Loving Ashe (26 page)
Authors: Liz Madrid
“I’m so sorry,” Riley said, regretting that she’d even asked the question. She realized then that in deference to her past with Gareth, Ashe had somehow kept his friendship with her ex-boyfriend away from her. Or at least not talk about it.
“I swore I wasn’t coming back to work, not for anything,” Ashe continued. “When
Sentience
was first screened at Cannes, I was a no-show. Everyone was livid, but nothing would have made me come back. Unless they could bring Hazel back alive, I wasn’t about to return.”
“What made you come back?” Riley asked.
“Gareth,” Ashe replied. “He flew all the way to Yorkshire. Rented a car and somehow found out where I lived by bribing a barmaid with a date if she told him where I lived. So he did, and found me shoveling manure at the farm.”
“Why would you be shoveling manure?”
“Because that’s what I do when I’m home, Riley, and you will, too, when I take you there for Christmas,” Ashe chuckled. “It is a farm still and my dad makes no exceptions. When I’m home, I have to do the same things I used to do before I became — what he says — world-famous. Threatens me every time that he’s going to charge people to watch world famous Ashe Hunter shear sheep or shovel manure. Not that I complained about it then. I needed something to do to get my mind off Hazel’s death. We all did.”
“So Gareth talked me into coming back, even if it was just for the publicity since it was in my contract anyway. He was right, of course, for if I didn’t come back, it would have been a huge breach of contract, and then I’d not only have my agent livid at me, there was my lawyer, too, who’d managed to negotiate a back-end deal for me for the first time. Ten percent of gross. Reign Studios would have sued me for everything I had,” Ashe said, pushing a lock of hair from Riley’s face, his gaze softening. “But then who was to know that I’d meet this girl who has the power to make my day brighter just by being herself?”
“If I ever end up with a swollen ego, I’ll just have you to blame,” Riley giggled.
“Stop it,” Ashe said, nudging her playfully before his expression turned serious, “which means, Riley-I-am, if it weren’t for Gareth Roman, I would have never met you.”
By the following morning, entertainment networks were abuzz with news of Gareth’s disappearance. Reporters kept themselves busy with speculations about drugs being involved, or whether he and Isobel had had another of their explosive arguments.
If eyewitness accounts were to be believed, Gareth and Isobel had been seen arguing just outside his trailer that evening, shortly after shooting had wrapped for the day. Someone said that it had involved another woman. Another report said it had more to do with creative differences, that Isobel wanted a scene to go one way and Gareth had other ideas. Yet another person claimed he’d overheard them arguing over some online review for a coffee shop about a rat.
“Didn’t you tell me that the cafe had a rat problem?” Ashe asked as he slipped a dark blue beanie over his head, a look that Riley loved.
“The cafe has no rat problem,” Riley replied. “Someone made a false review claiming they’d seen a rat in the premises and after intensive cleaning, we didn’t see a single rat or mouse dropping anywhere. You can eat off the floor if you want.”
“No, thanks,” Ashe grinned. “Well, thank goodness not everyone believes those reviews. Though I have to admit that if Isobel did leave such a review, well, it just shows her immaturity.”
He slipped on his dark wool coat before checking for cat hair. Unless Miss Bailey had learned how to recline on coats hanging behind doors, Ashe was simply doing it out of habit.
“Don’t look at me. I didn’t date her for over a year,” Riley said, arching an eyebrow.
Ashe didn’t say anything. He simply rolled his eyes and brushed traces of cat hair from his sleeve. He was dressed in his outfit from the night before, a plain white shirt layered beneath a denim shirt and his favorite jeans.
Riley was always in awe of his ability to mix and match clothes so effortlessly and had concluded that it must be the result of the years he’d spent modeling, just like Paige’s talent for mixing and matching anything on hand and making it work. As for Riley, she was lucky if she didn’t look like she was doing the walk of shame from her own apartment, dressed in what she thought was comfortable. That was how one gossip site had captioned their picture of herself and Ashe leaving her building in search of coffee two blocks away.
“But it’s my own apartment I’m walking away from,” she had wailed when she’d shown the picture to Ashe. “How can that be a walk of shame? Is it what I was wearing?”
“I told you the shirt didn’t match your trousers,” had been his reply, teasing her till she’d pouted and he’d apologized, reminding her that in the long run such things were too trivial to matter.
