by Ruthie Knox
“By tomorrow, I’m supposed to have convinced you to give up Sunnyvale. I’m going to get a call from Carmen, or I’ll call her, and she’ll ask me if she has a green light to do the demolition yet.”
“I thought Carmen was your girlfriend.”
“She was.”
“You said she wasn’t your boss.”
“She’s not.”
“So why is she giving you demolition deadlines? Or, wait, whose deadline is it?”
She sounded calm, unaffected. Balanced.
“Her father’s. Heberto Zumbado. Do you know who he is?”
“No.”
“I guess there’s no reason you should. He’s a developer in Miami. A big deal. He’s also Carmen’s dad, and … not really my boss, either. I don’t have a boss. But he owns a big share of this project.”
“I thought you owned Sunnyvale.”
“I do. A lot of the land around it, too. But Heberto’s put a bunch of money into the property we’re going to develop in the later phases, and it’s his reputation backing it. If it weren’t for him, I couldn’t pull this thing off. I’m too small-time for a resort this big.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah. And Carmen works for him. So if I tell Carmen tomorrow it’s a no-go, she’s going to tell her father, and then … then I’m not sure.”
“I thought I had two weeks.”
“You had them from me.”
“But you’re not in charge.”
He dropped his head backward, against the trunk. Through the canopy, here and there, he could see stars. The night was clear. When he closed his eyes, he could still visualize Ashley out at the end of her branch. A woman tied up and walked to the end of a plank.
Roman didn’t want to be the one to push her off. He’d been standing back, waiting and watching so he wouldn’t miss it when she figured out how to rescue herself.
He’d assumed, all along, that she would, somehow. She’d outsmarted him at Sunnyvale, manipulated him into going along with her plans, and she’d done it with such style—maybe he’d started to think she had an escape all figured out. That when the marauding pirates came after her, stalking down the plank, Ashley would heroically pull out a rapier and start fencing.
He’d thought she could keep spinning, whirling around, energy and light, until she won. This whole time, deep down, he’d believed in her power to outsmart him and defeat Carmen and Heberto, too.
Or, if she failed, at the very least she would land on her feet and find something else. He’d told her days ago that she was the kind of person who always found something else.
He’d been mistaken.
Ashley was at the end of her resources. Poised out over the water, toes gripping the bare board, sharks roiling beneath, and she was scared as hell.
It wasn’t that she didn’t have the spirit to get out of her situation. She had more spirit than anyone he’d ever met. It was that she was all alone out there.
That wasn’t how it went in the movies. In the movies, when the heroine was in peril, someone always frayed her bonds so all she had to do was tug sharply and they’d snap. Someone tossed her a rope so she could go swinging across the deck, recover her sword, and fight her way to freedom.
Roman hadn’t given her anything to work with. He’d let Carmen set deadlines while he waited for events to overtake them and overwhelm Ashley.
She didn’t deserve his cowardice. She deserved allegiance.
She deserved for him to throw her a fucking rope.
“I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said. “Which do you want to hear first?”
“I thought you already told me the bad news.”
“Unfortunately, no.”
“Okay. Well, I guess the bad news.”
“Heberto’s going to bring your father into this.”
She stiffened, swayed slightly, and put her hand out for balance.
“It’s possible he already has,” Roman added. “It’s even possible he’s knocked down Sunnyvale already, although I doubt it. But this game—it’s about to get bigger than you and me. And uglier.”
“What’s the good news?”
“I guess that I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. I was supposed to bring you here and find some way to convince you to give Sunnyvale to me. Neutralize you, or something. I’m not going to do that. I’m … I’m on your side. I’m not sure what that looks like right now, or if we can win, if we could even figure out some way both of us could win at the same time. But for what it’s worth, I’m … I’m defecting, I guess. I’m putting myself at your disposal.”
She laughed—a short exhale, her shoulders curling in.
“Is it so ridiculous?” he asked.
Ashley lifted her hands above her head, braced herself on a higher branch, and pivoted on her seat in a neat, graceful spin that Roman could never have executed.
She looked at him. “What am I supposed to do with you?”
“Whatever you want.”
She reached for her toes, covered them with her palms, and Roman heard a series of small pops as her joints cracked. Not a pretty sound, but a very Ashley sort of move—he’d seen her do it before. A nervous habit, or just an action she could take because she needed to take one.
Motion, for Ashley, was everything.
“Roman, what I want is my grandma back. My home back. What I want is impossible. You heard them at the party, didn’t you? And Stanley, and Prachi and Arvind—these people know me. I mean, there’s a reason I’m bringing you to them, right? Because they’re the people I love the most, after Grandma. I thought I’d be able to show you something, prove it to you, but instead I just keep hearing what I look like from the outside. I keep … I think I might be cracking up a little bit from all this. I don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t—I mean, thanks for offering to be on my team, but even I don’t want to be on my team at the moment.”
“You should. It’s the right team.”
“It’s the losing team. I’m tired of losing. I feel like I’ve been losing ever since … since I don’t even know when. Nothing I do ever works, not for long. So I just spin off into some other thing, as though if I keep going, keep investing myself in new things, sooner or later I’ll … get somewhere. Have something.”
