Roman Holiday 5: Ignited: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance

by Ruthie Knox

  But mostly I’m afraid because I’m here, now. With you. And I don’t know what’s going on, but I know it’s not what’s supposed to be going on.

  I’m afraid because I can’t feel “supposed to” anymore.

  “You’re going to get heatstroke in here with the door closed,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  “My grandma is dead.”

  “She’s been dead a few weeks. You’re supposed to be making me dinner.”

  That brought her head up. Good. Annoyed was better than sad. “It’s really not any of your business.”

  “Something in the boxes?”

  He knelt down. Beneath the flaps of the nearest of them, he found a stuffed toy hot dog, a cheap plastic back-scratcher that said “Dollywood” on the handle, and a pair of hot pink glittery shoes with metal fastened to the bottoms.

  “Are these tap shoes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Susan’s?”

  “Mine.”

  The trailer was too dark, lit only by a dim bulb over the stove and the light leaking in around the edges of the curtains. It was stifling, stuffy, dusty-smelling. But he didn’t have any trouble making out the expression on Ashley’s face.

  Utter devastation.

  “What is all this stuff?”

  “Souvenirs.” She sniffed and pushed at her nose with the back of her hand. “From our trips.” The last word came out pinched, as though her throat had tried to close off around it.

  “Come on. Enough with the crying.”

  She wiped at her eye with the edge of her finger. “I’m not crying. I’m doing great.” Her voice wobbled. “I just want you to go awuh-waaay.” The last word transformed into a sob, and she turned away from him and folded her forearms on the trailer wall and made the most horrible, ugly, naked sounds.

  He remembered how, in the truck, when she’d cried and sang to him, it had been like being stabbed with her sorrow.

  This should have been worse. In a way, it was worse. She was crying a lot harder now, and he badly wanted her to stop.

  There was a difference, though. This time, he didn’t feel like she was doing this to him. Ashley didn’t expect anything from him. She wasn’t crying because she wanted his help or his attention, or because she wanted to annoy him.

  She was crying because she felt terrible, and the impulse to leave her here to fend for herself came and went in an instant, barely registering.

  Talk to her. Touch her. Help her.

  Ironic that he should meet his worst fear here, in the trailer she’d insisted they bring along: that he might have no choice left to him but this. That Ashley might push him into some place he couldn’t get back from.

  And that he would go willingly, full of doomed hope.

  He studied the shape of her back, the fall of her hair, the outline of her bra strap against her yellow T-shirt. He wasn’t ready to touch her. He didn’t even know what to say.

  He took a deep breath, thinking, It starts with a question. Any question.

  “What’s the story with the tap shoes?”

  It took her a long time to pull herself together enough to answer. Even then, the words came out broken. “I wore those for, like, six wuh-weeks one summer. I’d got it into my head that I wanted taps on my shoes. I told Grandma, and she brought those pink shoes home one day. I tapped everywhere. All of the time.”

  Ashley in pink sparkly shoes, her skinny legs even skinnier back then. Her face not quite finished yet. Dancing around the pool, into the office, toward the beach.

  “It must have driven her absolutely insane, but she never said. She let me do that kind of stuff, if I wanted to. She wasn’t big on limits.”

  “What about that stuffed hot dog?”

  “That’s from when we camped overnight next to the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile once.”

  “The Wienermobile camps?”

  “Not normally, but they had a flat or something. Engine trouble? I can’t remember. It was just a freak coincidence. The driver—his name was Steve—was super-nice. Grandma made him dinner, and he gave us the little waving wiener to remember him by.”

  She turned around, smiling a little, and the tension at his temples eased.

  “Grandma made wiener jokes at him all night. I think he was about ready to throttle her by the time he left in the morning.”

  That was the Susan Bowman he remembered. Not big on limits. Or tact. Friendly, but in an undiscriminating sort of way. She’d called Roman “hon” and acted like she was excited to see him when he picked up the rent check, even though she was the one who’d made it a condition of accepting the offer that he show up in person once a quarter to retrieve the rent.

