Calling All Cougars!

Sandra looked up at the body in the tree. It wasn’t a dead body—it looked too much like a sleeping woman to be a dead woman. She gulped apprehensively, trying to convince herself it was just a statue or something. You know how those marketing yahoos will come up with kooky ad campaigns from time to time. What better way to advertise the first annual Cougars and Cubs Jamboree, right?

She’d found the flyer under the wiper of her car last week after a stop at the pet shop to look yet again at the selection of dogs. She was forty-five, still attractive, and newly divorced after being married to her high school sweetheart for almost thirty years. Getting a little dog to carry around everywhere was what all the other former trophy wives did in her Beverly Hills neighborhood. Of course, she had never really fit in with the other arm-hangers, which was probably why her rat-bastard husband had traded her in. Not for a younger model, but for one her age who was now at least 80% silicone. Sandra had refused adamantly to get a nose job, boob job, or any other job that didn’t entail actual work.

So now she was trying to figure out what she was supposed to do with her life. All she knew how to be was a fake trophy wife. The flyer had looked interesting. More interesting than a teeny dog crapping in her purse, anyway. If Demi Moore could go out and find herself a husband half her age then surely going to a Cougars and Cubs event wouldn’t send her own two grown daughters into a fit of “but Mo-om! You are embarrassing us to our country club friends again!”

Sheesh. She couldn’t help it. Sandra had grown up in Idaho, the youngest daughter of a potato farmer. She’d done all the “correct” things for as long as she could remember. She’d dated the quarterback, lead the cheer squad, ect. But the “correct” things in Podunk, Idaho were not the same as in the Hills. She didn’t want a dog purse, a plastic face, a perfect spry tan, boobs that made her back ache, or any other fake stuff all the other trophy wives wanted. She looked damn good for her age; why not flaunt it?

Sandra pulled the now heavily crumpled flyer out of her dog poop free purse and looked it over again.

Honestly, that didn’t sound exactly like what Demi Moore and the other celebrity cougars were doing but really, since she didn’t really “get” most of the finer details of frivolous housewifery, that was only to be expected, right? She squared her shoulders, tugged her brand new Louis Viton duffel bag out of the back seat of her car, and trudged up to the visitor’s center. She was determined to find at least one facet of California high society she could do right. Maybe she’d even walk away at the end of the week-long trip with a brand new boyfriend younger than her kids!

****************

Kevin eyed the bit of human fluff as she struggled to pull her ridiculous bad out of her ridiculous little car. What in the blazes was a female like that doing in the heart of Yosemite National Forrest? He dismissed her with a feline snort of ridicule. Whatever. He had a cats-only shape shifter camping trip to put on thanks to his meddlesome mother. He grinned as he looked over the list. Moms and cubs only. Oh, and any single females of suitable breeding age. Just the thing to make sure he had a surfeit of females—single parents and motherhood-minded females—to vet and trot out in front of him. Would she ever stop trying to make him hook-up and settle down.

“Excuse me…”

He looked up then frowned. It was that bit of human fluff. He looked around to see if she had really meant him, finding no one else nearby. He looked up at the sign over his head, reading “camping trip sign-in.”

“I think you have the wrong guy,” he said curtly then dismissed her again.

“Well fine!” she snapped. “I know I signed up for the Cougars and Cubs event a little late, but I know I freaking signed up for it! If this is how you … you… people are going to treat a paying guest—one who’s driven half way across California just to attend—the fine!”

Kevin looked up at the woman, shock making him just stand there and look at her dumbstruck. Dawning horror began to fill his gut when he realized someone had screwed up and invited at least one non-shifter. Oh hell. What now?