“You have me.”
She looked all the way up at him. “I don’t know what to do with you.”
Roman offered her a tentative smile. “I could give you some ideas.”
Ashley snorted, dismissing the sexual invitation she’d heard in his remark. “That’s it, though. That was Nana’s whole point. I have those kinds of ideas already. I feel like … you know, those things she said? And what Stanley said earlier, that I keep giving myself to men who don’t like me? I know they’re back there thinking, Oh, Ashley. What kind of idiot thing is she doing now? And all I can think of is a hundred ways to be an idiot.”
“Like what?”
“On the way here, walking through campus? I thought, We could find the bathroom in that dorm. I could take him in a stall and fuck him. I could lead him over there, where there’s a dark spot under those trees, and suck him off. I could go back to that party with my hair all messed up from his hands, lipstick smeared, and get into Roman’s truck and drive it somewhere I can unhitch the Airstream and roll it into a lake. I’m hurt and angry, and I can generate an endless list of things to do that would feel good for ten seconds. But then where am I afterward?” She shrugged. “I’m still a loser.”
“You’re not a loser.”
“You’re only saying that because I was beating you at your own game.”
Roman smiled. He turned around to climb down to her branch. She was so far away, he showed off a little, arms straight out at his sides, treating the limb like a balance beam.
When he drew close, she pulled in her toes, and he sat beside her, feet dangling over the side.
“You aren’t even wearing lipstick,” he said.
“You know what I mean.”
“Ye
ah, I know what you mean, Ash.”
For a while, they were quiet, and he listened to the sounds of the night settling in. Cicadas chirping. A car going by on the road. Somebody yelling far away, and a dog barking.
“I could give you some ideas.” He repeated the earlier comment because he wanted her to understand he hadn’t meant it sexually—not entirely. “And you could give me some. We could figure this out together. You’re not stupid, Ashley. Impulsive, maybe, but smart as hell.”
She looked at him over her knees. Her eyes seemed huge, windows to a soul that was so completely out of scale to her body, it spilled over.
Excessive, he’d thought of her, at first. Disturbingly excessive. But he’d only been disturbed because what Ashley had in abundance, he’d drawn down inside himself until he’d nearly lost it.
Honesty. Integrity. Hope. Joy.
Love.
“My dad is going to be pissed,” she said.
“Let him be pissed.”
“Mitzi will think I’m collaborating with the enemy, and Nana will think I’m doing exactly what I always do. Turning myself inside out to win the approval of some guy who doesn’t deserve it.”
“Ash, if this is what you’re like when you’re turning yourself inside out to win my approval, I’d hate to see you when you’re being an obstructive, infuriating pain in the ass.”
Her eyes met his, and they were smiling. “What are you saying, I’m not winning you over?”
“I’m saying you don’t have to win me over. I’ve declared for your side, and you got me to do that without compromising yourself.”
Her smile made it to her mouth, her teeth bright against the darkness. “Now you’re going to say again that you like me.”
“You wish. Now I’m going to take you back to the truck, drive you to whatever passes for a nice hotel in this town, and get you into bed before it occurs to you to think about the whole whether-I-deserve-you part.”
“Sexually frustrated, are we?”
“Aren’t you?”
Ashley laughed and scooted a few inches closer to drop her foot into his lap. “I could take care of that right now.”
“With your toes? Ugh. I don’t even want to know if that’s possible.” She’d worked her foot down along his zipper. It was troubling how quickly his dick came to attention. He didn’t even find feet attractive, but Ashley’s toes were like fingers—strong and dextrous. “Jesus Christ.” He flung his hands out, wobbled, and connected with a branch to the side just in time to prevent a fall. When Ashley resumed her massage, he picked up her foot and dropped it into space. “No. Hotel. I have standards.”
He should have known she would take that as a challenge.
Before he could even blink, he had a lap full of Ashley. She braced her arms above them. He had nothing to hang on to but her. Her hips in his hands. Her breasts right beneath his chin, her skin warm, that ocean smell …
“You’re going to break both our necks.” He barely managed to make it sound like a complaint.
“You said you’d do whatever I want.”
“I never—”
“Kiss me.”
He did. Teetering on a tree branch, distracted by visions of dropping to his death, he filled his hands and his head with Ashley.
She felt good. He felt good.
It was satisfying, doing the right thing. He wanted more of this feeling, more of this woman.
He smacked her on the ass and said, “Up.” When that didn’t work, he lifted her and sent her on her way with another light slap.
“Get your butt on the ground,” he said. “And don’t fall, or I’ll kill you.”
She laughed, poked him in the stomach when he got close enough, tried to talk him into racing her back when they finally got their feet on solid earth again. Roman was trying to pull on his socks when she ducked out from under the tree and took off.
He dropped them and followed her at a dead sprint across the lawn, shoes hanging from his fingertips.
His dignity, he left behind with his socks and his tie, crumpled in the dirt.
He wasn’t going to need it—not tonight.
