by Ruthie Knox
He kissed her. His dry lips, a warm, soft press that was comfort and amity, empathy, understanding.
He kissed her. The yield of his mouth, the discovery of the tip of his tongue, wet and alive, parting her lips. Her heavy lids, eyelashes sinking, meeting, her jaw moving and his hands settling on her shoulders, cupping her ribs, lifting her up. She made a sound, or he did, both of them giving in to the heat flaring deep inside them. Always there. Burning. Waiting.
He kissed her and said, “It’s not stupid.” She didn’t know what he meant until he said, “Hope.”
They quit talking and kept kissing, their tongues dipping, parleying, mating, exploring, their breath mingling in this empty space, this empty town that wasn’t empty. Her skin woke, warmed, a tightening in her breasts, an angry reawakening between her legs. Her breath came short, because she wanted him. She didn’t know if there had been even one moment since she first saw him that she hadn’t wanted him and been plagued by doubt about whether and why and how—questions that didn’t matter now.
None of it mattered.
Roman was kissing her, and it was all that mattered.
CHAPTER FIVE
They finally had to stop when a man came down the steps and they needed to move out of the way. Standing opposite him, pressed up against the metal railing, Ashley covered her lips with her loose fist and shook her head slightly.
What? he mouthed, because she didn’t look sorry. Pink had climbed up the sides of her neck. The sun sinking behind the hillside lit the ends of her hair and made her eyes too clear and perfect a blue for him to look at.
Priest, she mouthed back, pointing with one finger. Then he saw the top of the collar above the man’s short-sleeved shirt and rolled his eyes, because there would be a priest. If Roman made out with Ashley in a ghost town—if he felt good and right and alive for the first time in as long as he could remember—it was inevitable that they would be interrupted by the only priest for miles around.
Sinner, he mouthed, but she didn’t understand him, and that was probably just as well. He didn’t want to remind her that he still technically had a girlfriend. He didn’t want to remind himself, either. He wanted to take her hand and lead her back down the steps, to town. Back out the main drag to the road, over its accordion surface.
So he did that.
He wanted to stop with her and admire the penises spray-painted on the asphalt, count them, find the largest and the smallest, indulge her silliness as the light began to fade, until she realized they’d better get back because if he sprained his ankle on the broken road, she’d have to leave him for the wolves.
Roman didn’t usually do what he wanted. But tonight, he did.
The world kept spinning.
He’d told Ashley who he was, where he’d come from, and she hadn’t taken back her hand. She’d let him kiss her, had clung to his neck and scraped blunt fingernails through the hair at his nape.
At the campground, while she visited the bathroom, he walked to the camp store and bought marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate. He’d banked the coals in the pit earlier and asked Michael to keep an eye on them. It didn’t take long for him to get the fire going again.
She didn’t eat marshmallows, it turned out—they had gelatin, or, as she put it, “ground-up horse hooves”—but she set graham cracker halves out on the flat rocks surrounding the campfire and let the chocolate get soft on top, and she criticized his marshmallow-toasting technique.
They ate s’mores and potato chips under a carpet of stars.
He wasn’t afraid.
He knew that tomorrow everything would become complicated again, but he kept reminding himself it wasn’t tomorrow yet, and this wasn’t complicated. It was a fire he’d built with his own hands, terrible food, Ashley’s warm thigh pressing against his, a kiss that tasted of graham crackers and salt licked from the corner of her mouth.
When it got late, then later, he kissed her again, and she leaned into him hard enough to knock him off the log he was sitting on and then came down with him, throwing her leg over his hip. He captured her knee and stopped her from taking it any further.
“I have to call Carmen.”
The firelight died in her eyes.
“Shit, no,” he said quickly. “That’s not what I meant. I have to call her and tell her we’re over. Before … you know.”
He bumped his hips up slightly. She closed her eyes and crushed his shirt in her fists. “Oh.”
“Was that a good oh, or was that Oh, I see?”
“Little of both.”
“Good.” He touched her neck where it was most flushed, hot under his fingers. “I don’t want to be that guy,” he said solemnly. “Any more than I already am.”
“I get it.” She dismounted and sat on her heels next to his legs. Roman rose, and right away, he wanted to kiss her again. She had the kind of mouth that a man could get lost in for hours. Wide, agile, open. She did things with her tongue and her teeth that he’d never thought of before. Things that made him curious how many tricks she knew that she could teach him.
“Maybe I better go to bed,” she said, dodging his hand as he reached for her. “Unless you meant to call her right now?”
“It’s late.” He looked at his watch. “It’s two.”
“Way too late.”
“Sorry.”
She smiled. “No. It’s probably better not to, you know. Think with our little brains. In the long run. This way, we can take some time to kind of … get our heads around today.”
“Right. Are we still here tomorrow, or—”
“No, I think we’d better keep moving. We’ll hit the road in the morning. Head for Ohio.”
“Then I’ll see you in the morning.”
She smiled. “Yeah. See you in the morning.”
When she got up to go, the glow from the embers briefly lit the back of her legs orange-gold all the way up to the hem of her shorts, and then she walked into shadow, opened the trailer door, and he lost her.
