Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (54 page)

But you’re counting them
, Roman thought.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “Like I don’t know what I’m talking about. I can’t take it. I’m pretty sure there’s a law against looking at the mother of a six-week-old baby that way.”

Roman looked at Miles instead. The baby’s forehead furrowed in concentration, his legs pulled up into his chest.

Everything seemed simpler when he looked at Miles. As if it might be possible to start again from the beginning. Focus on things that were nourishing—love, food, sleep. Cry when you felt sad, grab when you needed to be touched, smile when you were happy.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay. Probably this whole conversation should be illegal. You should come back when I’ve had more than four consecutive hours of sleep. But if you try to leave before I’m ready, fair warning, I really will sit on you.”

“Understood.”

They sat quietly for a while. Miles guzzled and sighed. The music in Ava’s Barbie movie drifted into the kitchen.

“Of course,” Sam said, “Miles might turn out better adjusted if he could call up his cool black uncle when the kids are mean to him at school. And if his cool black uncle sent him really good presents, and, like, took him camping and stuff.”

“Quit calling me his cool black uncle. You’re making me sound like Inspirational Minority Guy.”

Sam snorted. “I forgot about Inspirational Minority Guy.”

They’d invented him in high school. Roman used to act him out, and Sam would always crack up. It got so all he had to do was make the Inspirational Minority Guy face and she would fold over with helpless laughter.

“How could you forget? He died so many tragic deaths for the betterment of his white friends and neighbors.”

“I know! And made so many important sacrifices.”

“And earnest speeches.”

“He was ace at the earnest speeches.”

Their eyes met, and for a second the pain was so huge—the gulf between what they’d had
and where they were now so vast—Roman didn’t think he could breathe.

But he inhaled, shaky, and his lungs expanded.

He exhaled, and that worked, too.

He could live with the pain.

And if he could live with it, he could have this back—his past. His sister.

His place in the world.

Miles spit out the nipple and wailed. Then his mouth screwed down into a blot. His cheeks trembled.

With all the fanfare of a trumpet solo, Miles crapped his diaper.

Warm wetness spread over Roman’s forearm.

“Well then,” he said.

“I guess we know how Miles feels about Inspirational Minority Guy,” Sam said.

She was grinning. Roman smiled.

He smiled, even though no part of this was going the way he’d anticipated.

He’d imagined this reunion, too. Tearful apologies. Histrionic accusations. He’d thought of himself and Patrick, rehashing the argument that had driven him away in the first place.

He’d thought of Patrick, dead in a coffin, and everyone in black suits, somber and appropriate.

Never once in all his imaginings had there been a six-week-old infant guzzling a bottle and crapping in his arms.

Sam studied his face. “He shit on you, didn’t he?”

“I’m pretty sure he did.”

She covered her mouth, but it was no use. He could see it in her eyes, bubbling up. “Welcome home, Uncle Roman,” she said, and then she lost it, dissolving in hysterical giggles that made her slap the tabletop.

Once she got going like this, she could never stop. Especially when she was tired.

Roman had always loved to egg her on.

“You told him to do that,” he said.

She gasped for breath. “I didn’t!”

“You’ve got the little bugger trained. As soon as you saw my truck in the driveway—”

She shrieked, and then he was laughing, too.

Laughing with his sister, and thinking that he couldn’t wait to tell Ashley.

He opened the door to his hotel room wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, and Carmen had to be stern with herself to keep the blush from rising up her cheeks.

It’s just Roman. You’ve seen him in his pajamas a million times
.

But it was different now. Everything was different.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Can I come in?”

He stepped aside, and Carmen walked into his room, which looked exactly like her room, backward. The headboard of his bed butted against the wall, directly opposite her own. That meant they could have had this conversation with two layers of wallpaper-covered plaster muffling their words.

Now that she considered it, it might have been a better approach.

Except that she’d wanted to see him.

