Just a Summer Fling (21 page)

She hung up fairly quickly and just stared at him for a moment.

“You got the part. The Western thing.”

She nodded as if testing how it felt to move in this new, brighter world. “I did. Adam said they were undecided. Then David McArthur called the director and told her I was trouble. Unstable and flaky. And the director told Adam that any enemy of David McArthur’s was a friend of hers. They’re going to give me a chance. The older sister. The part I wanted!”

“I’m happy for you,” he said. It was true. For her, he was happy. For himself? Miserable. But that was too damn bad. “You want to celebrate?”

“I need to phone people,” she said. “Oh. I need to phone Charlotte. He said they hadn’t cast her part yet. Maybe I should wait? No, I’ll call her. And my parents, and some friends—I need to call a lot of people!” She beamed at him, then leaned forward and kissed him, more enthusiasm than precision, and pulled away before he could find a way to hold on to her. “I got the part,” she whispered, trying the sentence out at all different volumes. “This is going to change everything!”

He knew she was right. He gathered up the remains of their stupid game and she paced around the house, getting back in touch with all the people she’d left behind. She was laughing and yelling and almost crying with happiness, and he made sure he had a smile on his face every time she looked in his direction. Not that she did that very often.

*   *   *

ASHLEY
couldn’t believe how happy she was. A great guy and a great job, both at the same time? It was like a whole new world was opening itself to her. She’d been stuck, but she’d broken free. Josh and challenging, meaningful roles. Making a place for herself as an actor, not a pretty, likeable girl. She went out on the porch when she called her parents and she looked out at the beautiful forest wrapped around her, fresh and new after the rain, and she cried with happiness. Her dad was crying, too, even though he didn’t really understand why Ashley was so overwhelmed. That was just the way her dad was. Her mom was, as usual, a bit confused by the emotional creatures in her life, but she was certainly happy and proud and excited.

“When does shooting start?” she asked. “Are they doing rehearsals? For a movie like this, they’ll do rehearsals, right?”

“Two weeks of rehearsal and fittings and whatever,” Ashley said. “Not a lot. Lauren doesn’t like to take the freshness off the scenes.” Then she cackled. “Did you hear that? ‘Lauren doesn’t like something’ . . . like I have any more idea about Lauren Hall’s directing style than anyone else does! But soon, I will! Soon I’ll know how she does things, and she’ll be working with me, and I only know a few of the others who are cast so far but they’re all great and everyone else will be great and I’ll be working with all of them, too, and every day is going to be like the best acting class I’ve ever been in! It’s going to be exhausting, and intense, and
perfect
!”

She could practically hear her dad’s tears starting up again, but her mother was the one who spoke. “And when does that start?” she repeated.

“Soon. They’re working out a couple details. Probably the week after next, though.”

“In Los Angeles?” her mother asked. “For several months?”

“Yeah! I get to live at home! It’s about half soundstage stuff, and then they’ve found somewhere just outside town that’ll work for a lot of the outdoor stuff. We might have to spend a week or so on location somewhere, but that’d be it.”

Neither of them said anything right away. But then her father said, “And this boy . . . man . . . this fella you’re so excited about. I thought you said he lived in Vermont?”

“He does,” Ashley said slowly.

“So you’ll have been seeing each other for a couple weeks by the time you leave? And—” Her father sounded like he might start crying again, but this time from a different emotion. “How’s that going to work, honey? You’re going to try to stay together over all that distance? Or would he be able to move down for a bit? But you’ll be exhausted, working all the time, excited about your career, and he’ll be . . . what will he be doing all day?”

She didn’t answer right away. Instead, she tried to imagine Josh in Los Angeles. It wasn’t like he was a total recluse. He’d said he used to hang out with the summer people; surely he could get his social skills back in gear. And, sure, he had a business to worry about, but how much could he be making from that? She could find some way to get money to him. Then she tried to imagine a situation where he’d accept her money, and she couldn’t do it. Would she be able to trick him about it? Lie to him? But she didn’t want to do that. Especially because she knew how hurt he’d be if he ever found out.

