by Cate Cameron
“Maybe I could stay up here—” she started.
“You just said you were going down for the job. And you should. You don’t want to get stuck up here. This is somewhere you vacationed, but you’re ambitious. You don’t want to be on vacation forever.”
He was right. She did want to go back and work more. She wanted to prove herself and take exciting roles that would let her grow as an actor. She thought about suggesting that they try to maintain the relationship long-distance, but that made no sense, not if they’d never be able to live in the same place. Long distance was only reasonable for the short term. “So what do we do?” she asked quietly. “We just give up?”
“We stick with what it was originally supposed to be. A summer thing.” He looked sad, but certain. “It’s better to have a clean break so we can both look back at it as a good memory. Otherwise, if we try to drag it out? You end up hating me, or I end up hating you, or . . .” He smiled softly and reached out to run the back of his fingers down her cheek. “Maybe not hate. But we resent each other. It ends dirty instead of ending clean. I don’t want that for us.”
She hadn’t known she was going to say it, but he was being honest with her and he deserved the same in return. “I love you, Josh. I know it’s fast, but it’s real. I’ve never felt like this before, and I’m scared that if I walk away from you I’ll never feel this way again.”
She was out of things to say, and it was just as well because Josh seemed to have kicked himself out of whatever wide-eyed shock he’d been in when she first said the words. Now he was moving, his mouth desperate as it covered hers, the kiss keeping her from speaking, thinking, or even breathing. All she could do was feel, and that was all she wanted to do. She loved him, and she was going to lose him. But he wasn’t gone yet, and until he was, she needed to work on building the memories that would sustain her.
* * *
THERE was nothing but Ashley. No forest except for the tree she leaned against, no rain except for the water that fell on her upturned face. No darkness except for the shadows on her body, no light except for the way the headlights shone on her. No past, no future. Only Ashley, and only for the moment.
Josh abandoned all of his usual rules. He wasn’t gentle, he wasn’t carefully gauging her responses and calculating the ways he could bring her the most pleasure. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, it was just that he was operating on instinct now, touching her the way he just knew she wanted to be touched. And the way he wanted to touch. There wasn’t really a divide between them, as far as he could tell.
When he pushed her back against the smooth trunk, she surged forward to meet him, her mouth hungrily claiming his lips, his neck—any exposed skin. And apparently there wasn’t quite enough of that for her, because she tugged impatiently at his shirt, her warm fingers sliding under the hem and up over the bare skin of his chest, then whipping back out to attack the buttons. All the time her lips were on his, separating only for gasps of breath and for desperate, greedy whispers.
She got his work shirt off and he pushed her back with one hand, separating them long enough for him to pull his T-shirt off over his head. The rain and the cool night air hit his skin and gave him a quick burst of consciousness. The night was too cold, the location too public, the whole thing too hopeless. Then he looked at her and all the rest was just too damn bad. He’d have plenty of time to be disciplined and smart. After she left, and for the rest of his life. But not while she was still there.
“Your turn,” he growled, and pulled her soaked cotton shirt up over her head. The rest of their clothes followed fairly quickly. There was some desperate tugging, a little bit of laughter, but soon they were naked, with a broad tree between them and the truck’s headlights, and there in the forest, in the rain, in the darkness, they joined together as tightly as they both needed.
Josh was being rougher than he’d ever been with Ashley, driving into her body as if trying to mark her deep inside. And she responded by wrapping her legs around him and pulling him in tighter and harder. He wrapped his arms around her so she wouldn’t bruise her back on the tree trunk and they strained together, wild and fierce and strangely triumphant, as if they were fighting against something, and as if they were, for the time being at least, winning.
They found their release together, and even then, as they both surrendered to the ecstasies of their own bodies, they still gasped and moaned in unison. They uncoupled slowly and gradually, but kept their bodies pressed together for warmth. When Ashley finally gave in and shivered, Josh kissed her forehead. “Your clothes are a mess, but there’s a blanket in the truck.”
“Will you drive me home?” she whispered. “You’ll come with me?”
“Yeah.” She could come back with him the next morning to pick up her car. And he could finish the work in the daylight.
But he needed to finish the work. And he needed to start another job when this one was done. Because Ashley was leaving. She’d be busy getting ready for the movie, and he’d better get busy trying to figure out how to live without her.
So they gathered up their clothes and scampered to the truck, Josh wearing only his underwear and boots, Ashley wearing nothing at all. He carried her over the gravel of the driveway and set her in the passenger seat, then got the truck started and pulled the rolled up blanket from the backseat.
“I’m glad you have cloth instead of leather,” Ashley said as he wrapped the fleece around her. “Leather would have given me a cold ass.”
“But if I’d been rich enough to pay for leather, I probably would have sprung for seat warmers, too.”
He shut the passenger door gently and circled around to his own side. She was watching him as he climbed in, but she didn’t say anything until they were out on the highway. “You keep horses. Your house is pretty nice, and you own a lot of land. You have your own business, and Kevin said you do okay. You really . . . Money was tight enough that you couldn’t afford leather?”
