Ginger wasn’t quite ready to dip her foot back in the dating pool just yet. She’d agreed to go out to the Hoot Owl just to observe from afar, and also so she could tell her friends back in New York she’d been to a real live honky tonk. She, Marigold, and their new friend Winifred were sitting at a small table in the back of the room eating burgers and fries and drinking frosty mugs of beer.
So far what she’d seen wasn’t that different than any bar in New York City – humans and shifters mingled happily, the music on the jukebox was modern and ran to songs like Zac Brown and The Band Perry, and everyone but her was having a great time.
She estimated that the crowd was about 60 percent human, 40 percent shifters of various species – mostly wolf, coyote, and panther. As a werewolf, she could tell by the smell, although the eyes gave it away too. Shifters had pupils that were shaped like the pupils of their animal species, and the colors of their irises came from a different color pallete than that of humans.
“You should totally do him, by the way,” Marigold added, tossing a glance in the sheriff’s direction.
Ginger choked on a French fry and coughed so hard she had to drink half her mug of beer before she could talk again. “Crazy woman say what?” she finally managed, blinking her watery eyes.
“Why not? The entire point of this vacation was for you to get over whats-his-dick,” Marigold said, stuffing a handful of French fries into her mouth and chewing. “What better way to get over him than with a hot vacation fling? It’ll be like a palate cleanser.”
Where did all that food go? Ginger wondered idly, and not for the first time. Certainly not to Marigold’s butt or thighs. She’d long suspected Marigold had a tiny black hole in her stomach which ported all calories to another dimension.
She took a deep breath and used her calm, even-toned, “reasoning with a crazy person” voice. “Okay, first of all, he has no interest in me. Look at all these skinny wenches rubbing themselves all over him. He can take his pick.”
“Actually, I have been informed by locals that women of corpulance are considered to be more attractive in this community. And fuller figured werewolves are just about unheard of, so due to your rarity you would be looked upon as an exceptionally desirable mating partner,” Winifred Hamilton said.
Winifred, an archeology student who was staying at the same boarding house as Ginger and Marigold, was studying the room with the fascination of an anthropologist in a remote Amazon village. She was in town with a group taking part in a fossil dig. Ginger and Marigold had dragged her out to the honky tonk with them that night so she wouldn’t spend yet another evening poring over textbooks until her eyes crossed.
She was a pretty girl, probably, but she insisted on wearing her hair pinned up in a severely unflattering bun that she stabbed through with two pencils to hold it in place, and she wore oxford shirts buttoned up to her chin. Then again, she looked at men with purely academic interest, so her lack of game didn’t seem to bother her at all.
“I’m pretty sure what she’s saying is, fat chicks are considered hot here,” Marigold translated.
“Yes. That is what I just stated, although in a more scientifically accurate form,” Winfired said, her eyes puzzled behind her oval gold-rimmed glasses.
“It’s true,” their waitress chimed in, leaning over to refill their pitcher of beer. “I would kill to have your figure.”
“Really?” Ginger said, startled, glancing down at herself.
“Oh, my God yes. I’d be getting so much action.”
Marigold had insisted that she wear a low cut yellow sundress which displayed the generous swell of her breasts, and which kind of made her look like she had a waistline by flaring out over her size 16 hips. She’d sprayed de-frizzing jell on her big mop of red curls and pinned her hair up with a flowery barrette. She had, indeed, been getting quite a few glances since she came in, and even some invitations to dance, but she’d begged off.
She’d chalked it up to the locals being polite, or the fact that as the new girl in town, she was a novelty. Although now that she thought about it, Marigold was also the new girl in town, and she’d literally gotten more attention from the local men than Marigold had gotten, which never happened in New York.
“So, about the affair that you’re going to have with Mr. Hot Stuff…” Marigold nodded her head at the sheriff, who was back on the dance floor, dancing with yet another woman.
“Are you kidding me? I can’t stand him, just on general principle! Look how arrogant he is!” Ginger shot him a disdainful look and turned her attention back to the big plate of salty French fries at their table.
“Why did you even want to come here, if you’re going to deny yourself the pleasure of a mindless vacation fling with a big-muscled Neanderthal?’
“I came here to put as much physical distance as I could financially afford, between myself and that cheating, lying, useless pig of an ex-boyfriend of mine. Not that I’m bitter,” Ginger said, and downed a third of a mug of beer in one gulp.
“No, not at all. I can see that.”