Page 2 of The One Month Boyfriend (Wildwood Society)

I’m only half paying attention as he holds the door open and I carry Mothman past him, into the slightly cooler dark of backstage, doing my damnedest not to run into a wall or let my sweaty palms slip on the metal. I blink, willing my eyes to adjust faster as the door swings shut again behind Gideon.

God, I love air conditioning. The pinnacle of human achievement.

“Where’d you want this?” I hear him ask Javier as faces coalesce from the darkness.

Then I realize I’m staring at her.

She’s just inside the door, a glasses-wearing oval with dark eyes and dark hair in side-swept bangs. She’s glaring at me, exasperated, arms crossed, like I’m a cat who can’t decide whether he wants to be inside or outside. Her entire stance—her entire being—gives off I can’t believe I have to deal with this jackass energy.

My attention snags on her like a loose shirt on a thorn. I can’t seem to pull it away.

“I don’t hear the alarm,” I say.

Kat doesn’t respond. She doesn’t do anything, except maybe glower a little harder.

“Silas. Move your ass,” Gideon says. “This thing is fucking heavy.”

“That way,” Javier tells us. “Next to Bigfoot. There’s no podium this time so it’s just gonna go on the floor…”

Javier keeps talking instead of helping as I shuffle backward.

Behind him, Kat narrows her eyes, somehow gives me a look even more disdainful than the look she was already giving me, and then stalks off into the darkness.

I back into a wall.

“Silas,” Gideon says, and I turn my head so I can see where I’m going.

* * *

“I wishI could’ve made Bigfoot bigger,” Javier says, staring up at the sculpture, arms crossed in what I’ve come to recognize as his thinking stance. “He really ought to be towering over the other two, you know. King of the gods! Raining down lightning and thunder, all that.”

“I think any bigger would have killed us both,” Gideon says, voice low and deadpan. “We nearly died getting that into the freight elevator to begin with.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Javier says.

Gideon lets his silence speak for him. I wasn’t there when he, Javier, and our other buddy Wyatt got a seven-by-three trunk of oak up to his fourth-floor studio, but I sure heard about it later.

And heard about it. And heard about it.

“I think he’s majestic,” I offer.

“Thank you.”

It’s the first Friday of August, which means that tonight is the last Sprucevale Summer Night until next year, and the town went all-out. They closed a couple blocks of Main Street to traffic in favor of food trucks, pony rides, folk singers, a performance stage for the Sprucevale School of Ballet, and a street magician named The Incredible Dwyane Wayne who pulls empty beer cans from a camouflage baseball hat with a fish hook on the brim.

I’m not sure who approved that last one. Maybe he’ll switch to Coke cans for a family-friendly event.

The three of us are on the stage at the Irene Williams Historic Theater, which is currently hosting the Burnley County SPCA Fundraising Carnival, Silent Pie Auction, and Art Show. The carnival—which is just basic games like Pin The Tail on the Tortoise—is set up where the seats used to be, the pie auction is right in front of the stage, and the art show is on the stage. The walls are lined with artistic black-and-white photos of animals up for adoption, and there’s a cash bar in the back.

The SPCA adoptions are really Gideon’s thing, and the art show is Javier’s. I’m just here because I’m a helpful, supportive guy who’d get into a fistfight over that blackberry pie. I shove a hand through my hair, the roots stiff with dried sweat, and consider the art.

“Aren’t there supposed to be twelve?” I ask Javier, not for the first time. “If it’s Appalachian Olympus?”

“Sure, everyone’s a mythology expert.”

“There are twelve Olympians,” Gideon says. “Everyone knows that.”

“Look, I’m working on it,” Javier says, and shifts his stance, one hand going through his shaggy dark hair. “We’ll get there. Right now there are three. Deal with it.”