Page 92 of Ride Me Cowboy

Chapter Twenty-Six

Beth

ISUPPOSE IF I HAD to distill it down to just one thing, that I really, particularly love about my time on Coyote Creek Ranch, it’s that I stopped feeling like an outsider a long time ago. I no longer have to pretend, or fake it, to act like someone I’m not.

But this afternoon, for the first time, I started to sense a shift. To sense my impermanence here, and to accept that this family is full and busy and has existed for a long time without me, and will continue existing that way when I leave.

Seeing Cassidy launch to Mack’s defense filled me with joy, but simultaneously left me cold. There is nothing quite so isolating as recognizing you’ve been usurped.

I’ve been so conscious of how things with Cole and me are developing, I haven’t really stopped to consider that my life was braiding together with everyone else’s, too. How my feelings were getting bound up with all of their lives, not just Cole’s.

So, I ran away. That’s what I’m good at. I came to the stables because it’s here that I feel most safe, most secure. Most like I’m in the place I’m meant to be.

“Beth?” Cole’s voice reaches me from a long way away, all gruff, husky tones and deep urgency. “Are you here?”

I move out of the apartment, toward the top of the rickety staircase, but he’s storming up them, two at a time, never mind that it’s visibly swaying under his exertion.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Is it Mack and Nash?”

He reaches the top of the steps and looks at me, like he’s searching for an answer I have no idea how to give.

“Elsie’s here.”

I stare at him through a strange swirl of lights in my mind, too bright and glaring to immediately see through. Hearing him say her name is jarring, like the last thing I expect.

“My Elsie?”

I think he flinches a little, but I’m too thrown off by the mention of her name to fully notice it. He nods once, eyes narrowed with concern.

The upstairs of the stables has always felt flimsy to me, so it’s no surprise that in this particular moment, I have the most nauseating sense of the balcony becoming disconnected from its supports and sliding to the ground. I reach out a little blindly and grab the railing, staring at Cole as if he too can anchor me to a safer, better reality.

“She turned up, looking for Beth McMahon,” he says, gently, but now it’s my turn to flinch. That name belongs to my past—to a part of me I desperately want to shuck.

“How the hell did she find me?”

“My guess? Mack’s video.”

I drop my head on a groan, because that possibility hadn’t even occurred to me when we uploaded it. We’ve started to amass followers but the type of people interested in a Northern Arizona ranch seem pretty removed from my sister-in-law’s normal life. I got so swept up in being here, I stopped thinking about the possible bleed into the world I used to inhabit.

“It can’t be that,” I say, shaking my head, simply because I don’t want it to be true. “Believe me when I say that video is not something Elsie’s algorithms would feed her.”

“I do believe that,” he says, with a slightly derisive flicker of his lips so I can only guess Elsie has arrived in full blown McMahon mode.

“Is she here?” It’s Elsie’s voice, barely audible and yet, I recognize it immediately, even when she’s still a ways off.

“Shoot,” I reach out and curl my hand into Cole’s shirt.

He looks at me intently. “What do you want, Beth?”

“I don’t know.” I’m in a state of panic. I can’t see Elsie. I’m not ready.

“I know you’re only here a few more weeks, but you’re a part of this. We can take care of you.”

He means it kindly, but the mention of how temporary my time here is somehow makes everything worse. New York is my real world, even when I don’t want it to be.

“Listen to me,” he says, moving closer, putting his hands on my hips like he has a thousand times. But I can hear Elsie getting closer, her voice indistinguishable but unmistakable. “Have you ever thought that maybe the only way you’ll ever be free of him is if you own the truth of what happened?”

I stare at Cole with a sinking heart. I know that’s probably true, but how can I destroy Elsie like that? His parents? And for what? Christopher’s gone.

---