Hitched (6 page)

Not because the opportunity to sort through her grandmother’s property had been taken from her, but because she understood that Grandma had made this choice, this
deliberate decision
, to exclude her. And that she hadn’t made it once or twice, on a whim, but over and over again.

She must have made it daily, for months—this decision
not
to call on Ashley.
Not
to bring her back.
Not
to get her involved.

Roman’s bald statement made it so much worse because what he was describing wasn’t even a decision not to involve Ashley. It was a conspiracy
against
her, a
condition of the sale
, and she couldn’t make sense of it unless she allowed herself to believe the absolute worst.

Grandma hadn’t wanted her by her side to help her cross over into death. She hadn’t wanted her to carry on the legacy at Sunnyvale, to step into the shoes, the role, that she’d been
training for since she was thirteen years old. To her grandmother, all Ashley was worth was a handful of boxes stashed in a junky old trailer.

The person she had loved best in the world hadn’t loved her back. Or not as much as Ashley loved her.

It turned out to hurt just as much the third time as it had the first two.

She turned as far away from Roman as she could get without leaving the seat and pushed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets.

A loud bang brought her head up.

Roman glanced in the rearview mirror.

Bang.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said.

Ashley spun around, but she couldn’t see the trailer well from inside the Escalade. “What is it?”

“The door’s blown open.”

He signaled and began to slow.

Bang.

“Sorry,” she said, before she remembered that she was supposed to be torturing him, not apologizing. “The latch is kind of crap.”

“It’s done this before?”

“It used to do this all the time.”

“Why didn’t you fix it?”

“We tried to fix it, but it doesn’t really cooperate.”

They were on a busy state highway, only two lanes, with a narrow shoulder. Roman pulled as far over as he could get and cut the engine. “You have a screwdriver back there?”

“Maybe. Why, what are you going to do?”

“Take the door off.”

He opened his door, and a car blew by going eighty miles an hour, way too close. Ashley squeaked. Roman stuck his leg out. “Don’t do that!” she cried.

“Don’t do what?”

“You’re not supposed to get out on that side. It’s dangerous. Here, come across. I’ll get out of the way.”

She opened her own door and unlatched her seatbelt, waiting for Roman’s assent.

“Fine.”

But when she actually looked out of the car, she realized they were perched at the very edge of the road, and she couldn’t just put her feet down onto the ground. She had to jump.

Ashley bit her lip and hoped her legs wouldn’t give out. It would be embarrassing to eat dirt while Roman was watching.

She landed in the drainage ditch, and fine dirt sifted over her toes.

After a moment, Roman jumped down after her. He glanced at his shoes. They’d been shiny when he came out of the hotel this morning.

“You’re right,” he said. “This is much better.”

“Shut up.”

They waded through the scrubby roadside vegetation together. Without the rain to cool her, she was dressed way too warmly for Georgia in August. She sweated through her shirt before they even made it to the door of the Airstream.

Roman had left his jacket in the car. When they reached the trailer, he rolled up his shirtsleeves. After a glance in her direction, he took a handkerchief out of his back pocket, bent down, and cleaned the dirt off his shoes.

“Wow,” Ashley said. “You are
anal
.”

“Shut up.”

She smiled. She loved dragging him down to her level. There was something subversively hot about flustering a man who tried so hard not to be flusterable.

When he straightened again, he considered the door. In the ditch, they were so far below the level of the trailer that the handle was above his head, the entry step at chest level.

“Can you get up there?” she asked.

“Sure.”

But he didn’t look sure. He grasped the metal step in both hands, lifted a foot, and flattened it against the side of the trailer. His slick shoe slid right off.

Then he tried high-stepping onto the riser, but he couldn’t get his foot up enough—and she thought, even if he could do it, he’d have to split his pants in order to make it work.

If Roman Díaz ever split his pants, the world would pretty much have to stop spinning.

“Here, I’ll do it,” she said. Her cargo pants were loose, with a lot of stretch, and she’d
done far crazier things in them than this.

