Ravaged (6 page)

Carmen did.

“Roman?” she asked. “Are we done here?”

Arvind descended the stairs, whistling. “Good morning,” he said at the bottom.

“Good morning.”

He went into the kitchen.

“I guess … no. I’m not done,” Roman said.

Ashley appeared and set a cup of coffee on the end table beside him, then disappeared again. He heard a noise that might have been nothing or might have been Carmen, tapping her fingernails on a clipboard in his mind’s eye.

“Why is it okay?” he asked.

“What? Speak up.”

“I said I’m wondering why it’s okay. That I cheated on you.”

“It wouldn’t be okay if you
had
cheated on me, but we’re not exclusive, Roman. If you use a condom with this woman—and I have to assume you’ll always use a condom because you’re not a moron—you don’t even have to call to tell me about it if you don’t want to. Though I would be astonished if you didn’t. You’re honorable to a fault.”

Roman couldn’t speak. Words had become elusive, slippery. He reached for them, but he couldn’t find any that seemed like they might come close to expressing his confusion.

Finally, he managed, “So, you’re telling me … What are you telling me? We’re not in a relationship?”

“Of course we’re in a relationship, but we’ve never defined it as an
exclusive
relationship. We’re dating. If I had wanted to ensure you would never go out with another woman, or touch anyone but me, I’d have at least bothered to say so, don’t you think?”

Roman held the handset between his knees, away from his ear, and traced the pattern of the holes in the receiver with one finger.

Not exclusive? When had exclusivity become a thing you had to declare to the woman you’d been seeing for a year? The woman you were sleeping with? It wasn’t—this wasn’t how things worked. If Carmen believed—

An uncomfortable thought made him lift the phone back to his ear. “Carmen, have you …?” But he couldn’t say it. No matter what Carmen said, if he asked her, he’d be leveling an accusation, and he had no business accusing her of anything. “Never mind.”

“Not recently, Roman, no. But I hadn’t ruled out the possibility.” Her voice was crisp.

She was always crisp. She wore crisp clothes and put her hair up. She had an ice-blue blouse that made her skin look flawless as a satin sheet.

Probably she wasn’t cold all the way through, any more than he was. But it went deep.

It had never chilled him before.

“So we’ve been dating each other for a year. I hadn’t been with anyone else, and you haven’t,” he said. “That suggests we’re exclusive.”

“Suggests?” She sounded distracted. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Roman. Whatever. Whatever you want, really. We were exclusive, if you say so. Now we’re not. Are you calling to beg my forgiveness or to break up with me?”

Roman’s mental gears ground to a halt again.

Why was he calling?

He hadn’t thought past confession. Now that he did, neither of the options she offered seemed to fit.

Carmen laughed. “Never mind. It’s clear you don’t have the first idea. I hope at least you made some progress with this woman. Is she feeling more pliable this morning?”

Prachi came out of the kitchen with a stack of plates, Ashley trailing her with four filled juice glasses. They set them around the table.

Ashley’s hair was wet from the shower. She wore tight orange yoga-type pants that ended just below her knees. A black top that tied behind her neck. She had freckles all over her shoulders, and she looked a little tired when she met his eyes, but she didn’t look the slightest bit pliable.

“No, I wouldn’t say that.”

“You know what today is?”

“Saturday?”

“September first. And you know what you are?”

Screwed
.

“No.”

“Behind schedule. Do what it takes to make this happen. Sleep with her if you think it’ll get her to drop the Key deer thing by Monday. I’m not bothered.”

She wasn’t bothered.

Carmen truly, honestly didn’t care. The woman he’d planned to marry.

If Ashley and Prachi hadn’t been in the room, he would have told her that he wasn’t going to sleep with Ashley regardless. Since they were, all he could say was, “About Monday. There’s no chance.”

“You’ll think of something. Always darkest before the dawn and all that. Look, I’m not good at pep talks. Just pretend I gave you one, okay? Call me back when you know something.”

She disconnected the call.

Roman returned the receiver to the cradle and looked at his hand wrapped around it, thinking about the woman on the other end.

It wasn’t a question of Carmen’s concealing her feelings. It was more a question of whether she had them at all.

