and I get the feeling he’s giving me the room to say what I need to without an audience.

“I went out with a couple of girlfriends one night, and we got drunk and ended up at a club.”

“A dance club?”

My cheeks heat. “Sorta, yeah. That night they had a competition that paid five-hundred dollars to the winner, and I was broke, so… I went for it.”

“What kind of competition?”

I clear my throat. “You know what mud wrestling is, right?”

Ty’s hand slips and he stabs himself in the thumb with a hook. “Excuse me?”

My face is on fire. “It was like mud wrestling. Except, there was a big agriculture conference in town—lobbyists and lawmakers and farmers everywhere. So instead of mud or pudding, they sprayed the rink down in butter.”

Ty’s nostrils flare, and suddenly his face is on fire, too. “What?”

“I don’t think it was real butter. Probably margarine or colored shortening. Oil, maybe. My hair smelled like movie theater popcorn for a week. I lost, anyway. Ruined a matching bra and panty set and got fired when someone posted a bootleg video and tagged my school. No one was supposed to be taking pictures, and I still don’t know how they knew who I was. The school board said my actions were ‘appallingly contradictory’ to their community standards clause.”

Ty says nothing. He just looks at me.

“Then someone dubbed the song ‘Hot for Teacher’ over it, and a clickbait site did an article. The dubbed version got a million hits in twenty-four hours. It’s the first thing that comes up if you search my name on any engine. Not a lot of schools out there desperate to hire a butter-wrestling kindergarten teacher.”

Ty sets the rods down and catches my chin between his uninjured thumb and forefinger. He kisses me gently. “I’d hire a butter-wrestling kindergarten teacher in a heartbeat.

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