Just a Summer Fling (22 page)

It was kind of a personal question, but maybe it was time to share a bit of that reality. “I could have afforded it,” he said. “But it would have meant that I wouldn’t have money for something else. I’m doing okay. I bought this truck new, and my old one wasn’t totally dead. I could have nursed it along another couple years, if I’d wanted to put up with it being temperamental. I have a retirement account, and I have savings for a rainy day. I’m fine. But I’m not rich, Ashley. Nowhere near it.”

“Does it bother you that I am?”

He thought about it. “No. Not really. I mean, the summer people thing, you know how I feel about that. But just you? For yourself? No. I’m glad you have money.” He snorted a little. “I like the idea of you having the finer things and being taken care of, and I’m in no position to give you all that, so I’m glad you can take care of yourself.”

She seemed reasonably satisfied with that answer. Then out of the blue she asked, “Does it bother you that I’ve done topless scenes? In movies? Some guys don’t like that.”

He took his eyes off the road long enough to give her a startled look. “Bother me? No, I don’t think so.”

“Have you seen them?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You haven’t seen all my movies?” She frowned at him
and he made sure he kept staring straight ahead. “Wait a second. Have you seen
any
of my movies?”

“I’m not a big movie guy. But now that you’ve mentioned the topless scenes . . . if you could just write the titles of those ones down, that’d be great.”

“What the hell, Josh!” She sounded like she wasn’t sure whether to be amused or outraged. “Not even
one
?”

“Maybe I have,” he said quickly. Then he grinned. “I just don’t remember. It would have been before I met you. So, you know, I wouldn’t have paid attention. But maybe I have. I don’t like movies that much myself, but obviously I’ve watched them with other people.”

She took a moment to think, then said, “You may have seen one of my movies while you were on a date with another woman?”

He nodded. “Yeah. You do mostly chick flicks, right? So it’s not like I would have seen one of them on my own.” This was kind of fun. “We can call some of my exes when we get home, if you want, and I can see if they remember. Hell, there was one girl I used to date who seemed to think the only reason movie theaters were invented was for fooling around. I had my own place by then, but she wouldn’t want to come over. Said everyone would think she was a slut if they saw her coming out of my apartment. But the second the lights went down in a movie theater . . .”

“You may have fooled around with another woman while watching one of my movies.”

“Well, to be fair, I probably wouldn’t have been paying much attention to the movie.”

She was staring at him and he glanced over and caught her eye. She was laughing, thankfully. “I’ve done some action movies,” she said. “I was generally just the love interest and had to stand around and get rescued, but still, you could at least see
those
.”

“Okay, you can write those titles down, too.” As if he was
going to torture himself by watching her movies after she was gone. But it was easier to pretend that pain wasn’t coming. “If you wanted to sort of cross-reference the two lists? Like, if there were any that were action movies
and
you were topless? You should probably put a star beside those ones.”

“Hey, Josh?” she said quietly.

He glanced over at her, and she raised her eyebrows, then dropped the blanket from her shoulders. “Right here, in person. Topless.”

He made himself return his eyes to the road. “If I sped up and pretended someone was chasing us, it’d be the perfect movie.”

It was so easy. That was what made it hurt so much to think about losing it. The warm affection, the easy jokes—the gorgeous, topless woman in his passenger seat. He had it all, and he was going to lose it all before he knew it.

“Daisy’s going to miss you,” he said quietly.

Ashley nodded. “I’m going to miss her, too. And Rocky. And your aunt Carol, and Kevin. And the lake, and the forest, and the stream.” She turned to him quickly. “That’s what I want to do. On my last night here. I want to ride back to the stream with you, and I want to lie there with my feet on your chest, looking up at the stars. Floating. I want to do that. Maybe
every
night until I leave. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said. It sounded a bit too much like she was dying, but he wasn’t going to argue with her last requests, regardless. “Do you think you’ll be back?”