CHAPTER SIX
“Roman. It’s about time.” Carmen stepped over a puddle of rainwater in the parking lot and picked her way down the path of round stone pavers to the Sunnyvale office building. “I tried to get you yesterday.”
“I’m at a campground. No cell service. I’m calling on the office phone now.”
She rested her clipboard on the porch rail, wishing Roman had left the keys with her so she didn’t have to wait for Noah. “Hmm? Oh. Sure. Listen, there’s only one thing I need to hear from you this morning, and that’s ‘Yes, Carmen, you can go ahead with the demo. I got the crazy woman under control.’ ” She peered through the narrow vertical window set into the middle of the door.
Still dark. No sign of Noah at the site yet, but all the demolition equipment waited in the lot, which was free of debris. He’d done what she asked him to do.
He would be here soon, and she planned to be gone within five minutes. All she needed was the go-ahead from Roman. She’d listen to Noah’s plan for the knockdown, approve it, and get back on the road to Miami.
She wouldn’t stick around to discover whether the strange affliction that had come over her the last time she saw Roman’s contractor would afflict her a second time.
That would be a bad idea, particularly considering how many times she’d indulged her affliction in bed recently. Fully nude. Imagining this strange man’s stiff tongue against her clit, she’d brought herself to one fierce, almost painful orgasm after another.
She’d had more orgasms in the past five days than in the entire previous year. Which, fine. Nothing wrong with masturbation, and sometimes you smacked into a trigger that made you want to do it more often than normal. So Noah was a trigger for her. Life was strange.
“Carmen?”
“What?”
“I need to talk to you about our relationship.”
You have a relationship with my father, she almost said. I’m an afterthought.
It was possible that she was angri
er with Roman than she’d been willing to admit.
It was also possible that her anger was one explanation for her endless willingness to imagine what a bristled chin would feel like, scraping over her bare sex.
At the sound of Noah’s truck in the lot, she looked up, alert and far more eager than she should be.
“What about our relationship?” she asked.
“I’m ending it,” he said.
It didn’t surprise her. She’d seen it coming, predicted it after that last, pathetic phone call.
She hadn’t predicted that she would feel this … this what?
She needed her clipboard. Her arms felt empty without it, her heart undefended.
When she picked it up off the porch rail, Noah stepped out of his truck, and it was as though she didn’t belong to her body at all. As though she were a pair of eyes, unfocused, and if she kept her gaze soft, she would separate in two, feelings and being, and everything would simplify that had become too complex.
Noah grinned in the most unseemly way and waved his arm back and forth. He was a Labrador of a man. Big and ungainly, with too much enthusiasm. Probably not very bright.
She shouldn’t approve of him. Shouldn’t feel so relieved to see him.
She shouldn’t be clutching her clipboard so tightly when she’d seen this coming and had already decided not to be upset by it.
Stick to the script, she admonished herself.
“All right,” she said to Roman. “What about the knockdown?”
“That’s it?” Roman asked. “You’re not even going to—to argue with me, or protest, or anything?”
“If I were to do that, would it make any difference?”
“Probably not, but it would feel different.”
To him, he meant. Roman was dumping her, and he wanted her to care how it felt to him.
Men were such bastards.
Noah bounded up on the porch. “Hey,” he said.
She didn’t do greetings. She’d have to tell him.
“Hey.”
“Is that Noah?” Roman asked.
“Yes. I’m at the site. We’re ready to go as soon as you give me the green light.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because she said she saw Key deer. She hasn’t retracted it.”
“Make her retract it.”
“I made a deal with her. She takes me on this trip, and at the end, if she hasn’t changed my mind about Sunnyvale, she’ll retract it.”
“Where are you going?”
“Wherever she says.”
“How long will it take?”
“Another week, week and a half, maybe.”
“We don’t have that much time. The schedule is tight as it is.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“I want to knock these buildings down today.”
“Well, you can’t,” Roman said, and there was emotion in his voice. “They’re my goddamn buildings now, and you don’t have my permission.”
Shaken, Carmen took an involuntary step back and stumbled into the door, which Noah had unlocked and opened while she’d been preoccupied. Just like that, she was falling, landing on her tailbone, but not hard enough to really hurt. The clipboard went flying. Noah’s face creased with concern, and he dropped to one knee at once.
“Are you okay?”
“Carmen? What was that?”
“Nothing. I fell. I’m fine.” She batted away Noah’s hands. They were heavy and warm. He had big fingers. Knuckles like knobs. Hair everywhere.
Undignified hands. So why did she like them so much?
Noah picked up her clipboard and handed it to her. She took it and then followed the path of his gaze. Right up her skirt.
He blushed like a boy.
Carmen got to her feet, registering the twinge in her ankle with annoyance. She’d worn the wrong shoes, and now she would suffer for it.
“I spoke with Heberto this morning,” she told Roman.
“Yes.”
“He was interested to know how things were coming along on your project. He said that if you aren’t able to get enough leverage on the Bowman woman, he could speak with her father.”
“No.”
