by Ruthie Knox
Nineteen-seventy-fucking-six.
“You’re telling me,” he said.
And then he had to take a breath and let it out, because his fists were clenching, and that wouldn’t do.
He took a second one, just to be safe.
“You’re telling me, in all seriousness, that the spare tire for this vehicle is five years older than I am.” It was the most neutral thing Roman could think of to say. He was trying—trying very hard—to find solid ground again and plant his feet on it, because he hated feeling this out of control. He hated it more than he hated Stanley taunting him. He hated it more than he hated knowing, with crystalline clarity, that he’d made himself easy to taunt.
Because of Ashley.
“Well, it could be worse,” she said.
“How?” Roman asked incredulously. “How could it be worse?”
“The tire is thirteen years older than me.”
For a second, he couldn’t process what she’d said. The tire. Five years older, thirteen years older—it was the same fucking tire, right? And was she …? She couldn’t actually think—
“It’s a joke.” Ashley lowered her oversize sunglasses and looked at him over the top, the freckled bridge of her nose wrinkling. “Ha-ha?”
Roman turned away. He couldn’t look at her, because he wanted to shake her.
And fuck her.
And give her a hug.
For crying out loud. She was having a hard time, and he wanted to give her a hug. What was this woman doing to him?
“At least tell me you’ve got a jack,” he said, trying to focus on the practical.
Her whole face turned into a wince. “No jack. But listen, I’ve got something better.”
Roman hoped it was a bottle of bourbon.
“Actually, don’t listen. Hang on a second, I’ll show you.”
She turned away and let herself into the trailer.
Roman waited for her to come back. Cars flew past on the interstate, and he let his gaze wander beyond the road to the fallow fields bordering it, a small farm with cows and a couple horses, the woods in the distance.
It looked like Wisconsin. Like home.
But Roman’s home was in Miami. He’d gotten too far away from it, lost himself, and now he was losing his grip.
Was this what it was like to be Ashley? Did she feel this much all the time? Stanley had called him her boyfriend, and it had just about knocked Roman over with … he didn’t even know. Confusion. Anger. Possessive elation. How did people sort all this shit out?
He took another deep breath and tried to find some kind of equilibrium again, but the air he drew into his body tasted like a memory of country roads that slowed down through town and then sped back up, fifty-five miles an hour, a ribbon of clean, undulating asphalt with no end.
His sister, Samantha, behind the wheel. Loud music. Stolen cigarettes.
He missed her. He missed her, and he didn’t want to be here.
Ashley hopped out of the trailer, her sunglasses pushed up on top of her head, a large block of wood cradled in her arms. She took one look at his face and said, “Bear with me. I’m not crazy—this is actually what the manual says to do.”
“What is?”
Ashley squatted down and placed the wood in front of the intact tire in the pair that included the flat. Roman realized it wasn’t a block, it was a ramp—eight inches wide, about six inches high at the tall end, and a good three feet long at the base.
“We roll up onto it,” she said. “And then the other tire is high enough to change.”
That made sense. He could do this. He could focus on the tire, keep his mouth shut, lock it all down until … until it didn’t matter so much. Until later. “I get it. You want to drive or stay back here and signal?”
They both glanced in the direction of the Escalade. Just thinking about Stanley in the front of his truck made Roman’s fists curl again.
“How about I drive?” Ashley asked.
“Good call. Keys are still in there.”
She stepped toward the road at the same moment a semi blew past going much too fast. Without thinking, Roman grabbed a fistful of her T-shirt and hauled her back into his body.
“Hey!” she shrieked. Off balance, she stepped on his foot—by accident, he thought—and then elbowed him in the stomach, hard, on purpose. Roman doubled over, more from the shock of it than the pain.
“What the fuck?”
“You grabbed me!”
“You were walking right into traffic!”
“I was inside the yellow line!”
“That truck was going seventy miles an hour, Ashley. Use your fucking head!”
“I looked both ways, asshole!”