He
liked
that about her. He didn’t need help from Noah or his PA to guess how to treat Carmen because he could treat her as an extension of himself. They wanted the same things: money, recognition, Heberto’s esteem.

He’d always assumed that made them perfect for each other.

It had. It still did.

But …

But it bothered him that she didn’t care that he’d come very close to having sex with Ashley last night. Wouldn’t he care, if their positions were reversed?

He tried to imagine Carmen beneath another man. Another man’s mouth on her breasts. Another man’s dick inside her. Roman waited for his pulse to quicken, his fists to clench.

Nothing happened.

“Did you sleep well?” Prachi asked.

“Very well.”

“Wonderful. Ashley and I are whipping up breakfast. Should be ready in twenty minutes or so, if you’d like to shower.”

“Thank you. I think I will.”

He didn’t move.

Ashley came over and perched on the arm of the couch. When Prachi left the room, she asked, “How’d it go?”

Her eyes were somber.

“I’m not sure.”

“Did you get an ultimatum?”

Hands off the bitch, or we’re through
. That was the sort of ultimatum she meant.

Not
Use sex to manipulate her into letting you demolish Sunnyvale, or my father won’t be happy
.

“You could say that.”

Ashley picked at her thumbnail. She lifted it to her lips and bit at it, gently. “I’m sorry I put you in that position,” she said. “I don’t—I’ve never been the other woman before. I don’t want to be now.” She tried out a bright smile and made a show of tucking her hands under her thighs. “So I’ll stop assaulting your virtue, I swear.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

A slight downward turn to her mouth made him regret putting it that way. It wasn’t her fault, what had happened last night. It had been both of them together, unhitching themselves from their common sense.

It wouldn’t happen again.

“We’re going to head out in a few hours, all right?” she asked. “Prachi said she has some old curtains and other things I might be able to use for the Airstream, so I need to go through that stuff first, but then we’d better get out of their hair.”

“Where are we going next?”

He’d given up the idea that he might not be going with her. There was Florida, Sunnyvale, Coral Cay—far away and unaffected—and then there was this trip. This thing he was doing with Ashley.

He didn’t understand what it was, but he accepted now that he was part of it, and he wouldn’t be getting off the ride until it came to a full and complete stop.

“Pennsylvania.”

“Camping?”

Ashley did a butter-churning dance with her arms. “In Virginia tonight, baby. Airstream all the way. And then again when we get to the big PA.”

Her glee was a performance. Another man might have been convinced. It was just that Roman kept looking at her eyes, and they were wrong. Too serious. Too sad.

He tried to figure out what he was supposed to be feeling about that.

Nothing. That had been his goal for so long, he’d developed a knack for it.

But he’d misplaced the knack. When he thought of breakfast, camping, sleeping bags, campfires, Pennsylvania, Ashley’s eyes—when he thought of Carmen essentially saying
You can score with other women to your heart’s content
—he felt a dozen things he couldn’t name. He didn’t know how to sort them into compartments or decide how to act on them, and that made his hands restless, smoothing back and forth over his pajamas.

His jeans were too dirty to wear today, and he no longer had a clean shirt.

“I’m going to need a new phone. Can we find a store before we get on the road again?”

“Sure. Let’s go shopping for real! We can buy you shorts. Little Ken-doll shorts with a belt that show off your magnificent thighs. And a Tar Heels shirt.”

“I’m not wearing a Tar Heels shirt. I went to Princeton.”

“Goodness, Roman Díaz. You are so out of my ballpark.”

He thought of Ashley then with another man between her thighs.

Ashley in the bathroom, upset, probably crying.

He stood up.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked. “You look like you want to do some pillaging.”

“I’m fine.”

He smiled back at her, but it was the smile she didn’t like, and her face fell. He crossed his arms and shifted from one foot to the other.

He wasn’t fine.

Roman was so far from fine, he doubted he could find it on a map.

They camped that night at a park near Richmond.

State campgrounds all looked the same: a looping gravel drive through a patch of forest, a series of sites like lollipops branching off, each with its picnic table, its electrical hookup, its fire ring and numbered post.

Roman pulled into the parking spot feeling leaden and doomed.

