Chapter 15
Ransom gave me directions without looking at me and kept his hand on my thigh, climbing higher every time I had to brake. I didn't ask what the place was. I figured if he was taking me there, it mattered.
The bar was called La Rosa, and it sat between the tire shop and the laundromat. The neon sign in the window flickered, but the L never lit up right. The window had been painted over on the inside, and more neon advertised a variety of standard American beers.
"Trust me," Ransom said.
"Do I have a choice?"
"You could sit out here in this truck and be miserable, or you can come with me and get shit faced and eat good Mexican food. Your choice."
I followed him out of the truck.
Ransom shouldered the door open, and the smell rolled out: cigarette smoke soaked into the walls, spilled beer, carne asada from the kitchen.
A telenovela played on the TV, two women screaming at each other over some man who wasn't worth the trouble.
Cumbia music drifted from the speaker in the corner, tinny and warm.
An older man with a gray mustache looked up from behind the bar. "Ransom."
"Eduardo."
Eduardo gave me a quick once over. "You a cop?"
"Not tonight," I replied.
Eduardo jerked his chin toward the back. "Your normal booth's open. Food out soon."
Ransom led me to the corner where the vinyl was cracked and the table was sticky, and the pink light from the neon sign made everything look like a memory. He slid in on one side and I slid in across from him. Our knees bumped under the table and stayed together.
Eduardo came over and set two Modelos on the table. "Food soon," he repeated and left.
I picked up my beer. "You must come here often to have a regular booth."
"Often enough."
The food came fast: carne asada, rice, beans, fresh tortillas, salsa verde. Ransom built a taco without looking at it: meat first, then beans, then enough salsa to make his eyes water when he bit down.
We ate in silence while the cumbia music played. The telenovela cut to commercial, and the two women were still fighting when it came back.
"That one's going to lose," Ransom said, jerking his chin at the brunette.
"That one's going to win, and you know it."
"She's crying."
"Crying women win. Rule of TV. The dry-eyed one always turns out to be the husband's sister or some shit."
"What?"
"Telenovelas, man. There's always a sister. Half the plot's incest."
He huffed a short laugh. "You watch a lot of telenovelas?"
"I was raised on Channel 41 in El Paso. Ask me anything."
He finished his beer, and Eduardo brought another without being asked. God bless Eduardo.
"Chance used to do impressions," Ransom said. "Teachers. Cops. The guy at the gas station who tried to shortchange us every damn time. He'd do the voice, the walk, the face, the whole thing. I'd be on the floor in stitches."
"Yeah?"
"He did this one of our landlord. This old guy, Mr. Padilla, always yelling about the noise." Ransom set his bottle down. "Chance had it down. Even the way the old man's hands shook when he was mad."
I laughed. The sound surprised me.
"Yeah," he said fondly. "He'd have liked that you laughed."
I picked at the label on my bottle. "My dad used to take me fishing. Lake Arrowhead, up by Wichita Falls. Never caught a damn thing in our lives."
"Never?"
"Not once. Lying son of a bitch convinced me it was on purpose. Said fish were smarter than us. That was the whole damn point of the trip — losing to something smarter."
"That right?"
"Made me feel real philosophical about a stringer full of nothing."
"And you believed him."
"I was eight."
"What about when you were grown?"
"I entertained him. Never called him on it." My lips twisted into a sneer. "Then Rex happened, and he went to prison."
"You close with your old man?"
I shrugged. "He was mine. He was a piece of shit sometimes, but he was mine."
Ransom finished his second beer. Eduardo brought a third. The world got softer around the edges, the music louder, the colors warmer.
The bar filled up around us, old men at the counter and a couple in the corner, and the pool table in the back getting loud. Eduardo brought another round and then, without being asked, two shots of tequila.
Ransom looked at him.
"On the house," Eduardo said. "You look like you need it."
Ransom didn't argue. I knocked mine back without flinching, set the glass down, and grinned at him. He grinned back. Suddenly everything was a little looser, a little easier.
Eduardo brought two more shots. Then two more. The tequila burned going down, sharper than the salsa, and the cumbia shifted to something slower.
"I'm drunk," I said eventually, when it was past the point of obvious.