As she watched him check his reflection in the hallway mirror, brushing his hair with his fingers, Riley remembered how their day had begun at five that morning, with his phone buzzing noisily. He’d been in the bathroom then, and when she’d taken a peek at his phone, she saw he’d received a number of text messages.
Have you heard from Gareth yet? We’re ready to file a Missing Persons Report if we don’t hear from him by noon.
Another text said,
Contract signing at 11 a.m.
, a third,
Are you available for shoot tomorrow?
And yet another said,
flt tx confirmed for 2 ppl 12/10
.
As Riley buried herself under the covers then, she realized that this was something she had to get used to, remembering Paige’s plea to find someone normal. She wondered how she’d fare in the long run having to deal with Ashe’s crazy schedule, his constantly buzzing phone, and the glances people gave them when they were together. She wondered if she’d always be judged for the way she looked, what she wore or what she did. One gossip site even wrote that Ashe could do better than date a barista, of all things. Never mind that she owned half of the Library Cafe, although that was not common knowledge.
Riley pushed away those thoughts. The last thing she needed was new crap heaped over her old pile of crap, the one that included the disappointments of yesterday. It was going to be hard to stop believing that the sky was falling but, as she had told Ashe last night, everything was going to be all right.
“You’re thinking so hard that fumes are coming out of your ears,” Ashe teased, his voice bringing her back to the present.
“I’m just getting used to my new reality, where I’m finally on my own. It feels like it’s the first day of my life,” Riley said, walking towards him and leaning against the couch as he stood by the landing.
“Because it
is
the first day of your life. At least, that’s the way I see it,” Ashe said. “You’ve had a hell of a day yesterday, and it will take time to adjust. I don’t think I’d be able to handle betrayal from everyone I trusted without falling apart like I did when Hazel died. You’re much more courageous than you believe yourself to be, Riley, so it’s time you gave yourself a bit more credit.”
“It’s called ‘practice,'” she laughed. “Gareth and I-” Riley stopped herself. “I’m sorry. I really shouldn’t be talking about him.”
“No, please go on,” Ashe said, but Riley clamped her mouth shut and he continued. “Riley, while I may be jealous of him for having spent all those years with you — and angry with him for having hurt you like he did – I’m also grateful that we met because of him. Now, while I may not want him to be in every conversation we have, there are things that you shouldn’t have to hide from me. I’m a grown man, and I can take care of myself. If I feel that you’re talking about him too much, I’ll be the first to let you know that, and we’ll sit down and work it out.”
“Why doesn’t it bother you, then? It would bother me a lot if you talked about Isobel.”
“For one thing, because he’s missing and, if he hasn’t reached out to any of the usual suspects, then he’s all alone somewhere. And that worries me. We may not be the best of friends, but we got to know each other pretty well during all those months of filming and rounds of publicity. And he did talk about you, Riley – you were his girl, even though he didn’t say your name,” Ashe said. “But if you think I’m jealous, you’re wrong. You grew up with him, and he was there for you so often in your life, good and bad, the way I was there for Hazel. I know it’s not the same because Hazel was my sister, but I’m happy to know that Gareth was there for you when Paige couldn’t be, and I don’t wish to take those memories away from you just to massage my ego.”
“How do you manage it then?” Riley asked.
“I trust you, Riley-I-am. That’s how I do it,” he said, his brow furrowing. “If I can’t trust you, then we have no basis for being together at all, not even for the sex, no matter how mind-blowing it is.”
“I trust you, too, Ashe,” she said. “You do know that, don’t you?”
“Of course I do, otherwise I wouldn’t be standing here in front of you right now,” Ashe said as Riley walked over to him and linked her pinkie finger with his. “We all have baggage, Riley, and we don’t have to be ashamed of it. It may have made us the way we are up to now, but we can’t let it define who we are or who we will become.”
“I wish I could be like you, Ashe,” Riley said. “No baggage to worry about.”
“I have baggage, too, Riley,” he said, frowning. “More than you’d care to know right now. But they’re there. I, too have to tell myself not to let myself be defined by my baggage. It’s not easy, but it can be done.”
