It startled Ash to realize how comfortable she felt here after only a few weeks. How real people seemed when you peeled away layers of presumption, when you paid attention to each other for the things you cared about and not the things you had.
She pushed her way through the bodies clustered around the stereo and found a space near the porch railing. She knew only a fraction of the guests by name, but she didn’t really mind. She’d catch up with Eddie in a minute or two, see if they needed to make another run to the store for anything. But at the moment, she wanted a few minutes to breathe. July had snuck up on her when she wasn’t looking, and she knew that after the fireworks vanished, August would steal along in its place. Then September would round the corner, hand-in-hand with a life she wasn’t sure she wanted to meet.
“Ashton, please call home,” her mother had said on her voicemail last night. “We haven’t heard from you in weeks. Is everything okay? Please…”
She’d erased the message before her mother finished talking. What was she supposed to say? How could she begin to explain her decision? Funny how it became easier every day to pretend she belonged in Paradise, to pretend she came from a normal family and had no secrets to hide.
Ash turned up the stereo volume another notch and dug a cold beer from the bottom of the cooler. She stared across the street to the shadowed park that backed up to Helen’s house. It was quiet for a Saturday. Usually she and Eddie spied a few kids there on the weekends, sneaking joints, making out, talking loudly in that adolescent voice that cracked and wavered and flirted and bullied. She laughed at them, wondered about them. Sometimes she even envied them a little.
Everything is so exciting when you’re sixteen, so fresh and painful. Your skin aches with wanting, and every sunrise, every phone call, every heartbreak, cuts you a little deeper. As a grown-up, she’d almost forgotten how a mere breath of wind at the right moment could bring tears to her eyes.
Tonight, though, the swings hung unnaturally still, and only a stray cat wound its way through the legs of a picnic table before it disappeared behind Helen’s house. Ash wondered how many first kisses that park had seen, and how many goodbyes.
Someone leaned against the railing next to her. “Hi, stranger.” Eddie’s teeth were a wide white slash in the darkness. He glanced across the street. “Whatcha you looking at?”
“Nothing, really. Just the night, I guess.” His scars seemed less noticeable in the moonlight. Still, she wanted to know his secrets, even as she tried to ignore her own.
He finished his beer in a long, smooth gulp. “It’s a great one, isn’t it? Terrific party. Everyone’s having fun.”
“Good.” Ash leaned over the railing again, chin propped on one hand. The humidity had finally broken, and now the temperature hovered at a perfect seventy-five degrees. On the breezes that passed through every few minutes, the perfume of Helen’s gardenias floated up to them. She took a long breath and drank it all in, wishing she could bottle the night and make it last.
The song on the stereo changed, and Eddie nudged her. “Wanna dance?”
“Here?”
“Why not here?”
Ash hesitated. She didn’t need to take center stage with Paradise’s favorite son and have someone in the crowd start to wonder why her face looked familiar. Plus, she wasn’t sure she trusted herself to put one hand in Eddie’s and pretend it didn’t take her breath away.
“Ash?” The edge of a tattoo peeked out of a shirtsleeve, and she studied the familiar lines that crossed Eddie’s face. She’d memorized them by now, the hairline ones, the thicker one, the patterns they made across his cheeks.
“Okay.”
Eddie took her hand. Their fingers met and twisted together, as if they’d done so a hundred times before. She stumbled a little and then found her rhythm, following him as they shuffled in a slow, tight circle. He spun her under his arm, and strong fingers moved across the small of her back. They guided her away and then back to him. They pressed into her palm, burning her skin a little.
The music bled into her veins as they danced around the roof, and for a few minutes, Ashton Kirk forgot everything. She forgot her father’s arrest, her mother’s plaintive messages, her sister’s harsh words. She forgot all her sad feelings, her confusion about Colin. It was just she and Eddie and some silly song. Nothing else mattered, except being in Paradise with someone who wouldn’t judge her or expect anything from her. In that instant, she wanted to stay twenty-six, laughing and dancing on rooftops, forever.
The song ended too soon, and they drifted to an awkward stop. Eddie looked down, and Ash glanced away, suddenly self-conscious of her hand in his, of their shoulders brushing in the shadows.
“I should check on the food,” she said after a minute.
“Okay.” But he didn’t drop her hand. “Thanks for the dance.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” It was all she could manage. Ash slipped back inside to find a corner in which to calm her heart and splash some water on her burning cheeks.
***
“Hey, check this out.” The voice came from the living room, and when Ash peeked inside, she saw a small knot of people gathered around her television set. The news banner scrolling across the bottom of the screen read, “Kirk Charges Dropped. Two Men Charged in Political Framing of Massachusetts Senator.”
Ash dropped the trashcan she held, and beer bottles spilled everywhere. A few people turned toward her, startled, but she didn’t care. Pushing through the crowd, she reached for the remote and turned up the volume.
“In a stunning turn of events,” the news anchor reported, “all charges originally filed against Senator Randolph Kirk have been dropped. Earlier today, two men came forward and confessed to being hired by a prominent member of the Republican Party to plant cocaine in the senator’s vehicle. They also…”
Voices rose, clamoring at the revelation, and Ash lost the rest of the anchor’s sentence. By the time she wormed her way close enough to hear, the news had switched over to a segment about a local dog trainer.
