by Ruthie Knox
Roman shook his head to clear it. He looked at Ashley—looked right at Ashley—and told that voice to fuck off.
He was done with that voice.
He refused to spend the rest of his life alone when he had a shot at spending it with her. If that meant he had to chase her all over the country—if it meant he had to tell her he loved her, or punch her senator-father in the face and probably make himself throw up in the process, or if it meant he had to tell her every day before she got out of bed that she was amazing and beautiful, exciting and awesome, worth every sacrifice he could possibly make for her—then he would do that.
He would do it for ten days or ten months or ten years. He would keep trying. Keep hoping. Because when he was with her, he couldn’t believe there was anything wrong with him—nothing that couldn’t be fixed.
He’d lived without hope. He was done.
This time, he would let her go, but he wouldn’t let go of her.
He would follow her. He’d take care of her friends. He’d talk to Esther.
He’d drive her trailer to his hometown and walk around in the mess of his own past, because there were parts of himself he’d left behind in Heraly, Wisconsin, and it was about time he took the past out to the woodshed and dealt with it.
There were things you couldn’t turn into fine just by pretending they’d never happened.
There were things you could never get your head around until you waded into the muck and made yourself feel them. It didn’t matter if you were afraid. It only mattered what you did about it.
He’d learned that from Ashley.
She looked up at him, her blue eyes pained, her mouth thin, and her lips blue. The wind whipped her hair into his face, and he caught a piece just to rub his thumb over its softness. He cupped her neck to feel her warmth, her pulse, and he said, “Ash, honey, it was always more than sex.”
She closed her eyes. “I have to go.”
“Then go. But I’m going to follow you.”
“Roman—”
“Go,” he said again, and he kissed her mouth. “But I love you.”
She shuddered. He didn’t think about it. He just kissed her again, harder, squeezing her shoulders, compressing all his hope for the future into this one kiss, this promise.
We can do this. You and I. Even if nobody believes it. Even if you don’t believe it right now—we can still do it.
We can compromise. We can build something. We can love each other.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” Her voice came out high and pinched.
“Yeah, you do. And whatever it is, it’ll be the right thing. It’s going to be awesome, just because you’re doing it.”
She huffed a laugh. “I meant about you.”
“So take some time and think about it. And when I see you again, maybe you’ll know.”
The look she gave him was impossible to pick apart. Frustration and sorrow. Guilt and anger. Hope.
He would hang on to the hope.
Roman kissed her forehead. Then he turned the woman he loved around, flattened his palm in the middle of her back, and gave her a gentle push.
“I’ll take care of everything,” he said. “You go.”
With one last look over her shoulder, she went.
He stood on the plank she’d led him out on and watched her walk away, listening to her sandals flapping against the soles of her feet.
Listening to the waves beat against the rock.
His heart beat. His skin cooled.
He stood there until he couldn’t see her anymore.
CHAPTER TWO
Roman returned to the lawn to find all of Ashley’s friends gathered around the picnic table, eating and talking—and with them Carmen, bright as a cardinal in her red suit.
He checked the lot, but the vehicle she and Ashley’s father had arrived in was gone.
“They left you here?”
She nodded. “I told the senator I’d catch a commercial flight back.”
“He wouldn’t fly you?”
“It’s a very small plane.”
“Oh.”
Carmen took anxiety medicine when she flew, and even then she usually white-knuckled it and napped for hours after landing.
It must have been a hell of a flight up.
“You book a ticket yet?”
“No. I wanted to find out what your plan was first.”
His plan. Right. Because he was supposed to have one.
Everyone at the table was looking at him as though they expected him to. With Ashley gone, they would naturally default to assuming he was in charge—because, even though she didn’t think of herself as a leader, she’d been in charge.
He was her deputy. Her partner. Her …
Actually, he didn’t know quite what he was anymore, in regard to Ashley, but it seemed pretty clear these folks expected him to step into her shoes.
She would know what to do, even without a plan. Roman had prided himself on always knowing the next step. He’d never appreciated how much bravery it took to deal with problems as they arose.
“I guess I thought I’d start with lunch,” he said.
Nana patted the bench seat beside her. “Grab a seat. Esther made us a good spread.”
Roman folded himself into the space. “You eat yet?” he asked Carmen, who remained standing.
“No, I’m fine.”
He reached out for the platter of deviled eggs and extended it to her. “Eat,” he said. “You love these.”
“I really couldn’t—”
Nana made an impatient sound and plucked a plate from the stack. She grabbed two egg halves and a napkin before handing them to Carmen. “Please join us,” she urged. “Dora doesn’t bite.”
Carmen gave in and sat next to the toddler, who had chocolate particles smeared all around her mouth and the remains of a slice of black-and-white-striped cake on a plate in front of her.
Refrigerator cake. Some of the churchwomen had called it zebra cake. Roman hadn’t seen one of those in … how long? Fifteen years?