“You’re the one who told me not to go out into the road like that. Now I’m the asshole for trying to keep you safe?”
“No, you’re the asshole for grabbing me. You scared me!”
“Yeah, well, you scared me, too!”
They were head to head, Ashley twisted around with his hand still fisted in her shirt, her face inches from his, flushed, passionate—and he realized he meant what he’d said.
She’d scared him. She could get killed out here. And that thought made him feel …
Way too much.
It made him feel way too much.
He was trying to get used to it. Talking to Ashley last night, he’d stripped off layer after layer of protection until there wasn’t anything left, and now he had to live like this, exposed and blown all over the place by emotions he’d effectively locked down for years. He was willing to try it for Ashley, but he hadn’t counted on Stanley. He hadn’t guessed he’d have to spend all day with a guy whose idea of fun was searching out Roman’s sensitive spots and poking them with a stick.
It wasn’t until Stanley had made the crack about Ashley that Roman had truly lost his temper. Hearing him say she couldn’t take care of herself—that she was weak and that Roman was playing right into her most self-sabotaging tendencies—it fucked him up to think about it.
Stanley was wrong about her. Everybody was, because Ashley wasn’t weak. She was skinny and impulsive, and she cared too much about all the wrong things, but she wasn’t weak, and Roman didn’t get why no one seemed to understand that but him.
He didn’t want to be the only person who saw Ashley Bowman for herself.
Ashley sighed. “You should’ve said something, not yanked on me like that. You can’t manhandle me whenever you feel like it.”
He unlocked his grip on her shirt, but only so he could gather a bigger fistful. When he raised his arm, she rose to her toes, and he pulled her closer until her breasts brushed his chest. “Can’t I?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She blinked. “I don’t—you just can’t.”
Slowly, with his forearm still flexed, he pivoted, taking her with him. He walked forward two steps, pushing his hand up to the middle of her back so she had no choice but to stay plastered against him, their legs interlaced. He kept walking—three steps, four—until she ran into the trailer and her chin lifted. Her back arched, breasts straining against the tight fabric of her shirt, flattened against him.
“What do you call that?” he asked.
She squinted up at him. He’d spun her into the sun, and her pupils were pinpricks surrounded by an unnatural blue, her eyelashes burnished gold in the bright light.
“I guess you can,” she said quietly. “If you feel like you have to.”
He wanted to kiss her. And shake her. And give her a hug.
He wanted to sink inside her, make love to her until she was trembling and breathing heavy, moaning his name.
He wanted to wrap her in his arms and hold her tight.
“Ashley.” When he lowered his head, it blocked the sun from her face, and her pupils bloomed in slow motion. She inhaled against his chest. In his grip, he felt the sweat-dampened skin of her back. “I have to.”
Her “Okay” was almost a sigh when he b
rought his mouth down to kiss her.
He wasn’t nice about it. He’d lost whatever filter made nice a possibility. Roman kissed her hard and touched her rough, pushing his free hand underneath her shirt and right up her back, under her bra strap, splaying his fingers wide. He let go of her shirt, got his other palm against her skin, rooting it under her bra, too, until he had both hands full of her breasts and his tongue in her mouth and he felt, finally, like he could breathe. Like he wasn’t crazy, or at least like the craziness wasn’t inside him, because it was located somewhere between them and they could exorcise it if they just kept kissing like this, deep and hot and dirty, with the sun beating down on the back of his head and the smell of hot tar and exhaust making him dizzy.
It didn’t matter how he kissed her. Ashley wasn’t the kind of woman who made “nice” a requirement. She took his tongue, made him taste hers, bit his lip. She found his hip, snuck her hand under his shirt and pinched him hard enough to leave a mark. Then she had his ass in her hands and she was grinding against him, one leg up, pushing where he was hard and getting harder all the time.
“Jesus, Ash. I’m sorry.”
He kissed her face. Her neck. He ran his thumbs over her nipples and watched her eyes close and her head dip back into the light with the sound of the traffic all around them, sealing them into this space where they were exposed, indecent, stupid, and he didn’t care.
