He snored softly. The sound was music to my ears. You should be freaking out about your paper, my mind told me, wanting to occupy itself with something other than my worries about Reign's safety and my desire to be rid of the nightmares.
I should have been worrying about my paper, after all. After enrolling in an online Master's program, I'd found myself happily absorbed in the old routine, the old comforting feeling of research and reading. It had been Honey's suggestion, actually, and it had been the best thing anyone could have suggested. I nuzzled closer to Reign, re-thinking the premise of my paper, letting the thoughts swirl and collide in my brain, percolating the ideas that would emerge fully-formed once I started writing.
But my mind kept drifting back to him, as always. His chest under my cheek rose and fell, rose and fell. The wind shifted outside, blew in through the open window, the desert winter still warm.
Beyond the window, I knew without looking, you could see the jagged mountains in the distance, the Rockies that I'd driven down so many months ago with nothing but the clothes on my back and a bag full of cash. They were constant, the landscape never shifting, a reminder of where I'd come from, how different everything was now. I loved them for that. But I preferred the landscape of Reign's muscled chest, the slope of his chin, the peaks of his ears, the river of his hair. He was my mountain. He was my home. And I wasn't goin' nowhere.
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CULVER
Part I
1
I can't tell him. I can't. He'll kill me – or worse. Oh my God, what have I done?
2
It was the summer after senior year of high school, and I was 18. I loved riding with the top down, Aunt Annie's pretzels, and my grandma. I had four Miss. Teen Missoula ribbons. I had a cow named Betty, and a flock of chickens that I just called "the girls". I had a high school degree, a Honda Civic, my two best friends, and we were headed to Las Vegas. It was a thirteen hour trip, and between the three of us we could afford to drive straight through the night, right into Sin City.
"I spy with my little eye something … .boring," Alicia said, sarcasm dripping from her voice like a melting ice-cream cone.
"Um, is it a cow pasture?" I asked in a dopey voice.
"Try again," Alicia replied, eyes out the window.
"Is it a horse pasture?" Becky suggested from the back seat. I stifled a laugh, wanting to play along with the charade.
"Nope," Alicia said, suppressing a smile herself.
"Well … is it a barn?" I suggested, feigning weariness.
"Oh, wait, no! I know! It's a barn!" Becky blurted out right after me, leaning forward in the backseat.
"Nope, you're both wrong, it's not a barn. It's a silo!" Alicia said, finally getting tired of the joke. This was one of our millions of inside jokes and comedy routines: you really have to make your own fun when you live in a rural area, even if you're right outside of the bustling, never-sleep city of Missoula, Montana. And, by the way, the "bustling, never-sleep" part was a joke, too. Sin City was going to be our first taste of a real city, and boy were we hungry.
Of course, we weren't planning anything too sinful. Or, at least, not seriously sinful. Our parents had okayed the trip at the beginning of the year, had even pooled their money to reserve us a nice hotel room as a graduation gift. Becky, Alicia, and I have been best friends since third grade, so we tend to do everything together, and we were such good kids that our parents really didn't have much to worry about.
But each of us did have our own agenda for going: Alicia wanted to smoke weed for the first time. Becky wanted to gamble. I wanted to make out with a stranger. Those were our ideas of sin: we'd all drank before, and at least kissed a boy, and disobeyed our parents more times than they knew (thank goodness for that), but overall we were pretty tame.
It's going to sound cliché to you, it always does, but we had a sort of idyllic time growing up. We were all cheerleaders, Becky ran for class president every year (and usually won), I was in drama, Alicia was on the newspaper. When we dated, it was usually good-looking jocks who were easy to bring home to meet the parents. We went to the post-game bonfires, drank beer out of red cups (never too much, though), and then went home to eat popcorn and giggle over Cosmo articles.
Kind of sad, right? I mean, just the blandness of that. Not to say it wasn't some of the best times of my life: I will always remember how happy I was, how much I felt like a part of my community, how willfully innocent I was. But there's something sad about it, too. Never really doing anything wrong your whole life is … well, it kind of seems like you're living half a life, doesn't it?
I guess some of that comes from being a sheriff's daughter. I was always a touch more rebellious than Becky or Alicia, and I think that's why. I love my dad, don't get me wrong, but I guess it makes me a little more … curious, maybe that's the word. Wanting to know what's on the other side of the curtain. I've always been interested in why criminals commit crime – and why they continue to commit crime even after they've been caught. Always seemed to me that something would have to feel pretty damn good to make it worth risking your freedom and good name time and again.
Which is also why, incidentally, I was planning to go into criminal psychology when I went to college in the fall. Becky and I were both going to University of Montana, while Alicia would start out at Missoula University of Technology: we were all staying home in order to save money and avoid taking out loans, which made this trip to Las Vegas even more special for us. We weren't really getting the chance to have the whole going-away-to-school experience, so we were trying to make up for it by having the best post-high school summer we could.
Which meant that we had all taken part-time jobs that would require minimal commitment and time spent at work, as opposed to the past few summers when we all worked as much as we could to save up. This summer, we were going to take it easy and backpack, camp, swim, and chill our way to September.
We'd picked Las Vegas out of some idea of tradition: after all, where else should you go if you want to signify your transition from childhood to (relative) adulthood? Of course, we weren't quite adults yet, but our fake IDs (the graduation presents we got ourselves) said otherwise!
As the landscape changed from mountain to flatland to desert, I marveled at the alien nature of the landscape, wondering at how I'd lived 18 years without ever really seeing so much of America. To tell the truth, my family almost never left Montana, unless it was to hop over to Wyoming, which is really just like bigger, emptier Montana.
We'd been on cruises and to the Caribbean, but only to resorts, never getting the chance to really explore the landscape or culture. It seemed like I was travelling for the first time ever: that I was being reborn as a smarter, wiser, more worldly, more cultured, deeper individual. Why did I think you could find enlightenment in the most notorious city in America? Who knows: all I remember is feeling like this was going to change me forever, that I would come back and entirely new and better person. I was right about half of that, anyway.
Las Vegas has a tendency, in pop culture, to rise from nowhere like a phoenix from ashes. One moment you are staring out onto the highway, into the desert haze, and the next moment you are seeing the sparkling, green glimmer of Emerald City – except that instead of having horses of a different color and helpful barbers, there are cocktails in every shade under the sun and narrow-eyed dealers (of both cards and other less-savory past times).
I'm here to tell you that this isn't just something they talk about to make the place more romantic: that is really exactly what it's like to suddenly come upon Las Vegas after hours of driving under the dark, desert sky. It just about hits you in the face, especially if you're a carful of 18-year-old farm girls from Missoula, Montana. We literally had to stop the car, pull over to the side of the road, and get out to collect ourselves
"Damn," said Becky, encapsulating all our reactions in one perfect word. We giggled, but none of us dragged our eyes away from the city skyline for a moment.
3
"I still don't want to leave before doing what I came here for!" Alicia cried as we lay next to the hotel's pool, the midday sun pounding down on us. We were sipping huge, elaborate Bloody Mary's and feeling very adult about it: we were also all making a very big deal of being hung over, even though none of us had really gone overboard.