“What can I get you?” Esther asked Carmen. “I’ve got ham sandwiches, turkey sandwiches, mac and cheese, potato salad, fruit salad, rolls …”
They negotiated what would go on Carmen’s plate, and Roman thought about how he and Ashley had driven all the way here so Ashley could talk to this one woman.
Esther had Asian features and gray hair pulled tightly into a bun. Wearing tidy dark slacks and a blue cardigan, she made an interesting contrast to Nana, with her unruly curly hair and her oversize personality, and to Mitzi, whose dark good looks projected a sensual mischievousness.
It was odd to think all of these women had been Susan Bowman’s friends.
Odd that he had been, too, sort of.
And odd to recognize that it was really Susan who had brought Roman to this Wisconsin peninsula jutting out into Lake Michigan.
She had given him Sunnyvale. In a way, she’d given him Ashley, too.
“What about you, Roman?” Esther asked.
“I’d love some of that cake,” he said.
He remembered the taste of refrigerator cake—thick, cold whipped cream spread between softened and crumbling chocolate cookies—and he wanted it. He wanted to taste something.
“You should have a deviled egg,” Carmen said. She held one in her hand, half eaten. A spot of yolk-yellow decorated one corner of her mouth. “They’re amazing.”
“I’ll take a couple of those, too. And a turkey sandwich, and some chips.” The chips were a reach for Esther. Roman grabbed the plate from her. “Here, I can do it.”
He loaded up his plate, conscious of everyone’s eyes on him.
Conscious of his grumbling stomach, how hungry he was.
He thought of Ashley in Nana’s kitchen, laughing and commenting on the strangeness of a life that had blown all of them so far off their accustomed paths.
How strange to be sitting here with Ashley’s people, famished, eating deviled eggs wit
h Carmen.
Strange to have come full circle, back to Wisconsin, back to these picnic foods of his youth, this lake, and this view that looked so much like the life he’d left behind. Almost full circle.
He was a few hundred miles from Heraly, with work left in front of him if he was going to make it back to Ashley. If he was going to be a man who could operate without a plan, who knew how to love and how to hope, and how to face the future without flinching.
He ate the cake first.
It tasted amazing.
Ashley stood near the nose of the single-engine Cessna, reluctantly admiring the shine of its white paint and its zippy blue-and-gray racing stripes. The fuselage felt cool beneath her hand, the enameled finish perfectly smooth.
“You got a new plane.”
Her father grinned—the first genuine smile she’d seen on his face since he arrived.
She’d forgotten he could smile like that.
In the car on the thirty-minute drive to the airport, she’d been assaulted by all of the things she’d forgotten. The aspects of her relationship with her father that she’d blocked out, because it was easier to tell herself they didn’t get along than to admit they did, sometimes.
It was easier not to think about the smell of the Altoid mints he crunched like candy or the restless tapping of his fingers against the steering wheel.
How he always came out swinging, but after she gave in, he was the one who apologized first.
How he wasn’t always angry, and he wasn’t always mean. He could be difficult, but he could also be genuine and charming, and she forgot when they were fighting how strong this other thing between them was—this yearning to love him and be loved by him, twisted up uncomfortably with all their other feelings.
Her resentment. His disappointment.
He helped her up into the cockpit. “Get comfortable,” he said. “I’ll make sure we’re refueled and ready to go.”
The seats were beige leather, the instrument panel tricked out with modern gadgets whose purpose she didn’t know. She didn’t want to look too closely, afraid she’d find out that she recognized some of them, after all. That somewhere in front of her were instruments her father had taught her how to read, years ago.
She didn’t want to feel the bite of nostalgia, sharp pins in her heart when he climbed into his own seat and held out a headset. “I adjusted this one for Carmen, so it’s probably a good fit.”
Ashley checked to make sure the noise-canceling function was turned on and slipped the padded cups over her ears. He was right—she didn’t even have to tighten the band over her hair. The hush fell, immediate and complete.
He slipped on his own headset, then leaned forward to turn a dial. When he spoke, his voice came at her from inside her own head, like the voice of God. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Buckle up. I’ve just got to run through the last few things on the preflight checklist, and then we’re good to go.”
Ten minutes later, they lifted off, and her father smiled to himself as gravity pushed its fist into her belly and pressed her shoulders to the seat.
Ashley squeezed her eyes shut tight.
It was easier to do that than to remember another plane, another father. Another life, when her parents were still married, still argued, still hated each other—but she and the man beside her had found pockets of peace, thousands of feet above the earth.
In those moments when her dad took her soaring above the land, over the water, he used to grin at the sky as though he’d made it himself, and he wanted to share it with her.
It had never been all bad between them.
It had never been all good with her grandma, or with any of the people she’d taken Roman to visit.
Maybe that was her problem: she wanted so much to flatten the world into two dimensions—love and hate, good and bad—when almost nothing was that simple.
“Will we fly all the way back today?” she asked.
