by Ruthie Knox
Noah didn’t touch her, but he stood close by, and she couldn’t keep herself from looking.
She studied his hair-covered forearm. The sleeve of his T-shirt. Her eyes crept upward, over his shoulder to his mouth. His nose. His eyes.
Heberto turned around, flicked his gaze at them both, and said, “I’ll be damned if I’m letting this thing fall behind schedule one more day just because Roman is balls-deep in some idiot hippie.” He focused his attention on Noah. “Take it down. I don’t want there to be one scrap of this place left tomorrow morning, and that includes the building we’re standing in, you understand me?”
“No,” Noah said.
“Which part’s got you confused?”
“Sorry,” Noah said. “I wasn’t clear. Yes, I understand you. But no, I won’t do that. It’s Roman’s property. I’m not taking it down unless Roman tells me to.”
“I’m his partner,” said Heberto.
“Handshake partner,” Carmen cut in.
Her father gave her a look that meant Keep out of this.
“They’re not really partners yet,” she explained to Noah. “This phase of the development is all Roman’s responsibility.”
“I’m building a resort hotel on this land,” Heberto said. “I’ve got it all lined up.”
“Informally lined up,” she countered. “The hotel is Phase Three. There’s a lot of work to be done before we’re in any shape legally to start building.”
“I need the site cleared,” Heberto insisted.
“And I’ll clear it,” Noah said calmly, “as soon as Roman gives me the go-ahead.”
Heberto made a disgusted noise. “Carmen, get on the phone and find me another demo guy. Your man here is free to leave.”
Noah folded his arms. He looked massive when he did that. Massive and muscular and … quite impressive, actually. “Roman left the keys with me. I’m custodian of the property. If you’re going to threaten to break the law, I won’t leave this building until the police restrain you or Roman gives me the word.”
Her father rolled his eyes. “Fine. Stay here.” He flicked his hand at Carmen. “Go outside and tell the hard hats to go home.”
Carmen looked from her father to Noah. Then back to her father again.
She couldn’t hold Noah’s steady gaze. Her obedience to Heberto was a foregone conclusion, and this impatient leaping inside her—this attention-starved thing that she’d made the mistake of feeding, not understanding that it would grow stronger and louder and more—
She would ignore it.
Carmen wouldn’t acknowledge it, and she wouldn’t mourn it. She would look away from Noah as she ground the heel of her shoe into the soft skull bones of this fledgling connection that had so audaciously come to life in the space of a day. This hummingbird-hearted scrap of feeling that had made itself at home in the soft, warm place between her hips. Bracketed by Noah’s hands. Soothed with his tongue.
There were other things to look at. Work to focus on.
She picked up her clipboard, pressed it to her chest, and walked from the building.
“Carmen!”
She moved down the steps as quickly as she could, but her shoes were impractical, and her skirt shortened her stride. Noah was so much larger. His long legs ate up the difference in an instant.
“Don’t do this,” he said.
“This is my job.”
“It’s not right. You know it’s not.”
“I thought you understood,” she said. “I’m not that way.”
Her heels clipped over the smooth expanse of concrete surrounding the pool. Noah reached for her arm, his hot grip firm over her silk blouse, and it hurt, it hurt.
“Baby.”
“Don’t call me baby.”
They’d stopped moving. His jaw was slack, his mouth open in soft astonishment.
“My name is Carmen. I’m not your baby. I’m not anyone’s baby. I took you to a motel to fuck you, and just because I—just because we—” She had to stop, to inhale, which sounded like a gasp, painful, broken, issuing from her throat before she could lock it down, and his eyes were so warm when he said it again.
One syllable. A meaningless word.
“Baby.”
“You weren’t supposed to get any ideas,” she said fiercely.
“I know.”
Her emotions were climbing her throat, that leaping creature wailing at her, alive, wounded. “We aren’t going to have a thing.”
Tears. There were tears in her eyes. God.
Noah gazed at her, forehead crumpled, eyebrows in, brown eyes steady and fathomless with the kind of steady wisdom she’d never possessed, never seen modeled, never learned. “All right. If that’s what you want.”
This man—he knew what to say. She didn’t understand how he could, but he did. He knew how to plant seeds and leave them alone, how to give them space to grow, how to keep faith that the world wouldn’t destroy them as soon as he looked away.
They couldn’t be more different.
“This isn’t going to work,” she said.
“It might not,” he agreed with a shrug. “It might. I think it’s too early to tell.”
“So, what? You just wait and see?”
He smiled. “Yeah. I just wait and see.”
She looked past him to the other side of the pool, where his men had gathered in a knot around their machines, watching. “I guess if I go over and tell your crew to leave, you’ll countermand the order,” she said.
“Yep.”
“I’m going back to the office.”
“Okay.”
He walked beside her all the way, and she felt the crewmen’s eyes on them. The sun warmed her cheek and heated her hair. Beyond the buildings, the waves smacked against the beach. Noah found her hand, squeezed it, and let it go.
The world went on. On and on, waves against the beach, sunrise and sunset, notes on her clipboard, papers crumpled and tossed away at the end of the day.
Carmen thought about boats and beer, fried seafood and slow, tipsy sex.