His phone buzzed again and this time Ashe pulled it out of his jacket pocket and checked who was calling. “I have to take this. It’s an interview for GQ Indonesia, which will go with a feature for
Sentience
,” he said, pressing
Answer
and asking the caller to hold on. “I’ll be at home today. I need to work on a few things before we take a break for the holidays together. What’s your day like?”
Riley shrugged. “I’m just going to tidy things up around here. Hang out.”
“I’ll phone you when I’m finished, then. Ring me anytime you need someone to talk to.”
“What if I want to do more than talk? What if I want to climb you like a tree right now?” she pouted. They’d only snuggled the night before, and she wished for nothing more than to strip his clothes off him and drag him back to bed.
“Then definitely call me, but not just now,” he grinned, kissing her lightly on the lips before she walked him to the door and watched him leave.
The knock on the door came two minutes later.
“I forgot my scarf,” he said. Riley picked it up from the couch and draped it around his neck. She planted a kiss on his lips, using the ends of the scarf to pull him back into her apartment.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” he said, laughing and holding up his phone, “unless you want the reporter to hear everything you’re doing right now.”
She let go of him, horror-stricken.
“Oh, my God, what did he hear?”
“Nothing yet,” Ashe whispered. “I put it on mute so I don’t think he heard anything, though it is unfortunate. Do you think if I turn the volume back on, it will make my public image more exciting? Less stuck up?”
“Shut up! Off you go then, actor boy, and get to work,” she laughed, chasing him out of the apartment and shutting the door behind him.
When another knock came three minutes later, Riley rolled her eyes and walked back to the door, scanning her apartment for anything else Ashe might have forgotten. Other than the glass containers he’d used for last night’s dinner, there was nothing. Perhaps he wanted another kiss, and if he did, this time she was going to keep him in the apartment and go back to bed.
“This had better be good, actor boy-” she said, opening the door. Her voice froze mid-sentence as she stared at the man in front of her.
The boys’ eyes looked back at her, she thought. Trevor, Trey and Thomas.
He looked exhausted. Dark circles ringed his eyes, his hair disheveled though she wondered if it was intentional for it actually looked good. Boyish.
“Gareth, what are you doing here? Everyone’s looking for you,” she exclaimed.
“I didn’t bring my charger, so my phone’s dead,” Gareth said. “Can I come in?”
Riley stepped aside and he walked past her and into the apartment. She shut the door behind him and leaned against it. He turned around to face her, and Riley wondered what he wanted to talk about, or if he wanted something else. She became suddenly conscious that she was wearing only a thin T-shirt with matching pajama bottoms and no bra, and hugged her arms defensively to her chest.
“Did Paige tell you what happened?” she asked, hoping that the answer would be in the negative. “Is that why you’re here?”
“What about Paige?” He asked, alarmed. “Are the boys all right?”
“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “The boys are fine. It’s just that … I know about them, Gareth. I know they’re yours and not Clint’s. I also know that it was Clint who had me moved out of the apartment three years ago, not you or Paige. He was the one who left me the money.”
“I know,” Gareth said, frowning. “Collette no longer works for me. I fired her as soon as I found out.”
“Did she tell you?”
“I overheard her telling Clint yesterday morning that she’d kept the rest of the money as her babysitting fee. I guess he just found out, too, and had to make sure. She said something about leaving ‘Gareth’s girlfriend $20,000,’ and I didn’t need to hear any more,” he said, sighing. “Riley, I honestly had no idea that Clint and Collette were involved in this. If I’d known — ” he took a step towards her and stopped. “Could you put on a robe or something? I see that you got yourself pierced.”
Riley stormed past him, took her robe from the bathroom and slipped it on. She gestured to him to sit down, choosing to perch on the short part of her L-shaped couch while Gareth sat on the longer side, although they were still close enough for their knees to almost touch. Riley thought how Gareth would have touched her thigh if they had still been together. He was always touching her, just to let her know that he was there. It was one of the things she had missed the most when he’d left, which had driven her to use drugs to numb the empty feeling every night when she went to sleep, and again every morning when she got up. But it had been three years since he’d touched her that way and she had become used to being alone, until Ashe had come into her life.
“I’m sorry for everything, Riley,” Gareth said. “All this time, I really thought you were fine. You never answered my letters when I was filming Hell’s Kingdom. Collette told me you had already moved out of the apartment by the time she got to New York, and of course I was annoyed. I had no reason not to believe her. Then I got busy with my career, but I should have checked on you. I should have at least called to see — ”
Riley touched his knee and he paused, surprised.