The audition had been such a long shot. She’d wanted to do it just for its own sake, for the fun and adventure and experience of it all. She hadn’t ever really considered the possibility that she’d get the part. Not as something that actually might happen, in a non-dream context. Now that it had happened . . .

“Damn it,” she muttered into the phone. “I’m not sure.
I . . . I hadn’t really thought about that.” She hadn’t thought ahead at all, really. She’d been planning her career, sure, but she’d been living in the moment with Josh, and she’d never tried to put the two dreams together. It had been more fun to imagine a reality in which one or both of them ran the world than it would have been to think of a way to make Josh fit in with her career. “I’ll talk to him,” she said. “We’ll figure something out.” They had to. Ashley couldn’t believe the universe would be so cruel as to make her choose between her two dreams. There had to be a way for her to have both of them.

She just needed to figure out what that way was.

The rest of the conversation with her parents was a bit more subdued. Ashley was just getting ready to say good-bye when Josh came out of the door. He had his work clothes on, right down to his steel-toed boots.

She stared at him. It was already late afternoon. And there was no way a call could have come in, because she’d been using his only phone line nonstop.

“I have to look after a few things,” he said quietly. “I’ll probably be a bit late. You can find dinner for yourself in the fridge, right?”

She frowned at him. Dinner wasn’t the problem. “Hang on a second,” she said into the phone. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Where are you going?”

“I started looking at my list of jobs, and there’s one that I kind of missed. I need to get it taken care of.”

She didn’t like this. Not at all. It just felt wrong. But she couldn’t tell him to not go do his job. “How late?” she asked.

“I’ll work ’til dark, and then there’ll be some cleanup. And I should check in with Kevin, see where he is with stuff. It’ll be pretty late.”

Their days and nights had blurred together lately; when you spent most of your time in bed it didn’t really matter
what time the clock said it was. “I’ll wait up for you. Or if I’m asleep, wake me up.”

“I’ll probably be tired,” he said. “Don’t wait up. And if you’re asleep, I’ll leave you like that.”

So, a “no” to both of her requests. She frowned at him. “We need to talk,” she said.

“Yeah. Okay. But tonight probably won’t be good.”

She sighed. “Tomorrow, then.”

He smiled in what she supposed was agreement, and then he was gone, striding across the lawn to the truck. She watched as it pulled out, then lifted the phone to her ear. “Sorry,” she said. “Josh had to go to work.”

“Josh,” her mother said. “That’s a good name.”

“He’s a good man,” Ashley said. He was. And she wanted him. How the hell was she going to make that work when her career dragged her way across the continent?

*   *   *

JOSH
worked until it was too dark to see the branches he was clearing. Then he turned the truck around and shone the headlights into the brush at the side of the driveway, giving himself enough light to keep going. The rain had stayed pretty steady as he’d worked, never hard enough to be a serious problem, but enough for him to add wet clothes to his list of miseries.

The job had been on his list for a while, but he was pretty sure the family who owned the cottage were in Europe until the end of August. There was no real urgency to get it done. But he’d needed to get out of the house, and now that he was out, he wanted to
stay
out for as long as possible.

Of course, he also wanted to go back immediately. What kind of idiot was he, staying away from that incredible woman because he was unhappy that he’d soon have to
stay
away from her? What? Had he learned nothing from her previous absence? But then again, what about his life before
Ashley? All the lessons he’d learned about summer people leaving?

The job was a good way for him to work out the frustrating contradictions, or at least to smash the crap out of some trees and wear himself out. Not a great plan, but it was the sort of thing he did when he had too much negative energy. As a boy, he’d found jobs splitting and stacking firewood for neighbors, sometimes doing it for free if no one would pay him. He’d spent his life taking out his frustrations on trees; no reason to go breaking habits.

