The Asset

by Anna del Mar

It was frigid downstairs.

  “What now?” I muttered to myself.

  “Is that you, Lia?” Ash called out from his room at the top of the stairs.

  “The one and only,” I said. “I’ll be up in a moment.”

  I took off my muddy shoes and stomped down the cellar’s rickety steps. The ancient furnace had given up just in time to welcome the first epic freeze of the season.

  I groaned. “Give me a break.”

  I filled up a basket with firewood from the back porch, climbed the stairs and peeked into Ash’s room. He lay on his bed, propped up on the pillows, working on his laptop.

  “What the hell happened to you?” He motioned me in and set his computer aside. “You look like you’ve been to hell and back. And you’re really late. I was worried.”

  “Car broke down.” I set a log in the hearth and stoked the fire.

  “Christ,” he said. “Does that happen often?”

  “Too often if you ask me.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  I stared at him for a moment then told him the truth. “It didn’t occur to me.”

  The hurt in his eyes reactivated the churn in my stomach.

  “You know I’m cleared to drive,” he said. “Hell, for all you know, I could’ve been in the neighborhood.”

  “I’m fine. I didn’t need any help.” I wiped my hand on my pants and made my way to the door. I hesitated. Anxiety squeezed my chest, but he needed to know. “The other day, a guy showed up at Mario’s. He was looking for you.”

  “I know,” he said.

  I gawked. “You do?”

  He nodded.

  “What did he want?” I asked, curious.

  “If you have to know, he’s an old skipper of mine. We have a business together and he wants me to become active in it.”

  “HowHHowqHowHow do you feel about that?” I said, leaning against the threshold.

  “It’d be an interesting job—you know—if I couldn’t do what I did before.”

  “That’s great, Ash. You’re keeping your options open.”

  “He wanted to meet me again tonight. I drove all the way over to Mario’s, but then...” He paused and fisted his hands. “Why the hell would anybody want me to work with them if I can’t even muster the balls to walk into a fucking bar?”

  He was really upset with himself. For a moment, I forgot about my lousy night. I went over to the bed, sat down next to him and uncurled his fist.

  “He wants you because you’re excellent at what you do.” I squeezed his hand. “You’re getting better every day. You just have to be patient with yourself.”

  “You’re right.” He intertwined his big fingers between my smaller ones. “I’ll get better. I have to. Thanks, Lia.”

  “For what?” I said.

  “For teaching me patience.”

  He brought my hand to his mouth and brushed his lips against my knuckles. The contact was slight, sweet and brief and yet my brain went into default. Total meltdown. My body, on the other hand came online with a burst of electricity. A switch flipped inside me. I was utterly and completely tuned in to him.

  His eyebrows dipped when he noticed the bruises on my wrists. “What happened?”

  “I’m just clumsy.” I reclaimed my hand and, face burning, made for the door. No question about it, I was in a bolting mood again. “The fire should last you through the night. It’s a cold one out there.”

  “Lia?” He hesitated. “Do you want to talk?”

  “About what?”

  “About what happened tonight,” he said. “About those bruises on your wrists. About anything, everything or just some things.”

  I stood at the threshold for a moment, keenly aware of him. What would it be like to put my day into words and free the emotions trapped so deep inside me?

  Disaster.

  If I opened my heart, Red would know. He would find us. Ash would die.

  “No, thanks.”

  I went to my room and closed the door, suppressing the tsunami of tears that wanted to burst out of the bottom of my being. There was no point in talking about anything. I’d been on my own for so long that I didn’t count on anyone else. Couldn’t. Trust had been wrung out of my DNA. I didn’t want to depend on anyone and that included Ash, who’d move on from my life as soon as Gunny Watkins decided he was fit to be on his own.

  * * *

  In the nightmare, I lay naked on the cold cement floor of Charlie Nowak’s basement, staked to the ground and unable to move while Charlie—wearing only a baseball cap from his collection—squashed me beneath his heft.