CHAPTER FIVE
Ashley peeled back the covers on the bed and arranged her bare legs beneath them. The hotel room was too cool, excessively air-conditioned. It felt good to pull the comforter up and bury herself under it, a secret warm clean body against a soft mattress, breathing in the faint scent of bleach.
She turned onto her side, her back to the bathroom and the muffled noises of Roman in the shower. He’d let her take her turn first—such a nice Midwestern boy under his slick Miami shell—and she’d come out in her towel to find him on the bed with his feet up, watching the news.
Then she’d rummaged around in his bag, and he’d turned off the TV to watch her drop the towel and pull his own comfy T-shirt over her head.
He’d stood and stripped for the shower right in front of her, his movements as casual as if he were unobserved, and walked away bare-assed and smiling. Ashley had smiled, too, bemused at how seductive it was not to be seduced.
She wouldn’t have thought she would throb like this, just from knowing he was going to come back and they were going to have sex, plain old sex in a plain old hotel bed, but there was something erotic about having it be assumed.
They were like an old married couple.
She’d never before wanted to be part of an old married couple, but she was starting to see the appeal.
After the water came on in the shower, she’d turned out the lights. There was too much light from the parking lot outside for the room to be truly dark, but it got dim and filled with shadows. The sheets felt cool beneath her stroking hand, the pillow downy under her cheek.
The water shut off in the bathroom.
She waited.
Before tonight, she wouldn’t have expected her first time with Roman to be this way. They’d begun in the mud—surely it only made sense to think they’d consummate this week of insanity with sex on the prow of a boat, or at the top of a Ferris wheel, or up in the hayloft of some barn where they trespassed against everything good and smart and sensible.
An hour ago, when he’d chased her and caught her and they’d walked to the end of the gravel path together, they ended up at a water tower, a massive spider with metal legs, and she’d thought about dragging him into the shadows underneath. They could have done it standing up, her leg hitched over his hip and last year’s accumulation of dried leaves crunching under his feet as he lifted her and pinned her, held her and fucked her.
She’d thought of grabbing his thigh in the car. Rubbing up against him in the elevator. Pulling him into the shower with her and making him slick and soapy and desperate.
But they’d had such a long day out in the sun, arguing, talking to strangers, feeling things. She was exhausted, and what she wanted was this. A bed in the dark. Waiting for Roman in the green T-shirt he’d worn with his old-man pajamas that morning at Mitzi’s house, the first soft thing she’d seen on his body.
No script, no stupid games, no nonsense.
Just them.
When he returned, he flipped the switch in the bathroom first so they lost the noise of the fan, and most of the light. The covers twitched away from her shoulder, and cold air rushed down her legs. She smelled mint—toothpaste—and the spicy scent of male deodorant, and then she felt his hand at her hip, the press of his kneecaps against the back of hers, weight on the pillow behind her head.
His hand slid beneath the shirt to her stomach. He settled against her, pulling her into his heat, the ticklish hair of his thighs, the sigh of his breath on her neck.
“Hi there,” he said.
He kissed her shoulder, smoothing her hair out of his way. His hand moved in slow circles over her stomach, brushing the underside of her breasts, following the dip of her waist, trailing heat beneath her navel.
“Hi,” she whispered, and hoped he heard what she wanted to mean.
Here I am, picking my team.
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You’re not my enemy. You’re my choice.
I’m not afraid.
“Nice shirt.”
“Mmm.”
“Take it off.”
He was already tugging it up as she turned. She rose slightly, lifting her arms, and it caught and came unstuck, pulling her damp hair straight to lie on the pillow. Roman threw the shirt off the side of the bed and kicked the covers down with his feet until they fell off the end.
Their mouths met as he came over her.
Soft. Soft and warm, testing angles and pressures, opening and fitting, refitting, learning what a kiss felt like when it wasn’t an excuse or an attempt at anything. When it was just two people, kissing because they wanted to be kissing. Two bodies pressed together, all their wanting taking this shape now, finally, taking them over.
Her eyelids got heavy, desire a drug that stole through her and made her movements slow and liquid. When she closed her eyes, Roman shifted above her, taking his weight on his elbows, his fingertips gently cradling her head. She thought, fleetingly, of the dream she’d had of him, back in Florida. His dark body against her pale one, their fumbling attempt to get his clothes off, get a condom on him, get him inside her. The panicked intensity of it so different from this easy, sensual unraveling.
Different in every way from every other time, every other person, every other encounter with Roman.
You have me, he’d told her earlier, in the tree.
I’m yours was what he’d meant.
His surrender.
Hers, too.
No games, no roles, no spike of adrenaline. No rush, no fumbling, no pretense.
Just kissing and what came after it. Tasting mint on his tongue, licking over his full lips, their bodies bumping together and moving apart, her hands ranging up and down his back, his smooth skin, the dip at the base of his spine, the bunched muscles of his ass. He rose up onto one hand so he could touch her with the other, stroking down from her neck to her shoulder, shaping her breast, thumbing her nipple, then following the slight slope from her waist to her hip. She raised her knee, dragging her foot up the bed, and he hooked his thumb behind it and pressed it flat, spreading her open and aligning his erection with her swollen lips to slide back and forth, coating himself in her wetness.