“I don’t care anymore about what happened between us, Gareth,” she said. “What I really want to know is why you and Paige did what you did. Two weeks ago, I heard you tell her you loved her. Have you loved her all this time? Was it Paige you really wanted from the beginning? If you came all the way here from Nashville to apologize to me, at the risk of getting fired from your own movie, at least answer me that.”
He exhaled and rubbed his temples. “All I wanted to know was why she kicked you out of your apartment, and why she left you that money. I thought it must have been Paige. That’s the only reason I went to see her. I swear, Riley, but even there, even with the best intentions, I fucked up.” He cradled his head in his hands.
“We all fuck up,” Riley said quietly. “But you haven’t answered my question, Gareth.”
Gareth took a deep breath, his eyes distant. “Do you remember my mom?”
“Of course,” Riley replied, though she didn’t have to tell him what she remembered about the woman. Gareth’s mother had worked as a waitress at a nearby restaurant during the day and spent her tip money on cheap tequila shots at a local bar. Sometimes, she went home with a different man a few days a week while Gareth’s father dished out his rage on their only son. Some people said she turned tricks. Most people simply called her a ho.
Yo mama a ho, Gar
, they’d say as Gareth and Riley would walk past them and he’d lose his temper and charge them. Gareth always lost to the boys who were taller and bigger than he was, but no matter how many times they beat the crap out of him, he never gave up. He always defended his mother.
Then one day, when he was sixteen and taller than everyone else, with all the girls after him because they thought him a stud for being a one-woman man, he stopped defending his mother and agreed with everyone else that she was a whore. He even said it to Riley, and that was because he’d seen her go down on some stranger in an alley.
They were all right about her, Ri
, he had told her.
Thank God for you and Paige. At least you both took after your mom
.
Gareth ran his fingers through his hair, chuckling drily as he spoke. “All I wanted when I was growing up was someone to tell me I was worth something. When I couldn’t get that from the shithole I called home, I found it at your house. Your mother was the first woman to ever treat me right. She told me once that she wished I was her son.” He smiled, not looking at Riley but straight ahead at the old box TV with the built-in VHS player. “God, she made me so proud that day, Ri. Your mother was one classy lady, and I mean it. You take after her. I always wondered why she chose to stay where she was when I heard that she grew up in Manhattan – Upper East Side. At least that’s what my mom said once.”
“That was probably just talk,” Riley said, watching him trace imaginary circles on the coffee table with his fingers, then little squares and spirals. “Maybe she just went to school there or something.”
“Nah, she was classy, that lady,” Gareth said. “And I know it’s twisted, but that’s how I love Paige. Not because she’s your sister, but because she’s the mother to those boys — my boys. What I did — we did — there’s no excuse and I’m so sorry, Ri. God, I’m so fucking sorry it’s not funny. Who screws his girlfriend’s sister but an asshole?”
Now Riley felt bad. “Gareth-”
“But she’s also raising my kids — my boys,” Gareth continued. “She’s my son’s mother and she loves those boys more than the world itself. She’d do anything for them.”
“And she would.”
“Those boys are so lucky to have a mother who just loves them, no matter how they came to this world. My mother couldn’t even give me the time of day, and she only had one son. Me! Can you imagine if she had had three?” Gareth said, chuckling wryly. “We’d all have been turning tricks, or worse.”
“I would have run out of bunk beds,” she said, smiling and reaching for his hand if only to stop him from gouging his fingers into the wooden laminate.
Gareth sighed. “I never meant to hurt you, not in a million years. But then, I’m nothing but a selfish prick really. All I do is hurt people, even when it’s the last thing I want to do. I know I could never make it up to you, even if I tried, and now, knowing what Collette and Clint did, it seems even worse.”
“I’m a big girl now, Gareth,” Riley said, squeezing his hand. “You don’t have to rescue me anymore.”
Gareth studied her, the anguish on his face fading, the lines that creased the skin between his eyebrows softening. How many times had he told her that he’d always be there to save her? He was always some super hero to her – Superman, Batman, Aqua man — and trying to see if he could breathe underwater.
“I’m serious, Gar. I’m fine,” she said. “Well, I will be fine. And so will you and everyone else. We’ll all get through this royal mess we find ourselves in.”
