Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
The next few weeks were busy, but Marlowe managed to make time for her doctor appointment and had gotten a clean bill of health, and getting that worry taken care of meant more than she had realized.
She was dragging her feet with the divorce papers, not because she didn’t want to do it, just because she hated thinking about Aiden at all.
It was nicer to pretend that her life had started the day she first came to Mustang River.
The day she first came to work at Painted Ridge Resort.
Because everything since then had been so good.
Don’t go turning it into a fairytale.
It was a good reminder. But it felt like a fairytale. She was a little bit saddle sore from the trail ride up the side of the mountain. Now she knew what that meant. It was not a pleasant sort of soreness, she decided.
Especially not because she would like to ride Cody later, and the pain in her thighs and rear might make it challenging.
Of course, he was nothing if not creative.
He could bend her over something, or have her up against the wall…
It took her a moment to realize she was sitting at the front desk, daydreaming about fucking her boss.
How funny to think of him that way. She didn’t really. Not anymore. He felt like a partner.
A sliver of dread wormed its way into her heart, and she pushed it away.
It was just because they worked together. And because he wasn’t high-handed or anything like that. He didn’t act like he needed to tell her what to do to affirm his status every few minutes.
He just wasn’t that guy.
But when she saw his truck pull up to the hotel, her heart jumped into her throat.
When he came to visit her for hookups, he didn’t come through the front door. Or if he did, he waited to slip up to her room until no one was around.
His family knew, but she really didn’t want her employees to know. It would make her seem unserious. And slutty. And she was fine feeling slutty in a fun way when she was with Cody, or sneaking around, but she didn’t want her newfound sexual freedom to undermine her position.
But he was walking right through the front door, and he looked like he had a mission.
“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 Cody becoming 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 in her 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 this could 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.”
Poor Nolan. Another kid who was caught up in the lives of uninterested adults. She knew what it was like to feel that way. Like an incidental.
But she still couldn’t quite draw the lines between this life and the ranch life Cody had now.
“How did your mom meet your dad? What did she do?”
“She was his cleaner. One of them. She got a job at the company that managed his home, and that was how they met. But that’s what she kept on doing.
Whether it was working for a service or getting a job at a hotel a couple of hours away.
I know it’s not what she dreamed of doing.
She had a pretty normal life, a normal upbringing.
But all it takes is one bad decision, and for the people in your life to completely abandon you.
My mom is a good example of what happens when you love everybody else in your life a whole lot more than they love you. ”
Not everybody, though.
There was an underlying thread of sadness when he talked about his relationship with his mother, and while he had shared a whole lot of things with her, he had never outright verbalized the truth.
The person that his mom had loved most in the world had been his father.
Even though he hadn’t deserved that love.
And as a result, she hadn’t been able to give the attention to her children that she should have.
Hadn’t been able to show them the love that they deserved.
He pulled into the parking lot, and they just sat there for a moment. He looked up, and she wanted to touch him. Wanted to do something to reach him in this moment, because this was vulnerable for him.
“We were by ourselves a lot. And sometimes we didn’t get left with any food.
So, what we would do is go around the neighborhood and collect cans, then we would take them to the recycling center and get some money.
Usually, we would get Ramen and Pixie Sticks.
A package of hot dogs. Whatever we could afford and make ourselves something. ”
“Didn’t your mom… Get any kind of assistance?”
“I don’t know. I think she might have. But she didn’t…
She had trouble managing to keep food in the house, that’s all I know.
I think it was a lot for her just to go to work, and then I think she was always hoping that my dad would get in touch with her on the weekend, want to hang out, hook up.
She was gone a lot. And occupied with other things. ”
“She neglected you,” she said.
He turned sharply toward her, something dangerous on his face. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“Cody, she left you without food.”
“She was going through a lot.”
“I didn’t say she wasn’t. I didn’t say she wasn’t going through a lot, but the reality is she had three children, and she wasn’t able to give you the attention that you needed, and whatever the intent is, that’s still neglect.
My dad was an alcoholic. And he could not choose me over drinking.
He couldn’t. He couldn’t even choose himself.
He neglected himself, too. It was illness more than it was selfishness, but it doesn’t change the way that it expressed itself. ”
“She wasn’t an alcoholic,” he said.
“She was sad,” Marlowe said. “Depressed?”
Cody looked down. Then nodded slowly. “Probably. She was probably pretty clinically depressed, yeah.”