She thought about what it would be like to have faith in what she wanted.
Her father was on his phone when they entered the office. “Fine. Give me twenty minutes.” He ended the call. “I’m running late for a meeting in Key West. I guess you’re going to tell me you couldn’t send them home with Mr. Superhero trailing you out there.”
“Yes.”
He wiped his hand up and down over one cheek. “Look. Get your boyfriend here to do his job or get a new wrecking crew in—I don’t care. Just get it over with today. I don’t have time for this shit.”
Her father’s eyes looked tired, and his accent was pronounced. I doan have time for this sheet. He would talk that way sometimes for effect, if he was meeting with other Cubans or trying to cultivate someone’s poor opinion so he could take advantage of being underestimated. But at the moment he wasn’t calculating. He was just weary.
“Call me when it’s done,” he said. “Send me a picture so I can email it to Roman and ask him what the fuck he thinks he’s doing. I need to take a leak. This place have a bathroom?”
Carmen pointed to the bathroom door. Heberto yanked at the knob, swore softly, and pushed it inward, leaving Carmen and Noah together in the dim office, isolated, awkward.
Her father did this. Took over rooms, took over situations, until there was nothing left when he walked out but the anticipation of his return.
Through the closed door, she heard the stream of his urine hit the water in the toilet.
The sound ceased, cut off prematurely.
There was a dull thump, the sound of a foot or a head striking the drywall.
“¿Pero qué coño?” her father shouted. “Who the fuck are you?”
CHAPTER SIX
“You’re quiet,” Ashley said. “Everything okay?”
Roman glanced at her. She had her feet up on his dashboard, her long legs bare to where her shorts gaped beneath the curve of her hamstrings.
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br /> She’d been quiet, too, since they left Camelot, Ohio, but the silence felt okay.
Strange to think that wouldn’t have been the case a few days ago.
He’d renounced one tie that bound him to his life back in Miami, made one choice—to side with Ashley—and since that moment, everything had been happening so quickly.
He thought of a rope under tension. How if you took a knife to it, nicked through just a few fibers, the cut ends would whip and spin, unraveling themselves.
“It’s all these small towns,” he said. “They look like where I’m from.”
The apples of her cheeks lifted—Ashley’s sly smile. “You told me you were from Miami.”
“They look like where I grew up,” he corrected.
“It’s the same.”
Yeah. No matter where in the world he lived, Heraly, Wisconsin, would always be where he was from. There was no escaping it—no getting away from Heraly in some final, forever way. Not when the tides of memory could always drag him back.
But this wasn’t Wisconsin. They were on a back road in north-central Ohio, a world of flat green expanses punctuated by the sort of towns that lined up politely on either side of the road, waiting for their turn to spill secrets.
“You think it’s gone yet?” she asked.
“Sunnyvale?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “That depends on Heberto.”
They’d left the subject behind hours ago, tacitly settling into silence when they pulled away from the curb. Nana and Stanley had stayed behind to get Carly’s mobile home—and possibly also Carly and company—while Roman and Ashley scouted out a campsite for tonight and grabbed some time alone.
We’ll catch up, Nana had said. You kids have fun.
Fun wasn’t exactly the right word for these slow-moving hours in the cab of the Escalade, with the smells and sounds of the world blowing in one open window only to fly out the other and leave the space between him and Ashley clean and empty, ready to be filled with their clasped hands, the brilliance of her smile, the juicy squeaking of her gum.
He didn’t have words for the comfort of Ashley’s presence as they cut through this landscape that flayed him open.
She turned toward him, folding her legs and tucking up her feet so she could give him her full attention. “Tell me about Heberto,” she said.
“What do you want to know?”
“Why do you say his name like … like when you say ‘That depends on Heberto,’ you could be saying, That depends on the will of the Lord?”
Roman considered before he replied. Resisted, then gave in to the tug of the past.
“When I was sixteen, seventeen, I went through this hard-core Cuban nationalist phase. I think now it was about seventy percent ordinary teenager rebellion, thirty percent a response to growing up in a place where nobody looked like me. I’d go around praising Fidel and talking about the universal brotherhood of man. It drove Patrick apeshit. He’d just about make himself cross-eyed trying to explain why I didn’t know what I was talking about.”
“Did you?”
“No. I was seventeen, and Cuba is fucking complicated. It’s a lot easier not to know what you’re talking about than to educate yourself on the different stages of the Revolution—I didn’t have the patience to tease all that apart back then. I just wanted to grow my Fidel beard and wear a fatigue jacket and stomp around downtown.”
“You had a beard?”
“I tried to have a beard.”
“Was it sad and patchy? God, I’d love to see pictures of your sad, patchy Fidel beard.”
“I doubt there are any.”
“Patrick didn’t take pictures?”
“If he did, he wouldn’t have kept them.” And Roman didn’t want to think about that. “So my senior year of high school I entered an essay contest sponsored by this Cuban group. These are mostly rich exile businessmen, the kind of people who hate Castro and want Cuba cut off and left to suffocate. I send them this twenty-page tract full of exactly the kind of thing they hate. You know, pages and pages about racial progress on the island and sugar productivity and the glories of the free public school system. I was so dumb about all of it, I didn’t even know it was an insult. I thought I’d win.”