Roman moved aside, and Ashley high-stepped, grabbed the door handle, and pulled herself up onto the trailer. It hurt a lot more than she’d anticipated. Like white-stars-in-her-vision hurt. Her shoulders ached deep in the muscle, her arms were weak, and there was a moment when the door wanted to swing open and take her with it. She felt like a cat, clinging by the claws. She threw her weight forward and somehow managed to regain her balance. When the trailer door opened, she fell inside. Then she dropped to her stomach and held her hand out to Roman.

“Here. I’ll pull you up.”

It was an unrealistic offer. Her arms were shaking, and she’d broken out in a sweat.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Roman gripped each side of the now-open doorway with his hands and hauled himself up as Ashley scrambled to vacate the space he was about to occupy.

There was nowhere to go. The place where she needed to put her body was full of boxes. Roman barreled through like a freight train, propelled by his own weight. He stepped on her ankle, then fell on her.

“Ow! Son of a bitch!”

Making a strangled kind of
arrrrgch
sound, he rolled to his side, and she tried to grab her ankle but only succeeded in knocking her head against one corner of the cabinet under the sink.

“Ow ow ow ow OW! You big dumb clumsy
dickhead
!”

“It was an accident!”

“I know, but you stepped on me, and I’m allowed to keep complaining as long as it hurts. Which it still does. So you’re an idiot, and you’re ruining my life, and I
hate
you.”

“Is it broken? Let me see.”

His hand wrapped around her calf, and she pulled her leg away and somehow kicked him in the face.

He covered his nose with his hand.

“Sorry! I didn’t mean to do that. Are you okay?”

Roman didn’t say anything. He just sat there, breathing. She looked for blood dripping out beneath his hand, but there wasn’t any.

“You must be okay, because you’re not bleeding, and the only other possibility is that I drove your nose bone up into your brain and killed you instantly. In which case you’d be a lot
more limp.”

“Noses don’t have bones.”

“Huh. Then how do people get killed that way? You know, in movies, where the guy shoves his palm into the other guy’s nose and pushes it—”

“Jesus, do you ever give it a rest?”

Ashley lapsed into silence.

The good thing about absorbing one blow after another was that each subsequent one stung a little less.

Her ankle had settled into a dull sort of throb that she could already tell was going to fade, so she sat all the way up and placed it gently on the floor.

“Well, on the plus side, we’re both going to live.” She surveyed the trailer. There were eleven cardboard boxes on the floor but no sign of the old Trusty Toolkit she and her grandmother had kept on board to use for emergency repairs. “In the minus column, I have no idea where to find a screwdriver.”

Roman stood. “I’m going to rip the cord off those blinds and tie the door shut with it.”

“No, you’re not. No ripping of things off my Airstream. Rip whatever you want off the Caddy.”

She took his proffered hand, and he hauled her to her feet. When she put weight on her ankle, it yelped. She hissed in a breath through her nose.

“You okay?”

“I’ll live. But for the record, I hate you.”

“Understood.”

She stared up at him, and he cupped the back of her head in his hand, his fingers stroking her hair. The tenderness of the gesture was so sudden, she had no defense against it. She just felt it right through her—in her heart and lungs, in between her legs.

She inhaled and froze. In that long pause between breaths, she memorized the shape of his mouth, measured the breadth of his cheekbones and the hard angle of his jaw with her gaze. She admired his wide nose and the black slashes of his eyebrows, the punctuation of his face.

“What are you doing?” she asked in a whisper, because she was afraid he was going to kiss her.

She was afraid she might actually want him to.

“Checking your head.”

“For what? Nits?”

“You hit it, didn’t you?”

She had, in fact. And then he’d touched her, and she’d forgotten.

Because he was so gorgeous.

And she was a moron.

She stepped backward, crushing a box. “It’s fine. I’ll just …”

 … crawl in a hole and die.