“We just about could, but we’re going to have to stop in Nashville tonight. I’ve put in a lot of hours already this morning—I don’t want to risk getting overtired.”
That meant another airport. Going to a hotel with him, getting up with him, eating breakfast with him, another flight, an arrival …
“Where are we going to land when we get to Florida?”
“My car’s in Marathon.”
So tomorrow he would drive her to Sunnyvale. He would witness whatever was going to happen there, and then—
She didn’t know what then. She wondered how long it would take Roman to make his way home. Whether he would call her, or—
No. He would call her. She didn’t have to wonder about that, because when he’d promised to follow her, he’d been as solid as the rock they’d stood on.
Ashley wished she could lean into his solidity now.
Beneath her, the earth dropped away, and the shapes of the land revealed themselves.
At the lake earlier, clouds had blocked the sun, but those clouds had vanished and there was nothing, nothing separating her from the view laid out in front of her, on both sides of her, everywhere she looked.
Her father banked the plane into a turn, and Ashley floated above the barnyards, the sharp pencil lines dividing the land into farms and fields, roads and fences, forests, ridges, furrows—all of it so clear from up here. So obvious.
Roman was down there somewhere. Loving her.
Look at me, he’d said.
She heard him so much more clearly in this silence than she’d been able to hear him on the shore, gazing out over the water.
It was always more than sex, he’d told her.
Go, but I’m going to follow you.
Go. But I love you.
Why hadn’t she told him she loved him, too?
She should have told him.
“You remember when you used to fly with me?” her father asked.
“Yeah.”
He looked at her. “That was fun, wasn’t it?”
“It was.”
Silence for a minute. Two minutes.
Time didn’t mean anything up here, only motion. The drone of the engines and the passage of their bodies through space.
“I think about you,” he said. “Just about every time I get in a plane.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“It doesn’t seem so long ago. Not to me.”
Ashley’s palms gripped her elbows. She pressed her forearms into her stomach in a futile effort to contain everything she felt.
He’d flown all morning, greeted her, humiliated her. He’d told her that he paid her grandmother to take care of her—implied that her grandmother had only loved her because she wanted the money he sent—and now he was being so …
So human.
So annoyingly human.
The way he smiled with pride at his stupid, fuel-guzzling luxury plane.
The predictable way he showed her his belly, now that they were done arguing.
When she was a kid, he’d take them all out for ice cream after the worst fights. He’d take Ashley up in his plane, and the height, the droning of the engines, the long view—all of it would smooth the anger out of him, the same way it smoothed it out of her.
Now that they were done arguing, there was vulnerability in his voice that she could hear. She could hear it because he’d paid maybe a thousand dollars for these fucking noise-canceling headsets, so she could hear everything—every breath he took, every word he spoke, even the nervous catch of an inhalation right before he said, It doesn’t seem so long ago. Not to me, burrowing into her, impossible to ignore.
She wished he were simpler. She wished this were easier: this man, this relationship.
She wished she knew how to manage it so she could see her father without tripping over memories of the heartbreak of her childhood.
She’d been a little girl who wanted her parents to love each other, but they hadn’t.
She’d been a thirteen-year-old wh
o wanted her mother not to die, but no one had the power to grant her that wish. And what she’d been left with in the aftermath was a father who loved her but didn’t know what to do with her, and an anger at him that stood in for her anger at the universe, at God, at everything.
Neither of them had known how to cope with the enormity of her anger.
So he’d sent her to his mother, and his mother had given her the means of coping, but she hadn’t taught her how to repair the relationship with her father. Susan Bowman hadn’t known how to fix broken relationships or how to talk to her only son.
Ashley didn’t know how, either.
She hated her father. And she loved him.
She resented him. And she longed to be closer to him.
She shut him out and argued with him and tried to pretend he didn’t exist, and when that didn’t work, she wished he were easier.
And God, it all seemed so obvious now, thousands of feet in the air—Because, duh, Ashley, you wished exactly the same thing about Roman.
She’d wished, when she first met Roman, that her enemies would remain her enemies and her friends would always be her friends.
She’d wished, on the road with him, that the people she loved would love her back, and that love would feel like love—that it would never feel like condemnation, judgment, or disapproval.
She’d wished the people who loved her wouldn’t judge her, so she could be a spark of starlight, pinwheeling through the galaxy, beautiful and bright, without regard to morality or rules, propriety or complexity.
Ashley had wanted that because she’d loved her grandmother, and Susan was like that sometimes—bright and unbounded.
But Susan had been other things, too: secretive and selfish, heedless and impulsive.
And the thing about starlight was that it didn’t have to be born. It didn’t have to age or adapt or change. It didn’t have responsibilities or relationships. It just burned.
Which sounded nice, until you thought about how it died.
How it came from nothing, went nowhere. How it never learned, never grew, and never loved.
How lonely it must be, to be a spark of starlight.