“It still doesn’t change the fact that I hurt you, or that every time you look at those boys it will always hurt you,” Gareth said. “They’re proof of what Paige and I did. And I don’t know what I can do about it.”
“The boys can’t be blamed for what happened, Gareth,” Riley said. “If I did that, I’d be doing the same thing my dad did to me — still does to me — because he’ll never stop blaming me for mom dying. I can’t do that to those kids, and I don’t intend to. I mean, I may have thought of abandoning them, but I can’t. I’m not perfect in this, but I’m trying to do what’s best for the boys.”
Tears sprang into Gareth’s eyes but he wiped them away before they had the chance to roll down his face. He tried to speak but the words refused to come out. Riley’s chest tightened then, the memory of him slipping through her bedroom window with a black eye coming back to her. His father was going through one of his moods again.
Are you alright?
He’d asked her that night, even through his split lip. She’d been crying when he got in, though her father’s insults faded as soon as she saw his split lip and the black eye. She grabbed her first aid kit from underneath the bed so she could tend to him though he’d pushed her away then.
Your
lip-
Forget my lip
, he mumbled.
One day, Ri, we’ll move out and God help me, we’ll make it, you and me. I’ll always take care of you, babe.
“Everyone’s been coddling me since my mother died, you and Paige most of all,” Riley continued. “And then there was Clint, doing his own thing behind the scenes. But I need to stand on my own two feet now. I need to live my life on my own terms. If I’m hurt, then I’ll figure out why I’m hurt and deal with it — not with drugs like I did before, but as a responsible adult. I don’t need anyone to rescue me anymore.” She paused, frowning. “Well, maybe if I’m hanging off a building or something, then I might need someone to rescue me, but otherwise, no.”
Gareth chuckled, and this time Riley glimpsed the gleaming white teeth between his lips, the corners of his mouth creating the dimples that he was known for, dimples that made women and even some men swoon.
“That’s where you got it all wrong, you know,” Gareth said, his hand reaching towards her, touching her face, stroking her cheek. “All that time, you got it all wrong.”
She frowned in puzzlement. “What?”
“You were the one who was always there for me, more than anyone in the world. You were my anchor, and I’m not just saying that to say it, Ri. I mean it. I always knew I had a safe place to go to when things went crazy at home, just like I do now though I doubt someone will agree,” he said.
“He’ll live.”
Gareth squeezed her hand, his eyes boring right into her. “You were my knight in shining armor, Riley.
You
. They don’t just come in size M for male, you know.”
He dropped his hand and sighed. “But I screwed up. I’m the one who took from you, and I kept taking, even when you were running on empty.” Gareth withdrew his hand, pressing the heels of his palms against his eyes before sliding them down so that it was his fingers that wiped away these tears. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed and sniffed, and Riley handed him a tissue.
She took a deep breath, brought her arms around him and held him as he sobbed. Then she pulled away so she could take a box of tissues from the coffee table and hand it to him. His nose had begun to run.
“How did you get here?” she asked. “They’re all looking for you. I think they even checked the airlines.”
“I drove,” replied Gareth, blowing his nose and tossing the tissue into the plastic trashcan she held out to him. “Thirteen fucking hours, Ri. Six states, though don’t ask me to name them. I should have flown, but I needed the time to think with no one telling me to do this or do that, to emote, or to take it one more time from the top. I just needed to get away and go someplace where I remembered feeling safe, and that led me right here.”
“Well, you’re safe here,” she said, squeezing his hand, and together they smiled a smile that they had often given each other long ago, before they had become more than friends and added another layer onto their feelings for each other.
“Do you want me to call someone and tell them where you are? They’re ready to file a missing persons report on you.”
“That would be a good idea,” he said, leaning back against the couch. “Then I’ll be out of here in no time. Sorry if I messed up your day.”
“You didn’t. If you hadn’t come to apologize, I’d have hunted you down anyway,” Riley said. “I’m tired of being left in the dark by everyone else. I’m not a baby.”
Gareth smiled wistfully. “You never were, Ri. But maybe it made all of us feel bigger if we made you one.”
Riley looked at him for a few moments, the meaning of his words sinking in. She nodded and retrieved her phone from her bedside table. Then she took a deep breath and dialed a number.