  “This ass, these boobs.” He groped me with harsh hands. “He’s caught your scent, bitch, and he’s coming for you.”

  I tried not to feel, not to care—the only way I knew to survive—but I was freezing and couldn’t stop shivering. My soul ached and my bones crumpled beneath the man’s crushing weight. There weren’t enough steel plates, pins and wires to repair the damage. Broken as I was, no miracle of science could keep me together. And yet I held on, because someone, somewhere, was calling my name.

  “You won’t get away this time around,” Charlie said. “He’s coming, right now, and he’s gonna teach you a new level of pain.”

  The basement around me transformed into a meticulously landscaped garden crisscrossed by a river. The sound of artificial cascades muted the sobs escaping my throat. I lay facedown on the terrace’s warm limestone floors. A vindictive presence weighted me down, a savage whose malevolence dwarfed Charlie’s drunken stunts. Even without seeing him, I knew who he was.

  I wrenched my neck and spotted the face that terrorized my life, the harmonious features that masked the workings of a putrid mind. He sat on my back and, forcing my forehead against the floor, stabbed the nape of my neck with the sharpened bone needles he preferred.

  He chiseled at my spine, tapping directly into my nerves. He laughed every time I flinched in pain. From the corner of my eye, I could see him dip the needles into a rich pool of red pigment sloshing at the bottom of a wooden saucer. Red. It wasn’t only his name. It was his favorite color too. The pigment was mixed with fresh blood. My blood.

  “Did you think you could escape me?” His caw-like laughter was the sound of my life gone wrong. “You’re such a fool. This time around, I’m gonna mark you mine for good.”

  It didn’t matter that I’d gone to great lengths to remove his brand from my body. The needles savaged my skin. Blood dripped down my back and pooled over the limestone. I cried and begged and yet he wouldn’t stop. The inverted R replicated over my body like a gruesome virus.

  “It’s a nightmare,” a calm voice said. “You can stop it, Lia. You just have to wake up.”

  The voice fueled my inner strength. In the nightmare, I broke the ropes around my wrists, bucked from under my captor and ran, following the sound of my name. I darted out of the garden, through Charlie’s stark basement and up the stairs, barreling through an open door I hadn’t seen before.

  I woke up crying and gasping. I saw the German shepherd first, head tilted, brow wrinkled, caramel eyes gleaming with concern. Then Ash’s face overtook the space before my eyes.

  “Lia?” he said, caressing my hair. “Are you awake, sweetness?”

  I lay on my side with my nails digging into my palms and my body curled around my knees, shivering for real. I must have kicked off the blankets. I didn’t think I could move even if I tried.

  “It’s really cold in here,” Ash said. “It’s too cold for you to get warm. I’m going to take you to my room. Okay?”

  I nodded and tried to get up, but my body refused to uncoil and the shivers made me an uncoordinated mess. Ash picked me up and carried me as if I were made of air and light. He limped out of my room, across the hallway and into h
is room, and deposited me gently in his bed.

  The mattress was still warm from his body. The covers he tucked around me helped. Neil lay on top of my legs, lending me his doggy heat. Ash stoked the fire and then got under the covers, slipped his bare shoulder beneath my head and gathered me against him.

  The heat of his body permeated through me, unknotting my muscles and defrosting the frozen fear.

  I don’t know how long I lay there, listless and thawing, enjoying the soft strokes of his fingers running through my hair. He didn’t ask any questions and I was grateful for his silence. The nightmare haunted me and, when I closed my eyes, little red packets of incense streamed in my mind like an electronic news ticker.

  “Try to relax,” Ash murmured in my ear. “No need to be upset. Go to sleep, Lia. You’re going to be all right.”

  Eventually, my exhaustion prevailed. I succumbed to the calming rhythm of Ash’s heart. I had no fears, nightmares or dreams. For once, I simply slept.

