Something Better and a Love Story

The stale cigarette smoke hung in the air and low conversations drifted past the pool table.  Brittle cracks of the balls layered themselves over the top of everything, with the accompanying laughter as the balls ricocheted off the sides and seem to purposefully avoid the pockets.

The brunette took aim along her cue and slid the 12 ball past the side pocket, and laughed again as it took an unexpected angle.  “Nothing like making our quarters last a long time!”

“Better than sitting in the laundromat watching our clothes go round and round!”  The blonde took her shot, and wonder of wonders, the ball slid into the hole.

Smirks were exchanged and they kept playing.  They had begun their friendship two years before and been able to swing working together for half of this current summer.  The brunette led a horseback unit at Girl Scout National Center West, and the blonde had managed to finagle a few weeks of commissary duty to finish out her summer after archaeological field school was over.

Riding horses, camping, leading Girl Scouts from across the nation in adventures, *that* was their “dream job description” and they felt very lucky to land these jobs.  The only drawback they could find was the one lone washing machine to serve the large camp staff.  Two weeks of riding horses in the backcountry created a mixture of red dirt, white sand, sweat, horse hair, horse smell, and the occasional food stain and pounded it into the cotton of their jeans and shirts.  There was no way one lone washing machine could handle the onslaught of the horse unit staff!  They had drawn the job of hauling everyone’s clothes to the tiny town of Ten Sleep and commandeering the laundromat.

For some reason their usual routine didn’t appeal to them.  The girls had passed on an ice cream cone from Dirty Sally’s, and even on the milkshake and french fries with gravy at the Flagstaff Cafe.  They’d ended up in the dark coolness of the Big Horn Bar, shooting a long drawn out game of pool instead.  They had time to kill as the laundromat did its job.

At the tiny table behind the door sat two men.  They, too, worked together and for some inexplicable reason, they had come to Ten Sleep together.  It was not their usual routine.  The darker, heavier set man came often after work, but his boss rarely ventured out, always finding more work to do to fill his time.  His boss was a younger man, a rancher, with dark hair and blue eyes, a dedicated worker who rarely visited the bar.  This day had been different though and the boss man had found himself sharing the table with his hired man, drinking a cold beer, and admiring two young women playing pool.

It was obvious they worked at the Girl Scout camp, Ten Sleep is small enough to know everyone, and he definitely hadn’t seen these two before.  He watched the blonde, her hair pulled back in two pigtails, a smile coming often to her lips.

The brunette leaned over and whispered something to the blonde.  The blonde raised her green eyes and looked towards the men’s table for the first time, a slight blush coloring her cheeks.  She dropped her eyes back to the pool table and smiled.

The dark man leaned across the table and spoke to his boss.  “I’ve got the brunette, you take the blonde.”  That was fine by the boss man, the blonde looked like someone who enjoyed life, who wasn’t looking to settle down just yet.  He wasn’t either.  The blonde seemed like the perfect choice for him.

He stood and walked over to her.

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