modern!billy with a farmers daughter!reader but not in the cute silly way?
youve grown up on a farm, ik billy is western but im actually thinking something more midwest; iowa/missouri/kansas
for the express purpose of the vibes of a once-great steel or railroad town, now resigned to notice by road trippers and academics researching the fall of industrial america
with this you've been kind of isolated; you had friends in high school but they've all either run as far as they could from their childhoods after graduation or languished in the remorse of not being able to escape
you. you didn't really want to escape; you're happy with your quiet ghostly life of taking care of your animals and avoiding talking politics with your parents
you grew up religious in a way that taught a god who was fear, you have made peace with a god who is your friend. knelt by your bed he has heard your deepest secrets told as girlish, gossipy whispers; your most outlandish, complicated questions asked like you are up too late at a sleepover
you are quiet for the most part, happy to twist your thoughts around into your head until they either make a pretty shape or break in two, and when you're not working the farm, you're wandering aimlessly through creeks and cemeteries and abandoned buildings
billy is, like everyone not born in a place like this, just stopping through - you meet him through your wanderlust, traipsing down a dead and dying main street as he pulls his equally moribund truck up to the curb, asking you for directions to the nearest mechanic
mechanic is the only one for miles and thus extortionate, but your father is handy and ready to help a stranger, so you tell billy that if his truck can make it a few miles up the road, he'll have a fixed engine for a reasonable price
he, of course, accepts and leans over to push open the door to give you a ride. you get to talking, learn that he was born in new york and has been living in new mexico, he's just travelling for a new job atm. he learns that you have lived here your whole life and have no real desire to move, have never had a reason to have that desire, and he smiles and tells you that he respects comfort in consistency, that he wishes he had a place he felt that settled
when you get back to your house your father helps billy fix his truck and your mother has you take iced tea out to the men, which you also drink a glass of while sitting on the cluttered porch and watching billy bent over the open hood
he's pretty, sure, but you cannot decide whether he is worth loving. if he is as transient as everything else that blows through this town like tumbleweeds, if - and a big if - you fell in love, would it flit away just as quickly as businesses seem to be closing down?
you pray those questions that night, as cricket song and sticky, heavy heat presses through your open window and gets circulated by a white box fan that stays on more for the comforting noise than any kind of cooling
god doesn't respond in words, because that's not how god works, but the next morning when you're in the grocery store squeezing plums to find one that is a little bit further from overripe than the others, billy finds you and tells you that he'll be staying in the motel in town for a few weeks (you make a face, he laughs) because his job has been delayed and maybe if you'd like to go out with him sometime, you could go to the one nice chain restaurant in town and if you decide you trust him (and his truck, which is still...questionably functional, even after repairs) enough, maybe you could drive out a little ways, just towards some of the corn fields? he would show you the stars?
and oh, you realize, this is god's answer and love and guiding hand. maybe it is time to move on.
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GOOD EVENING. a great challenge awaits tomorrow: can i accept sincere thanks, admiration, and even praise from a person i care about and deeply value WITHOUT cracking a joke that partially ruins the moment and greatly deflects from both my own abilities and the others' appreciation? it remains to be seen...
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