“This is a hell of a mess,” he heard from behind him. A familiar voice that made all the contradictory emotions he’d been trying to quell flare back up. He had no idea how Ashley had found him, and couldn’t worry about it right then.

“I’ll clean it up,” he said without turning around.

“I wasn’t talking about the path.” She was closer now, and he knew he should turn to greet her, but he couldn’t do it. “Kevin told me where to find you,” she said, coming even closer.

He’d needed some time, and she wasn’t giving it to him. He wasn’t ready for this. He was still too raw, too uncontrolled, and if he said something now it would be truer than he wanted it to be. Because he wanted Ashley to be happy, and his truth would make her sad. “I need to finish up here. You should head back to the house. Or the lake, I guess.” Or the city. Maybe she’d tracked him down so she could tell him she was leaving early.

“I’ll help you. You’re moving these branches over to the truck?”

He half turned, far enough to see her bending to grab a few of the branches he’d hacked off. “No,” he said.

She looked up at him. “You’re not moving them to the truck?”

“I am. But I don’t need help.” Which wasn’t quite right. “It’s rough work. Your hands will get all scratched up. If you
grab them like that, your arms and your chest, too. I don’t want you to get beat up from trying to help me.”

“It’ll be good for the part,” she said brightly. “If I show up with a good set of calluses, that’d be excellent.”

He turned away. He guessed she could carry branches if she wanted to; she wouldn’t last long.

Twenty-two

“I’M TAKING THE
part, you know.” Ashley had the base of one of the branches in her hand but she hadn’t started moving toward the truck; she wanted to get this all sorted out first. “I’m going back to L.A.”

Josh turned and squinted at her. “I know,” he said, clearly mystified.

“I thought about turning it down.” She stared at him and tried to read his reactions. “To stay here with you. I realized that this thing with you and me is really new, and it would be hard to keep it going if I left right now. So I thought about staying.” She took a deep breath as she shook her head. “But I can’t. This part . . . it’s my dream. You know? I mean, not this part specifically, I’ve only known about it for a few months. But taking my career in this direction. Being a real actor. Getting to live all those different lives, getting to be all those different people. That’s my dream, and I can’t give it up just for some guy. I can’t do that.”

“I never expected you to,” he said, and she could tell he was being honest.

“Why not?” she demanded, and he just stared. “You never even thought about it? Because I’m still a summer person. Right? You’ve known all along that I’d be going home at the end of the summer, you’ve been thinking of this thing as something temporary, just a fling.” She tried to throw the branch away from her to express her frustration, but it was heavy and awkward and the tip ended up jamming into the earth, bringing the base back around to painfully jam into her shin. “Ow!” she gasped.

And Josh finally moved. “Shit,” he said, falling to his knees in front of her. He tugged at the leg of her jeans, rolling it up so he could see the damage.

“It’s no big deal,” she tried, but she was pretty sure he wasn’t hearing her. “Just a scratch.”

“It broke the skin. You’re bleeding.”

She grabbed the hair on the top of his head and angled his face up so he was looking her in the eye, not the shin. “People bleed. Then they get better. That’s life, Josh.”

He frowned at her. “Yeah, okay. I’m familiar with the concept.”

“I’m not made of china. I won’t shatter. I can get scratched sometimes. And you can tell me things I don’t want to hear sometimes. You know?”

“I can tell you so you can ignore them,” he said, calmly standing up. “Like tonight, when I said I was going to work and you should stay home. Like that?”

“You can tell me things about
you
. Not tell me what to do.”

“I don’t understand this conversation. Are we still talking about when you’re leaving?”

“I’m talking about when you left, Josh! Tonight. You heard I got the part, and you were out of there. No time for us to talk about it, no trying to figure it all out. You just
decided you knew exactly what was going to happen and that was it. You were back to old Josh, working hard and freezing me out.”

“It’s been about six hours,” he said, clearly trying to hold his temper in check. “And you spent the first good chunk of that on the phone talking to everyone but me. I can’t take six hours to get used to an idea without you saying I’m freezing you out?”

