Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (33 page)

He stood now on the lawn, talking to the bridegroom. Hands in his pockets, legs planted wide in the grass, totally at ease in a group of people with a collective net worth of approximately four kajillion dollars.

Stanley was inside. He’d found another codger to play backgammon with in the kitchen.

Ashley looked at the slips of paper in her hand. The top one read
Advice for the Married Couple
. There were six blank lines where she was supposed to write down words of connubial wisdom for a friend she hadn’t seen in years.

“Never go to bed angry,” she mumbled to herself. “Take time for each other. Don’t forget to have sex. How the hell should I know?”

On the lawn, Carly sidled up to her husband, their young daughter in her arms. She handed the girl over, and Ashley watched as Jamie introduced his bride to Roman, draping his arm casually over her shoulder.

Carly looked cool and beautiful in a slim-fitting beige dress. Jamie looked like … he looked like Jamie Callahan, the gorgeous boy next door whom half the women in the free world had sex dreams about. The pudgy redheaded toddler in his arms patted his face, the skirt of her fuchsia party dress ballooning out around her.

Roman must have said something funny, because Carly laughed. Jamie pulled her in close for a kiss.

They stood in the sunlight, beautiful, secure.

Ashley crumpled up the paper and shoved it into her front pocket.

She had no advice to give. Not to Jamie and Carly.

Not to anyone.

When the party games were over, the shower presents opened, and most of the guests gone, Ashley found herself on the front porch again, sitting beside Nana in the lounge chairs.

The light was fading now, sunset not too far off. Fireflies winked on the lawn. The smell of charcoal and seared meat still drifted from the grill out back. Last time Ashley had checked,
Jamie and Roman were there, talking about basketball over beers. Stanley had retired to the trailer for the night. Carly was inside with her friend Ellen, Nana’s neighbor, organizing the remains of the party.

“So,” Nana said. She leaned toward Ashley with her blue eyes alight. “What brings you to Ohio?”

“You.”

“Me, huh? All right, I’ll bite. What do you need?”

“It’s kind of a long story.” And maybe the morning would be better for telling it. The story had gone thick and dark as syrup inside her head. Sticky.

“I’ve got time for you. Let’s hear it, sweetie.”

Carly came out of the house with a short stack of plastic cups and a glass pitcher of something maroon.

“What have you got?” Nana asked.

“Sangria. Ellen made it.”

Nana took the cups and held them up as Carly poured. “You girls should sit with us.”

“That’s the plan. Ellen’s putting together a second pitcher, and then we’ll come out.”

Ashley took her cup from Nana as Carly set down the pitcher and went back inside the house. “Thank you.”

“It’s a bribe. I can’t stand waiting anymore—you have to tell me what you’re doing traipsing around the Midwest with that beautiful,
interesting
man.”

“Stanley, you mean?”

Nana snorted. “I’m assuming you brought Stanley as a chaperone. Or a hair shirt.” She lifted her glass. “Cheers, Ashley. It’s good to see your face again.”

Ashley clicked her plastic cup to Nana’s and took a cool swallow of her drink. She looked at the front yard, empty now. “I’m trying to keep Roman from knocking down Sunnyvale.”

Nana’s eyes widened. “Why would he do that?”

“He’s a developer. He wants to build a resort there.”

“But isn’t Sunnyvale yours?”

“He bought it from Grandma. She didn’t tell me—I only found out after she died.”

Frowning, Nana said, “You better start from the beginning.”

Ashley told her the whole story. She told her about how she’d been in Bolivia when her grandmother had died, how she’d come home to Florida, only to find the office empty, Grandma gone, Susan Bowman’s whole life erased as though it hadn’t happened.

She explained how she’d chained herself to a palm tree to keep Roman from razing the property. How the hurricane had arrived and given her the leverage she’d needed.

When she was telling Nana about dragging him to the commune in Georgia, Carly and Ellen came out with the promised second pitcher and took seats on the other side of her. So Ashley started over and told them, too.

How Roman had been sort of attacked by an alligator and how she’d figured out, with Mitzi’s help, that she could blackmail him into taking this trip with her by revealing that she’d seen Key deer on the property. That she’d threatened to hire a lawyer to block his project for ecological reasons if he didn’t cooperate.

The level in the sangria pitchers dropped, and Ashley told the women her plan to make Roman meet all the regular renters she loved best, to force him to listen to stories about Sunnyvale so he could understand what a great place he was about to destroy. But how, when they’d stopped to visit Prachi and Arvind in North Carolina and Stanley and Michael in Pennsylvania, her plan hadn’t worked the way she’d hoped it would.

There were parts she left out: Skinny-dipping and rolling around in the mud with Roman. Kissing him. The pulse of his heartbeat when she’d put her mouth to his throat. The fire he’d made from a wisp of breath, wood shavings, friction drawn from his palms and his utter concentration.

Maybe it was because of these omissions, or maybe it was because the wedding shower had involved a lot of cocktails, but for some reason the story came out wrong. Nana, Carly, and Ellen kept laughing. Even when Ashley wasn’t trying to be funny, it all became sort of inadvertently hilarious, and she found herself playing to their riotous mood. Alligators and hurricanes, blackmail and communes, Stanley being such a jerk in the car: it
was
funny. Ashley could make it be funny in the telling.

She could laugh at herself, though her lips felt wrong doing it, and her throat hurt.

Nana praised Ashley’s cleverness in the campaign against Roman. When Ashley tried to protest that she
liked
Roman, that they were in fact kind of
involved
, she only made Nana laugh harder.

“Nana!” Carly shoved her grandmother’s shoulder. “Don’t be mean.”

“I’m not!” Nana was bent over her knees, her drink trembling in her outstretched hand, shaking with laughter. “It’s just—oh, Ashley, you
would
get involved with him. Who else but you?”

