Yours: A Standalone Contemporary Romance by Jasinda Wilder

haven’t gotten around to getting it fixed. It’s not a big deal, though, since I work six days a week, sunup to sundown, and thus I’m rarely in it during the real heat of the day.  
    I’ll drive this old heap until it quits on me, because I can smell Ollie in it. See him in it. I’ve got his picture wedged into a gap in the dashboard, a candid photo I took in Africa. He’s blood-spattered, in the middle of stripping off his gloves. He’s exhausted; you can see it in the bags under his eyes. But he’s happy. I’d just told him I loved him, out of the blue. He’d needed to hear it, and I knew it, so I shouted it out across the tent: “Hey, Pep! I love you!” And he’d looked up, grinned, and I’d snapped the shot. I got him grinning, a moment of happiness amid all the hell.
    I turn the engine over and it coughs, rattles, and then catches with a rumble. The radio is on—it’s always on—and the cab is filled with country music, Ollie’s favorite. It’s a traditional station, the same station where he’d had it tuned. Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Randy Travis, Alan Jackson, maybe some older Tim McGraw and that crowd. Nothing new. It’s the soundtrack of this town of Ardmore—slides on steel strings and songs about love lost and taillights in the dust.  
    I hate it.  
    But the old radio has never been changed. Not once, not ever, and I’ll never change it.  
    We used to sit in that old Nissan pickup at the MSF compound, and Ollie would pull out his trusty iPod, filled to max capacity with every country song he could think of, tuck the left ear bud in my ear, the right in his, and we’d listen to country music and catch a breath or two between incoming two-tons full of bloody refugees.  
    I’ll always hate country music.  
    But I listen to it anyway.  
    Home is a good twenty minutes away on the outskirts of town. Outskirts may be pushing it. It’s a tiny one-room shotgun shack at the end of a long dirt road, sitting on a half-acre pocket in the midst of hundreds of acres of grass and hay in every direction. No neighbors but the Jensens half a mile down, who own all those acres, and the dozen or so horses grazing on them. It’s a lonely little place, dead silent at night except for the hooting of the occasional owl, and the crickets, and the humming of the light fixed to the power line pole at the edge of my property. It’s not much, but it’s mine.  
    I’ve got a couch, a TV, a few overflowing bookshelves, a bed, and a dresser; that’s all that’d fit anyway. It’s all I need, all I’ll ever want.  
    I toss my lab coat and purse on the couch, strip out of my scrubs, toss them in the hamper. Throw my sports bra and panties after them, step in the shower and rinse off the day. I towel off, brush my hair and slip on an old T-shirt of Ollie’s. It used to smell like him, but the smell has faded now even though I don’t wash it much; I’m trying to preserve the last shreds of his scent on it.
    Pep, my cat and only friend, waits until I’m sitting on the couch with a book before saying hello. He’s a little black and white tom, so of course I named him Pep. I adopted him as my first official act after moving down here, because you can leave a cat in a house alone all day, and I needed something .  
    And god, does Pep come through for me. He’s a snuggly little fella; I like to sit cross-legged on the couch, and he likes to curl up like a comma in the space between my legs. Purrs like a little engine for as long as I stroke his back and the little strip of fur between his ears. He sleeps on the pillow next to mine at night, and takes my warm spot after I get up in the morning.  
    I read until my eyes blur, until my head spins. And then I climb into bed, set Pep on his pillow, and go to sleep.
    Then, I wake up in the morning, and do it all over again.  
    Same as I’ve done every day since I came down here.  
    I had to go somewhere, and Ollie’s hometown seemed as good