“Theyknow,” Violet said.
“Well, I don’t know what you and Sadie talked about on the way over, but she clearly knew.”
“I didn’t tell Sadie,” she said.
“Well. She knew all the same. She was giving me a dead eye.”
“Her dead eyes were not my fault.”
He swept her hair over her shoulder and leaned in, kissing her neck.
She jumped. “We’re riding a giant horse.”
“I thought you grew up on a ranch.”
“I did,” she said.
“You’re from Texas,” he said. “Sometimes I can hear it in your voice. I like it.”
“I don’t like it,” she said. “I’ve been trying to get rid of that drawl for the last six years.”
“Why is that?”
“I decided that this was my home. I couldn’t go back. I don’t want to go back.”
“Angry at your mother?”
“Not anymore.”
“No?”
“No. There’s no point. I was at first. I was thirteen and she left me when I needed her most. My poor dad had said... Well, all the girl things were up to him. And he was wonderful. But... She threw him in the deep end. I feel too sorry for him, and too grateful to him to waste a minute being upset about her.”
“Liar.”
“I’m not a liar,” she said.
He didn’t know why he was pushing this conversation. Except they were out here in the woods, and it would only be two weeks. And he... Well, he didn’t talk to all that many people he didn’t already know. He was doing a lot of that these past few days. With his cousins, and now with her. But...there was something fascinating about talking to a woman he’d slept with. He never did that. He’d gotten to know Violet a little bit first and it was... Well, it was producing a hell of an interesting dynamic. And if Wolf was one thing it was a glutton.
He’d found the best way to drown out unwanted echoes of emotion and memory was to cover them up. With layer on layer of everything that feltgood.
He liked new physical experiences.
And there was something about this that seemed to be heightening the physical connection between them. He was all good with that.
“People leave,” he said. “It’s terrible forever. And look, you can decide that you shouldn’t care. Doesn’t mean you won’t.”
“You’re still upset about your mother?”
“Upsetisn’t the right word. I’m angry.” It was easy enough to talk about this. Because he was angry. It was true. It wasn’t so much a nest of snakes and hurt as it was just rage. He was pretty comfortable with rage. He had a damned lot of it. At his mother. His father. At the universe. At God, if He was out there. “I already told you about the family curse.”
“But you don’t actually believe...”
“At Garrett’s Watch, the women don’t stay. My older brother, Sawyer, his mother left. Then mine. Then my sister, Elsie’s. My grandmother left my grandfather. It was only when he got a mail-order bride that he got a woman to stick around. That’s what my brother, Sawyer, did. His wife, Evelyn. And that’s why he did it. He thought that was the only way to break the curse.”
“What about you? Do you believe in a curse?”
“No. I just believe in selfish people doing selfish things. You see it all the time. You see it all around you. It’s nothing more or less interesting than that.”