by Ruthie Knox
Because right now Ashley Bowman was so much his problem, his skin hurt.
“Do you want to see the inside?” she asked. “There’s lots of boxes in there, but if I move them out of the way, you can get a good look at the magnificence.”
“I’ll pass.”
“Are you sure? It’s got shag! And this awesome burnt-orange velour couch thing by the window, and the cutest little kitchen with two burners and an oven and a sink, plus—”
“Let’s get this over with.”
“Fine, be like that.” She let go of his arm and braced herself against the trailer, squinting up at him in concern. “I wonder, though, are you any good with wiring? Because chances are, we’re going to have to do some fiddling in order to get the trailer’s signals and brake lights to work. Now, if you’re not good at it, no worries—I know Grandma has a box of connectors and stuff in the Airstream, somewhere, or at least she used to. I bet if I futz around for a while I can figure out—”
“You’re not futzing with my truck.”
“I kind of have to, though. I mean, if you don’t have the wiring for the lights done right, you’ll get pulled over. They’ll give you a ticket.”
“I can live with that risk.”
“Ah. Big risk-taker, huh? I guess that’s why you want to develop this property. God knows there’s not much money in it. I mean, Grandma and I got by okay, but we ate a lot of those Cup Noodles when I was a kid, and I think maybe that’s not your thing. Where are you from anyway?”
“Miami.”
“No you’re not.”
“I live in Miami.”
“Yeah, but where are you from?”
“Can we not do this?”
She would be unbearable if she knew where he was from. If she knew the whole story.
“You promised to have honest conversations with me.”
“I didn’t promise to do it while we were hooking up the truck in the rain.”
“You have an accent,” she said.
“No I don’t.”
“You said ruf yesterday. You’re, like, Canadian.”
Roman bent over the trailer hitch. Water dripped from his forehead. “How do I jack this up?”
“Do you even speak Spanish?”
“Of course I speak Spanish.” Badly.
“Hasta el mes pasado, vivaba en Boliva. Hablo español bastante bien. ¿De donde eres, Honduras?”
“My parents were from Cuba.” He pronounced it like a Cuban—Coova—in the hope that she would accept that bit of evidence and shut up.
“Really? And they named you Roman?”
“Roman was my father’s name.”
“Weird.”
“Thanks.”
It barely stung. When you were named Libertad Roman Ojito Díaz—when you were a small, dark-skinned kid among a sea of Caucasian middle-schoolers in Nowhere, Wisconsin—you got used to comments about your name. Ashley’s “weird” was nothing compared to roll call on the first day of school. An annual visit to hell.
“But you’re not really Cuban.”
“I’m not, huh?”
“No, I mean you’re Cuban, but you didn’t grow up with Cubans.”
“Because I say roof wrong?”
“Because you had to think hard to translate when I spoke Spanish to you.”
She’d caught that.
She caught everything.
If he spent too much time with this woman, she would take him to pieces and scatter him all over, like the monkeys did to the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz.
Roman always used to hide behind his sister, Samantha, when the monkeys came on. Now he had no one to hide behind. He’d found, though, that it was possible to hide inside yourself. It took patience, and practice.
He was very good at it.
“I grew up in Wisconsin.”
“Not Canada?”
“Not Canada.”
“Damn. Canada would have been a lot cooler.”
He let out a long breath. “Now will you please tell me how to jack up the trailer?”
“I’ll do you one better, Cheesehead. I’ll show you.” She bent over, staggered, and put her hand out to balance against the hitch, knocking the block of wood to the ground. “Oopsie. Little light-headed.”
She remained bent over for so long, breathing and unmoving, that he had no choice but to help her up and support her by the elbow as he guided her to sit on the wet metal steps beneath the Airstream’s entry door. She recovered for half a minute, then began issuing vague instructions for hooking up the trailer hitch that he could barely understand, much less carry out.
By the time he had it ready to go, Roman was freezing, Ashley couldn’t stop shuddering, and Carmen and Heberto were in the air, well on their way to New York.
CHAPTER THREE
“So where am I dropping you?”
Ashley picked her purse up off the immaculate passenger-side floor mat and began rummaging around for a piece of gum. Anything to stall.
It was a miracle he hadn’t asked sooner, really. Most people would have. But Roman was efficient, and U.S. 1 was the only way out of the Keys, a bridge-studded north-south corridor that linked the islands together. Because of the evacuation, all the lanes were northbound.
He’d had no reason to ask. He’d simply merged into the stream of traffic and kept his questions to himself. Until now.
So why was he asking?
He can smell your fear.
Maybe he could. She’d been growing more rank with every passing mile, mentally calculating their speed against the number of miles they had to go and trying to anticipate how far north they would need to get before the traffic thinned out and they started making better time.
On a good day, it took her nine or ten hours to drive to Mitzi’s from Sunnyvale. At their current speed, it would take them until the End of All Things.
Ashley had evacuated before. She knew the drill—once they got to Miami, people would start forking off in different directions, and everything would speed up. Still, that could take hours. They might not make Georgia tonight. What if they had to find a hotel room together? What if there were no hotel rooms? She could bunk down in the Airstream, of course, but she doubted Roman would go for that.
