Her Four Cowboys

I heard a small smack from the front seat and did my best not to bite down on my lip and ruin the careful application that I’d had to spend a whole five minutes on as I’d been doing my makeup for the night.

I wasn’t used to wearing lipstick, so I opened the camera on my phone and dabbed at the edges of my lips, ensuring that lipstick I put on for the first time in weeks wasn’t smudged. Lipstick wasn’t exactly part of my every day, so I needed to ensure that my application looked half-decent. If I did put on makeup, it consisted of the tried-and-true eyeliner and mascara combination that I’d discovered in high school, which came in a shade of brown that seemed to highlight my eyes while not overpowering my pale coloring.

Tonight, though… something had told me to unpack the small bag of makeup that had been sitting at the bottom of one of my bags since I’d moved home. Even then, I’d been less than impressed with what I’d found, and had texted Molly for an emergency trip to the nearest Sephora… which was an hour away in Boulder.

She’d been thrilled, of course, and I’d come away with a couple of tubes and little cylinders with names that I’d never heard of in my life.

As a result, my eyes were lined in a kohl black that the girl at the store had told me would make them “pop like a jack-in-the-box,” and my lips were coated in a thick, tacky paste that had dried in a crisp matte. The dark red was a perfect match for the soft sweater I’d pulled out of the back of my closet, and my long hair was left to hang naturally around my shoulder in a fall of blonde waves.

The whole look was a major change from my normal appearance. Even though I was still wearing pretty much the same combination as I always did—namely a pair of jeans and boots—I felt like a wholly different person. From the cosmetics on my skin to the excitement that bubbled its way up from my belly, I felt different.

What was even more confusing to me, though, was that I’d had no idea who I was getting dressed for as I’d carefully applied the makeup to my eyes and lips and then dragged the brush through my hair so that it hung thick and loose over my shoulders, with little wisps floating down to the middle of my back. I could say that it was simply a desire to fit with the festivities of the holiday, but the truth was that through almost all my life, I could probably count the number of times that I’d worn lipstick on one hand… and they’d almost all had to do with one guy or another that I’d been trying to impress.

The trouble here was that I had no idea which of the four Kent brothers I’d been thinking of when I decided to put a few extra steps of effort into my appearance that night. I was excited to see each one of them for one reason or another and thrilled to have varying conversations with them.

They all looked similar enough for me to clearly see why I found them all so attractive. As a collective, they were some of the best-looking men I’d ever seen, but each of them possessed something individual that drew me in separately, and I had no idea what to make of it.

Over the last few days, I’d found my mind dancing over each one of them individually, trying to take what I could only describe as an audit of my attraction to each one of them. I knew that I couldn’t be interested in four men at once: especially four brothers. The idea just felt so… obscene to me.

And yet, the attraction I felt to each one of them felt so natural, so much its own entity that, somehow, it didn’t feel like the wrong thing.

We pulled up to the driveway of the ranch, and I climbed out of the backseat, unable to help the fluttering that I felt in my belly. I took one of the pies that my mom handed me from her baking binge earlier that day, quickly wiping my hand off on my jeans so that the sweat wouldn’t make the pie dish slip out of my hand.

We weren’t even halfway up the path that led to the Kents’ front door before it opened and Alice Kent called out to us through the doorway, “Merry Christmas, Olivers!”

The smile that broke across my face felt huge and freeing, and I ran the rest of the way up the path, not giving a thought to any potential danger of slipping on the ice that had formed there from the last rain fall.