She settled herself into the chair in the corner. Roman stood at the foot of the bed, visibly confused about what she was doing in his room at two in the morning when they were supposed to be catching a few hours’ sleep before hitting the road again.

I’m confused, too
, she could have told him.
I have a list of things I’m confused about
.

For example, what am I doing in Indiana, again?

What the everlasting fuck am I
doing?

Take today, for instance. Today was … Saturday now. But before midnight it had been Friday, a workday. She’d spent the morning with her phone turned off, wandering aimlessly around Roman’s hometown. She’d had a vodka tonic at a one-room bar while shooting the breeze with a man named Jerry who had a beer gut and a penchant for reality TV, particularly the shows that involved tattoos.

Her lunch had consisted of breaded fried cheese curds dipped in ranch dressing.

After Roman finally came back to pick her up, they’d driven through the afternoon and well into the night. He hadn’t wanted to stop, because he wanted to get back to Ashley.

He didn’t have to tell Carmen this. It was obvious. He needed Ashley, badly.

Whereas Carmen was sort of hoping never to see Noah again.

Except for the part where that was the largest and most ridiculous lie she’d attempted to tell herself.

“What are you wearing?” Roman asked.

She glanced at her legs.

She’d pulled on pin-striped slacks at the last second, because it would have been wrong to come over here with her legs bare beneath her nightdress.

But then she’d decided the nightdress was too low-cut, too lacy for Roman to see, even though he’d seen it before and managed to keep from turning into a lust-ravaged beast.

So she’d put on her robe.

But left on her pants.

Her clothes were as jumbled as her brain.

“I don’t know. I didn’t want to look like I’d come over here to jump you. Because I didn’t. I mean I don’t. Want to jump you. At all.”

“That’s a relief.”

Carmen didn’t know if he was joking or serious. It could be difficult to tell with Roman.

He sat down on the bed. The covers were rumpled as though he’d been under them, but she could see the backlit screen of his e-reader glowing on the pillow farthest from her, so she knew she hadn’t woken him.

“What did you come over here for?” he asked.

She studied the knobs of his knees beneath his pajama pants. So familiar, those knees. She knew what Roman looked like without his clothes on—the smooth texture of the skin of his back under her hands, the rise and fall of his body over hers. But she’d never been naked with him.

She’d taken off her clothes, but she hadn’t been naked.

Before Noah, she’d never
felt
as naked as she did now, all the time.

“I didn’t know you had a sister,” she said. “I didn’t even know the name of the town you were from.”

“I never told you.”

“Because I never asked.”

“I didn’t want you to ask.”

“I was thinking about that. How did I know what I wasn’t supposed to ask? Did we have a conversation I can’t remember about that, when we first met?”

He flopped onto his back, arms spread wide, and looked at the ceiling. “You were a kid when we met.”

“I thought maybe that was why I didn’t remember. You know, like you said,
Carmen, you’re a cool kid. Let’s agree never to talk about my family or my feelings or where I came from or why I don’t seem to have any people, and once you’re grown up enough, if your dad says it’s okay, I’ll ask you out
. And I said,
Yeah, all right
. And then we both forgot.”

“That never happened.”

“What did happen?”

“What are you asking—how come we’re the way we are together?”

She pulled her feet up onto the seat of the chair and wrapped her arms around her bent legs to rest her chin on her kneecap. “I thought we were going to get married.”

“When you were a kid?”

“A couple weeks ago.”

Roman lifted both hands from the bed, interlaced them, and stretched his arms above his head. He looked like a sacrifice, vulnerable to her sharpness.

He looked beautiful, and she appreciated his beauty, but she didn’t want it.

“So did I,” he said.

“I liked thinking about it,” she confessed. “It was … it was so …”

“Comfortable?” he asked.

“Easy.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?” she asked.

“Sure. Because we didn’t need to have that conversation, right? You were never going to ask me about my family. And I was never going to ask you why you’re like you are.”