No worries, Roman, there are twin beds. You sleep on that one, and I’ll sleep over here. Thirty-six inches away.
She could only imagine what sort of dreams she’d have in that situation.
But even sex dreams would be better than the fear-visions plaguing her. Roman finding out where they were going and pulling over to the side of the road. Unhitching the trailer and leaving her there in the rain, alone.
He wouldn’t do it, she was ninety-nine percent sure. He’d gone along with the trailer thing, and it seemed safe to assume he’d follow through on the rest of his promises.
And even if he did do it, she had her address book, her phone, and the green canvas duffel bag that had accompanied her all over the world. If he left her behind, she could find someone to pick her up within an hour or two.
Ashley had a lot of friends. Tons. All over the world, she had friends.
No matter what happened, she would be fine.
So why did the very idea of Roman driving away from her, leaving her alone in the rain, force her heart up into her throat? And why, when she imagined it, did she keep seeing Roman’s stern face as he drove away, rather than her own sad, abandoned roadside figure?
Ridiculous, to care that he might be disappointed in her.
She was tired, that was all. This was a lingering effect of her time on the palm tree, not guilt at the way she was testing him or some bizarre, inappropriate attachment to a man she didn’t like. A man who was right now ruining her life.
Albeit by the unusual means of catching her when she fainted, making her tea, hooking up her trailer, and driving her and her worldly belongings to safety.
“Ashley.” His voice again, as calm and unperturbed as ever despite the fact that she’d spaced out and forced
him to repeat the question. “Where are we going?”
“Oh, it’s a ways north yet.”
Roman drove. If he felt any impatience about the traffic—any tension about the hurricane on its way, discomfort in his wet jeans and damp shirt, irritation with her refusal to supply a destination—he didn’t show it.
He had borrowed a towel from the office bathroom, though, and laid it carefully over the leather-upholstered driver’s seat. Three more towels sat in the middle of the backseat, at the ready in the case of some Ashley-spawned disaster.
He loved his awful car.
“How far is ‘a ways’?” he asked.
Distract him. Get his mind on how annoying he finds you, and maybe you can put off that side-of-the-road-abandonment scenario a little while longer.
Ashley leaned forward and studied the built-in GPS screen, as if she were pondering entering the necessary coordinates. “I’m not sure precisely.” She dialed one of the knobs, then poked at a few buttons.
“Quit touching that.”
“How much does a car like this cost anyway?”
“Buy one, and you’ll find out.”
“More than it’s worth, I’m sure.” She ran her hand over the dashboard. He’d chosen a charcoal interior with silver accents and that dark, burled wood that they always seemed to put in the dashboards of luxury cars. Ashley had never been able to understand the impulse. Was the idea to make the inside of the car look like some nineteenth-century tycoon’s library, or was it more like, Here’s a little bit of the nature you’re destroying with your egregious consumption of fossil fuels?
She bet he’d paid thousands of dollars extra for the interior package. They didn’t just give you a little hem of wood around the steering wheel, after all. They made you think you were treating yourself to it.
“It’s worth whatever the buyer’s willing to pay,” Roman said.
“Is that how you justify it to yourself?”
“That’s the definition of worth.”
“I drive a 1980 Volkswagen Fox. I got it for four hundred dollars at a used car dealership when I was nineteen.” She’d gotten it on a trade-in, actually, and kept it, the summer she’d worked at one of the used car lots her father owned—part of a dealership empire that now stretched all over north Florida and into Georgia.
But she didn’t have to mention that. Maybe Roman didn’t know who her father was yet.
Unlikely. Pretty much everybody in Florida knew Senator Bowman, and it was no secret that she and he weren’t close. The summer she’d worked the lot had been the last time Ashley and her father had spent more than three consecutive hours in each other’s presence.
“It’s rusty,” she continued brightly. “And there’s a huge dent in the driver’s-side door. The headlights stop working if you try to turn on the high beams when it’s too humid. If I drive over seventy miles an hour on the highway, either the gas gauge or the heat stops working—but never both at the same time. It has unknown mileage, because the odometer took a little nap at some point before the trade-in, but it’s upward of a hundred and sixty thousand. So, given all that, how much is my car worth?”
He glanced at her. “About a buck more than a drive-in burrito.”
Surprised, Ashley laughed. Roman glanced at her with all the affect of a superior alien species observing an incomprehensible earth creature, and she found herself touching her lips, as if they’d betrayed her somehow.
It had been a joke, right?
Why could she never tell if he was joking?
She put her feet up on the dash. He frowned, and that made her feel a little better.
“Cash value aside,” she said, “I’ve had my car for five years. It never fails me. It’s the most reliable car in the whole world. I love that car.”
“So the question is what you would be willing to pay for it. That’s what it’s worth.”
“I don’t need to pay for it. I already own it.”
“What if I came into possession of it? What would you pay to get it back?”
“If that happened, you should just give it back. Because of how much I love it, and because it doesn’t mean anything to you.”