It was kind of a personal question, but maybe it was time to share a bit of that reality. “I could have afforded it,” he said. “But it would have meant that I wouldn’t have money for something else. I’m doing okay. I bought this truck new, and my old one wasn’t totally dead. I could have nursed it along another couple years, if I’d wanted to put up with it being temperamental. I have a retirement account, and I have savings for a rainy day. I’m fine. But I’m not rich, Ashley. Nowhere near it.”
“Does it bother you that I am?”
He thought about it. “No. Not really. I mean, the summer people thing, you know how I feel about that. But just you? For yourself? No. I’m glad you have money.” He snorted a little. “I like the idea of you having the finer things and being taken care of, and I’m in no position to give you all that, so I’m glad you can take care of yourself.”
She seemed reasonably satisfied with that answer. Then out of the blue she asked, “Does it bother you that I’ve done topless scenes? In movies? Some guys don’t like that.”
He took his eyes off the road long enough to give her a startled look. “Bother me? No, I don’t think so.”
“Have you seen them?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You haven’t seen all my movies?” She frowned at him and he made sure he kept staring straight ahead. “Wait a second. Have you seen any of my movies?”
“I’m not a big movie guy. But now that you’ve mentioned the topless scenes . . . if you could just write the titles of those ones down, that’d be great.”
“What the hell, Josh!” She sounded like she wasn’t sure whether to be amused or outraged. “Not even one?”
“Maybe I have,” he said quickly. Then he grinned. “I just don’t remember. It would have been before I met you. So, you know, I wouldn’t have paid attention. But maybe I have. I don’t like movies that much myself, but obviously I’ve watched them with other people.”
She took a moment to think, then said, “You may have seen one of my movies while you were on a date with another woman?”
He nodded. “Yeah. You do mostly chick flicks, right? So it’s not like I would have seen one of them on my own.” This was kind of fun. “We can call some of my exes when we get home, if you want, and I can see if they remember. Hell, there was one girl I used to date who seemed to think the only reason movie theaters were invented was for fooling around. I had my own place by then, but she wouldn’t want to come over. Said everyone would think she was a slut if they saw her coming out of my apartment. But the second the lights went down in a movie theater . . .”
“You may have fooled around with another woman while watching one of my movies.”
“Well, to be fair, I probably wouldn’t have been paying much attention to the movie.”
She was staring at him and he glanced over and caught her eye. She was laughing, thankfully. “I’ve done some action movies,” she said. “I was generally just the love interest and had to stand around and get rescued, but still, you could at least see those.”
“Okay, you can write those titles down, too.” As if he was going to torture himself by watching her movies after she was gone. But it was easier to pretend that pain wasn’t coming. “If you wanted to sort of cross-reference the two lists? Like, if there were any that were action movies and you were topless? You should probably put a star beside those ones.”
“Hey, Josh?” she said quietly.
He glanced over at her, and she raised her eyebrows, then dropped the blanket from her shoulders. “Right here, in person. Topless.”
He made himself return his eyes to the road. “If I sped up and pretended someone was chasing us, it’d be the perfect movie.”
It was so easy. That was what made it hurt so much to think about losing it. The warm affection, the easy jokes—the gorgeous, topless woman in his passenger seat. He had it all, and he was going to lose it all before he knew it.
“Daisy’s going to miss you,” he said quietly.
Ashley nodded. “I’m going to miss her, too. And Rocky. And your aunt Carol, and Kevin. And the lake, and the forest, and the stream.” She turned to him quickly. “That’s what I want to do. On my last night here. I want to ride back to the stream with you, and I want to lie there with my feet on your chest, looking up at the stars. Floating. I want to do that. Maybe every night until I leave. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said. It sounded a bit too much like she was dying, but he wasn’t going to argue with her last requests, regardless. “Do you think you’ll be back?”
Shit. He hadn’t known he was going to ask that question. “No, don’t answer,” he said quickly. “It doesn’t matter. And you don’t know. . . . You can’t know. Your life’s changing and you need to be ready for anything. Next summer you could be working on a movie with . . . I don’t know, I’m trying to come up with a big-name director and I’m drawing a blank. Steven Spielberg?”
She smiled. “I’ve already worked with him. But I’d love to do it again. And you’re right, maybe this time it’d be on one of his more serious movies.”
“You’ve already worked with Spielberg? Seriously?” Josh took a moment to collect his thoughts. “He made E.T., right? That was him?”
“Well, yeah, but I wasn’t in E.T., Josh.”
“Yeah, I know. But it’s an excellent movie. You’ve worked with the guy who made E.T.?”
She laughed. “This is what’s going to get you interested in my career?”
“Seriously, if you’ve been topless in an action movie directed by the guy who made E.T., we should watch that movie right away. How do people watch movies these days? Would we have to download it?”