  She was the one who’d insisted that he not speak to Ashley about the terms of the sale, then or now.

  “I’m guessing the beads are from Mardi Gras.”

  “No. They’re from Fardi Gras.”

  “Do I want to know?”

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds. There’s a bunch of RV people who meet up in southern Oregon every year and work on this miniature train track that’s open to the public, but only in the summer. A group of them call themselves the Old Farts, and they throw Fardi Gras in September, right before it gets cold enough to make them scatter for warmer climates. We celebrated it with them one year. It was really fun. Fardi Gras is light on the carnival floats and ‘Show us your tits,’ heavy on the drinking and high-speed miniature train rides.”

  “I hope you wore a helmet.”

  “No.” A memory made her smile faintly. “I fell off in the tunnel. Nearly got run over by the next train that came along.”

  He looked at the piles along the walls. Box after box of memories, packaged up and preserved. Ashley’s version of merit badges and handbooks, dusty compasses and campfire cookware.

  “It’s nice,” she said with a sniffle and a brave smile. “To have all these things to remind me of our stories. It just makes me sad to remember. Sometimes it’s good to be sad, you know?”

  She tried to sell it, she really did. But her eyes had ghosts in them, and he recognized those ghosts. He’d curled up under a tarp in the woods, trying to keep his gaze on the stars to drown out their howling.

  Deep down, she knew the truth as well as he did. These boxes, this dusty trailer—they weren’t love. They were what you got instead of love, if you got anything at all.

  There were no boxes anywhere with Roman’s name on them, but he didn’t envy Ashley’s, and she couldn’t convince herself that her grandmother’s legacy was worth the gas they’d burned hauling it around.

  “This is just a bunch of old crap,” he said.

  Her smile collapsed. “Don’t be mean.”

  “I’m telling you what I see. Mardi Gras beads. A back-scratcher. This isn’t what you wanted, right? You wanted Sunnyvale, and you got a stuffed wiener. I don’t see why you’re trying to convince me that you’re happy about it. Especially when you’re crying.”

  She pushed her hand through her hair. Her fingers got tangled in the ends, and she had to wiggle them to work herself free. Sometimes her hair looked windblown. Beach mussed. Right now it looked scraggly, like she hadn’t had it cut in a while.

  So much about Ashley was like that. If she felt good, she could make you think she was made of sunlight and spun gold. She could make herself believe it. But when she was struggling—then she just looked like what she was.

  Young and uncertain. Poor. Lost.

  Those were the times he most wanted to touch her. When he saw how much of herself she pushed out into the world—her bravery, her astonishing optimism—and how little the world gave her back.

  “It’s not what I expected,” she said quietly. “That’s all. I just need … I have to adjust my hopes to reality sometimes. I have a problem with that. Expecting more than … more than I should. And I don’t mind, really. Except … except I didn’t know she was sick again.”

  “What do you mean, you didn’t know?”

  “I mean I didn
’t know. She was always losing her phone. She hated email. She just wouldn’t get around to it. I mean, it was fine. I saw her lots in the winter when I was living back at Sunnyvale, and then when I wasn’t home, there was always next winter, right? That was how Grandma was.”

  “She didn’t tell you she was sick.” He had to repeat it so he’d stop mentally stumbling over it.

  Roman had understood that Ashley didn’t know about the terms of the will. About Sunnyvale. He hadn’t understood she didn’t know anything.

  But the worst of it was, it made sense with what he knew of Susan. How secretive she’d been about her debt and about the condo sale. How she would focus on whoever was in the room, whatever was right in front of her, but he’d had to hound her on the detail stuff. It took them three months to close on Sunnyvale after they’d agreed to the sale, and that had been ninety-five percent because Susan never returned phone calls and never got around to scheduling the appointment. Once she did, she missed it, and they’d had to start all over again.