“Would never have guessed…
“Told you he was innocent…
“Betcha it turns out to be one of those religious fanatics from…”
Fragments of conversation rose and fell around her, but Ash couldn’t make out any of them. In fact, she couldn’t follow a single thought beyond the ones racing inside her own head. Her stomach felt as though it might erupt. She reached blindly for a place to sit.
Innocent.
After all this time, her father was innocent. All those weeks, he’d insisted that someone had set him up. He was right. And no one believed him. His own family didn’t believe him. Ash shook her head. Unshed tears burned in her eyes. Is that why Colin had called last night? Did he already know? She blew out a long breath. Everything had suddenly become more complicated.
“Hey, you okay?” Jen said close to her ear.
Ash jumped, startled. “Did you see it?” One hand waved toward the television screen. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Did you hear what they said? My father’s innocent. Someone set him up.”
Her friend stared at her for a long minute. “Yeah, I heard. Now what are you going to do?”
Chapter Fifteen
Ash tied the last bag of garbage and set it near the door. “There. Done.”
The clock read after two in the morning. She felt as though she’d been run over by fatigue, but at least the place was clean. The last thing she wanted to do was wake up in an apartment that reeked of stale beer or find a half-naked couple lounging on her living room floor.
Frank and his wife had been the last to leave, about a half-hour ago. She could hear Jen fussing in the bathroom, and she guessed Eddie was somewhere downstairs, hauling boxes of empties onto the porch.
She sank onto the loveseat and let it cradle her. She’d switched shifts with one of the other waitresses at the restaurant, so at least she didn’t have to work until the following day. She stretched, and a yawn split her mouth wide. “
Think I’ll sleep ‘til about noon,” she said aloud. “Maybe even later.”
“Sounds like a good idea.” The familiar voice buzzed through her, and she opened her eyes again. She hadn’t heard him come in, but there Eddie stood in the doorway, smiling at her. Her heart jumped a little, sending shots of adrenaline into all the wrong places. She’d managed to avoid being alone with him for most of the night, not trusting the tingling in her hands and toes after their dance. But now it sounded like Jen had made her way into the spare bedroom, and nothing stood between Ash and Eddie but a few feet of hardwood.
“Thanks for taking everything downstairs.”
“No problem.” He sat on the arm of the loveseat. “You need anything else?”
She pretended not to hear the double meaning in his words. Instead, she lifted a hand toward the roof. “Still have to take down the tables and chairs out there. But I guess that can wait until tomorrow.”
“I’ll do it. Only take a few minutes.”
“No, Eddie, really. It can wait.”
But he’d already crossed the room and crawled through the window. Ash sighed and followed. She’d much rather wait until she had about ten or twelve hours of sleep, but if he was going to tackle the last of the cleanup, she couldn’t very well sit there and watch him.
By the time she made it outside, he’d already collapsed most of the chairs and folded them into stacks of three and four. Two tables still stood, and as Eddie yanked on the legs of one, she found herself watching the way his shirt pulled across his back, the way his hair fell into his eyes, the way his arms flexed and deft hands put things back where they belonged.
Ash made herself look away. Struggling with a few of the chairs, she pulled them toward the window. But the effort exhausted her, and after a minute she leaned against the side of the house to catch her breath.
“You okay?” Eddie glanced over his shoulder.
“Yeah. Just resting.” She reached for another chair, but this one sprung open when she touched it, and the next thing she knew, it had pinched her finger in its hinge. Hard.
“Ow! Dammit.” Yanking the finger free, she blinked back tears. “That hurt.” A blood blister welled up immediately, and she put it to her mouth to try and suck away the pain.
In an instant Eddie was there. He reached for her hand and held it under the weak light that shone out from the kitchen. “Ouch. That’s gonna sting for a while.”
“No kidding.”
He looked at her, concern in his eyes, and suddenly Ash knew she was in trouble. Big, huge, complicated trouble. She felt as if someone had pushed her out of a plane from about a million miles up, and in that moment on the roof, when Eddie held her hand in his, she fell and kept falling, past the point where she knew whether it was right or wrong, to some bottomless, buoyant space where all she wanted to do was stay in his gaze forever.
“Ash? You okay? You want some ice?”
God, she loved the way the words sounded in his mouth. She loved the way he took her nickname and made it sound like no one else ever had. Even the pinpricks of desire Colin had once stirred now seemed like long-dead embers.
“No, I think it’s—” She couldn’t finish the thought, not with his eyes on her like that. She wanted to pull her hand away, to run the finger under cold water and make the sting go away. But she couldn’t move. Eddie’s gaze traveled from her hand to her face, and in the next instant there was no more space between them: no floor, no rooftop, barely any air at all.
***
Eddie gave up. He couldn’t stand there any longer, holding onto Ash’s hand and pretending not to notice the desire that rippled back and forth between them like a damn tidal wave. One arm slipped around her, meaning to comfort, but before he knew it, his lips sought out hers. He needed to taste her, to feel her, to fill her with half of what swept through him. For an instant, she hesitated. Then her lips parted, with a sigh that turned into a purr, filling his mouth with want and the promise of things he had no right to even ask.