“Are you trying to say you weren’t going to stay frozen? Are you trying to say I was wrong about what’s going to happen?”

“You’re going back to L.A., Ashley. That’s a fact. I thought we had longer, and then I found out we didn’t and I needed a bit of time to adjust to that before I could go back to being happy for you. It’s not a fucking crime to need a bit of time.”

“It’s not a crime to tell me things, either.” She was crying. Stupid, weak tears. Except she was still functioning, still having the conversation she needed to have, so “weak” wasn’t the right word. “We’re allowed to have feelings, you know. Negative ones, even. You can share those with me, just like you share being happy.”

“How long ’til you go back, Ashley?” His voice was dead, almost as if he was wishing for her to depart sooner rather than later.

“A week and a bit, probably.”

“And do you want to spend that time being unhappy and fighting? Or do you want to give me a little time to get my game face back so we can enjoy the time we have?”

“I want to spend it fighting,” she said. “But with both of us on the same side!” She shook her head. “When I called Kevin, looking for you, he told me how things have been up here. He told me you lost a lot of business and took some crap from people. And he said you were just walking through it, head high. He said you were a tough son of a bitch.” She pushed him so hard he took a step backward.
“So where the hell is all that toughness now, Josh? Why are you so . . . so
eager
to give up now? You think the only possible outcome is for us to break up. We couldn’t possibly turn this into something more than a summer fling. That’s what you think. Right?”

“Do you think something else?” His expression was almost scornful. Now that she’d got him talking she was wondering if she’d made a mistake. “You think . . . what? What Hollywood romance ending do you see for this? Do I suddenly realize that I’ve secretly wanted to be an actor for my whole life, and I go down with you and get a great part in your movie and we rule Hollywood together? Is that one of your plans? Because leave aside the part where it’s a total fucking fantasy that could never actually happen. Even if it did happen, I
hate
people staring at me. Being an actor sounds like the worst job in the world. So there goes the Hollywood ending. Real-world version? I just go down to be your kept boy. But people would still stare at me, right? Wondering who the hell I was and what the hell I was doing with someone like you. I didn’t enjoy the Hollywood gossip experience the first time around, so I don’t think I’d want to sign up for a lifetime of it. Being in a city at all is something I can handle if I go down for a weekend or something, but by the end of it my skin’s crawling and I feel filthy and stressed and I want to punch everyone I see. I hate the city.” He shook his head and his voice was a bit softer when he said, “Not to mention that you wouldn’t want me anymore, not in L.A. Not when you’ve got all those other guys to choose from. Smooth, rich guys in fancy cars with great houses. Guys who can take care of themselves, without mooching off you for everything they need. Guys who can help your career, and who look good next to you at whatever those glossy events are.” He stepped backward and apparently the expression on her face was the one he’d expected. “Yeah. So that’s not going to work.”

“Maybe I could stay up here—” she started.

“You just said you were going down for the job. And you should. You don’t want to get stuck up here. This is somewhere you vacationed, but you’re ambitious. You don’t want to be on vacation forever.”

He was right. She
did
want to go back and work more. She wanted to prove herself and take exciting roles that would let her grow as an actor. She thought about suggesting that they try to maintain the relationship long-distance, but that made no sense, not if they’d never be able to live in the same place. Long distance was only reasonable for the short term. “So what do we do?” she asked quietly. “We just give up?”

“We stick with what it was originally supposed to be. A summer thing.” He looked sad, but certain. “It’s better to have a clean break so we can both look back at it as a good memory. Otherwise, if we try to drag it out? You end up hating me, or I end up hating you, or . . .” He smiled softly and reached out to run the back of his fingers down her cheek. “Maybe not hate. But we resent each other. It ends dirty instead of ending clean. I don’t want that for us.”

She hadn’t known she was going to say it, but he was being honest with her and he deserved the same in return. “I love you, Josh. I know it’s fast, but it’s real. I’ve never felt like this before, and I’m scared that if I walk away from you I’ll never feel this way again.”