Shit. He hadn’t known he was going to ask that question. “No, don’t answer,” he said quickly. “It doesn’t matter. And you don’t know. . . . You can’t know. Your life’s changing and you need to be ready for anything. Next summer you could be working on a movie with . . . I don’t know, I’m trying to come up with a big-name director and I’m drawing a blank. Steven Spielberg?”

She smiled. “I’ve already worked with him. But I’d love to do it again. And you’re right, maybe this time it’d be on one of his more serious movies.”

“You’ve already worked with Spielberg? Seriously?” Josh took a moment to collect his thoughts. “He made
E.T.
, right? That was him?”

“Well, yeah, but I wasn’t in
E.T.
, Josh.”

“Yeah, I know. But it’s an excellent movie. You’ve worked with the guy who made
E.T.
?”

She laughed. “This is what’s going to get you interested in my career?”

“Seriously, if you’ve been topless in an action movie directed by the guy who made
E.T.
, we should watch that movie right away. How do people watch movies these days? Would we have to download it?”

He wanted to keep joking and laughing about her movies. He wanted to keep driving, maybe forever, and he wanted to keep sneaking looks at the topless beauty in the seat next to his. He did not want to think about the end of
E.T.
, the part where the stupid alien went back to his happy spaceship and left the poor kid behind with a broken heart. It had been hard enough for that kid to watch his alien buddy leave, and he hadn’t even been getting sex out of the deal.

Better not to think about it. “Absolutely,” he said, and obviously it had been too long since anyone had said anything because Ashley gave him a look that made it clear she thought he was losing it. “The stream,” he explained. “We’ll do that. And maybe I can take a bit more time off and we can go kayaking at the lake. And Aunt Carol and Kevin will want to say good-bye—we could all go for a ride, if you wanted, one afternoon. I could borrow a four-horse trailer and we could go over to Merck Forest. They’ve got some good trails.”

“Okay,” she agreed. She settled into the seat and bundled
the blanket back up over her shoulders. He knew she wasn’t hiding; she just wanted to be cozy.

He wondered what she’d say if he suggested they just keep driving, running away from it all and never coming back to their current lives. But he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to hear her say no. And if she said yes, he’d have to deal with the guilt of messing up her dream. So he stayed quiet, and they drove back to the cabin. Back to the place that was, for a few more days at least, home.

Twenty-three

ASHLEY CRIED THE
entire flight to L.A. Not deep, shattering sobs, just intermittent tears that snuck out before she noticed them coming. They’d gone to Woody’s the night before and there had been so many people there who’d come just to say good-bye to her. Abi and Laurie and Kevin and his mom, and Josh’s cousins she’d met at The Splash. Theo had hauled her up onstage and prodded her to make a speech, and for the first time in her life she’d been too overcome to give a performance. She’d just stood there and smiled and laughed and cried until finally Josh took pity on her and lifted her down and hugged her until she was strong again. They’d gone home and ridden to the creek and she’d looked up at the stars and tried to feel insignificant, because if she was nothing compared to the universe then surely her pain was even less than nothing, and she should be able to ignore it.

It hadn’t worked, though, and they’d gone back to the cabin and made love and fallen asleep together, and then
they’d woken up and Josh had driven her to the airport and she’d made herself walk away from him forever.

Adam had booked her two seats on the plane so there was no one beside her, and she was grateful to him, and then, suddenly, irritated. She was grateful? As if it were some personal gift from him to her, rather than an expensive luxury incurred on her behalf by his assistant, one that Ashley would end up paying for the next time Adam submitted his expense report. She had nothing to be
grateful
to Adam for.

Not until she landed and was escorted past security and made her way to the car waiting for her. But then she climbed inside the car and saw Charlotte, and heard Charlotte say, “Adam said you were a bit shaky. He thought you might want some company.” Then Charlotte saw Ashley’s face, blotchy and swollen, and said, “Oh, Ash,” and Ashley was crying again.