“The senator is campaigning. He might want to hear what his daughter’s been up to. It’s potentially quite embarrassing, given his vocal support for business over environmentalist nonsense.”
“No, Carmen.”
“Or we could go the other way. His numbers were poor in Miami last time. He’d be grateful for help winning the Cuban vote. A fund-raiser, perhaps. A donation in return to talking some sense into his black sheep.”
“No. I’m handling her.”
“I’m sure you’re handling her plenty. The question is, are you getting anything from the woman other than a warm place to shoot your load?”
Noah flinched. Carmen didn’t blame him. It was the worst thing she’d been able to think of to say, mean and predatory.
This was how she had to be. Men didn’t respond to her otherwise. They didn’t listen. They didn’t learn. They just took things, unless you made them stop.
Unless you hit them with a seven-hundred-dollar driver. Then they called you a bitch, but they stopped.
But she felt strange, still. That weird sensation hadn’t gone away—as though she were splitting in two. As though she was actually hurting, and she didn’t want to hurt.
Roman said, “Carmen, it’s not—I don’t—Listen, the thing is …”
What had happened to him? He’d been so sensible a week ago. She’d had such hope for him. The woman had turned him into someone who raised his voice and sputtered. Someone Carmen was tired of talking to.
“The thing is, Roman, that we’ve invested in your project. Even if you do own this property, Zumbado Development is going to be building the hotel, and Heberto wants these units down. He wants them down yesterday.”
“That’s not the best way to handle this.” Roman had raised his voice now, speaking loudly enough for Noah to hear. His wrinkled forehead got more wrinkled. “It’s a delicate situation, and if you bring him into it—”
“Twenty-four hours,” Carmen said. “You green light this demo within twenty-four hours, or we’ll take care of your new girlfriend our way, and I’ll knock the fucking buildings into the swimming pool myself.”
She reached up to her ear and hit the button on her new headset to cut off the call, wishing, as she often did, for her old phone that had flipped shut. There had been something so satisfying about the finality of that noise.
Noah was watching her, arms crossed, face creased as though he were one of those ancient old men who played dominoes all day at Máximo Gómez Park in Little Havana.
She checked his left hand, but it was as bare of a wedding ring as it had been the last time she saw him.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“No.”
No. Nothing was okay. There was this … disruption. Upheaval. An earthquake beneath her perfectly ordered life.
She felt awful.
“Roman isn’t prepared to go ahead with the demolition today.”
“Oh. Shit. That’s really going to mess up the schedule.”
“He also broke up with me.”
Noah didn’t look all that surprised. He must have figured it out from the context.
She wondered if he’d guessed what she was going to do next.
“Do you find me attractive, Noah?”
“Sure.”
“Sure? You don’t sound sure.”
“With respect, I’d have to be a dead man not to.”
“Do you have any moral objection to casual sex?”
She’d hoped for a gasp or an open mouth, a fish-catching-flies expression, but Noah didn’t react at all except for between his eyebrows, where twin frown lines sank deep. Impressively deep. Two or three centimeters. If she still had the ruler she’d used to familiarize herself with metric measurements in middle school, she cou
ld confirm.
“Not on principle,” he said carefully.
“Do you object, on principle or in practice, to the idea of taking me to the nearest motel and fucking me?”
What followed was the longest ten-second silence of her life. In the parking lot, a diesel engine roared to life, and Noah’s delicious, soft brown eyes flicked to the door, then back to her face.
Down to her breasts. And below.
It was a good view. She made sure of that.
Carmen waited for something to happen. The anticipation should have been delicious, but it didn’t feel right. Her eyes fixed on Noah’s impractical giant belt buckle. “Sisters Rodeo,” it said. “70th Annual.”
She tried to imagine this man on a horse and failed utterly.
“Noah?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“The offer’s on the table. Take it or leave it.”
“You’re not kidding,” he said.
When she just raised an eyebrow, he reached for her.
She wasn’t sure what he’d intended. A quick grope—that would be the obvious thing. But those lines were still deep between his eyebrows, and he looked … concerned. As though he could see right through her to the earthquake, to the hurt, and Carmen didn’t want that.
She pushed his hand away. Her heart went into overdrive, and she almost called it off. The words formed on her lips. Forget it. Just forget I said anything.
Only she found, when she looked down, that she hadn’t actually let go of his hand. And he used that weakness, turned it on her somehow. He pivoted his own hand at the wrist, clasped her palm, released it before she’d even registered what he was doing, and then he was sliding his fingers over the sleeve of her suit jacket, up toward her elbow. He was reeling her into his body, inch by inch, so she had to tilt her chin up. Way up.
Then it was hard to feel like she had all the power in this situation. Because of the crick in her neck. And the wound in her pride.
Because she couldn’t stop thinking, Kiss me. God, please, kiss me.
“Not here,” she told him sternly. “Follow me.”
He looked at her face, an unauthorized X-ray of every decision she’d made before she left the house this morning. The white suit because it made her look untouchable. Her hair down because she had beautiful hair, hair that made men pay attention to the way she looked instead of the way she got what she wanted.