Roman Holiday: The Adventure Continues

by Ruthie Knox

  She wasn’t. They’d talked about this. They were just taking a few more days to adjust the plan, and then—

  “Your people at Sunnyvale, they’re doing everything they can think of to get attention. The story’s going to hit state news channels soon. If this gets bigger, it’ll poison the whole development.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  Her father was right behind her now. He’d caught up, his voice low and smooth. “Díaz will run into trouble with local people, environmentalists, government. It’s tricky trying to build something that large. Complicated. And if the wrong person puts pressure in the right place …”

  If he did. That was what her dad meant. If he put pressure in the right place, he could ruin Roman’s development. His career. His life.

  “You wouldn’t.”

  He would, though.

  He wouldn’t even have to try hard, because she’d laid all the groundwork for Roman’s ruin herself.

  She’d set this thing in motion—her friends at Sunnyvale trying to rescue the apartments because of her, Roman in Wisconsin because of her, problems at his office because of her, his ex-girlfriend threatening his partnership with Heberto because of her.

  This was her mistake. It was her fault. Her father wasn’t wrong about it.

  He was being a manipulative jerk, but he wasn’t wrong.

  “Everybody loses then, Ashley,” he said. “Díaz loses biggest of all. You don’t want that, do you?”

  She didn’t. She wanted Roman to get to make his own choices, free and clear of the mess she’d created.

  What if he couldn’t?

  Her father stepped to her front and wrapped his fingers around her chin. “Come back to Florida with me,” he said. “Tell them to clear out. Let Carmen get those buildings knocked down, and the press will lose interest.”

  He breathed down on her. Pinned her with his gaze, full of wounded pride and a terrible resolve that Ashley couldn’t understand. “Let her go,” he said.

  “I can’t. I loved her.”

  “You have to.”

  She moved away from him, putting distance between them until she came to the edge of the lawn and looked out over it and saw Roman.

  He sat next to Carmen at a picnic table, their twin dark heads bent over Carmen’s clipboard. She said something, and he made an animated gesture in the air with his hand, a looping circle that meant nothing to Ashley.

  They were talking about the project. The development.

  They were talking about the demolition or their financing or how to manage Heberto. How to get around zoning laws. What kind of footers to use.

  Ashley had no idea what they were talking about, because she and Roman existed in completely different worlds, and in eleven days she’d barely brushed the surface of understanding what his life had looked like before she blithely imploded it.

  Yesterday, she’d had sex with him in the orange glow of their tent. He’d bent her over the mattress and pushed into her while she cried, and it had seemed significant. It had seemed beautiful, a singular experience, a love like nothing else she’d ever felt.

  But now, with her father’s words ringing in her ears, she felt delusional. What had she thought, that she and Roman would get married? Have babies? Build a monument to Susan Bowman and live in it?

  When this trip came to an end, Ashley didn’t even have a place to go. What was she planning to do, ask Roman if she could crash with him? Park the Airstream at his apartment complex, his condo, in the driveway of his mansion? She didn’t know where he lived, but she knew it would be attractive and sterile, and she wouldn’t be able to stand it.

  She couldn’t get another job waiting tables or serving drinks and come home every night to Roman, whose life she’d ruined. There was no way.

  Maybe the reason she hadn’t been able to see their future was because she’d set this giant blockade in the way of it. She’d told Roman that Sunnyvale was his, but she hadn’t moved out of the way and given it back to him.

  The senator came up behind her. He laid his hand on her shoulder.

  “Ashley,” he said.

  Be reasonable, he meant.

  Be reasonable, she told herself. Even though it hurts. Even though it sucks.

  Fix what you’ve broken. Act like an adult.

  Her father squeezed her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean for that to get so out of hand.”

  “You never do,” she replied.

  Neither did she.

  She looked at Roman again. From a distance, she took in the shape of him, one leg bent on the seat of the picnic table, the other on the ground, his elbow on the table and his body leaning in toward Carmen’s, interested in something she was pointing his attention toward on her clipboard.

  If Ashley were closer, she’d be able to see his face. His mouth. His cheekbones, his caterpillar eyebrows, those dark, expressive eyes.

  She loved him.

  She loved him, but she’d stolen Sunnyvale from him, and even when he’d bent over backward to assure her that he was on her side, she’d never given it back.

  It was time.

  Past the picnic table where Roman sat with Carmen, Lake Michigan had lost its magic under a rolling carpet of clouds. It looked flat and dark, deep enough to sink into, cold enough to leach the life right out of her.

  Ashley measured the distance from where she stood to the car her father had arrived in. Fifteen feet. They could walk around behind it, open the doors, and be gone before anyone noticed.

  She could be a coward and run.

  But the last time she’d allowed fear to steer her, she’d ended up padlocked to a palm tree with ants in her bikini. This time, she’d do better.

  “I’ll leave with you,” she said. “But I have to say goodbye to Roman first.”