  * * *

  I woke up to the smell of coffee and something else, something delicious that my stomach recognized with a loud growl. I stretched beneath the blankets. The fire roared in the little hearth. I was surprised to find myself in Ash’s bed, but then memories from last night flooded in.

  Inasmuch as I avoided sharing beds with anyone, how on earth had I managed to sleep with him all night?

  A glance at the alarm clock on the night table showed that it was almost eleven. What about my animals? I must have slept so soundly I didn’t hear the breakfast racket. I threw the covers aside and rushed down the stairs, stopping only to don my galoshes before careening into the kitchen.

  “Hey, wait, whoa.” Ash caught me by the waist. “Where do you think you’re going without a coat? It’s freezing out there.”

  “I forgot to feed the animals.” I tried to disentangle from his arms. “They must be starving—”

  “Calm down, Lia,” he said. “They’re not starving. I fed them.”

  I froze. “You fed them?”

  “It’s not so hard to do.” He let go of me, turning his attention to the pan on the stove. “Camels, now those are a pain in the ass. They’re the nastiest sons of bitches.”

  “You fed all of them?” I said.

  “I did.” He turned the eggs with the spatula. “Nobody out there is complaining.”

  “I’ll go check.”

  “After you have your breakfast.” He plated the eggs.

  “But—”

  “Sit.” He pointed at the table. “Food first, animals later.”

  With my brain still in a fog, I plopped down on the chair. He parked a full plate in front of me before he took his place beside me. I didn’t know how hungry I was until the eggs eased down my throat and warmed my empty stomach. My mouth exploded with the taste of bacon.

  “This is amazing,” I mumbled with a mouthful of breakfast goodness.

  Ash added a buttered biscuit to my plate. “Try this.”

  “Hmm.” I swallowed. “It tastes just like your grandma’s.”

  “She taught me all I know about cooking.”

  I washed it down with a gulp of coffee and a sip of freshly squeezed orange juice.

  “Better?” He dug into his breakfast.

  “Much.”

  “And the nightmare last night?”

  “Gone.”

  “You get those often?”

  “Sometimes.” I glanced at Ash tentatively.

  He sighed. “Nightmares suck.”

  I caught a rare glimpse of his intimate pain. My heart sank a little. Nightmares were the mind’s ultimate hauntings, perverse, recurring and relentless. That’s why he slept so little. Heck, that’s why I slept so badly too. I wished I could do away with all of his nightmares.

  “I hope I wasn’t too loud,” I said. “Did I wake you?”

  “You weren’t loud enough,” he said, “until the end.”

  “But...how did you know?”

  “Neil is trained to recognize nightmares.” He bit into his biscuit, chewed and swallowed. “He alerted me that something was wrong. I knocked on your door, but you didn’t answer. When I opened the door, he went straight to you. That’s when I knew.”

  “Thanks, Neil.” I sneaked a strip of bacon to the dog under the table.

  “What happened to the furnace?” Ash said.

  “It stopped working last night.”

  He put another biscuit on my plate. “And you didn’t think to say anything?”

  “The problem doesn’t affect your room,” I said. “The fireplace kept it toasty all through last winter. That’s why I rented out that room and not the other. To be honest, I didn’t realize how cold it would get in there.”

  The little lines between his eyebrows deepened. “So my room used to be your room?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Who’d pay to stay in the other one?”

  “You would,” he said crossly. “You paid a high price last night.”

  “I have another blanket I can add to the pile.”

  “You can’t possibly be thinking about sleeping in that freezer all winter.”

  “I can try weatherizing the windows,” I said. “Or I can sleep downstairs on the couch.”

  Ash made a face. “That old thing will likely wreck your spine for good.”

  “Silas Ford doesn’t have the money to replace the furnace, but I’ll stop in when I go into town today and ask him again.”

  “Why are you going into town?” he said. “I thought it was your day off.”

  “I volunteer for Reverend Martin when I can. I deliver hot meals to some of the church members.” I checked the clock. “I’ll need to get going soon.”

