Me and the Sweet Snowstorm

Excerpt:

Chapter 1

Bain

I don’t know how to dance. But not knowing how to do something has never stopped me before.

I guess that comes from growing up in the mountains of Idaho, with parents who were…unconventional, to say the least.

My brothers and I learned at a young age that just because we didn’t know how to do something didn’t mean we would get out of it.

Plus, what better way to learn how to do something than to actually do it?

I twist the cup of punch I’m holding in my hand, looking around for a place to set it down.

The fire hall is full of happy people, happy music, happy smells of good food mixed with summer air and flowers since someone left the doors open to allow a breeze to flow through.

A small-town volunteer fire company has to be frugal, and air conditioning probably isn’t on anyone’s top ten list of things they need.

I don’t care, since that’s another thing I somehow learned growing up—to acclimate to the climate.

In the summer, I’m fine with the heat.

In the winter…okay. I’d be lying to say I’m fine with subzero temperatures, but there does come a point where your body compensates for the temperatures outside if you’re out in them.

I’d get soft if I constantly moved the temperature of the air inside to make me the most comfortable.

I didn’t have a lot of comfort growing up.

I’ve found a garbage can, and I mosey over to it, draining the rest of my punch before dropping the cup in.

The object of my attention, or maybe I should say the woman my attention is focused on, is deep in conversation with her grandmother, a spry eighty-year-old named Agnes, with whom I went whitewater rafting on the Snake River not that long ago.

Kimber, the woman I’m going to be dancing with, went with us.

She’s a city girl.

That makes me nervous. But it doesn’t make me change my mind.

I nod to a couple of people as I weave through the crowd, conscious that the current song is winding down and, now that I’ve made a decision, not wanting to wait through another one.

I don’t know the rules, maybe you can’t ask someone to dance in the middle of the song.

It occurs to me that Kimber probably knows the rules. People from the city usually do.

People like me, who grew up on the land, have more of a tendency to make the rules to suit themselves.

I also look to see what’s going on outside with the weather before I decide what I’m doing for the day.

Not that there’s anything wrong with people who don’t. We just live by different rules, which means sometimes we don’t understand each other very well.

That’s probably going to be true for Kimber and me, but the time I spent with her on the Snake River has given me the knowledge that there’s an attraction there, for me at least, and even though I know we are too different to ever be compatible, I want to dance with her.

Maybe hold her a little.

I might have helped her in and out of the raft a few times, the same way I’d helped her grandmother and everyone else on the trip.

I want this to be different.

I want to hold her the way a man holds a woman, even though I know the man-woman thing isn’t going to work for the two of us.

I wish I could say I time it just right as I arrive at her side, and she and her grandmother have just finished their conversation, and I’m able to ask her to dance, and she accepts with a smile.

If life were perfect, right?

But I don’t time it just right. Maybe there is no such thing as perfect timing for me. Because I’m twenty feet away when a man in what I assume to be an expensive suit—but what do I know about these things—taps her on the shoulder. He’s got his back to me, and she turns to face him, her face lighting up with a smile and her eyes holding recognition.

Obviously, she knows him and is happy to see him.

He tilts his head, and his mouth moves, and she nods, putting her hand in his, as he leads her to the dance floor.

There goes that idea.

I suppose it took less courage for me to walk over than it did to think that she wouldn’t mind dancing with me, even if she isn’t attracted to me like I am to her and even if she doesn’t like me as much either.

Seeing her reaction to that man has made me wonder.

I guess I don’t get my feet stopped in time, or maybe the Lord just kept them going. I don’t know.

But I’ve taken another fifteen or twenty steps, thinking about whether I’m going to attempt to ask her to dance again and not really paying attention to where I’m going.

I realize I’ve stopped right in front of Miss Agnes, Kimber’s grandmother.

“Why, Bain,” she says with a smile—an older version of Kimber’s smile. She’s happy to see me. And she recognizes me.

I had a lot of fun with the seniors that I guided down the Snake River.

“Sonny, you came over here to ask an old lady to dance, didn’t you?” She grins at me, and I get the feeling she somehow knows that I had intended to ask her granddaughter and not her. I don’t get the feeling she’s upset about that.

In fact, Agnes might be eighty, but she’s shrewd, and I see the intelligence in her sparkling blue eyes. I also see her brain moving.

She likes me.

I have no idea why, other than we might be kind of kindred spirits. Even if I’m a much younger version since I’m less than half her age.

I figure Kimber is about the same age as me. I do know, from hearing different conversations on the trip, that Kimber has never been married and doesn’t have children.

She enjoys living the city lifestyle, enjoys being her own woman, enjoys her independence and her success as a vlogger.

All things I admire.

Even if I don’t entirely understand them.

“I sure am,” I say, holding my hand out for Miss Agnes. “I looked around the room, and you looked like you had on a pair of sturdy shoes that can handle me stepping on your toes since I don’t know how to dance.”

I think she takes it as a compliment, because her lips stretch up further, and her face wrinkles even more. Miss Agnes and I hit it off the first day we met, and there’s definitely mutual respect flowing between us.