“It’s a great part,” Ashley sobbed. “And you got your part, too! I get to work with you! I’m so excited,” she tried, and then she sobbed. “I miss him so much.”

“It’s over, then?” Charlotte asked, gathering Ashley into her arms.

Ashley nodded. “He drove me to the airport and he kissed me good-bye and . . . it’s
over
.”

“I’m so sorry.” Charlotte didn’t say much more. She just held Ashley tight and let her cry.

“They wanted to cast Rocky,” Ashley said eventually. She wasn’t sure why it was important that she share this, but at least it was something to focus on. “Lauren saw the videos we took, of us riding around? And she said he was the perfect horse for the part. Someone called Josh and tried to set it up, and he wouldn’t agree to it. He didn’t even want his
horse
down in the big dirty city.”

“Or maybe he was trying for a clean break,” Charlotte said. “Isn’t that what you guys were supposed to be doing?
It wouldn’t be too clean if you had to come to work and see his horse every day.”

Ashley cried a little more at that, wondering whether Josh had been looking out for her or for his horse. She finally regained some sort of composure and managed to sit up straight. “It really was that easy for you?” she asked. “Leaving Kevin? He seems fine, you seem fine . . . You’re not just both putting on brave faces, are you? No. So, how did you do that?”

Charlotte shrugged. “We just never cared that much. We’re friends. We’ve stayed in touch a little; he e-mailed me a few days ago and told me to brace myself for your arrival, because he was pretty sure you were going to be having a hard time.”

“Kevin said that? Did he say . . . Did he seem to think Josh was going to have a hard time, too?”

“He said Josh would just go to ground. He said Josh never lets anyone help, but that you seemed a bit more sensible, so hopefully I could be useful down here.”

“I don’t like to think of him being all alone.”

“Then stop thinking about him. Think about
you
. Rehearsals start tomorrow. We’ll get you home, do your laundry, make sure you’ve got quick meals in the freezer just in case you ever manage to catch a bite at home. . . . What else do you usually do at the start of a project?”

“My assistant usually does all that.”

“But you got rid of your assistant in the spring.”

“Yeah.”

“So should we be doing a quick-hire to get you a new one? Your contract doesn’t specify that you get one?”

“No. Wait, does yours?”

“No,” Charlotte said with a grin. “Relax. You’re not being contract-snubbed. If you need an assistant, you should call Adam and get him on it; you’ll have to meet the top candidates, and it’ll be easier to do that during rehearsals than when we’re actually shooting.”

“No,” Ashley said with a sigh. She leaned her head back against the hard window. “I don’t want an assistant.” She didn’t want anything except for Josh. And he was the one thing she couldn’t have.

*   *   *

“SHE’S
going to stage some sort of weird guerilla mothering intervention pretty soon,” Kevin said as he handed the wires down to Josh. “That’s all I’m saying. It’s been four days since Ashley left, and Mom’s getting a bit intense. You can come over for dinner tonight and let her poke at you a little, or you can live your life in fear of her rappelling down the side of someone’s cottage and shooting you with a stun gun before tying you up and force-feeding you chicken soup.”

Josh ducked himself under the water and jammed the inflow pipe beneath the cement block with a little more force than was strictly necessary. The cottage he was working at had run out of water in the middle of a multi-guest weekend, and they needed their plumbing fixed, so Josh had called Kevin for help in order to get the job done more quickly. But he was regretting his decision. The summer people could have gone without water for a few more hours if it meant Josh wouldn’t have had to listen to Kevin’s nagging.

Josh stayed underwater for as long as he could, savoring the cool green peacefulness, but eventually had to put his feet down and poke his head out of the water. “Hit the pump,” he ordered, and after a moment’s hesitation, Kevin leaned over and flipped the switch. The hum was satisfying and Josh could feel the water at his knees being sucked slowly in through the end of the pipe. “Okay,” he grunted as he heaved himself out of the chest-deep water and up onto the dock.

