Windchaser’s eyes widened as she listened to him talk, listened to him admitting he had loved Ellie…loved her, it still felt to her like he was admitting it. She drew away from him. She wanted to divert him, to ask any other questions, to make him say something else, anything else. To divert herself from asking him why he never told her, she would have liked to have known this before she left the ranch.
“It’s nice to know that, I was expecting to come here and be told you really had forgotten my name.” Windchaser said softly. “To be told to walk away, forget about it.” She remembered how Ellie had felt about him too, that she had, in her mind, forgiven him everything, even breaking his promise and leaving her, as long as she eventually found him alive and well.
Windchaser however could not. “I…We’ve both changed. I don’t think Ellie could have survived what happened to me. I was never so naïve as to think you wouldn’t have changed...I grieved you…I just never buried you, I couldn’t. I found myself wondering who you might have become, if you’d remembered me,” Her tone was cool, she had to be, she was stunned, her head ached, her soul felt torn.
“I have to ask…Do you remember, in the stable, just before I left, I kissed you, but you didn’t respond. Why not, if you felt that way about me?” She had to ask, before all this it had been a plain simple rejection, now it became much more complex, much more confusing. “And you were never just a Mexican boy, you should have been proud of how well you coped. I was. I should have told you.”
Her shoulders slumped as he told her he was going to leave town. There were selfish reasons she wanted him to stay, but there were also real ones. “You shouldn’t leave, the Tribes are in pieces and you’re useful. I mean Sundance is a big place, there would be no need for us to see each other at all. After all, I don’t know about you, but I’m busy as hell.”
Windchaser’s fingers strayed to the rosary, and she quickly reached behind her neck, unfastening it. “You’ll want this back…It was your grandmothers after all.” She tried not to remember how it had felt when he’d fastened it.