They unloaded the back of the truck. Ashley had bought all kinds of supplies at a store in Raleigh while Roman was picking out a phone. She also had the curtains from Prachi, as well as a variety of other things her friend had found in the basement.

“You need me to do anything?” he asked.

“Nah. You just sit there and look pretty. There’s not really room for two people in the trailer right now.”

He got his new phone set up, but it had no reception. He sat on a log and drew patterns in the sand beneath the leaf litter with a stick while Ashley popped into the Airstream, came back out carrying a thin mattress, and draped it over the picnic table. She sang along to a Spanish love song on her portable radio while she beat the dust out of the mattress with a broom handle.

He tried to push back against the pressure building inside him by playing tic-tac-toe against himself, best two out of three. Best five out of seven. The X always won. He tried various opening moves, hoping to find a way to ensure the demise of X, but nothing worked.

It was impossible to throw a game against yourself. You always won.

You always lost, too.

Ashley appeared behind the wraparound windows of the Airstream. She picked off the electrical tape that held the tinfoil in place, squirted Windex on the pane, wiped it off with a soft rag. She’d exchanged her T-shirt for a hot pink bikini top. When she made vigorous circles with the rag, her breasts bounced. Her skin gleamed.

Her belly button was an outie.

Too much pressure.

Roman stood. He walked around the trailer, stuck his head in the door, and watched her
ass bunch, her back muscles tense as she twisted to look at him.

“I’m going for a walk in the woods.”

“When it’s the woods, you call it a hike.”

“I don’t hike.”

And it was true, he didn’t. He couldn’t. It wasn’t possible to hike in a dress shirt, suit pants, tie, and loafers. His clothes insisted on dignity, but there was no dignity in what he was doing to himself and no way for him to stop doing it.

A mile up the trail, he gave in to the relentless press of memory.

He’d joined the Boy Scouts to get Patrick’s attention. His foster father had been an Eagle Scout, and Roman had found all his scouting things in the attic. He used to leaf through the old handbooks and study the artifacts of Patrick’s years of scouting as though he’d unearthed them with a toothbrush and had to investigate them gently, to puzzle out their mysteries so he could discover whatever clues were hidden in this joined-together fork-knife-and-spoon set. These two shallow plates that sealed into a clamshell and could be opened with the twist of a wing nut.

Now that it no longer mattered, he could see how wrong he’d been to think Patrick’s heart—always locked down to Roman—could be accessed and transformed, if only Roman located the right angle, the right pressure to loosen the wing nut.

But it had seemed possible then.

Roman wore his uniform to school on meeting days, never neglecting the neckwear or committing the sin of tucking his uniform shirt into jeans, as the other boys did. He took Patrick’s Swiss Army knife and carried it in his pocket, running his fingers over the smooth red plastic, the Swiss Army insignia, the ridges of blades and scissors and can opener. A classmate had noticed his fingers moving and accused him of touching himself.

After that, he kept the knife in the outer pocket of his backpack, until someone stole it.

Patrick bought him another one. He signed off on the work Roman did toward his badges, made sure his uniform got laundered in time for meetings, asked questions at the dinner table about Roman’s progress. Encouraging signs. Patrick was taking an interest.

Roman stepped in an unseen deposit of muck beneath a tree root and stumbled as the suction pulled off his shoe. He had to put his hand out and brace himself against the trunk to keep from falling. When he pulled the shoe out, it was coated with a foul-smelling mud that seeped into his trouser sock with every subsequent step.

He loosened his tie and kept moving.

Between sixth grade and seventh, being a Boy Scout had lost whatever cachet it might once have had and became laughable. But Roman was already laughable. He was a brown boy with big lips and big eyes, and everyone knew about his father serving a life sentence at the maximum security prison in Waupun. Everyone knew about his dead mother. Everyone knew Patrick, and they must have seen the distance between them that Roman tried so hard to obliterate.

The troop leader dispatched them to ring bells for the Salvation Army, make Pinewood Derby cars, sell popcorn. Roman earned one merit badge after another and pored over the handbooks in the attic. He learned knots and the ways of the woodsman. How to treat Our Country’s Flag. Wood lore, emergency shelters, orienteering. He dragged out Patrick’s old external frame backpack and practiced packing and repacking it with only the essentials.