Page 1 of 11 Cowboys

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GRACE

My mascara is smeared halfway down my face, there’s a wine glass in the bathroom sink for reasons I can’t explain, and the guy I let inside me last night called meBrandywhen he came.

Spoiler: my name’s not Brandy.

I stare at my reflection in the mirror of my tiny, overpriced apartment and try not to hate the girl with the bloodshot eyes, the walk-of-shame ponytail, and the full-body regret wrapped in a crumpled undershirt that isn’t hers.

Last night, I wanted a connection.

What I got was tequila, bad sex, and a door slam so loud, it shook my bathroom towels off the rack.

“Stop being so desperate,” I whisper to the woman in the mirror. “He had a vape chain and a man-bun. He listens to podcast bros who start every sentence with ‘the problem with women…’. He spent most of our date talking aboutcrypto.”

But I know the truth. I wasn’t looking for love. I waslooking for a moment when I didn’t feel alone in my skin. Someone to make me feel connected, even for a little while. Spoiler again: that moment never came.

It’s time to pull myself together. It’s what I do. Shower away my mistakes. Foundation over the blotchy beard burn. Red lipstick smeared on like war paint. A hairbrush to deal with the just-been-badly-fucked bird’s nest. A pencil skirt tight enough to demand attention and heels high enough to make me forget I regret anything but buying them.

I brush the taste of Crypto-Carl from my mouth and spit him down the plughole.

By 9:15 a.m., I’m walking intoFine Lines Magazine, our open-concept office buzzing with fake cheer and deadline desperation. My assistant, Leo, holds out a latte like an offering to a hungover god. He doesn’t ask why I look like I crawled out of Coachella a day after it ended. He doesn’t need to.

God bless him.

By 9:23, I’m sitting behind my glass desk with a stack of article drafts, three meeting invites, a sore, unsatisfied pussy, and the urge to scream into the void. My title is ‘editor-in-chief,’ which sounds glamorous until you realize I spend most of my time fixing everyone else’s messes and pretending I don’t want to throw my phone into the nearest toilet.

At 9:35, the call comes in.

Rianna, my best reporter and the only other person in this building who understands how to use a comma correctly, sounds like she’s swallowed a bee.

“Grace,” she croaks. “You’re going to hate me. No, hate is too good. You’re going to despise me.” She coughs. “I have Mono.”

“You’re thirty-four,” I reply, shaking my head. “You’re supposed to be immune to bad teenage decisions and illnesses.”

“Tell that to the bartender from Cancun.” She coughs, and it sounds like a husky on its deathbed. “I’m dying.”

Her current boyfriend yells distantly in the background about NyQuil dosage.

I click into the assignment doc. “Okay, okay, fine. You’re excused from the… cowboy thing?” There’s a pause while I scan what’s in front of me, confused. “The what now?” I blink.

“You assigned it,” she says, voice hoarse and annoyingly smug. “You don’t read my pitches, do you?”

“I skim.”

“Well, read this one all the way, boss. It’s good.”

The headline is in bold:

“Eleven Cowboys, One Wife: A Modern Marriage Experiment in the American West.”

I keep reading, thinking it’s a joke, but it’s not. It’s real. Eleven men, all brothers, and cousins, living on a ranch in God knows where. Parents dead. Grandparents raised them. Now, they’re running the land they inherited and raising six kids between them. They want one woman to join their family. One woman for all of them.

All eleven men.

At once.

Well, it doesn’t actually say that last part, but that’s where my mind goes. My ex-colleague, Allie, is in a poly relationship with ten men, so the concept isn’t new, but it’s still foreign enough to smell like humus.