“What about the money he paid your mom?”
“She took it, and I wanted her to. She doesn’t need to sink more of her cash into the house.”
My bestie rakes her long, dirty-blond hair over one shoulder. “I hate Luke so much. Did you know that?”
“I do,” I reply with a giggle. “But I doubt you hate him as much as I do.”
“Hmm. It might be pretty close.” She tucks her long legs underneath her and swirls the orange liquid in her glass. “I could slash his tires for you. If that doesn’t work, I could shiv a dick.”
I choke on the margarita, I laugh so hard.
“I don’t mean literally slash his nuts off,” she confirms. “Onlyhe’sa dick, so I’ll cut him for you. But notinthe dick, because that’s horrible. Even I wouldn’t do that.”
When I stop wiping laughter-tears from my eyes, I croak out, “It’s fine. I’ll figure out a way through this. I can take care of myself. After all, I took care of myself just fine when Luke dumped me.” I prop up a bunch of pillows and lean on them. “I just don’t understand why they’re both doing this.”
She pokes the air with her glass. “Ah, you forgot the important ending to that sentence—why are they doing thisto you?” She bites into a chip and adds, “Because they can.”
“Because they hate me.”
“They’re evil, is what they are.” Cristina makes a little whimper of sympathy in the back of her throat. “I can loan you the money.”
“No. Absolutely not. I don’t want or need your cash. Besides, you’re saving it.”
“I am, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have some stashed away for you.”
“No. That is my final answer.”
Cristina’s a massage therapist. She works several towns over and is trying to buy a home.
“You need a miracle,” she tells me before sucking the dregs of her drink through the straw. “Really. That’s what you need. You need some extraordinary thing to happen so that you can save the farm.”
“You mean like maybe piggycorns will somehow turn out to be magical and they’ll kick the unicorns’ butts?”
She grimaces. “Since unicorns aren’t born with magic anymore, I doubt that piggycorns ever will be.”
“But they were magical once,” I say, sounding pitiful even to myself.
“I know.”
It’s true. When the unicorns first appeared on Sally Ray’s grandfather’s farm fifty years ago, they had magic. Lots of healing magic. Heck, the whole town was magical—at least, that’s what my dad always told me. But he also explained that Sally Ray’s grandfather got greedy and began overbreeding the unicorns. Their magic slowly dwindled—and so did the town’s power—until they became nothing more than a horse with a horn.
Cristina nibbles on a chip, studies it, and nibbles again. “These aren’t bad.”
I take one and eat it in one bite. No point in saving calories. Any diet I might have had when I woke up was shot to hell by six this morning.
“Oh!” She covers her mouth with a hand, still chewing. “I saw Clarice Sinclair today. She said that you met some hot stranger. Tell me everything.”
“There’s nothing to tell.” I drop a finger into my drink, swirl the liquid around, and suck it off. Turns out, the margarita is just as good from my finger as it is from the glass.
I must be drunk if that’s as deep as my thoughts are getting.
“What do you mean, ‘nothing to tell’?” she prods.
I drop a hand down beside me and coax Tallulah over. Yes, the piggycorns sometimes come into the house. They’re trained, thank you very much. Except for that one time when they got into some old cabbage that may or may not have accidentally been left in their troughby accident when I was in a rush to head into town. Other than that, they’ve never had an accident.
Ever.
I rub the sweet piggycorn under her chin. She snorts happily before curling up at my feet and letting me run my fingers down the soft pink mohawk that hugs her spine.
