Excerpt 1
The location pin on his phone showed he was in Rock Springs, Wyoming. He smirked. Kind of made sense now, the bar name. The phone faded to black, waiting for him to punch in an address, something. 

A horn honked in front of him, and the driver left the driveway with a wave to someone. 

Luke glanced around. “Not too shabby for a hick town.” 

A chipper, informative voice on his phone began spouting off a dissertation about hick towns in general and a song of the same name. 

“Shut up.”

The phone went quiet.

Those new beginning adventures reemerged today. After last night, every shot of tequila loosened his pitiful tongue. What could he say? He felt like wallowing, and the bartender girl was a good wallower listener. 

He looked at his phone again. “Go west, young man.”

Making a hard right, he went west.

Ten minutes down Interstate 80, the highway became a traffic jam of semis. His little pickup, overshadowed by diesel mammoths. It gave him a chance to look around at the beauty of the mountains, their whitecap tips touching the sky. Last night, nothing had been beautiful, but in the heated cab of his truck, Wyoming was quite gorgeous. All white and green. Mountains, not hills. When things began moving again, the highway patrol motioned drivers off the road and into a rest stop. 

The bright sunshine made the cold tolerable. The expensive lightweight jacket he picked up mid trip in Durango did its job, keeping him warm and comfortable.

He walked the on-ramp from the rest stop to the highway, curious to see what the problem was. There were several truck drivers on the side of the road, arms crossed over their down vests. 

“Any clue what’s going on?” he asked an older man in a beanie, making a note he needed to pony up for a beanie to go with his fancy warm jacket.

The man pointed down the highway. “Hell of a storm. I’m going to miss my delivery in Salt Lake.”

“They should have rerouted you if the dispatchers had any sense,” one of the other men said. 

They all laughed about the stupid-ass dispatchers, safe in their terminals somewhere.

“Might as well get some sleep. Going to be awhile,” the older man said, nodding at Luke. “Only seen this happen once before, and that was a helluva long time ago. We’re going nowhere fast today.”

Luke thanked him and walked farther down the ramp, feeling fortunate there was nowhere to be anytime soon. He kicked at a sheet of ice on the road and maneuvered to the dead grass, so he didn’t slide on his ass and make a fool of himself. He peered in the direction the other gentlemen had looked, holding his hand over his eyes as the sun blasted up and over a mountain top. 

He said it to the bartender last night, to himself plenty of times in the last couple of weeks, but in the valley before him, his new reality stared him in the face.  

Rushing, as if it had somewhere to be in a hurry instead of considering all the people inconvenienced, the Green River raced up and over the asphalt of the interstate in the distance. 

The End of the Road. 

Luke pivoted on the dirt, taking in the white mountains, the pine trees snaking up the incline into the bluest, widest sky he’d ever seen. All the air a man could hope to breathe. 

Rock Springs would be a tough town if bartender girl were any sign. A tough town built with tough people who weathered tough times with grit and tenacity. 

He cocked his head and smiled. He’d fit right in.

Excerpt 2
New guy held up his finger for the fourth time in an hour.

She swept his plate and silverware into the dirty dishes bucket and pulled the handle to deliver him another beer. “Are you sure you don’t want a shot of something?” She waved at the collection of liquor bottles behind her. “Your something unpleasant is going to get expensive at some point.”

He ran his finger along the grain of the wood, up the condensation of the glass. His hands were large and calloused. Workingman’s hands.

Refusing to bite, or speak apparently, he looked up and smiled.

Twisting around, she grabbed up one of their generic, bar-grade bottles. “You look like a tequila man.”

“A tequila man, huh?” He raised one eyebrow, motioned with his finger for her to pour. “Sure, you want to call that tequila?”

She glanced at the bottle, thought again, and grabbed up a bottle of Sagebrush, her mid-grade agave tequila, and held it up for inspection. “Better?”

“I’m impressed.” He nodded as she was poised to pour.

“So, a man who knows his tequilas. A man not in his element with this weather.” She glanced at his ambiguous touristy ball cap. “You’re from Texas.”

He extended a killer smile that swept all the sharpness away in an instant. “And how would you know that?”

“Simple.” She looked at his hands, at his chest. “We get a lot of oil guys in here. But oil guys in Wyoming are different.”

She nodded at a customer a couple of bar stools down, held her finger up to new guy.

He shot down his tequila and winced, looped his finger as she got back to him. “You realize you’d be laughed out of the Lone Star State with your tequila selection.”

“Maybe, but that means I’m right about the Texas part though.”

He rocked his head from side to side. “Perhaps.”

“Ball cap is a dead giveaway.” She floated her head sideways to indicate the packed bar. “Wyoming boys wear them backward, trying to look cool, or what they think is cool. Texas boys are already confident, wear their caps like grown men should.” She was flirting, but he was a safe sort. The kind just passing through on their way somewhere else. Not like he’d be interested in her anyways. Since the courtroom visit—her sweet and salty explosion of junk food continued, ending last night with an entire key lime pie. Instinctively, she glanced down the counter to Angela. But here new guy sat, had sat. She knew better than to read anything into that.

After three shots, he slowed down, nursing his beer, staring so intently at the coaster, there had to be something unpleasant and deep going on. There was no way one night on her barstool would touch his problems. No matter how many shots he did.

But in an instant, his buzzed ass stared at her with blue eyes, glacier blue, burning straight to her insides. She liked to think she could hold her own looking someone in the eye, but she was the first to look away. She didn’t need anyone trying to analyze her lengthy list of problems.

“Do you have family here?” she asked, trying again. She’d never worked so hard for a conversation. Two nights off diminished her let-me-into-your-world vibes.

“Huh?”

“Mom, brother, sister? What you Texas boys may call kinfolk?”

She didn’t miss the flinch when she said brother. She also didn’t miss his eyes lighting up and the bite at his lip when mentioning a sister. Within ten short seconds he pulled out a photo of not only his sister, but two adorable nephews, in full cowboy attire.

He put his credit card on the bar and returned the pictures to their sleeves. After he signed the receipt, he hitched his hip and jammed his wallet into the back pocket of well-worn, faded-to-soft jeans.

He tipped his cap, looking over the crowd for a minute, and turned his hat around backward, making her laugh. “Does that make me blend better?”