“If anything, knowing how much you loved it would make me raise the price.”
“That makes you a jerk.”
“No, it makes me a capitalist.” His hand slid over the steering wheel in a gentle caress. “If you wouldn’t pay to get it back, it has no value.”
God, she’d had him pegged right from the get-go. One of those glass-bottomed-boat-cell-phone men. An invisible-hand-of-the-market ideologue who justified his soulless behavior with empty ethics.
Irredeemable.
Although it was strange. Most of the ideologues she’d met delivered their lines with more passion than Roman. He sounded as though he were reading his off a script.
“You have a seriously skewed sense of value.”
He gave her one of his brilliant, empty smiles. “One of us does.”
“Not me.”
“So you say.”
She rubbed at a spot beneath her sternum that had begun to ache.
Hunger. That’s all it was. Not disappointment.
“If we’re going more than thirty miles, I’m going to have to stop for gas,” he said. “You know what that will be like.”
Ugh. Mid-evacuation gas lines were insane. Ashley mentally added another forty-five minutes to the length of the journey.
Stupid gas-guzzling monster-beast car.
“It’s more than thirty miles,” she said. “You should probably get gas before Miami.”
“When are you planning to tell me where we’re going?”
“Later.”
She caught herself picking at the pocket of her cargo pants and folded her hands in her lap.
What would Roman be like when he was angry? Would he turn red, yell? Or was he one of those people who got even quieter and planned revenge?
Leaning forward, she pointed the heat vent away from her. The control for her side of the car read 70 degrees, but the air from the vent felt cold, raising goose bumps all over her arms.
Roman drove. After a few more miles, he signaled and took an exit.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Hotel.”
“We can’t stop here. We’re only at Homestead. If this is some trick—if you’re going to dump me here and leave, then I just want to say—”
“Relax. This is where I’ve been staying. I need to take a shower and pick up my things.”
“Oh. I thought you lived in Miami. Why are you staying in Homestead?”
“In traffic, it’s still another seventy-five, eighty minutes to my place. When I’m working in the Keys, I don’t always feel like making the drive.” He pulled into the parking lot of one of those extended-stay chain hotels for businessmen and parked.
“So you have a room here all the time?”
“Not all the time. Often.” He put his hand over the key in the ignition and paused. “I’ll be thirty minutes or so. You can wait here, or you can wait in the lobby.”
“I’ll wait here.”
“Fine.”
He paused again.
“You’re not going to steal my truck.”
The way he said it, it wasn’t quite a question. It wasn’t an order, either.
His hand hovered protectively over the key.
Ashley rolled her eyes. “For heaven’s sake, Roman, I’m not a criminal. What would I even do with it? Drive out onto Route 1 and get stuck in evacuation traffic? It would be the shortest joyride in the history of car theft.”
That seemed to decide him. Leaving the key where it was, he opened the door and hopped out, retrieved his briefcase, and loped through the sliding-glass doors.
Ashley turned up the heat and toed off her sandals. She twisted sideways in the seat to rest her cheek against the leather upholstery.
She watched the raindrops move over the window, each following its own unpredictable track, and she
tried not to think about how tired she was—how utterly beaten.
How far out on the limb she’d walked with this stranger.
She tried not to think of Roman behind the windows of one of those hotel rooms. The shower filling the air with warm steam that smelled of him. He hadn’t invited her up, and she didn’t want to go, even in her imagination. She didn’t want to see his throat bared as his razor scraped a path through his shaving cream, or to imagine his brown arms pushing into the sleeves of a starched white shirt.
She didn’t want to know how much better, how much more settled he would feel with his jaw gleaming, his clothes clean, his neck smelling of aftershave. Perfect again.
She didn’t want to know him.
She wanted her grandmother, and her bed at Sunnyvale, and for none of this to be happening.
Ashley closed her eyes, and her tears tried to come up, but she pushed them down deep into a dark well where she had learned to keep them long ago. She piled all her hateful thoughts in on top of them, and when the well brimmed over, she put the wooden cover on and closed her eyes.
She slept.
She woke to the sound of his voice outside the driver’s window. The door opened and brought the cool, moist air with it, and a cacophony of wind.
He wore the gray suit she’d first seen him in, with a white shirt open at the collar. He looked exactly as she’d expected him to. He leaned into the car but didn’t climb up to his seat.
“You said so this morning.” He spoke into his phone. “I haven’t forgotten.”
A pause. “Yes.”
“No.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
And then, after another pause, “Give Heberto my best.”
“All right.”
A flash of white teeth.
“I’ll do that, kitten.”
He disconnected the call and opened the back door to toss his briefcase and suitcase behind the seat, then climbed up into the car and started the engine.
“Ready to go?”
Never let them see you sweat. It was the only truly useful motto Ashley had adopted from her father.
She straightened her legs, pushing her toes back into the thongs of her flip-flops. “Did you just call a woman kitten?”
“If you need to use the facilities, now’s a good time. Or you can wait a bit. I’m going to stop for gas just up the road.”