Please don’t go.
I need those muffled voices, and now they’re slowly fading out into the street. Sigh. Now they’re outside the saloon. The music has stopped, the conversation has completely blown out, and now all I have to listen to is…
“Oh! Oh! You’re the best thing I ever had!” he times awkwardly with his thrusts. “I love you Cactus Rose!”
“Desert Rose,” I quietly correct him.
I pause. That was the name I had given him, right? Yes, Desert Rose. That’s who I am when I can hardly stand who I have to be. She is braver than me. She is beautiful and painted in unexpected brilliance. She is resilient in the harshest of surroundings, and she is exactly who I have to be right now.
“Tell me ya’ love me too,” he slams down on me. Exhausted, spent and probably passed out.
Now what.
My eyes roll as I softly say, “I love you too?”
If only he didn’t weigh a hundred pounds more than me. Maybe then I could push him over and gather my things to go.
No... I’m stuck.
I’m not sure what repulses me most; the gritty feel of a hair-covered, un-bathed, sweaty man, or the smell. Tonight’s unfortunate cologne is tobacco, the odor of a month’s worth of work and whiskey-filled breath.
He’s already snoring, and I work to slide myself out.
“Oh, honey,” I pleasantly gasp. “Can’t you just move over a little?”
He turns his head as he starts a roll he doesn’t finish, and I’m not any freer. His ear is closer, though.
“Henry…. Henry! Hey Henry, wake up!” I yell.
He rolls over with an annoyed grunt, “Stop the yellin’,” he turns away from me.
“I’m sorry, hon’,” I roll out from my weighty prison. “I just need to go freshen up.”
I refasten my corset as he situates his body back into the position it had been when I was trapped underneath it. How had I possibly fit under there?
Dressed again in my petticoat and ruffled skirt, I gingerly cross the creaky boards of the room. As I watch his chest rise and fall with the increasing volume of his snores, I reach into his boot to retrieve what I had come to get.
The map is fragile, and I take my time to unfold it. I’m careful to put my body between the map and the man who will kill me if he sees me holding it. My eyes quickly scan the legend and the markings, and I can feel my heart racing as the pieces of my life take shape in the characters on the page. This is the moment I have spent years orchestrating and it is also the moment I realize that my life will never be the same.
I stash the map at the top of my boot and next to the jeweled dagger I keep there. I’m startled by a noise outside the thick curtain, and I look quickly back at Henry to see if it woke him. He doesn’t move, but now I have to.
The curtain is heavy as I pull it back to peer out to the bigger room. I can hear the stirrings behind a couple of the other curtains, but silence is the loudest. I strain out to get a look at where the noise would have been, and I see a pair of cowboy boots slowly sliding along on the floor as they follow the clumsy crawl of the man who wears them.
It’s too dark to know for sure, but I could swear those boots are Luke’s. I can’t call out to him, and if I follow, and it’s not him, I might never make it out of this saloon alive.
I had already decided I was going to have to let him go; to leave Luke here. He was never a part of the plan, and if I loved him back, I’d end up stuck worse than I was earlier tonight. I let the cowboy disappear down the hall, and I sneak out the other way.
My bag has been packed for weeks, and I hastily grab it from my room. I stand up to look one more time at the broken reflection of my mirror. My seven years of bad luck has been paid. Good luck, and good fortune, is all I’m looking for now.