  Episode 9:

  Transformed

  CHAPTER ONE

  Roman guessed it was going to be bad when she led him away from the others.

  All of them were watching: Esther and Stanley, Nana, Carly and Jamie, Dora. Her father. Carmen. Everyone wanted to know what was going on, but Ashley didn’t tell them. She didn’t introduce her father around. She didn’t gather her troops together and make an announcement.

  She said she needed to talk to him, so he followed her toward the water.

  When they reached the cliffs above the shoreline, she turned onto a parallel dirt path. She kept walking until Roman couldn’t hear anything but Lake Michigan rushing up against the rocks.

  The farther she took him, the more he sweat. The more his skin crawled. The path was perfectly flat, the movement far from strenuous. Roman kept scratching the back of his neck and the backs of his hands, but it didn’t help.

  Something wrong with you, Patrick had told him once, and Roman had believed him.

  He knew now that it wasn’t true.

  Part of him knew.

  But part of him couldn’t let it go, convinced there had to be something wrong with him because the good things in his life never lasted.

  Ashley kept walking until he began to feel as though they were the last two people on earth, lone survivors of a cataclysm. When she led him out onto a crag of pitted rock—a prow that extended into the water with a view of dark gray turbulence—he understood that the cataclysm was what he was headed into, not what she’d led him away from.

  Without meeting his eyes, she took both of his hands in a loose grip. “I told my father I’d go back to Florida with him.”

  The announcement made him itch all over.

  It made him want to scratch his skin until he hit whatever was underneath it—this skittering loud frightened thing. He would find it and scratch it, scrape it under his nails and put an end to it.

  “When?” he asked.

  “Right now.”

  Right now.

  But that wasn’t true. She meant after she finished breaking the news to him—that was when she’d leave. She would fly back to Florida on a plane, and he would sta
nd on this rock and … what?

  Watch the world end?

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “My dad says Mitzi is at Sunnyvale. That a whole bunch of the people from Okefenokee—”

  “No, I get that part. Carmen told me.”

  Sunnyvale had been occupied by friends of Ashley’s, and they seemed to think that the more publicity they could draw to their cause, the more likely they were to rescue Sunnyvale from his evil clutches.

  Never mind that he’d already put the demolition on hold.

  Never mind that he’d pissed off Heberto and fucked up the partnership that was supposed to make financing the development possible.

  Never mind that it was his property, his decision, his fight. Or that Ashley was his girlfriend, his lover—whatever this was, this mess, this problem, it belonged to both of them, not just to Ashley.

  It wasn’t her father’s to fix, or even Ashley’s. It was theirs.

  She pulled her hands away to stick them in her back pockets. “He wants me to go back with him and make them stop.”

  “Because it’s bad press for him?”

  “Because it could be, yeah. But more because I’m embarrassing him.”

  “You’re not doing anything to him.”

  “I kind of am, I guess. I mean, if this turns into a big news story, that doesn’t look good.”

  “But it has no bearing on him. None whatsoever.”

  “I guess the people at Sunnyvale, they’re making it all about me. Because of my whole stupid deal with the palm tree.”

  “What you did with the palm tree was genius.”

  “It was crazy.”

  “It worked.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t think it through.”

  “Ashley—”

  She turned her back on him and stepped closer to the water, and he knew she didn’t want to hear it.

  She needed space. She needed time. She needed movement, action, a chance to think, and it wouldn’t help for him to get in her face, trying to fight off her father’s version of reality with his own.

  He hated her father’s version of reality.

  Though he hadn’t been present for their conversation, Roman had heard the way her father spoke to her. That night in North Carolina, naked in the pond, she’d enumerated her faults in the senator’s voice, and Roman had hated it even then, when he’d been trying to resist her.

  He hated it so much more now, because he knew her. He loved her.

  “Ashley.” He stepped close and put his arms around her. She still had her hands in her pockets, making for an awkward embrace. “This isn’t your problem. You don’t have to fix it.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Because your dad says so?”

  “I just have to.”

  “But what about us? Aren’t we …”

  He didn’t know how to put it. Aren’t we in love?

  There was no way. No way he could say that out loud, even though he believed it.

  Don’t we have something between us? Doesn’t it mean anything to you?

  Don’t you think we can figure out the future on our own, without input from your dad or Carmen or Heberto or anybody?

  What’s wrong with me, with us, that you can’t bring yourself to believe in that?

  He couldn’t say any of it.

  Ashley felt so small in his arms, stripped of the glamour of her confidence.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t have a plan. I just thought it would all work out, somehow.”

  “It still could.”

  “But don’t you get it? It can’t, because this is how it ends. I created this mess. My father’s here to make me clean it up.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “He didn’t really have to tell me. That’s just … what we do.”

  “Twenty minutes ago you were on a quest.”

  “It was you who said that.”

  “But you believed it.”

  “I tried to believe it.”

  So believe it. Believe in us. Believe in me.

  He didn’t know how to say that, either.

  “And this is what you want now?” he asked. “You want to get on a plane and fly away with your father, and we’re just … over?”