He pushed Ash’s hair from her face and nipped at her lips, her earlobes, the skin at the base of her neck. She jumped a little beneath him, a sizzling electrical wire. His hands moved to her waist, to her hips, to the pliant places along the small of her back. His thumbs moved in circles, stroking tender skin in the spaces where her shirt pulled away from her shorts. He grew hard and pulled her to him, letting her know what she did to him, how she turned him inside out.
“Eddie,” she breathed, and in that moment he wanted every part of her, there on the rooftop, beneath the sky. He drank her in, tasting her, pleading, licking, as she melted under his touch. Her hands came up to the back of his neck, nails digging into him. Eddie pulled back long enough to glimpse dark desire in her eyes.
His mouth found her ear, his words a ragged whisper. “God, I want you.”
Her response was a lifting of her hips, a pressing against him, heat matching heat. Her tongue wound around his, with quick little pants that made him loose in the knees. Hell, he’d wanted her since the first day he’d run up those stairs and stood in her doorway. He wanted her on the days they argued, on the days he came home too tired to breathe, on the complicated days when one woman or another let herself out of Eddie’s apartment. None of them mattered now. He couldn’t believe any of them ever had.
Ash was different from any other woman he’d ever met. More intelligent, more secretive, more sensual in the way she moved across a room. More heartbroken, too, though he didn’t yet know exactly what or who had devastated her. More confusing, more temperamental, more fragile some days. Was that why she turned him upside down with desire? That crazy combination that he’d never before run across in a woman? Because more than anything, he wanted to wind this amazing creature inside him, possess her, melt into her and lose a little of himself before coming up for air.
“Ash? Are you and Eddie still—oh...”
At Jen’s voice in the kitchen, Ash pulled away from him. Through the window, Eddie could see the blonde fishing around in the refrigerator. She held up a hand, as if to block her view. “Sorry. Pretend I was never here, okay?”
But it was too late. One inch between them turned to two and then six. Ash looked up at Eddie, a thousand questions in her eyes that he knew he couldn’t answer. I don’t know, he wanted to say. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what tomorrow brings. All I know is—
“Stay with me tonight,” he whispered. God, if she didn’t say yes, he was going to take her right here, neighbors be damned.
She shook her head. One hand lingered on his cheek, on his deepest scar, as she looked from him to Jen and back again. “Eddie, there’s so much—”
“Don’t.” He raised a finger to her lips. “Don’t explain. Don’t make excuses.” He ran a hand through his hair and tried to calm his pounding heart.
“It’s just that—”
He kissed her before she could finish, and his last words escaped inside her mouth. “I’ll wait, Ash. Okay? For you, I’ll wait.”
Chapter Sixteen
Ash slept late the next day. She pushed her face under the pillows, trying to ignore the morning sun that streamed through her curtains. Finally, sometime around noon, Jen knocked on her door.
“Ash? You alive in there?”
Alive…
She rolled over. One hand came up to her throat, and she wondered whether Eddie’s mouth had left a mark there, a deep strawberry of passion that she could still feel clear down to her toes.
I don’t know the last time I felt this alive.
“Yeah,” she croaked. “Come on in.”
Jen pushed open the door and eased inside. Damp hair swung against her cheeks, and she smelled like soap and shampoo. Her eyes gleamed as she leaned against Ash’s dresser.
“So,” she began.
Ash pushed herself up. She felt tired, pressed flat, ironed down to little bits of nothing. Though she’d slept for nearly nine hours, her dreams had bounced around, little flickers of Eddie and Colin
and her father on the edges of her subconscious. She yawned and drew her hair back from her face.
“Does he kiss as well as he pours tequila shots?”
Her cheeks flamed again. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why the hell not?”
Ash shrugged and picked at the covers. Because everything else in her life was a total mess right now. Because she couldn't get involved when she'd be leaving town in a couple of months. But mostly because it scared her, the way she felt around Eddie.
“Colin called me the other night,” she said instead of answering.
“You’re kidding.”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?”
“What did he want?”
Ash reached for the bottle of water beside her bed. “I guess to apologize.”
“Screw him.” Jen narrowed her gaze. “Did you hang up on him? Tell him to go to hell?”
But it wasn’t that easy. Ash couldn’t just say goodbye to all that. Colin had been her life for three years. She thought he’d be her future, too.
“Ash, don’t even tell me you’re thinking about taking him back.”
“I’m not,” she lied.
Jen narrowed her eyes. “Listen, I’ve got to catch the train. I’ll call you later tonight, okay? And we’ll talk about it.” She gave Ash a quick hug and turned to go. “But let me just say, for the record, that Eddie West is more of a man than Colin will ever be. Screw the pedigree and the money and whatever else you think Colin has to offer you. A hundred of him wouldn’t add up to half the personality of that guy living downstairs.”
“Yeah, I know,” Ash said to the door that closed behind her friend. That was part of the problem.
Summer on Main Street Page 68
