Rough Beauty by Karen Auvinen

Author:Karen Auvinen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

PART III

* * *

Home of the Somewhat Feral

Chapter 8

Controlled Burn

I’d long vowed to avoid a town romance because proximity and loneliness pulled strange pairings out of thin air, and left awkward aftermaths across the mountain. Suzie, whose split from Joey ignited a turf war at the Merc, had wagged her finger at me the day she left, saying, “Import your men.” She was right: The gene pool was small. No matter who you were, a little Saturday-night-at-the-Merc flirting led to chin wagging all over town by Sunday brunch. All of this attention tended to step on budding romances. But things were far worse when relationships went sour, or someone began comparing your partner’s past with your present.

Even marriages were not exempt. Plenty of long-term relationships had gone suddenly bad, but none more notoriously than when the town put on a musical. Twice in its history, Jamestown had mounted original productions that made—owing to the twin elixirs of shared artistic passion and rehearsal beers—strange bedfellows. The result of which was the rearrangement of several unions around town. Singing, it seemed, stirred more than just the soul.

When couples split, their onerous task was to divide not their homes but the town between them. Breakups were hard on everyone as new groups were jigsawed from established circles of friends. Sometimes it was easiest when one-half of the couple simply moved away.

Still, the town had its serial daters, those who tried on love interests and cast them aside like clothes in a pile. Their reputations, along with their conquests, were the stuff of happy hour and party gossip. My jaw-dropping favorite was Lance, who was just thirty when I first met him. He was a tall, thin drink of water with sandy hair and the aloof charm of David Bowie. Not handsome by any stretch of the imagination, or especially interesting—just another guy with a beer in one hand and cigarette in the other standing on the Merc porch. And yet, he managed to pick off the women in town one by one, and each time, from the awkward, all-knees-and-elbows teen who grew into a raven-maned beauty with terrible taste in men to a silver-haired divorcée twenty years his senior, I was shocked. How did he do it?

With Sammy, on the other hand, you could see exactly how. She was an athletic woman with snaky brown hair who exuded sex and went through men and women like saucers of delicious cream. A woman so in love with love that she had been married nine times, twice to the same man. She once slid next to me on the dance floor on a Merc Saturday night, spearing me with what were irresistible feline eyes, purring what a good dancer I was as she rubbed her hand provocatively from my shoulder to my hip.

Avoiding romantic imbroglios in Jamestown was a no-brainer. I was too smart, I told myself. So I never thought I’d fall for Jay. But he was the first man to kiss me in over a decade.

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