by Ruthie Knox
“Excuse me,” she said to Prachi. “I have to …”
Go.
She ran from the room, thundered up the steps, and locked herself in the upstairs bathroom, where she turned her face into the nook where the wall met the shower, pressed her hand against cool plaster, and tried to push everything she felt down where it belonged.
There was so much resistance. Too much. Sorrow kept climbing up her throat, wanting to escape in noise, tears, exclamations, self-pitying speeches that did nothing to help her.
She couldn’t push hard enough, so she took a shower, even though she’d already taken one. She shampooed and conditioned her hair, soaped her skin, turned her face up into the spray and let it beat against her forehead.
When the hot water ran out, she dried off and put her clothes back on, still restless. The need to escape, to move, pounded through her, but what were her options, really? She was a stranger in this place.
“Ashley?” Prachi said from the hallway. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” she called back. “I’ll be out soon.”
Under the sink, she found sponge, toilet brush, cleanser, paper towels.
She piled them into her arms and opened the bathroom door. From the kitchen, murmured voices and running water told her that Roman was with Prachi and Arvind, sucking up.
Ashley went outside and started cleaning the Airstream. She scrubbed the toilet, wiped down the shower and sink, swept dust out of drawers. She cleaned the linoleum bathroom floor tile by tile until there were no tiles left, and then she laid on her back, head on the disintegrating bathmat, and tried not to think about the cardboard boxes in the main room of the trailer.
She tried not to think about anything.
CHAPTER THREE
Ashley couldn’t sleep.
Prachi had put her in the guest room, right next door to Roman. He was sleeping on a pullout sofa in the craft room. Every time he moved, something creaked.
She listened for it. Twelve after ten. Eleven-thirty. Twelve-oh-five.
Creak.
The guest bed was a tall prison with a white ruffled canopy. Ashley kept twisting around, trying to find a comfortable position, but the pillow pushed too hard against her neck. The top sheet tangled in her legs.
She hated top sheets. As far as she was concerned, top sheets were purposeless and irritating. Purely decorative, overly civilized, far too fussy. They pissed her off. She spent an hour fuming about top sheets and then another half an hour constructing a mental list of all the other products that drove her up the wall.
Fabric softener. Washcloths. Those plastic net things you were supposed to use to scrub your skin with in the shower instead of a washcloth.
Scented lotion. Panty liners. Scented panty liners.
Scented panty liners made her want to punch the pillow, so she did. She punched it several times, but it didn’t help, so she went back to list-making.
Seasoning packets. MSG. Jokes about tofu made by people who’d never even tried it. Roman’s sunglasses. Bucolic planned villages with scenic cows and winding streets and guest rooms that were too cold and too stifling.
She flipped from one side to the other, thrashed her feet around beneath the covers, and thought about things that made her angry until she got too hot and had to stick her leg out.
Then she got too cold. Frigid air blasted from a vent beside the bed, and for crying out loud, what did they set the thermostat to, 45? It was fucking freezing.
Hoping for a reprieve, she got out of the bed and opened the door, but when she climbed back into the tall guest bed it was even worse. Like the princess and the pea, she couldn’t get comfortable—only the problem wasn’t something under the bed, it was her. She was a kernel of kinetic heat in a room where she couldn’t find stillness, and Roman was right on the other side of that wall, just there, awake. Creaking.
It didn’t make sense for him to be awake. Insomnia was for people with a conscience, people with feelings. Robots like Roman put on their old-man pajamas and initiated their shutdown routine, and then they didn’t open their eyes again until their processors came awake with a beep in the morning.
“Go to sleep, robot,” she whispered at the ceiling.
Two-ten. Two forty-five. Three-seventeen.
Creak.
Ashley threw the covers off and put her feet down on the cold floor.
She picked up her flip-flops and tiptoed out the door and down the hall, thinking of varnish over smooth wood, pebbles under her toes, sand on a beach. That was what she needed—to feel honest texture on her skin and push against it. Something rough. Something real.
Her feet made no sound on the carpeted stairs. The deadbolt yielded to her fingers and thumb, the door opening with a soft sucking sound. A broken seal. Escape.
She paused on the front porch with her sandals dangling from her fingers.
There was nowhere to go.
Roman had brought her here, and she didn’t have a key to his car. She couldn’t go in the Airstream, because she’d run out of cleaning jobs she could do without more supplies, and she couldn’t handle looking at all those boxes and admitting to herself that she was far too scared to open them.
She picked her way down the brick path, closing her eyes at the feeling of the day’s stored-up heat soaking into the pads of her feet.
Her toes curled.
Better.
She walked all the way to the sidewalk, but the sidewalk wasn’t what she wanted. Neither was the road beyond.
She turned and walked into the garden, where there was mulch and dirt and a metal bench beneath a redbud tree. Ashley sat and gathered fallen seedpods into a messy pile with her feet. She picked one off the top and deconstructed it. The brown pod flaked away, but when she tested a seed inside with her fingernail, it gave. Alive.