She was out of things to say, and it was just as well because Josh seemed to have kicked himself out of whatever wide-eyed shock he’d been in when she first said the words. Now he was moving, his mouth desperate as it covered hers, the kiss keeping her from speaking, thinking, or even breathing. All she could do was feel, and that was all she wanted to do. She loved him, and she was going to lose him. But he wasn’t gone yet, and until he was, she needed to work on building the memories that would sustain her.

*   *   *

THERE
was nothing but Ashley. No forest except for the tree she leaned against, no rain except for the water that fell on her upturned face. No darkness except for the shadows on her body, no light except for the way the headlights shone on her. No past, no future. Only Ashley, and only for the moment.

Josh abandoned all of his usual rules. He wasn’t gentle, he wasn’t carefully gauging her responses and calculating the ways he could bring her the most pleasure. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, it was just that he was operating on instinct now, touching her the way he just
knew
she wanted to be touched. And the way he wanted to touch. There wasn’t really a divide between them, as far as he could tell.

When he pushed her back against the smooth trunk, she surged forward to meet him, her mouth hungrily claiming his lips, his neck—any exposed skin. And apparently there wasn’t quite enough of that for her, because she tugged impatiently at his shirt, her warm fingers sliding under the hem and up over the bare skin of his chest, then whipping back out to attack the buttons. All the time her lips were on his, separating only for gasps of breath and for desperate, greedy whispers.

She got his work shirt off and he pushed her back with one hand, separating them long enough for him to pull his T-shirt off over his head. The rain and the cool night air hit his skin and gave him a quick burst of consciousness. The night was too cold, the location too public, the whole thing too hopeless. Then he looked at her and all the rest was just too damn bad. He’d have plenty of time to be disciplined and smart. After she left, and for the rest of his life. But not while she was still there.

“Your turn,” he growled, and pulled her soaked cotton shirt up over her head. The rest of their clothes followed
fairly quickly. There was some desperate tugging, a little bit of laughter, but soon they were naked, with a broad tree between them and the truck’s headlights, and there in the forest, in the rain, in the darkness, they joined together as tightly as they both needed.

Josh was being rougher than he’d ever been with Ashley, driving into her body as if trying to mark her deep inside. And she responded by wrapping her legs around him and pulling him in tighter and harder. He wrapped his arms around her so she wouldn’t bruise her back on the tree trunk and they strained together, wild and fierce and strangely triumphant, as if they were fighting against something, and as if they were, for the time being at least, winning.

They found their release together, and even then, as they both surrendered to the ecstasies of their own bodies, they still gasped and moaned in unison. They uncoupled slowly and gradually, but kept their bodies pressed together for warmth. When Ashley finally gave in and shivered, Josh kissed her forehead. “Your clothes are a mess, but there’s a blanket in the truck.”

“Will you drive me home?” she whispered. “You’ll come with me?”

“Yeah.” She could come back with him the next morning to pick up her car. And he could finish the work in the daylight.

But he needed to finish the work. And he needed to start another job when this one was done. Because Ashley was leaving. She’d be busy getting ready for the movie, and he’d better get busy trying to figure out how to live without her.

So they gathered up their clothes and scampered to the truck, Josh wearing only his underwear and boots, Ashley wearing nothing at all. He carried her over the gravel of the driveway and set her in the passenger seat, then got the truck started and pulled the rolled up blanket from the backseat.

“I’m glad you have cloth instead of leather,” Ashley said
as he wrapped the fleece around her. “Leather would have given me a cold ass.”

“But if I’d been rich enough to pay for leather, I probably would have sprung for seat warmers, too.”

He shut the passenger door gently and circled around to his own side. She was watching him as he climbed in, but she didn’t say anything until they were out on the highway. “You keep horses. Your house is pretty nice, and you own a lot of land. You have your own business, and Kevin said you do okay. You really . . . Money was tight enough that you couldn’t afford leather?”