“Do you have someone else who can man the desk?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Why?”
“I need to make a quick trip to town. I was wondering if you might want to come.”
“Oh. I’d love to.”
He owed her a story. She had been wondering about how in the world he had become a cowboy. She had put some pieces together for his childhood. She knew that he had taken care of his siblings. She knew that he’d lived in an apartment complex. His dad, who he’d had no relationship with, owned this ranch, and none of that really added up to Codybecoming a rodeo cowboy. She hadn’t ridden a horse in her life, and that made sense. But what had made Cody pursue that?
They talked a lot, all things considered. But every so often, she thought of a new question she wanted to ask him. A new aspect of his life she wanted to understand.
Because all of that made her understand more about the man.
She was a little bit overdressed for a trip to town, wearing all black, a vest, and a skirt, but she decided she wasn’t going to worry about it and opened up the office door to check in with Chris. “If I go to town for a little bit, will everything be okay here?”
“I’ve got it,” he said. Then he looked at her conspiratorially. “Are you going out with that hot Cody Grayson, who owns the ranch and is your boss?”
“I am,” she whispered. “Don’t tell anybody.”
Chris saw too much and knew too much, but he seemed to enjoy the scandal of it all, and she had no concerns that he was going to tell anybody. Cody opened up the door of his truck for her, ever the gentleman in some ways, and she got inside, leaning back in the seat, a little bit surprised by her own spontaneity, but then, not really.
It always felt natural to rearrange things for Cody.
He felt important.
She chose not to excavate that at the moment.
“What made you decide to go to town?”
“I just have to go to the store. But I figured I’d rather go with you than go by myself.”
That simple statement made her heart jump in her chest.
“Well, I’m happy to go with you.”
He put his hand on her thigh as they drove down the road that led out to the main highway. She really hadn’t been to town all that often. She had to keep a small grocery supply inher apartment, but a lot of the time she ate in the restaurant, or had some of the supplies for the room, because it was so much easier. And she did live at the hotel.
She had been to Cara’s house a few times, but mainly, Cara would come to the hotel to visit, because Cara had to drive out here already for work.
It was early in the day on a Wednesday, and town wasn’t packed with people walking up and down the sidewalks like it was on the weekends, or even on weekday evenings when people came in from home and work to have dinner and drink.
“I want to show you something,” he said.
“Anything you want to show me, I want to see,” she responded.
He turned down a narrow street off the beaten path and then onto another one.
They pulled up to an apartment complex that was four floors high, with stucco siding and spindly, wrought iron railings on tiny balconies.
“This is where I grew up,” he said.
From the outside, it wasn’t that bad, not to her. She had grown up in a trailer park, and she knew that some people might look at it and see all of the faded flaws of a place like that. Might look at it and see the kind of abject poverty they couldn’t imagine living in, but to her, there was something familiar and normal about it.
She was still more struck by neighborhoods with scrupulously clean streets, where people paid for more space, paid for perfection. She had grown up in a world where people could barely afford time outside their jobs, or time away from the trauma that nagged them, or health problems that had cemented their financial status.
To her, this looked like a home. But she knew that wasn’t the beginning and end of the story. Because a place like thiscould house a perfectly happy family. She knew that in his case it hadn’t.
“Nolan’s grandmother lived on the first floor, we lived over here on the fourth. So, it was easy for all of us to hang out all the time. And she didn’t especially want him home anyway.”
