He’d also gotten a bottle of champagne.
“Champagne?”
“Some things deserve celebrating.”
She grabbed hold of the bottle with both hands and sat on the edge of the bed, and he just wanted to keep this moment in his mind forever. Elsie sitting on that plush bed with her dark hair in a tumble, clutching a champagne bottle. Like a thoroughly debauched princess.
She deserved that. The pleasure, the comfort.
“This is kind of going above and beyond when it comes to job perks,” she said dryly, tugging at the foil around the top of the bottle, clearly uncertain about how to open it.
He took the bottle from her, and aimed it the opposite direction, popping the cork with ease.
Then he poured a measure into a glass and handed it to her before pouring some for himself.
“This isn’t about the job,” he said. “This is just us.” He raised the glass.
She offered him a funny little thin-lipped smile, but took a sip of the champagne, her eyes brightening.
“You like it?”
“Yes,” she said.
He took the food and set it on the bed, presenting it to her.
“Are we eating in bed?”
“We have to go to the Running Y tomorrow, and then we have to go back to the real world. I think we should do as much in bed as possible while we’re here, don’t you?”
She laughed softly, her dark lashes fanning over her cheekbones as she lowered her gaze. “I guess so.”
He felt so hyperaware of every detail of her. And he wanted to exist in that for as long as possible.
He took his own tray and carried it onto the bed with him, settling across from her.
She grinned. “This is ridiculous.”
“Indulgent.”
“I’m unfamiliar.”
“I know. And you should be more familiar with it. Because you deserve it.”
“I always thought that was such a funny thing. The idea that any of us deserve anything. I didn’t deserve to have my mom leave, any more than you did. So I don’t really know why I would deserve anything good either. It’s just life. It’s either crap. Or you have steak and a naked man in a hotel room.”
“And I assume that’s a good thing?”
“It’s been pretty good so far,” she said, cutting a bite off the steak and popping it into her mouth. “Yes. Very good.”
“I don’t know. I figure it has to balance out. If we didn’t deserve to have our mothers leave, then maybe we deserve to have some nice things.”
“I just think it’s random.”
“And you just have to enjoy it when the random doesn’t suck?”
“Basically,” she said.
“I’m not sure if I like that or if it’s grim.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know that it’s particularly grim or not. It just is.”
“Yeah.”
“I told my mom to go,” he said. And he hadn’t meant for the words to come out of his mouth, they just had. But maybe it was because she had given him something she’d never given anyone else, and he wanted to do the same.
Or maybe he’d just been lonely for all these years and something about Elsie made him less lonely.
“You... What?”
“I told her to leave,” he said, his chest feeling oddly tight.
“Why?”
“My dad was a monster, Elsie. He hit her. He beat her up badly. And at the time, she wouldn’t report it. The sheriff knew, but he wasn’t doing anything about it. He said that he couldn’t. Just... Gus was getting angrier and angrier, and Dad was escalating things with him. The abuse was just starting to trickle down. And I thought... I thought maybe...maybe if she left, Dad wouldn’t be so angry.” He chewed on those words because he felt guilty for them. For having those thoughts when he was a child. For believing that on some level any of them had been the cause of the abuse that happened around them.
But he hadn’t known then. Hadn’t understood that it was the abuser who was responsible for his actions. He had grown up in a bubble of it, so to him, it had seemed like it must be something to do with the boys. Something to do with his mother. That they made his father angry in much the same way his brothers made him angry when they pulled a prank on him or something.
It had seemed reasonable then.
But it was all tangled up, because he hadn’t been angry with his mother or anything like that. He’d worried for her. For all of them.
And he knew... He knew she stayed for him, because he was the youngest. She’d said so.
And so he felt like it was his responsibility to let her go.
That he was the only one that could do it.
And he could remember just how it was. Being eleven years old and filled with conviction. So certain that he had to shove down whatever he wanted. Whatever his own fears were, and tell his mother to go and be happy on her own.
“I saw her in the barn, and she was crying. She had a bruise on her face. Because he’d done it again. And that was just a fresh one from that morning. She had...so many others from other times.
“And I told her that I didn’t need her to protect me. I said I could take care of myself because I wasn’t a little kid anymore. I was close enough to being a man. And that she didn’t have to be trapped just because of me. I said I’d be all right.”
Elsie was staring at him, her eyes bright. And then she reached out and touched his forearm. “Hunter,” she said. “How could she leave you? You were so brave. What a selfless—”
“It wasn’t selfless. Like I said. I thought maybe...maybe it would just be better. But it wasn’t. Gus just became the target, and I didn’t have my mom.
“She was the adult. That’s the thing. I come back to that, over and over again when I think of my mom,” Elsie said. “If ever I’m tempted to think that maybe there was something wrong with me... Maybe there was. Maybe I was an ugly baby. I was born in a barn, after all. She dropped me right there in the hay. The thing is, I don’t think she ever wanted me. And I think she was trying to hold me and for as long as possible, not go to a hospital, not admit it. I think I was born in a barn because my mother desperately didn’t want me to be born. But none of that is my fault. I didn’t choose that. She was the adult, and she was the one with the power to make the decisions about what was going to happen. With me, with her life and with mine. She didn’t need to leave me at Four Corners. I’m glad that she did. I could have spent my whole life with a mother who didn’t want me, and not had Wolf and Sawyer there. Not had Four Corners. Not had you. And that would’ve been terrible. But in the end, she didn’t know that. She didn’t know that it would be okay. She didn’t know that I would be okay. She just made the decision. She made it for me, she made it for them. And that’s exactly what your mother did. She didn’t know what your father would do when she left, and think about Gus. Everything did get worse for Gus, and she just left him.”