Roman Holiday: The Adventure Continues (4 page)

“Oh, I remember him,” Carly said. “He wore a beret.”

Ellen looked at Ashley, one delicate eyebrow lifted, and asked, dryly, “A beret?”

That set them all off again.

“His name was Tam,” Ashley said. “He was my first boyfriend.”

More helpless giggling. “He was almost
my
age!” Carly said.

“And not the brightest light on the patio,” Nana chimed in.

“He had a great body, though.” Carly again.

Ashley smiled until her face hurt.

She remembered Tam, too.

He’d had brown eyes you could drown in. A thin scar above his upper lip from cleft palate surgery. A thickness to his speech that made him a little shy.

His shyness had blinded her to what a complete and utter asshole he was—needy, forever creating minor crises that had to be attended to.

She’d been supplying most of his meals by the end. Sleeping at his apartment, servicing his every whim, certain her love would rescue him from himself.

“What about that surfer?” Nana asked. “The one who was always talking about tantric sex.”

“You were like, ‘Young man, I
invented
tantric sex,’ ” Carly said.

“And he believed me!” Nana shrieked. “I was only kidding, but then he wanted notes!”

Ashley’s smile hardened. She felt … not angry. But not amused, either. Lost.

Lost in this conversation. In herself.

Lost until Roman came around the side of the house, and their eyes met, and he saw her.

She didn’t know how long they looked at each other. It felt like forever, time slow and meaningless, her senses full of Roman and the cooling night air against her skin, the sour taste in her mouth, the wrongness of everything.

Nana’s hand settled on her shoulder. Ashley looked away from Roman to find sympathy and understanding in the older woman’s eyes. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You’re afraid you’re going to mess this up, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Ashley answered. Because she didn’t.

Nothing was simple anymore. Not like it had been at the palm tree, when she’d first met Roman. She had been sure then that she was the good guy and he was the enemy. When she became aware of her attraction to him, she’d seen Roman the way Nana and Carly surely did—seen him as the wrong man and her urge to get closer to him a symptom of her dysfunction.

Now Ashley wasn’t so sure.

A part of her—an awfully big part of her—was terrified. Roman had promised to destroy her, and he would, one way or another. He cut deeper into her than anyone had in a long time, when she was already weak from her grandmother’s death, primed to make the most familiar sort of mistake. The one where she fell in love, offered up her heart and her soul, and got taken advantage of.

Used. Laughed at. Left.

The one where she got hurt, and then she had to pretend it didn’t matter, because every other choice had been taken from her.

But there was another part of Ashley that listened to the echoes of Nana and Carly laughing over Tam and thought, for the first time, of her fourteen-year-old self, involved with a shiftless manipulative loser seven years older than her. A man who committed statutory rape every time they slept together.

What kind of friends—what kind of family—had allowed that to happen? Someone should have stopped it. Forced naive Ashley to come home, sleep in her bed, act her age. But no one had.

Not her father, who’d sent her to live with his mother because he couldn’t figure out any other way to handle her.

Not her grandmother, who’d liked to say,
Live and let live. Everyone has to make their
own mistakes
.

Ashley made plenty. That’s why she was here. Her whole reason for this detour to Ohio was to draw on Nana’s strength. But when Nana gripped her shoulder and Carly stroked her knee, their touches made Ashley want to curl in on herself.

“You okay, hon?” Carly asked.

“It’s not supposed to be funny,” she said. “It’s my life.”

“Of course it’s not funny
really
,” Carly said quickly.

“No,” Nana confirmed, “we don’t mean it that way. But you have to admit, there’s a pattern.”

Later, Ashley would wonder if everything really had slowed down then. If the twilit night went still and quiet when she said, “Tell me what it is.”

If the world paused, waiting to hear the answer, or if it was only her heart that stopped beating, her breath that stuttered when Nana said, “You make yourself over for these men. You give them too much power over you, let them use it against you, and you smile the whole time.”

In the quiet moment afterward, Ashley didn’t decide to stand up. Her legs straightened of their own accord.