“Like I am?”

He levered up onto his elbows so he could see her. “With your clipboard and your clothes, and the way you work out at exactly the same time every morning, for the same number of minutes, and weigh yourself before you take a shower. And how you went to college close to home and only studied things that would be useful when you went to work for your dad. Like
that
.”

“Oh.”

Roman flopped back down.

Carmen felt his words crawling on her. Crawling all over her, like they needed some way in, and she couldn’t decide whether she should open her mouth and give them access or close her eyes, flatten her lips, make understanding impossible.

“Come here by me,” Roman said. “Lie down. You look tired.”

She wasn’t sure she could unbend her limbs, but he patted the bed beside him, and she found herself standing.

She found herself on the bed next to him.

She found herself saying, “She doesn’t look like anything special.”

“Who?”

“Ashley.”

He rose on one elbow, jaw stubbornly set. “If you came here to insult her—”

“No, settle down. I was just going to say, she doesn’t
look
special. I thought she would. After everything that’s happened, I thought she’d be some kind of … amazing.”

“She is amazing.”

“But that’s what I’ve been thinking about. How you’re obviously completely enthralled with her, like she’s trapped you or … I don’t know,
transformed
you, but I saw her and I thought,
Her?
”

He was close enough that she could actually see his jaw muscle working as he ground his teeth together.

“Just
wait
, okay? My point is, I think I understand. How this skinny blond girl with tangled hair—”

“Get to your point.”

Carmen took a deep breath. “Noah is like that.”

“Like what?”

“He’s like
that
—like I objectively know that he’s just this sort of big, dumb guy—”

“Noah’s not dumb.”

“—this big Labrador retriever man with a beard and a giant belt buckle,
objectively
, but I can’t …” She made a helpless gesture in the air with her hand. A looping sign of defeat.

Roman’s mouth softened. “You can’t, huh?”

“I
can’t
.”

She couldn’t get away from his mouth or his hands or the kindness in his eyes.

She couldn’t get away from the way she craved him, even though she was afraid of the mess of him. The chaos of her feelings.

She couldn’t.

“So don’t,” Roman said.

“I don’t know how not to.”

“It’s not hard. You just
don’t
. You wait for when your
don’t
is right on the verge of kicking in, and then you
do
, instead.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“Yep. It’s dangerous.”

She needed him to tell her how to protect herself from the part that was dangerous, but he didn’t.

He didn’t, which meant she’d been right. There wasn’t any way to protect herself from the part that was dangerous.

You either did, or you didn’t. You had to pick.

“It’s worth it,” he said.

“You don’t know that,” she said irritably. “You don’t even know what
it
is. Either of those
its
.
It
is worth
it
. Complete nonsense.”

“I do too know. And I’m telling you, it’s worth it.”

She sighed. “I was mean. When I left Sunnyvale.”

“How come?”

“He told me about his kid, and I freaked.”

“Can you fix it?”

She turned her head. There was Roman, looking at her with concern and understanding.

There was her friend. The reason she was in Indiana right now.

To talk to Roman.

“He texted me.”

“What, today? What did he say?”

“He said,
When you’re ready to talk, call me
.”

“Did you call?”

“I turned off my phone.”

Roman shook his head, smiling. “You’re a piece of work.”

“I know.”

And then they just lay there for a minute, and he picked up her hand and held it. The touch was so explicitly
not
sexual—so frankly and completely
un
arousing—that it forced her to say, “I never liked having sex with you.”

Roman started to laugh. “Thanks.”

“It’s not as if you liked having sex with me.”

“We did all right.”

“It’s nine hundred times better with her, though, isn’t it?”

“I’m not supposed to say.”

“It’s a
million
times better with Noah.”

Roman turned his face away and covered his eyes with his hand. “A million. Jesus. If baby angels sing when you guys are in bed together, I don’t want to hear about it.”

“I cry. Every time.”