Ellen rescued the cup from Nana’s fingers. Carly asked, “How much did you drink today?”

“None of your business,” Nana said primly. And then grinned, straightening, wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said to Ashley. “It’s just that you always fall for these guys. Who was the fellow you were with that first time we came to Little Torch? Tom or Tim or something? With the goatee.”

“Oh, I remember him,” Carly said. “He wore a beret.”

Ellen looked at Ashley, one delicate eyebrow lifted, and asked, dryly, “A beret?”

That set them all off again.

“His name was Tam,” Ashley said. “He was my first boyfriend.”

More helpless giggling. “He was almost
my
age!” Carly said.

“And not the brightest light on the patio,” Nana chimed in.

“He had a great body, though.” Carly again.

Ashley smiled until her face hurt.

She remembered Tam, too.

He’d had brown eyes you could drown in. A thin scar above his upper lip from cleft palate surgery. A thickness to his speech that made him a little shy.

His shyness had blinded her to what a complete and utter asshole he was—needy, forever creating minor crises that had to be attended to.

She’d been supplying most of his meals by the end. Sleeping at his apartment, servicing his every whim, certain her love would rescue him from himself.

“What about that surfer?” Nana asked. “The one who was always talking about tantric sex.”

“You were like, ‘Young man, I
invented
tantric sex,’ ” Carly said.

“And he believed me!” Nana shrieked. “I was only kidding, but then he wanted notes!”

Ashley’s smile hardened. She felt … not angry. But not amused, either. Lost.

Lost in this conversation. In herself.

Lost until Roman came around the side of the house, and their eyes met, and he saw her.

She didn’t know how long they looked at each other. It felt like forever, time slow and meaningless, her senses full of Roman and the cooling night air against her skin, the sour taste in her mouth, the wrongness of everything.

Nana’s hand settled on her shoulder. Ashley looked away from Roman to find sympathy and understanding in the older woman’s eyes. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You’re afraid you’re going to mess this up, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Ashley answered. Because she didn’t.

Nothing was simple anymore. Not like it had been at the palm tree, when she’d first met Roman. She had been sure then that she was the good guy and he was the enemy. When she became aware of her attraction to him, she’d seen Roman the way Nana and Carly surely did—seen him as the wrong man and her urge to get closer to him a symptom of her dysfunction.

Now Ashley wasn’t so sure.

A part of her—an awfully big part of her—was terrified. Roman had promised to destroy her, and he would, one way or another. He cut deeper into her than anyone had in a long time, when she was already weak from her grandmother’s death, primed to make the most familiar sort of mistake. The one where she fell in love, offered up her heart and her soul, and got taken advantage of.

Used. Laughed at. Left.

The one where she got hurt, and then she had to pretend it didn’t matter, because every other choice had been taken from her.

But there was another part of Ashley that listened to the echoes of Nana and Carly laughing over Tam and thought, for the first time, of her fourteen-year-old self, involved with a shiftless manipulative loser seven years older than her. A man who committed statutory rape every time they slept together.

What kind of friends—what kind of family—had allowed that to happen? Someone should have stopped it. Forced naive Ashley to come home, sleep in her bed, act her age. But no one had.

Not her father, who’d sent her to live with his mother because he couldn’t figure out any other way to handle her.

Not her grandmother, who’d liked to say,
Live and let live. Everyone has to make their
own mistakes
.

Ashley made plenty. That’s why she was here. Her whole reason for this detour to Ohio was to draw on Nana’s strength. But when Nana gripped her shoulder and Carly stroked her knee, their touches made Ashley want to curl in on herself.

“You okay, hon?” Carly asked.

“It’s not supposed to be funny,” she said. “It’s my life.”

“Of course it’s not funny
really
,” Carly said quickly.

“No,” Nana confirmed, “we don’t mean it that way. But you have to admit, there’s a pattern.”

Later, Ashley would wonder if everything really had slowed down then. If the twilit night went still and quiet when she said, “Tell me what it is.”

If the world paused, waiting to hear the answer, or if it was only her heart that stopped beating, her breath that stuttered when Nana said, “You make yourself over for these men. You give them too much power over you, let them use it against you, and you smile the whole time.”

In the quiet moment afterward, Ashley didn’t decide to stand up. Her legs straightened of their own accord.

She went to the porch railing and set her elbows on it, looking at Roman. He lingered at the edge of the lawn—too far away, she hoped, to overhear the conversation.

She soaked up the sight of him as Nana’s sharp words bounced around inside her, wounding her more deeply with every ricochet.

“Is that how you see me?” she asked quietly.

When she turned back to the three women, Ellen looked away, too much a stranger to share an opinion. Carly frowned.

Nana met her eyes and said, “Yes.”

Yes, that was how Nana saw her. Because that’s how Ashley was.

It was how she’d been ever since moving in with her grandma. At Sunnyvale, Ashley had decided to stop being angry, so she’d pushed her pain into a well. She’d covered it over with a wooden lid, damp underneath, dripping and cold and sealed shut.

Living in the Keys with her grandma, she’d become Ashley Bowman, the girl who was always up for it. A dance, a fling, a quick fuck in the dark cabana—sure thing. A limbo contest, a canasta partner, a hand to wield the knife to cut up sugarcane for the happy hour drinks—
absolutely. Ashley blended the margaritas and turned her hurt feelings into a joke, because if they were laughing
with
her, tousling her hair, giving her advice, asking her to mix another round—that meant they loved her, right?

That was as close as she ever seemed to get to love.

She hated to recognize it. It hurt so goddamn much to think of herself in those terms, but the pain was okay, in a way. The pain felt like an arrow into something true, its shaft solid enough to grab onto.

This was a pain she could
do
something with.