  “Mind if I go with you?” he asked.

  I was surprised. “Do you really want to go into town?”

  “No, but I’ve got some errands to run and I might as well get them out of the way.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll do the dishes, get dressed and then see if I can get my car started.”

  “Your car’s no longer at the bottom of the hill,” he said. “I jump-started it this morning and drove it up.”

  “You did?” I gave Ash a hug that got shortened on the spot when it had a big impact on my body. “Um...” I reeled from the contact, but rallied. “That’s great, thank you.”

  “And by the way,” he said. “There’s no way in hell you or I are ever getting into that death trap again. I survived the jungles of South America, Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m not riding in that rusted piece of shit and neither are you.”

  “Hush, don’t let the car hear you talking like that.” I lowered my voice. “She’s easy to offend and highly temperamental. She might just quit altogether. What would I do without her?”

  He rolled his eyes. “You should make her into scrap metal, that’s what you should do.”

  “But—”

  “It’s final,” he said. “I’m driving and we’re taking my truck. From now on, the truck is the designated primary transportation asset in and out of here.”

  Right. I gave him a mock salute. Like he was going to take me everywhere I needed to go.

  We drove to town in Ash’s immaculate truck, a smooth ride on winding backcountry roads. The sun ignited the aspens, which lit the hills with flaring reds and luminescent yellows. I lowered my window, enjoying the crisp mountain air and the stunning views with Queen’s “Princes of the Universe” blasting in all of its orchestral glory.

  Ash looked relaxed at the wheel, reveling in the simple joy of driving, maneuvering the curves with obvious ease. Sticking out from beneath his knit cap, the ends of his hair fluttered in the breeze. He grinned whenever I smiled in his direction. The universe was playing with me again. Why did he have to be so darn good-looking?


  Neil stuck his nose out the window and wagged his tail. His fur, tongue and lips flapped in the wind. I leaned back on the heated leather seat and shared in the moment’s perfection. I even dared to imagine that this could have been my life in some other dimension. I couldn’t remember a more beautiful day.

  Our arrival to town put an end to the ride, but I stored the moment in my mind, eager to add to my limited collection of precious memories.

  “Thanks,” I said. “That was awesome.”

  He gave me the oddest look. “I don’t know many people who’d think of a drive as if it were a gift.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “We’ll do it again,” he said. “And wait until I take you to Heaven.”

  “Heaven?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The mood in the cab changed when Ash parked the truck on Main Street. I opened the door and got out, but Ash lingered in his seat, toying with the leash while Neil hovered by his shoulder. No force in the world would get him to admit that he was having flashbacks, but he eyed the storefronts and the folks strolling by as if an attack was imminent.

  I came around to the driver’s side door and leaned into the window. “You don’t have to get down if you don’t want to.”

  He reached out and gently trailed my chin with his knuckles, a faint, brief caress. Was I imagining this? No. The buzzing in my spine proved that he’d disturbed my body’s molecular hive. The eyes that centered on my lips turned into pure cobalt. My knees buckled. I clung to the door. The lush look of his mouth pulled on my body like a magnet.

  “Ah, Lia.” He took a deep breath. “What would I do without you? But I need to do this. I made an appointment.”

  I forced my eyes away from his mouth. “Where are we going?”

  “We?” His gaze met mine.

  “I have some time yet before the meals are ready,” I said. “And if it helps...”

  He put the leash on Neil, opened the door and limped out of the truck and onto the sidewalk, leaning on his cane as we made our way down the street.

  It was unavoidable that people in Copperhill would notice Ash. Despite his limp, he made for a striking figure. Mrs. White, who ran the Laundromat, was the first one to come out on the street to say hello. He greeted her kindly. Mr. Stewart, the pharmacist, joined us at the curb. Ahead of us, the librarian pulled out her cell phone and called someone, before she too joined the group gathering around us.