“Roman,” she said.
He kissed her throat. Kissed her mouth. “What?”
She smiled with her eyes closed. “Nothing. Just Roman.”
Something about her smile. The honesty of it, and knowing it was for him, it was real, purely Ashley, putting up with his shit and kissing him back, grabbing him close, finding a way to turn this horrible morning into a smile. He pulled his hands out from under her shirt so he could cup her head and kiss her temple and say, “You know I like you, right?”
Her smile turned into a grin. Sunlight and gold, and those bluer-than-blue eyes looking up at him. “Yeah. But I could stand to hear it again.”
He couldn’t help it. She made him grin. He’d never met another woman who could do that—who did it as effortlessly as she pulled air into her lungs.
“I like you. You make me happy. I’m glad I rescued you from getting creamed by that car.”
She laughed. There might have been a hysterical edge to it, and tears in her eyes, but she laughed, and she tickled his sides and his ribs, goosed his abs until he was laughing, too.
Bent over with his hands on his knees, leaning his butt against the trailer.
Holding her hand and laughing.
CHAPTER THREE
“Oh, I almost forgot!”
Nana dug around in the plastic bag hanging off her elbow and came up with a few slips of paper and a silver pen. She had to dip down to hand it to Ashley, who perched awkwardly on the lip of a deck chair designed to force her into a reclining posture. The bag swung as Nana dipped, nearly whacking Ashley in the nose. When she jerked away, she fell against the back of the chair, spilling the cocktail Nana had just handed her onto her bare toes.
She smelled fruit punch and felt stupid.
“You have to write advice for the newlyweds on this one,” Nana said, oblivious. “And these other ones are etiquette questions for a game, so you have to answer those, too. And then put them in the basket on the table right inside the door.”
Fantastic.
As she struggled to sit up, Ashley furtively scanned the yard from her position on the front porch, wishing it weren’t such an outlandishly beautiful day and she weren’t surrounded by so many outlandishly beautiful people. There were A-list actors here. Singers whose posters she had hung up on her bedroom wall in middle school. Even Devon Alexander, a gorgeous dark-haired Olympic swimmer who’d taken three golds in the summer games.
She turned the pen over in her hand. It said Jamie and Carly in elegant white script. “We’re doing games?” she asked, faintly horrified.
“It’s tradition! But don’t worry, they’re dirty games, mostly. It’ll be fun!”
Nana’s smile lit up her face. Ashley smiled in return, though she’d felt vaguely sick ever since she arrived at Nana’s house to find a wedding shower in full swing.
A celebrity-studded wedding shower. With security guards.
“I’m not sure I know Carly well enough to give her advice.” Or be at her shower.
Nana petted her arm, shaking her loose white curls. “Don’t think about it too hard. Just write something. I’ll get you a drink, too. That’ll help.”
Ashley watched her go inside. She scratched at a bug bite right above her kneecap. A mosquito must have gotten into the Airstream in Pennsylvania last night, because she’d woken up with her legs covered in bumps. The shorts and tank top she wore were way too informal for this party, but she didn’t have anything better to change into that was clean.
This wasn’t the quiet, private visit she’d been seeking. It was a circus. And probably a mistake.
The final part of their drive today, which Roman and Stanley had spent in blessed silence, Ashley had spent remembering her last trip to Camelot. She and her grandmother had come when Ashley was sixteen years old, having hosted Nana and Carly at Sunnyvale the previous two seasons and hit it off so well they’d arranged this visit as part of their summer rambles.
Back then they’d eaten breakfast in Nana’s funky 1970s kitchen, where Nana had served strong black coffee and made teenaged Ashley feel included, even when the conversation turned to raunchy sex jokes—as conversations had a tendency to do when Nana and Ashley’s grandmother were together.
At one point that trip, Carly had come to see her grandmother, and she’d taken Ashley swimming at a nearby lake. Carly was eight years older—Ashley’s age now, she realized with a start. To Ashley, she’d seemed gloriously grown up.