Helplessly discombobulated, Ashley cast around for something to look at and saw only the cartons her grandmother had asked a stranger to pack for her—this legacy Ashley hadn’t even been able to bring herself to open yet. She glanced around the trailer. The deeply, terribly familiar location of so many of her happiest memories with Grandma.

She tried to find something to look at that didn’t hurt, but there was nothing, so she looked at Roman. A sound came out of her throat that she couldn’t accept and didn’t even want to admit she’d heard.

Like her heart, punctured by an awl, leaking out all the hope.

Roman touched her elbow.

It was a different sort of touch for him, and so awkward. He put one fingertip on her body with such reluctance—as though he had to, but he didn’t want to own what might happen afterward.

“You know,” he said quietly, “you’ll find something else. You’re the kind of person who always finds something else.”

She wished, then, that she weren’t.

Everyone always said,
You’re just like Susan. You’re so like your grandmother.
They’d toured the country in the Airstream every summer, making new friends, seeing new places. Free spirits. Sparks of starlight.

Only, a free spirit wouldn’t feel like a kicked puppy when she learned that her grandmother had left her with nothing to tether her down.

A spark of starlight wouldn’t want to curl up on the dusty mattress at the back of the trailer and sleep because it was so much easier than feeling.

Ashley looked at Roman, and she realized she’d given too much away. She knew she
looked as lost and sad as she felt. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be seeing what could only be pity in Roman Díaz’s dark brown eyes, and she definitely wouldn’t be thinking that if he weren’t the worst man in the entire world, she might actually like him.

CHAPTER SIX

If it hadn’t been for the ticket, they would have made it by nightfall.

Once the state patrolman had stopped to see if they needed help, though, there was no getting rid of him. Not until they’d pulled back onto the road—at which point, of course, he noticed that the signals and lights weren’t working on the Airstream and flashed his lights.

Roman would have taken the ticket, but instead Ashley and the patrolman had spent ninety minutes digging through an old box full of cracked plastic electrical harnesses and dangerous-looking wires before they finally had everything hooked up to their mutual satisfaction.

By then she was calling him
Tommy.
She’d put his home phone number in a little red address book she fished out of her purse—the kind of address book that lots of people used to have but no one carried anymore—and promised to call if she was ever in Alachua, Florida, again to take him up on his offer of his mother’s tamales and a six-pack of beer.

All things considered, Roman would have preferred to handle things his way. If he’d accepted the ticket, they could have been on the road much earlier, and now he wouldn’t be driving down a gravel road in the dark, in the rain, waiting for things to go even more horribly wrong.

The Escalade’s high beams picked out a white shape, and after a minute it resolved itself into a sign.

OKEFENOKEE LAND COOPERATIVE
An Intentional Community

Ashley bounced. “There it is! I knew we were almost there. It’s just so much harder to find stuff in the dark, and your GPS is
worthless
.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my GPS. Ordinary people don’t need to know how to get to swamp communes.”

“Everybody needs to know how to get to swamp communes. Swamp communes are great.”

As they rolled closer to the sign, Roman made out the words along the bottom.

Est. 1974. Pop. 362.

“Hippies,” he groaned.

“What’s wrong with hippies? I love hippies!”

“Everything is wrong with hippies. Just tell me it’s not a nudist colony.”

“It’s not a nudist colony, Grampy Díaz.”

“That’s Papi Díaz to you.”

“Oh my God. Did you just make a
joke
?”

He kept his face turned away from her, unwilling to let her see him smile, even in the dark.

Which was why, when she began waving her arms around frantically and saying “Here! Turn here turn here turn here!” he didn’t get it at first. He hadn’t noticed the upcoming split in the road. Once he’d finally seen it, he threw on the brakes and spun the wheel right just as she was saying, “It’s too late now, we’ll have to go around because—oh, fuck, Roman, don’t do that!”

He jackknifed the trailer on a little patch of lawn just beyond the fork in the road.

The front door of a house across the way opened. Then another, and another. Like fireflies, porch lights on eight or ten small houses came on, and people began coming outside. There was a low murmur of conversation.