She found a stick, dug a small hole with it, and tucked a few seeds inside. A futile act of sabotage. They would never be allowed to grow.
The door opened, and Roman came out. Shirtless.
His jeans sat so perfectly on his hips—low, a little loose, framing the thick curve of oblique muscle at his sides. Showing off his abs, which were the sort of abs men acquired by punishing themselves at the gym for hours every week. The sort of abs that belonged on a man who hated dessert, excess, and life.
Roman’s abs. Roman’s attitude.
Roman’s body.
She looked at his feet, because she didn’t want to look at his stomach and want him and hate herself for it, and she didn’t want to see his face.
Loafers. No socks.
Robots didn’t wear loafers without socks. She knew that—knew he wasn’t a robot or a Ken doll or any other inhuman thing she wanted to make him into.
He was a man who had visited her grandmother when she was sick. When she was dying.
He was a man who’d come after her in the middle of the night. A man who now asked, “You all right?”
Which wasn’t fair at all.
It wasn’t fair for him to be nice to her. To have been nice to her from the very outset, in his own way, providing an umbrella and water and protection. Providing his car and his time and his company.
It wasn’t fair that she liked him, a little bit.
A lot. Sometimes, a lot.
It was completely, deeply unfair that she wanted to press herself against his naked body and find out how warm he was. How hot he could make her. Find out if he knew how to fuck, if he was any good at it, if he could make her forget for an hour or two that she was lost and she didn’t know how to get home and she wanted to cry. All the time.
The only thing he’d done was come outside without socks on.
It wasn’t fair.
“I can’t sleep.”
“I know.”
She dissected a pod and laid the pieces in separate piles. Pods on the left. Seeds on the right. “You act like you care,” she said.
She picked up a seedpod and twirled it in her hand, because she wanted to find the words f
or him. She wanted him to hear what was the matter with him, why she was right and he was wrong, no matter what happened and no matter who took his side.
“You make people like you,” she said. “I bet my grandma liked you a lot. I bet you talked to her about all kinds of things she found interesting, and she thought you were really great with people. But you’re not. You only see people as a means to get what you want. As if nobody’s feelings matter but yours. You’re selfish.”
“That’s the way the world is.”
“No, it’s not.” She turned sideways, her back to him, and lifted her feet onto the bench so that her knees guarded the seed pile. “It’s too hot out here.”
Too hot out here. Too cold inside.
Too turbulent, too lonely, too churned up.
She looked down at the rescued seeds and dispersed them with one sweep of her hand, scattering them on the ground. Because what did she think she was rescuing them from anyway? They were seeds. She had no special powers. She’d never been the kind of person anybody saw as a savior.
Fun, sweet, up-for-it Ashley. Good for a beach party or a summer fling. Good for a tourguide job, a quick lay, a limbo contest. Good at mixing cocktails, good at poker.
Bad at life.
Roman sat down on the front step.
“Were you ever young?” she asked. “Did you ever do crazy things, stupid things? Or were you just born like you are?”
He reached up behind him to toy with the brass doorknob. “I was young.”
“But never wild, I bet. You never took shrooms and then drank half a bottle of Southern Comfort while you waited for them to work, then got hit with it all at once, waaaay too high, and ended up puking up a Shamrock Shake and little bits of dried mushroom all over somebody’s bathroom floor.”
“No.”
“How come?”
“I had other things on my mind.”
She tried to imagine what those things might have been, but she drew a blank, and that made her even angrier. It made her blood pound in her temples that he’d never been wild. That he hadn’t had a childhood, a troubled adolescence, and that nothing seemed to trouble him at all.
He was a cipher. She wanted to crack his code. Trouble the hell out of him.
She wanted to run her hands all over his perfect torso and lick his neck and bite his ear and pinch him hard until she found somewhere soft to kiss. Touch him everywhere, all over, even where he didn’t think she should. Especially there. Stroke his flanks, stroke his cock and be good at it—be so much better at it than he gave her credit for, so that his mouth fell open and his jaw went soft, he panted, he groaned, he came against her stomach.
She wanted to get away from herself.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said.
“I’m not dressed.”
“It’s after three in the morning. No one’s awake.”
When she stood and made her way down the brick path to the street, he got up, and she knew he would follow her. He’d followed her outside. He’d followed her here from Florida.
He would keep following her until her two weeks were up, and it gave her a sick kind of comfort that she didn’t want to need.
“We won’t go far,” she lied.
She would take him as far as she had to.
She would take him wherever she wanted to go.
The muscles in her legs kept pulling his eyes back from wherever he banished them to. Her calves bunching and releasing. Her ass rising and falling with each step.
Her legs were too skinny, but he couldn’t not look.
Following her was stupid, but he couldn’t not follow.
He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened to her face at the dinner table when he told her he’d visited Susan when she was sick.
A loose cannon, Carmen had called her. Those were the words he’d used to convince himself to go with her wherever it was she was going.
The fact was, they were supposed to be enemies, and he was supposed to be striking blows for his side, but every time he struck one, he felt like someone had punched him in the stomach.
