Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (20 page)

“Ashley?” Prachi.

“Ashley, are you all right?” Roman.

“You don’t understand,” she said. Three pairs of eyes gazed up at her. She hit the tabletop with her fist, making the red-paper-wrapped chopsticks jump. Arvind and Prachi looked startled. Roman went blank.

“All of you are just
deliberately
missing the point.” She tried to find the words to tell them what the point was, but she couldn’t find any she hadn’t already said. Sunnyvale had made them happy. They needed it, because …

She couldn’t finish the sentence.

“What Roman wants to do there—it’s wrong,” she said. “It won’t feed your spirit, because there’s no place for that in his vision. He’s just throwing everything good about the Keys away. That’s not what you want, is it? To spit on my grandmother’s memory so you can go
sport fishing
?”

She flung the last words at Arvind, a curse and an imprecation, but he’d stopped looking at her around the time she’d banged on his table, and Prachi’s mouth was pursed in displeasure.

Roman stood up. His warm hand enveloped her shoulder.

“I’d like to speak to you. Privately.”

Ashley shook him off. She looked across the table at her friends. “Just tell me you’re on my side,” she said to Prachi. “Please.”

Prachi’s fingers rose to sweep a stray lock of hair back, tucking it into place with a dip of her hand. She looked uncomfortable, unhappy. “I’m on your side, Ashley,” she said. “Of course I’m on your side. But to be perfectly honest with you, I think …” Her eyes flicked to Arvind’s again, and she took a deep breath. “I think if your grandmother had wanted you to spend the rest of your life at Sunnyvale, she would have made it possible for you to do that.”

The room fell silent, but there was this sound inside her head. This far-away, high-pitched keening that kept getting louder.

When Roman touched her arm again, she slapped his fingers away.

“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.

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 for 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.