“Okay, what’s up?” I sat on the bench with my back against the bricks at Joe’s Pub. “You’ve been pissed since last week.”
My best friend and secret love of my life, Jimmy, glared but didn’t answer. We’d known each other for so long that I waited him out like usual. I crossed my pumped arms and sat back, smelling my sweat-soaked T-shirt in the AC blowing around us.
The past summer in Seven Winds, once a gold rush town in California’s northern Sierra Nevada Mountains and now a tourist trap, had been brutal. A record number of days over one hundred degrees had turned a lot of the shop owners into snarling dogs.
As the resident blacksmith, I took the heat as business as usual. So I was hot and sweaty? I was always hot and sweaty. The day I ain’t I’m either sick or dead.
I figured Jimmy’s p
