The Fangirl and the Grump

It takes a special kind of person to get dumped and fired on the same day. Yep. It’s me. I’m the special one. When my life takes such a spectacular turn for the worse, my three best friends know the perfect way to cheer me up––a weekend trip to Evening Shade, Oregon. The movies that shaped my teen years put the quaint little town on the map, making it a tourist destination for werewolf-loving fangirls who want the full movie experience. And I’m most definitely a card-holding member of that eccentric fandom, even though my friends are decidedly not. After copious amounts of alcohol that lead to the revelation of the worst kind of betrayal, I kick my backstabbing ex-best friends out and decide to stay in Evening Shade for the rest of the summer. I have nothing to go back to, so why not? Enter my new landlord, Trace Bardin, a man thirteen years my senior and the spitting image of Wolf Daddy from—you guessed it—my favorite movie.The downside? Trace hates the comparison, and I make the colossal mistake of howling at him the first time I laid eyes on him. Don’t judge. I was kind of drunk at the time. But if we can get past my little faux-pas and his conviction that I’m far too young for him, we could have the summer of our lives. Then I’ll go back to Seattle, pick up the broken pieces of my life, and move on. Sounds like a solid plan, right? Right.

It takes a special kind of person to get dumped and fired on the same day. Yep. It’s me. I’m the special one. When my life takes such a spectacular turn for the worse, my three best friends know the perfect way to cheer me up––a weekend trip to Evening Shade, Oregon. The movies that shaped my teen years put the quaint little town on the map, making it a tourist destination for werewolf-loving fangirls who want the full movie experience. And I’m most definitely a card-holding member of that eccentric fandom, even though my friends are decidedly not. After copious amounts of alcohol that lead to the revelation of the worst kind of betrayal, I kick my backstabbing ex-best friends out and decide to stay in Evening Shade for the rest of the summer. I have nothing to go back to, so why not? Enter my new landlord, Trace Bardin, a man thirteen years my senior and the spitting image of Wolf Daddy from—you guessed it—my favorite movie.The downside? Trace hates the comparison, and I make the colossal mistake of howling at him the first time I laid eyes on him. Don’t judge. I was kind of drunk at the time. But if we can get past my little faux-pas and his conviction that I’m far too young for him, we could have the summer of our lives. Then I’ll go back to Seattle, pick up the broken pieces of my life, and move on. Sounds like a solid plan, right? Right.