  “I don’t understand it,” Ashley said. She sounded plaintive. “And I don’t know how to figure out what to do next when I feel like … like everything keeps shifting. Like I haven’t got anything to hang on to anymore, you know?”

  Eyes gleaming, fierce and frightened, she looked right at him in a way that no one ever did. No one. As if he could give something to her, something she needed. His fist curled around the impulse to soothe her with his hands, his mouth.

  “Maybe she wanted me to work out my own path.” She’d managed to inject a little cheer into her tone again. “Maybe that’s what these boxes are all about. Like, ‘Here’s your past, hon. Go find your own future.’ ”

  “Or maybe she was selfish and shortsighted, and she never stopped to think how you would feel about any of this.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  He shouldn’t do this. He didn’t want to. But it made him so fucking mad to think about Susan, blithely ignoring Ashley. Keeping the sale from her, the cancer, the chemo, packing up those boxes but never picking up the phone.

  It made him so mad, he needed to make Ashley understand.

  “Of course you don’t. You never see unpleasant stuff. You never see what’s going on at all. You think you’ll be happiest if you move back to Sunnyvale, change your name to Susan, and start wearing ugly pants suits.”

  “She wore classy pants suits!”

  Roman took a step toward her, leaning in. “She wore polyester. Pink and blue. And really terrible scarves. She ate too many candy bars. Her thighs rubbed together when she walked. She ran up gambling debts she couldn’t pay and took out a second mortgage on the property, and then she ran through that, too, and then when she was totally fucking broke, she still hard-balled me on the sale and made me pay her three times what the place was worth so I could get it before foreclosure, because she knew I’d have a bitch of a time getting the land if the bank owned it.”

  He wasn’t supposed to tell her that.

  He wasn’t supposed to be this close to her, pushing her back against the wall, their noses nearly rubbing, her breasts against his chest.

  He wasn’t supposed to catch her wrists and pick them up and pin her in place with the truth.

  God, it felt good, though. Righteous and fucking satisfying.

  “She gave me everything,” Ashley whispered. “She was great.”

  “She was flawed, Ashley.”

  “She loved me.”

  “I know she did. She talked about you all the goddamn time. ‘My granddaughter Ashley’s making jewelry. She has a new boyfriend, and he seems like such a nice young man. She’s going to be a doctor. She’s in Bolivia, helping people get clean water.’ I’m not saying she didn’t love you. Everybody knew that.”

  She looked right into his eyes. “Then what are you saying?”

  Roman dropped her arms and stepped back, struck suddenly by the selfishness of what he was doing. By the raw hostility of it.

  I’m saying that she didn’t love you as much as you deserve to be loved.

  I’m saying it’s starting to look like nobody does.

  Who wanted to hear that? What right did he have to say it, even if it was true?

  Her mother was dead. Her father had turned her away, or she’d turned him away—Roman didn’t know which.

  She’d had no one but Susan.

  Roman had no right to take Susan away from her.

  He backed up until he ran into the sink and the rest of the Mardi Gras beads fell in with a clatter.

  It was too hot in the trailer. Sweltering. His head hurt. He needed to get out of here and calm down. Let the sediment settle, clear his mind so he could think rationally.

  Instead, he asked her, “What’s the deal with your dad?”

  Her throat flushed red, her cheeks pink. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean your dad’s a senator, and he never talks about you, and you never see him. What’s the deal?”

  She crossed her arms. “There’s no deal.”

  “There’s got to be. If there were no deal, you’d be giving speeches at rallies for him.”

  “We don’t have the same politics.”

  “Even so. He could use you. Just your face—you wouldn’t even have to talk. But he doesn’t. He acts like you don’t exist.”

  Ashley looked at her feet, bare against the trailer’s shag carpeting. “Okay, so we have an arrangement.”

  “What arrangement?”

