“What soundtrack goes best with self-pity?” Hunter asked.
“Well, I am glad that you asked that,” Elsie said, “because it so happens that I have a curated playlist for when I’m marinating in the sadness of my past.”
“Well, if you can plug your phone in, my truck will play it.”
“Excellent,” Elsie said.
She fired up her favorite playlist, which she thought was a work of genius, and settled back in the plush seats.
The familiar scenery of pines and ferns gave way to less familiar scenery of I-5, which would take them the whole way north.
The farther behind them Four Corners got, the more her excitement grew. Maybe she should get out more. Maybe she should have tried to go somewhere else for a while.
“We should get there by dinner. We can throw our stuff in the motel and go somewhere to grab food.”
“Oh yeah, I’d like that.”
“What do you like?”
She tried to think of something she couldn’t get in Pyrite Falls, but the list was too long. “I don’t know! Everything?”
“Thanks, Els, that narrows it down.”
She didn’t put a lot of thought into anything but food until they were about a half hour away from their destination, and then she thought back to what he’d said about the motel.
“We’re staying at a motel?”
“Some roadside place? Kind of shitty. I changed it to a suite when you decided to come.”
“What does a bad roadside motel suite look like?” She was genuinely curious.
“I don’t know, but they claim to have a kitchen, a dinette set and ample sleeping arrangements.”
A strange, unsettled feeling crept up her back and made her shoulders tense. It was something about not being at Four Corners. Something about being far away from home and Wolf and Sawyer and everything normal.
Like a weird sensation of being in free fall.
She could do whatever she wanted and no one would know.
Well, no one but Hunter. And what was she even thinking of anyway?
The feeling had been fleeting, but bright and hot and when she’d tried to grab it and make sense of it, it just didn’t.
What anything was she thinking?
Why had her stomach swooped down low while her breath had overfilled her lungs?
“Ranking my food preferences,” she said. “Indian, Thai, really good steak, Italian.”
“All of that would work for me.”
It was easier to anticipate a good meal than it was to try and parse the feelings she’d just had a minute before.
She looked at Hunter’s profile, and something strange echoed in her chest. Hunter was that kind of handsome you couldn’t really deny. And she had known him all her life. When she looked at him, she saw Hunter. The way the sunlight filtered through the truck now, highlighted the dark whiskers on his square jaw.
“Hunter,” she said, because honestly, she couldn’t really believe that she hadn’t asked this question before. She had been curious about the way that he saw her. But now she wanted to know how women saw him. What he did. Because wasn’t that part of the answer to this whole man/woman thing. “Why are you... I mean... Why do women like you?”
He turned toward her, just quickly, the corner of his lip turning up incredulously, one eyebrow lifting. “Elsie,” he said, her name spoken like he was talking to a sad child.
And as she continued to stare at him, she realized why it was such a dumb question. Because he was beautiful. That was why. All of that male beauty had been in front of her for all of her life. But it had never been aimed at her. It had never been...for her. It had just been there.
Like the glorious mountain range that she could see in the distance every day when she got up and looked out the window of her cabin. Like the river and the meadow, like a sunset. That was all. Right out there, something that she could enjoy all the time, but something that she sometimes just took for granted.
Something she didn’t pause and stare at all that often.
“What, like... Okay, fine. You’re hot.” And it made her squirm in her seat to say that. Hot. What a weird thing to call Hunter.
“Thank you.”
“It’s not a compliment. It’s an observation. But I just mean, there’re...cowboys everywhere. But I guess you just have a...particular...”
“So did your brother,” he said.
“Sawyer?”
“Yeah. Although, to be fair, Sawyer never spread it around quite like me or Wolf.”
“How was Wolf...?” Wolf was just so grim. Or he was, before Violet. “What’s that deal?”
“He’s intense,” Hunter said. “So I’ve heard women say.”
She shimmied her shoulders, doing the best outward expression of deep revulsion that she could. “I don’t want to talk about my brothers. They’re all settled.”
“Which is not what you want.”
“No. But I don’t like feeling... I’ve been protected from a lot, Hunter, but some of it I never asked to be protected from, and the rest... You can’t protect someone from their mom leaving, you know that. But then at the same time I feel like I get all the credit of someone who can work the ranch but when it comes to my personal life I still get treated like a child. And that isn’t fair. I’ve been through the same shit you all have. Why shouldn’t I get to flirt and drink and sleep around and...” She snorted. “What the hell am I supposed to do with all my demons?”
“Some things aren’t healthy,” he said. “Especially in the name of demon control.”
“And you don’t do them?”
He laughed. “Oh hell no. I do them times ten.”
“Well, maybe I want to do them too.” It sounded so stupid. But he’d shared with her about his parents. She wanted to share this. “I want...” She leaned against the passenger-side window. The glass was cold and her breath spread a fan of condensation over it. “Nobody has ever chosen me. Sawyer and Wolf are stuck with me. My mom ran away. My dad didn’t give a shit. I just think it would feel really amazing to have a man look at me across a bar and choose me—and yeah, for a night is fine.”
“So you really do want to...date.”
“I said I did. I’m not a man, I’m not just thinking with my...well.”
He didn’t laugh. “All right, when we go to dinner tonight we’ll practice that.”