He wanted to keep joking and laughing about her movies. He wanted to keep driving, maybe forever, and he wanted to keep sneaking looks at the topless beauty in the seat next to his. He did not want to think about the end of E.T., the part where the stupid alien went back to his happy spaceship and left the poor kid behind with a broken heart. It had been hard enough for that kid to watch his alien buddy leave, and he hadn’t even been getting sex out of the deal.
Better not to think about it. “Absolutely,” he said, and obviously it had been too long since anyone had said anything because Ashley gave him a look that made it clear she thought he was losing it. “The stream,” he explained. “We’ll do that. And maybe I can take a bit more time off and we can go kayaking at the lake. And Aunt Carol and Kevin will want to say good-bye—we could all go for a ride, if you wanted, one afternoon. I could borrow a four-horse trailer and we could go over to Merck Forest. They’ve got some good trails.”
“Okay,” she agreed. She settled into the seat and bundled the blanket back up over her shoulders. He knew she wasn’t hiding; she just wanted to be cozy.
He wondered what she’d say if he suggested they just keep driving, running away from it all and never coming back to their current lives. But he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to hear her say no. And if she said yes, he’d have to deal with the guilt of messing up her dream. So he stayed quiet, and they drove back to the cabin. Back to the place that was, for a few more days at least, home.
Twenty-three
ASHLEY CRIED THE entire flight to L.A. Not deep, shattering sobs, just intermittent tears that snuck out before she noticed them coming. They’d gone to Woody’s the night before and there had been so many people there who’d come just to say good-bye to her. Abi and Laurie and Kevin and his mom, and Josh’s cousins she’d met at The Splash. Theo had hauled her up onstage and prodded her to make a speech, and for the first time in her life she’d been too overcome to give a performance. She’d just stood there and smiled and laughed and cried until finally Josh took pity on her and lifted her down and hugged her until she was strong again. They’d gone home and ridden to the creek and she’d looked up at the stars and tried to feel insignificant, because if she was nothing compared to the universe then surely her pain was even less than nothing, and she should be able to ignore it.
It hadn’t worked, though, and they’d gone back to the cabin and made love and fallen asleep together, and then they’d woken up and Josh had driven her to the airport and she’d made herself walk away from him forever.
Adam had booked her two seats on the plane so there was no one beside her, and she was grateful to him, and then, suddenly, irritated. She was grateful? As if it were some personal gift from him to her, rather than an expensive luxury incurred on her behalf by his assistant, one that Ashley would end up paying for the next time Adam submitted his expense report. She had nothing to be grateful to Adam for.
Not until she landed and was escorted past security and made her way to the car waiting for her. But then she climbed inside the car and saw Charlotte, and heard Charlotte say, “Adam said you were a bit shaky. He thought you might want some company.” Then Charlotte saw Ashley’s face, blotchy and swollen, and said, “Oh, Ash,” and Ashley was crying again.
“It’s a great part,” Ashley sobbed. “And you got your part, too! I get to work with you! I’m so excited,” she tried, and then she sobbed. “I miss him so much.”
“It’s over, then?” Charlotte asked, gathering Ashley into her arms.
Ashley nodded. “He drove me to the airport and he kissed me good-bye and . . . it’s over.”
“I’m so sorry.” Charlotte didn’t say much more. She just held Ashley tight and let her cry.
“They wanted to cast Rocky,” Ashley said eventually. She wasn’t sure why it was important that she share this, but at least it was something to focus on. “Lauren saw the videos we took, of us riding around? And she said he was the perfect horse for the part. Someone called Josh and tried to set it up, and he wouldn’t agree to it. He didn’t even want his horse down in the big dirty city.”
“Or maybe he was trying for a clean break,” Charlotte said. “Isn’t that wha
t you guys were supposed to be doing? It wouldn’t be too clean if you had to come to work and see his horse every day.”
Ashley cried a little more at that, wondering whether Josh had been looking out for her or for his horse. She finally regained some sort of composure and managed to sit up straight. “It really was that easy for you?” she asked. “Leaving Kevin? He seems fine, you seem fine . . . You’re not just both putting on brave faces, are you? No. So, how did you do that?”
Charlotte shrugged. “We just never cared that much. We’re friends. We’ve stayed in touch a little; he e-mailed me a few days ago and told me to brace myself for your arrival, because he was pretty sure you were going to be having a hard time.”
“Kevin said that? Did he say . . . Did he seem to think Josh was going to have a hard time, too?”
“He said Josh would just go to ground. He said Josh never lets anyone help, but that you seemed a bit more sensible, so hopefully I could be useful down here.”
“I don’t like to think of him being all alone.”
“Then stop thinking about him. Think about you. Rehearsals start tomorrow. We’ll get you home, do your laundry, make sure you’ve got quick meals in the freezer just in case you ever manage to catch a bite at home. . . . What else do you usually do at the start of a project?”
“My assistant usually does all that.”
“But you got rid of your assistant in the spring.”
“Yeah.”
“So should we be doing a quick-hire to get you a new one? Your contract doesn’t specify that you get one?”