"No shit, Ranger."
"You're worse."
"I'm grieving. Doctor's orders."
"Doctor told you to drink your weight in tequila?"
"He implied it."
"Bullshit doctor."
"Best one in Albuquerque."
He grinned sloppily across the table, his hair falling into his eyes. He looked younger somehow, softer. Maybe more dangerous than ever.
"Dance with me," he said.
I looked around. "Here?"
"Nobody's watching."
I looked around at the old men and the couple and Eduardo polishing a glass that didn't need polishing.
"Alright."
We slid out of the booth together and staggered over to the dark corner where the neon didn't reach.
The song was slow, a man singing about a woman he couldn't have.
Ransom put his hands on my hips and pulled me in hard, his fingers digging into the bone.
My arms went around his neck and we moved together, no rhythm, no plan, just two drunk idiots pressed together in a dive bar, dancing like the world was about to end.
My chin dropped to his shoulder. He turned his face into my neck and breathed me in, and his hands slid lower, gripping my ass, pulling my hips flush against his so I could feel exactly what this was doing to him.
"That thing you said," he said against my throat. "In the prison."
I held my breath. "What thing?"
"You know what thing."
My breath caught. My pulse jumped under his lips, and he had to feel it.
"That man's mine," he said, low, right into my ear. "You said that. You broke a man's nose, and you pointed his bloody face at me, and you said that man's mine like it was nothing."
"It wasn't nothing."
"I know it wasn't." He bit down on the tendon in my neck, and I shuddered against him. His teeth held. His hand slid up my back, fisted in my hair, and pulled my head sideways to give him more of my throat. "You don't get to take it back now."
I couldn't get a breath in.
Somebody at the pool table whistled.
Ransom didn't lift his mouth off my neck. He just turned his head a quarter inch and growled low in his throat, and the whistle cut off mid-note.
"Say it again," he said into my skin.
"Ransom—"
"Say it back, Ranger."
"You're my man."
He growled against my throat again, and his hand tightened in my hair.
Then he kissed me, hard and desperate, with his tongue in my mouth.
I kissed him back like I was trying to crawl inside him.
Someone else in the bar laughed, and I did not give a single shit.
I did not give one solitary shit about anything except the taste of him, the heat of him, the weight of his voice when he said my name.
I don't know how long we stayed like that. Long enough that my eyes closed, and the world went soft. Long enough that the only things holding me up were his arms and the wall he'd backed me into. Long enough that when I said "we need a bed" against his ear, he just nodded.
We paid the tab. I think we paid the tab. Eduardo said something on the way out that I didn't catch, and Ransom waved a hand at him in answer, and then we were out in the cold air with the sign flickering A ROSA in the dark behind us.
I put my hand on his back and steered him across the lot to a squat building with VACANCY in red letters above the door. It was a shit motel, but we were too drunk to drive anywhere else.
Ransom leaned against the wall outside while I went in and got us a room. I could see him through the glass with his head tipped back, eyes closed, throat long and pale under the sign. The neon painted half his face red.
The woman behind the desk took my card without looking at me and slid a key across the counter on a plastic fob.
I took him by the arm and walked him down the row. The lock fought me. I cussed at it under my breath until he laughed into the side of my neck, a stupid drunk laugh that hit me hard right between the ribs, and the key turned the second after that.
The room had the smell every cheap motel in the world has when the door first cracks, industrial cleaner laid on top of a generation of cigarettes, and underneath both the faint wet smell of a window AC that had been running for somebody else an hour ago.
I steered him toward the bed. His knees met the edge, and he went down face-first into the comforter.
I worked his boots off and set them by the bed where he could find them in the morning if either of us could stand up by then.
His belt slid free easily. He lifted his hips when I tugged at his jeans without me having to say a word, and I pulled the denim down past his knees and dropped it on the floor.
He shivered once as the air found the back of his thighs and stopped fighting it.
I shucked my own boots and jeans at the foot of the bed and climbed in behind him.
The mattress dipped under my weight, and the warm line of his back pressed against my chest. I thought, for one long second before he moved, that this was going to be the end of it.
That he was already gone. That my job was to hold him through the night and let him sleep off whatever the hospital had done to him.