Arthur Morgan did not intend to survive when he gave his hat to John Marston and stayed behind to gain his redemption. As he crawled towards his final resting place, he never intended to wake up again.
But he does wake up. Thanks to time travelers F...
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When Arthur awoke the next morning, he wasn't quite sure where he was. In fact, he managed to fool himself that he was with Mary, her bare skin pressed warmly against his. Tenderly, Arthur put his arm around her waist from behind and drew her to him, enjoying the feel of her bare back pressed against his chest and stomach. It wasn't until he got a mouthful of wild, blond hair that he realized the woman he held wasn't Mary. It was the prostitute from last night. What was her name again?
Eliza?
It was still early in the morning. In fact, the only hint of sunlight was a low, grey gloom outside the window and the occasional twitter of the first, earliest birds. Icy, white frames of frost had formed on the warm windows last night, indicating that it must be cold outside, but inside, snuggled against Eliza, it was warm. She was still asleep; he could hear her low, easy breathing as her ribs rose and fell against his arm. For a moment, Arthur almost managed to fool himself that the woman actually cared for him. The moment was so tender, so intimate, that he almost forgot she'd been paid to do this.
He still hadn't had sex with her, though. Her fingers stroking his face and running themselves through his hair and scraggly beard stubble were enough. Eliza's touch was so relaxing, so intoxicating, that he'd simply fallen asleep there in the bed with her. She was better than any alcohol, better than morphine or opium. But not quite as good, he decided, as Mary.
For one thing, Mary was older. It was easy to forget that Eliza was barely two days past eighteen, and Mary had been only a year younger than Arthur's twenty-one years, but Arthur supposed that was just Eliza's training as a higher-end whore kicking in. Unlike Mary, Eliza also wore makeup, as did most ladies of the night, and her ruby-red lips in combination with the liner around her eyes made her look much older, and not at all like a woman who'd only just left childhood.
For the first time, Arthur realized her age bothered him a bit, but it was common in those days for younger women to entertain older men. In fact, Arthur was less sure it was her age that bothered him so much as it was the fact that she was not Mary, and he could not shake the feeling that it was wrong to be here, naked, in bed with her.
He sighed in frustration, and he felt Eliza stir slightly with the movement of his chest. She turned sleepily to look at him with her wide, dark eyes, blinking up at him in the darkness as though she, too, couldn't quite remember why she'd dozed off here. "Didn't mean to wake you," Arthur whispered softly.
She shook her head gently. "No. No, it's... It's okay." She turned towards him and buried her head in the hair of his chest. "You're warm."
Arthur's arms encircled her around her back, and he held her to his chest tightly, feeling the chill of her cold nose as her breath warmed his skin and, by proxy, his heart. It was hard not to feel something for her, in that moment. Not quite love, but a fondness, an admiration, for her beauty and for the grace with which she did everything. There was a stirring, deep within the pit of his belly, that he had not felt in quite a long time. Holding a woman as if he cared for her was something he missed very, very much.