  She kept looking at the water instead of at him. “It’s not like we ever made much sense.”

  “Why not?”

  Ashley shrugged. “You’re Roman Díaz, with the suits and the sunglasses, and your place in Miami. You’re a land developer. I’m just … me.”

  Roman’s throat felt tight, like he would choke if he tried to speak, and it wasn’t because he didn’t have the words to give her.

  He could come up with a way to describe what she’d looked like the first morning he met her—how brave she was, how clever her idea had been, how magnificent when she parried and thrust and fought her way out of one tight spot after another.

  He could find a way to describe her energy, her vitality, the way she glowed sometimes. How she’d reminded him that he was alive, that being alive was important, that it was absolutely fucking everything, even when it hurt.

  How right now, despite how much it hurt, he was grateful to her.

  He could tell her all of that.

  The problem was, there wasn’t any way to make her hear him. And if she did hear him, his version of her was the last thing she needed.

  She kept asking people to tell her what to do—to tell her what she was like. Her friends. Her father. They all told her. They were wrong, but they told her, and she believed them.

  Roman didn’t want to be the fifth person or the tenth person or the hundredth person to tell Ashley what she was like. He wanted to be the person who saw her, and trusted her, and gave her the space to figure it out for herself.

  Because deep down, she knew. That morning when he drove up and found her chained to the palm tree, she’d lifted up her chin and looked at him with defiance because she’d known.

  And last night in the tent, when she’d yanked at his clothes and told him she needed him—she’d known then, too. What she wanted. Who she was.

  Ashley didn’t need to find some gold chalice in a hidden cave that would teach her all the secrets of herself. She just needed confidence. She needed to listen to her own voice, because she’d been right all along about the stuff that mattered, even as she got a lot of the stuff that didn’t matter wrong.

  He couldn’t tell her that.

  He could only let her go and have faith that she’d figure it out.

  And he could make sure, before she left, that she saw him, so she would recognize him again when he came after her.

  “Look at me.” When she didn’t respond, he took her by the shoulders and turned her around. “Where’s my suit?”

  “You probably had to throw it away because of me.”

  “I’m not wearing a suit, because I’m not a suit, Ash. Look at my face.” When her eyes flicked to his, he said, “This is me. And what I want to know is, who do you think I am that I don’t deserve to be with you?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. It’s me. I’m not employed. I’m not stable. I never had the right to traipse in and wreck your development thing. I’m so sorry I did that.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You should be! This deal was important to you, and I put it at risk. You should hate me. You should always have hated me.”

  “Look at me,” he said again. Because she wasn’t seeing him. She was seeing everything she’d done that she considered a mistake.

  He understood how that felt. Roman knew exactly what it was to look in the mirror and see another person’s version of himself. He’d spent more than a decade hearing Patrick’s voice in his head, telling him, There’s something wrong with you.

  Something wrong with him, that he couldn’t hold Ashley’s eyes on him now.

  Something wrong with him, that she didn’t seem to see him.

  Always, always something wrong with him, and one after
another, every important person in his life slipped away.

  We never want to see you again, Patrick had said.

  Roman had said, Fine.

  Fine.

  It had never been fine. It wasn’t fine now.

  He could spend what was left of his life believing that he was broken, unlovable, unfixable. That by some accident of birth, some trick of inheritance, he would never belong to anything—never have love, family, community.

  Or he could hope. He could risk.

  He could lay everything out on the line.

  “I don’t want you to go,” he said.

  “I have to.”

  “I know you think so. I don’t know what he said to you, but I know you. I know you need to move right now, so bad you can hardly bear to be standing here talking to me. I know you want to do something, because that’s how you are when you’re feeling too much—you need to act, to work, to make things change. So that’s fine, if that’s what you have to do. If you can’t take me with you, then I’ll stay here and talk to Esther and deal with getting my truck and your trailer and all your friends back where they’re supposed to be. But don’t leave telling me that I’m supposed to chalk up everything that’s happened to us as some big, impulsive mistake you made, because that’s bullshit.”

  “Roman—”

  “No, it is. It’s bullshit. I care about you. This trip—you and me—it’s real.”

  “We haven’t even been together two weeks.”

  “Maybe not, but you can’t tell me we haven’t been more together in however many days we’ve had than you’ve ever been with anybody else. You can’t tell me that, because I won’t fucking believe it. I don’t know everything that’s ever happened to you, but if you try to tell me that I don’t know you and you don’t know me—no. I don’t accept that.”

  “It was sex.”

  “It was more than sex.”

  He took her by the shoulders, biting down on the urge to shake her. Biting down hard on the voice in his head that just kept saying it, over and over, Something wrong with you. Let her go. Something wrong with you. Give it up. Something wrong with you, Roman, and you don’t get to have this. You aren’t ever going to get to have it, so stop thinking you can. Stop hoping. Build a bigger fortress, live alone, count on nothing and no one. It’s the only way.