She went to the porch railing and set her elbows on it, looking at Roman. He lingered at the edge of the lawn—too far away, she hoped, to overhear the conversation.

She soaked up the sight of him as Nana’s sharp words bounced around inside her, wounding her more deeply with every ricochet.

“Is that how you see me?” she asked quietly.

When she turned back to the three women, Ellen looked away, too much a stranger to share an opinion. Carly frowned.

Nana met her eyes and said, “Yes.”

Yes, that was how Nana saw her. Because that’s how Ashley was.

It was how she’d been ever since moving in with her grandma. At Sunnyvale, Ashley had decided to stop being angry, so she’d pushed her pain into a well. She’d covered it over with a wooden lid, damp underneath, dripping and cold and sealed shut.

Living in the Keys with her grandma, she’d become Ashley Bowman, the girl who was always up for it. A dance, a fling, a quick fuck in the dark cabana—sure thing. A limbo contest, a canasta partner, a hand to wield the knife to cut up sugarcane for the happy hour drinks—
absolutely. Ashley blended the margaritas and turned her hurt feelings into a joke, because if they were laughing
with
her, tousling her hair, giving her advice, asking her to mix another round—that meant they loved her, right?

That was as close as she ever seemed to get to love.

She hated to recognize it. It hurt so goddamn much to think of herself in those terms, but the pain was okay, in a way. The pain felt like an arrow into something true, its shaft solid enough to grab onto.

This was a pain she could
do
something with.

Ashley had wanted so much, from the moment she arrived back in Florida, to do something with her grief—use it to find a direction, to deliver truth or produce change. Her grief was the reason she’d chained herself to the palm tree, the root of her decision to throw her body down as physical proof of her dedication to the place she’d made her home.

But grief wasn’t all of it, because Ashley had stayed on the palm for two days. She’d stayed overnight, alone, when there was no purpose to her protest, no one to see her steadfast or listen to the anthems she sang in the dark.

She had remained there—hungry, tired, and aching—when the wind picked up. And she’d almost wanted to carry on for longer. Let the hurricane blow through her. Find out what was left of her when the storm was over and the waters receded.

Find out who she was.

Underneath all the roles she played to please other people, was there really a spark of starlight, or was there just emptiness—a well full of pain, a desperate need to be recognized, valued, loved?

If she opened up her little red address book and called ten of the people she counted as friends, plucking names out at random, would they know her? What kind of help would they offer? What kind of love?

She looked at Roman again. His hands, loose at his sides.

His eyes, dark and unreadable from this distance.

“Ashley, are you really okay?” Carly asked.

She didn’t mean to answer. Didn’t realize she had an answer. But she spoke, and what she said was, “She’s right.”

Nana was right. Ashley made herself over for men. It wasn’t just men, either—it was her
friends, too. Carly and Nana, Stanley and Michael, Prachi and Arvind. She gave them too much power, and when they used it against her, she smiled the whole time.

But she’d never played a role for Roman.

She’d never smiled at him when she didn’t mean it.

He’d begun crossing the lawn. Ashley closed her eyes and waited for the heavy sound of his footfalls on the porch steps.

“Can we talk?” he asked. “Alone?”

A rising tide of emotion made it impossible for her to answer.

Roman’s hand landed in the middle of her back. When he leaned closer to speak quietly in her ear, the world seemed to close around the two of them.

“Ash,” he said. “Please.”

She thought of the way he’d looked this morning, right after he yanked her away from traffic. How he’d touched her face by the Airstream, kissed her with such desperation.

She thought of everything he’d told her at the ghost town last night. What they’d shared. Ashley pivoted to face him. His hand rested at her waist. His eyes were awake, alive with feeling.

Not a robot. A man who was looking at her. He’d always been looking right at her.

She thought, then, that it wasn’t that she’d been telling the story wrong to Nana and Carly and Ellen. It was that they hadn’t been
listening
.

Roman listened.

“You weren’t kidding,” she whispered. “You really like me.”

“A lot,” he said.

When that made her smile, he leaned closer and kissed her.