  “I keep a low profile. Don’t embarrass him.”

  “And in return?”

  “He leaves me alone.”

  But the loneliness in her voice—the desolation in her body—told Roman she was lying. Her father didn’t leave her alone. He ignored her.

  Roman thought of Ashley in her tap shoes, clamoring for attention, and he could hardly breathe.

  Someone needed to give her what Heberto had given him. A purpose. A sense of her abilities, so she could focus on the future and what she could have instead of letting everything she didn’t have drag her into darkness.

  He could do that.

  But to do it, he’d have to hurt her.

  Roman exhaled, eyes on his shoes. On the ugly carpet. On anything but Ashley. “You need to grow up,” he said.

  When he looked at her, she’d gone still. Her cheeks were stained red, as though he’d slapped her.

  It’s for her own good.

  Not his. Hers.

  “Stop moping around like a teenager,” he said, “and start thinking about what you want to do with the rest of your life. Because you get to keep the boxes. That’s more than most people get. But I’m knocking down Sunnyvale, and you’re just going to have to deal.”

  She sank to the floor, eyes closed, hands braced on her knees, wrists dangling. “I don’t like you very much.”

  “You’re not supposed to. I keep being a dick to you.”

  She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

  It was that movement—her hands, how hard she pushed, her sharp elbows and thin ankle bones and the way she pressed into herself—that made it impossible for him.

  Impossible to break her.

  Impossible even to try to mold her into someone more like himself.

  He dropped into a squat, needing to get closer to her. “The thing is, Ash? I don’t want you to hate me.”

  She nodded, as though she’d known that all along.

  They didn’t say anything for a while. Roman didn’t know what to say. He had no handbook for this. No mentor to mimic. No rules.

  No skills.

  Ashley asked, “You want to see a ghost town?”

  He wanted dinner. And calm.

  Five hundred more push-ups that would give him aching shoulders and a smooth mind.

  He didn’t get to have that. Here they were, and there wasn’t any getting around it. Whether he liked it or not, whether he wanted to or not, it had been like this with her from the beginning.

  She would keep asking
him to do things, and he would keep saying yes.

  “Sure, if we grab something to eat first.”

  “Let me find my shoes.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  They scrounged up microwave pizzas from the camp store, nuked them, and ate them with burning fingers. Afterward, Ashley showed him the road just beyond the back edge of the campground property.

  “This used to be the front,” she said, “but in the nineties they had to reroute the highway and abandon this section because it was too dangerous.”

  “Dangerous how?”

  “There’s an underground fire. This is coal country, and the coal caught on fire. It’s been burning ever since—fifty years or so. They can’t put it out. Or they won’t, because it would be too expensive.”

  “That’s bizarre.”

  “Yeah. So for a long time, it wasn’t noticeable, but then in the eighties and nineties, I think, there started to be all these dangerous things. Like, Stanley says the highway was venting clouds of gas, and plus it was so warm that the temperature difference caused banks of fog, and people couldn’t see where they were driving. He said it was like driving into the Twilight Zone sometimes.”

  The surface of the road undulated and shifted. Gullies opened up, then disappeared. She kind of loved this road. She loved thinking about what it must have looked like when it was exhaling heat into the air, the strangeness of it, how beautifully broken it had become since it was abandoned. Most of the surface was covered with graffiti. One section featured hundreds of identical spray-painted phalluses—cartoonish wangs with proud, bulging balls, all pointing in the same direction. The words and colors hit out of order, making a profane poetry.

  Ziggy. Cami. Creamy snatch.

  Never forget.

  This is where she appears in the dark of the night.

  Wark.

  Asian people love golf.

  Welcome to Hell.

  Be kind whenever possible.

  Roman studied it with his forehead furrowed, like it was a puzzle he might find the clues to solve.

  It was all very Roman of him. She was starting to get how he approached the world. As though he were just visiting, trying to understand the best way to blend in with all these messy humans.