“Did you?”
He exhaled a laugh. “No. But I got a phone call from Heberto Zumbado the week after the contest results were announced.”
“Because he liked your essay?”
“Because he wanted to explain to me, in painstaking detail, what a jackass I’d made of myself.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. He reamed me. But then, after an hour of that, he started asking me questions. Where was I from, where were my people from, had I been to the island, did I speak Spanish? At first, it was like a police interrogation, except I started to realize that he genuinely wanted to know. He was listening to me.”
“How come?”
“I think at first because I was Cuban, and he felt a sense of responsibility. Like, Hey, a missing Cuban kid randomly living with white people in Wisconsin, let’s figure out what the deal is here. But after that he called me again, more than once. My senior year, he checked in every month or two. He found out about my father, asked me about that, asked how Patrick treated me, was I going to college, that kind of stuff.”
Roman hadn’t thought about those phone calls in years. How much time Heberto had carved out of his busy schedule—hours, sometimes entire afternoons. They had talked about what Roman was reading. What he thought of college, Cuba, Patrick, the Catholic Church, girls. What he thought the world should be like.
“He liked you.”
“I don’t know if he liked me. It’s impossible to know if Heberto likes you. But he was interested in me, and that meant a lot to me back then.”
“I bet it meant the world.”
He looked over. Her blue eyes were clear and full of understanding, and Roman remembered that Ashley had found someone, too. Ashley’s grandmother had given her a home, listened to her, bought her tap shoes, told her she had a spark of starlight in her.
“Patrick fucking hated it.”
“I’m sure.”
They were quiet for a minute. Roman waited for Ashley to put together all the pieces. Earlier in the trip, she’d heard him on the phone, saying Heberto paid for him to go to Princeton and gave him a place to stay over break. She knew he didn’t go home to Heraly anymore, that he didn’t speak to Patrick, that he’d been to visit his father at the prison and wouldn’t talk about it.
“I’ll tell you sometime,” he said. “But not today. These towns …”
“It’s all right.”
He tried a smile. “Thanks.”
Ashley reached over the console and laid her hand on his shoulder. He placed his own hand on top of hers, then picked up her fingers and brushed a kiss over her knuckles. She tucked her hand back into her lap, looking down at the spot he’d kissed.
A moment later, she straightened her legs out and propped them on the dash.
“I think I kind of like Heberto,” she said.
“You wouldn’t if you met him.”
She sank farther down into the seat, tipped her head back, and turned it to the side enough to smile at him. “We’ll find out, huh?”
“We just might.”
“Do you think we should give up? Go home and … whatever? Because, I don’t know, I think maybe it’s not going to get easier.”
“Probably not.”
“And I’ve already cried more in the past week and a half than I have in, like, five years.”
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s not your fault. I mean, a lot of it is my fault. I guess I want to believe that maybe there’s something to look forward to at the end of this. Other than, you know, whatever wisdom I acquire from having fucked up so many things.”
Roman laughed.
“I’m serious!”
But she was smiling at herself, relaxed in the seat, slump
ed and bare-legged and so much more alive than anyone Roman knew.
“I’m the wrong person to ask,” he said. “Until I met you I had the next five years of my life all planned out. Now I don’t know what’s going to happen five minutes from now. And you told me I should enjoy it.”
“You should.”
“I am.”
Ashley’s head jerked. “You didn’t just admit that.”
“I did.”
“Roman Díaz, I never thought I’d see the day.”
“Me neither. But you know what Heberto would say?”
“What would He-berrr-to say?” She gave the name depth, rolling the r for extra emphasis.
“He’d say we make our own luck.”
“Huh.”
“Huh,” Roman agreed.
“Okay,” she said. “I can work with that.” Ashley poked her tongue through her gum.
“When you do that, the gum looks like a tongue condom.”
She flipped down the vanity mirror and pushed her tongue through again. Orange gum. Pointy red tongue. She slurped it back into her mouth. “Have you ever done it with a flavored condom?”
“Done what, exactly?”
Ashley flipped the mirror up and pushed her sunglasses low on her nose. She made vamp eyes at him and lowered her husky voice. “Anything, baby.”
Roman chuckled. “No.”
“Let’s buy some at a gas station. Then we can park by one of these rivers we keep driving over and do four hundred dirty flavored-condom things in your car. Smear secretions everywhere.”
“Ash.”
“And we’ll be so busy desecrating your traveling sanctuary, here, we won’t even hear our phones, and Nana and Stanley will wonder where we are, and they’ll probably call the police, but it’s just that we’re, like, rimming each other in the Escalade.”
Roman started to laugh, so naturally she kept going, listing dirty sex acts until she ran out and had to look them up on her phone.
“Seriously, Roman. We’re going to do five of these at the next gas station. I’ll pick ten, and then you can choose the least-threatening options. How do you feel about the ‘Christmas turkey carver’ ”?
“Which one was that again?”
She told him. He suffered some kind of lung collapse. It felt so good and so bad—he’d forgotten what it was like to laugh until you wished you could die.