The kiss was public-appropriate, gentle and uninsistent, but by the time Roman’s mouth left hers Ashley felt kind of dense for having taken so long to figure all of this out.

She didn’t know who she was—not exactly. But she knew that when Roman told her he liked her, he meant that he’d seen her there, attached to his palm tree, obstructing his path, and he’d liked the woman he saw.

He liked her when she got in his way. He liked her in the rain, and at the drum circle, and post–alligator attack. When she was blackmailing him, kissing him, infuriating him, crying in the Airstream.

She liked him, too. Far more than she could have imagined possible.

Resting her forehead against his shoulder, Ashley said, “Yeah. Let’s talk.”

He offered her his hand, and when she took it, he led her away from her friends.

Ashley went willingly, confident that this time she wasn’t mistaken in her trust.

It made sense to go with Roman down the driveway, onto a dark and unfamiliar path. He had come with her, after all. He’d driven her into the unknown, put up with her crazy stunts, built her a fire and held her hand.

He’d wrapped her legs in a space blanket, followed her into the lake in the moonlight, pulled her out of the path of a speeding semi, talked their way into this party.

She wouldn’t say no to him anymore.

Not when she needed so badly to say yes.

“You all right?” Roman asked.

He’d waited until they hit the bottom of the driveway to ask. He couldn’t imagine how she could be all right. He’d overheard her so-called friends ripping her apart back there.

“I’ll survive.”

He squeezed Ashley’s small, damp hand and wished he was someone who knew how to help.

They crossed the road. He led her onto an asphalt path. “You have any idea where this goes?”

“Hmm? Oh. No. I’ve never been here before. It’s the college, I guess.”

“You want to walk around the college for a while?”

“If you want to.”

They followed the path up a steep hill and through a group of dorms. A student sat on a plastic chair beside his front door, smoking a cigarette. Another bombed past them, flying downhill on her bicycle.

She should have safety lights. One of those flashers. It was starting to get dark.

Halfway up the hill, Ashley let go of his grip to wipe her palm along the seam of her shorts. She didn’t make any move to take his hand again.

Let her go
.

Roman led her through the parking lot at the top of the hill. To the right, past a dorm, along the path to the road again. Then they were on the gravel central path that ran through the little string of businesses downtown—they’d driven through this part of the village earlier—and it became impossible for him to pretend that the right moment would present itself soon.

There were no right moments for doing wrong things.

When he spotted a large tree in the middle of an otherwise empty lawn, he said, “Let’s check that tree out.”

They followed a dirt path that branched off the gravel, through the grass to a gap in the tree’s canopy. It was a willow with branches that trailed all the way to the ground. Underneath
was a private world, waiting for them. The bare earth revealed signs of frequent visitation—random pieces of plastic garbage, a Popsicle stick. Initials had been carved into the thick trunk.

The tree had a low fork that made climbing easy. Bare of impediments, its limbs stretched out almost horizontally. Roman put both hands on one and lifted his feet, testing his weight, hanging in space.

“This is cool,” Ashley said.

“We should sit in it.”

That brought a faint smile to her lips. “Never thought I’d see you climb a tree, Díaz.”

“You’re the wind beneath my wings,” he said with a smirk. He unlaced his shoes and peeled off his socks to stand barefoot in the dirt. As Ashley watched, wide-eyed and solemn, he took off his tie, freed his cuffs, rolled his shirtsleeves up.

Then he climbed the tree.

He’d meant to find a place to perch just off the ground, but the bark was smooth and cool against his feet, and there was satisfaction in finding the right handholds, stretching for a good grip, making his body do the work of propelling him upward.

He only stopped when the branches began to thin. He found a place to sit, back against the trunk, feet dangling on either side. When he looked down for Ashley, she’d disappeared.

“Where’d you go?” he asked the night.

“I’m here.”

He spotted her eight feet below him, away from the trunk, out toward the end of a long limb. She had her feet pulled beneath her, and she made a neat package of slim femininity, balanced there.

“I have to tell you something,” he said.