“You okay?”
“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m just...thinking.”
“Thinking loud enough that I can almost hear it, but I still don’t know about what.”
“Just last night.”
It felt strange walking out of the hotel room with him. Wearing her same jeans and tank top. Carrying that duffel bag. Because all these things were the same. Just like the truck they got in to leave. And yet she was different. They were different.
It was a half-hour drive out to the ranch from the center of the city, and she watched as the gray concrete landscape gave way to something much more familiar.
And she waited. Waited for her insides to feel more like usual as the trees began to outnumber the buildings. As the fields grew and expanded, carrying more cows than people.
But she didn’t feel like herself. She felt like that woman she’d been last night. So aware of him. Of his body, of the ways in which she wanted him to touch her.
Kiss her. Taste her.
Would she always think about this? She was never going to be able to go back to just being near him.
She was going to have to... She was going to have to figure this out. And she wasn’t looking forward to it. Wasn’t looking forward to having that conversation.
Not at all.
When they pulled up to the ranch, Elsie suddenly felt shy. Because she had met the ranch owner, and she wondered if she would look alarmingly different now that she was no longer a virgin.
Oh, she hadn’t even thought about that. When she got home was Sawyer going to look at her and know? Was Alaina?
She felt a stab of guilt, because she hadn’t thought about Alaina at all. Even when she had been talking about how much the Sullivans meant to her, she had not thought about her friend, or the ways this would hurt her.
You decided not to think about it. You decided to do it anyway.
She had.
And for what? Because...because no one could ever know. Because it would have to end here. In this moment outside of time. They were going to have to draw a line around it. There was nothing else for it.
She had never come here with him intending for it to be one night. She had thought... She had thought that whatever was going on between them could continue on after this, but she could see now that it couldn’t.
Because it was all weird and strange in this place that they’d been before without being lovers, and when they got back to the ranch it was only going to be that much more pronounced.
That fancy hotel with room service and champagne, that hadn’t been the Hunter and Elsie that worked at Four Corners.
That had been the Hunter and Elsie that went to the country club and had a fancy dinner. The Hunter and Elsie that had danced. That had flirted.
Out-of-town Hunter and Elsie. Those two slept together, and they were going to have to be the only two that ever did. Because real world Elsie and Hunter could not have that relationship.
They would never be able to carry on. They would never be able to get on with their jobs. With their lives. With the relationships that they had at Four Corners that they had a deep responsibility to.
“Calm down,” Hunter said.
And she was thankful that picking up the horses didn’t take very long. They were loaded into a trailer right there, and Hunter hitched up. And the owner of the ranch wasn’t even involved in the transaction. It was a ranch hand that she’d never seen before, and it made her feel calmer.
And when they were back on the road, she knew that she couldn’t wait to speak.
“We really could’ve done this in one day.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Wolf and Sawyer are probably going to realize that.”
“Not unless you give them an itemized list of all the things we did. And if you do, I hope that you make sure to talk about my staying power.”
She wasn’t sure if she was horrified or relieved at the joke. Because it was like him to tease her. But weird to have him tease her about this. “I will not,” she said, sniffing loudly.
“Skittish.”
“I’m not skittish! I want all your body parts to stay where they are.”
“Because you like all my body parts.”
“You are an unstoppable egomaniac.”
He nodded. “Yeah. Pretty much.”
“But seriously.”
“No one’s going to question it,” he said. “You don’t need to worry.”
“Right. Because they would never suspect it.”
“Not in a million years,” he said.
“They trust you.”
He nodded slowly. “I should feel worse about that than I do. But the thing is, you trust me. And that’s what you wanted.”
“Yes,” she said. And even though she didn’t like what she had to say next, a small well of pleasure bloomed in her chest. Because she had been the important one. Not Sawyer. Not Wolf. What she wanted had mattered more. And maybe what he wanted too. But it had been her. So the pleasure of that was all the same.
It was complicated, sure. But there was joy in it.
And that joy was all theirs to share.
Which was sort of a wild, reckless epiphany. They had shared their bodies. He’d shared difficult things about his life.
And they shared this.
“We can’t do this at Four Corners,” she said, blurting it out even as her mind spun out, racing ahead and imagining them doing just that.
“We can’t?”
“No.” And that dampened her joy.
But right now they were talking. And they had something special. And what if they broke it if they pushed their luck?
She didn’t want to break them.
“I don’t see why we can’t.”
“I can’t,” she said. “Just going to Running Y... I was freaking out. I think everybody can see that we had sex.”
“The thing is, Elsie, maybe they can.”
“Don’t say that to me. You should be trying to make me feel better.”
“Why? You want me to lie to you?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want you to lie to me, but I don’t want you to say that. I don’t want you to agree that maybe the fact we had sex is stamped on my forehead somewhere.”
“I don’t know that it’s stamped on us, I just think when two people have chemistry and when they’ve shared intimacies, it can be pretty obvious.”