She could get into trouble. Get herself hurt. That was why he was out here. To protect his investment, his future.
He wondered if there was anyone alive dumb enough to believe that.
“Did you ever go cow-tipping?” she asked.
“No. I don’t think people actually do that.”
“I bet they do. I bet they just never invited you.”
“That’s possible.”
“What about petty theft—did you ever break the law and steal something? Pack of gum? A car?”
“No.”
“God, you really are a hundred years old.”
She turned off the road and began walking over the grass, heading downhill toward a pond.
“Where are you going?”
She didn’t say. He went after her, even though he knew he shouldn’t. Even though he knew that in her current frame of mind—in his—going after Ashley wasn’t simply annoying or reckless. It was dangerous.
He followed her, and he watched her, knowing something was about to happen.
She crossed her arms at the waist, grabbed a handful of shirt, and pulled it over her head.
Roman passed it, a lump in the grass, and watched the smooth expanse of her naked back shift with each step. He gazed at the spot at the base of her spine, just above the band of her shorts, where he wanted to put his mouth.
She reached the water’s edge, kicked off her sandals, shoved down her pajama shorts and panties, and stood there in profile, naked in the moonlight.
Her tan arms and white breasts. Her nipples. Her navel. Her pubic hair.
All her skin, pale at night, as though she were vulnerable.
Even naked, she was invulnerable.
“You’re going to get arrested.”
“No, I’m going to get in the water.”
The bottom made muddy squelching noises as she walked in. When she’d gone deep enough, she bent her knees, put her back to the water, and let it envelop her. She dipped back her head and wet her hair, and she looked radiant.
She would always do this. She would always get herself hurt, and she would always turn it into movement and transgressive grace, and he would always want to watch her do it, even though he couldn’t do it himself.
“Come in the water, Roman.”
“I’m going back to the house.”
But he stood by the edge of the pond, and she swam closer and swept her palm flat across the surface, splashing him.
He wiped the water off his face.
“Come in the water.”
“No.”
She splashed him again. “You’re no better than I am.”
Water dripped down his stomach, soaking his waistband. His jeans clung to his thighs. She splashed him a third time. “You feel it, too,” she said.
“What do I feel?”
“Everything.”
This time, she aimed for his crotch, and the water was surprisingly cold, which told him how hot he was. How hard.
“You’re being stupid,” he said.
She made a sound, too torn apart to be a laugh. “I’m always stupid.”
She wasn’t. He wanted to say it aloud, but he didn’t like this urge to make her feel better. An urge so strong, it was like a sickness, and he was supposed to be able to find all his sicknesses, pin them down and label them and store them away. He’d given himself over to the project, and if he couldn’t do that—if he couldn’t just not care about Ashley Bowman—then he was well and truly fucked.
Ashley used her whole forearm as a paddle and heaved a wave of water up onto his feet and calves. “Too distracted to do well in school,” she said. “Too lazy to go to college.”
She splashed him again and lowered her voice, imitating a male register. “Too lacking in ambition to keep the same job for more than a season. Lacking in moral principles. Lacking in sense.”
Her father, he
would guess. Roman had met her father once.
She sounded positively senatorial when she said, “When are you going to grow up, Ashley? When are you going to take on some adult responsibilities?”
This time, she pushed the water out from her body, her palm at just the right angle, and it hit him in the chest.
He felt foolish. She was always making a fool of him.
Making him feel things—all the wrong things. Because he didn’t even feel sorry for her. He had no pity for Ashley Bowman. What he felt when she used that voice, ran herself down in that tone that was so obviously her father’s tone, these patronizing observations about her behavior that were so similar to what he’d thought about her, that were so obviously her father’s observations—
What Roman felt was angry.
Furious.
At her father.
At anyone who’d ever told her that about herself.
At her, for humiliating him and soaking him. Making him care. Making him feel.
When a wall of water hit him in the face, Roman lunged.
He caught her easily by one wrist. She tried to get him again with her free arm, but he found the crown of her head and pushed her under. She came up spitting and sputtering, then head-butted him in the stomach.
Roman folded and went under, finding her shoulders, her armpits, taking her down with him. When he pushed to standing, she was clinging to him, her bare, wet breasts pressing against his chest, one arm slung around his neck, her face close, water clumping her eyelashes together, muck on her neck, danger in her smile.
Reckless, yes. She was as reckless, as stupidly reckless, as anyone he’d ever met.
But she was alive, and he was drawn to her despite himself. His weakness to her strength. He didn’t know what to do about it. About her.
He didn’t want to feel compelled to make her feel better, or to get harder at the feel of her body against him, which was softer than he’d expected. Warm everywhere, alive everywhere, breathing and human and so real, it hurt to touch her.
“Now you’ve got me,” she said. “What are you going to do with me?”
In that moment, he felt everything, just like she’d said. Everything in precarious balance—a broomstick in the palm of his hand, and on top of it a ball, and on top of the ball Heberto, Carmen, Ashley, Sunnyvale, Coral Cay.