They’d lain out on towels and put sunscreen on each other’s backs. Sipping gas-station Cokes packed with slivers of ice, they’d joked about how they should start a club for women raised by oddball grandmothers.
Carly had shrieked at how cold the water was. Ashley could still recall the silky feel of the mud squishing between her toes.
Not too long ago, she had seen Carly’s picture on a tabloid rack in a checkout line—Carly smiling and holding hands with pop star Jamie Callahan. Ashley had done a double take. She bought the magazine and studied the pictures, captivated by the unlikelihood of it all.
A week ago, Carly and Jamie had eloped in Vegas. Distracted by her own drama, Ashley had missed the headlines this time, although according to Nana the wedding had made all the tabloids and celebrity gossip websites.
Ashley had no right to be crashing Carly’s post-elopement shower.
She didn’t belong here.
The strange thing was, Roman did. He hadn’t so much as blinked at the barricade—had just asked her, You go way back with these people, right? and, at her affirmative, talked their way through security, smooth as satin.
Smooth as the Roman she’d met a week ago, loping across the parking lot in his perfectly tailored suit.
He stood now on the lawn, talking to the bridegroom. Hands in his pockets, legs planted wide in the grass, totally at ease in a group of people with a collective net worth of approximately four kajillion dollars.
Stanley was inside. He’d found another codger to play backgammon with in the kitchen.
Ashley looked at the slips of paper in her hand. The top one read Advice for the Married Couple. There were six blank lines where she was supposed to write down words of connubial wisdom for a friend she hadn’t seen in years.
“Never go to bed angry,” she mumbled to herself. “Take time for each other. Don’t forget to have sex. How the hell should I know?”
On the lawn, Carly sidled up to her husband, their young daughter in her arms. She handed the girl over, and Ashley watched as Jamie introduced his bride to Roman, draping his arm casually over her shoulder.
Carly looked cool
and beautiful in a slim-fitting beige dress. Jamie looked like … he looked like Jamie Callahan, the gorgeous boy next door whom half the women in the free world had sex dreams about. The pudgy redheaded toddler in his arms patted his face, the skirt of her fuchsia party dress ballooning out around her.
Roman must have said something funny, because Carly laughed. Jamie pulled her in close for a kiss.
They stood in the sunlight, beautiful, secure.
Ashley crumpled up the paper and shoved it into her front pocket.
She had no advice to give. Not to Jamie and Carly.
Not to anyone.
When the party games were over, the shower presents opened, and most of the guests gone, Ashley found herself on the front porch again, sitting beside Nana in the lounge chairs.
The light was fading now, sunset not too far off. Fireflies winked on the lawn. The smell of charcoal and seared meat still drifted from the grill out back. Last time Ashley had checked, Jamie and Roman were there, talking about basketball over beers. Stanley had retired to the trailer for the night. Carly was inside with her friend Ellen, Nana’s neighbor, organizing the remains of the party.
“So,” Nana said. She leaned toward Ashley with her blue eyes alight. “What brings you to Ohio?”
“You.”
“Me, huh? All right, I’ll bite. What do you need?”
“It’s kind of a long story.” And maybe the morning would be better for telling it. The story had gone thick and dark as syrup inside her head. Sticky.
“I’ve got time for you. Let’s hear it, sweetie.”
Carly came out of the house with a short stack of plastic cups and a glass pitcher of something maroon.
“What have you got?” Nana asked.
“Sangria. Ellen made it.”
Nana took the cups and held them up as Carly poured. “You girls should sit with us.”
“That’s the plan. Ellen’s putting together a second pitcher, and then we’ll come out.”
Ashley took her cup from Nana as Carly set down the pitcher and went back inside the house. “Thank you.”
“It’s a bribe. I can’t stand waiting anymore—you have to tell me what you’re doing traipsing around the Midwest with that beautiful, interesting man.”