“
Okay
, you’ll come for dinner?”

“
Okay
, let’s see if the reservoir is filling up.” Josh slipped on his sports sandals and stalked up the hill in his wet shorts, Kevin trailing behind him.

“Charlotte says Ashley’s a mess,” Kevin said quietly.

Josh turned to glare at him. “What the fuck are you doing? Is that supposed to help somehow, you telling me that?” Josh shook his head. “Seriously, Kevin, what’s so hard about just leaving this alone? Do you think there’s some magic solution? Do you think I could ever be happy down there? Do you think Ashley could ever be happy up here, for good?”

“It doesn’t sound like she’s too happy down there, either,” Kevin said slowly. “And it doesn’t seem like you’re too happy up here. So you’re both miserable. It just seems—”

“Seems what?” Josh prompted angrily. If Kevin could get this off his chest, maybe he’d shut up about it for a while.

“Seems like if one of you moved, then at least
one
of you would be happy. Instead of both of you being miserable.”

Josh shook his head. “Nobody’s miserable. We’re adjusting. That’s all.”

“Adjusting,” Kevin said slowly. “Oh. That’s okay, then. Sorry about the misunderstanding. I guess ‘adjusting’ must look a lot like ‘miserable’ from the outside.”

“Fuck off, Kevin.” Josh swung down into the little concrete room beside the cottage’s holding tank. He checked the pipes and then opened the hatch and heard water pouring into the reservoir. Okay. That was working, at least.

He climbed up and went to knock on the cottage door. Michael Montgomery answered, the glass in his hand combining with the angle of his posture to make it clear he’d found something to drink other than water. Cal’s brother was one of the few locals who owned waterfront, and he could only afford it because his family also owned half the town, in addition to the furniture factory that was about the only year-round industry in the area.

“Water should be back up and running,” Josh said. “Seems like your intake pipe got clogged. It’ll take a half hour or so for your reservoir to fill back up; Kevin will stick around and make sure everything’s working after that.” He
had more to say, a suggestion for monthly maintenance or at least a quick inspection, both of which could be done by anyone going swimming, but he’d save it for when the guy was sober.

“Great. Thank you,” Michael said. Then there was a stir behind him and a thin blonde appeared at his side. Sheila Lambert was older, but well maintained, and considered herself the queen of the local social scene, at least through the winter. Josh was pretty sure Michael was actually dating someone else, but Sheila seemed to feel pretty at home at his place.

“You should come have a drink with us, Josh! We heard you had some fun up here this summer. Ashley Carlsen was here? How exciting!” She raised her eyebrows and smiled salaciously.

“I have to go,” Josh said. He couldn’t stick around to make excuses or be polite about it, and there was no way he was going to get dragged into their cocktail circle to discuss his “exciting” summer with Ashley Carlsen.

He turned and stalked toward the truck, and somewhere behind him he heard Kevin chatting away, covering for Josh’s abrupt departure. Josh got behind the wheel and got the hell out of there. He had more jobs to do, more distractions to pursue.

More ways to pretend he wasn’t totally miserable.

*   *   *

“I’M
not seeing the power, Ashley.” Lauren Hall leaned back in her rickety desk chair and took a sip of tea from her brown pottery mug. “In your auditions, there was an energy, an intensity that just burned up the screen. It made you
glow
with a fascinating, subdued fire.” She waited for Ashley to speak, then said, “We’ve been rehearsing for a week, and I’m not seeing it. What’s different?”

Ashley was supposed to be a professional. She was supposed to keep her personal shit at home, and if she was
struggling with that she was supposed to deal with it, not go whining about it to her boss. But what other answer did she have? “I’m dealing with some stuff. Personally. I . . . I know it’s not your problem, but I had to leave a guy behind to come down for this job. It’s a choice I made. But I guess it’s kind of . . . I guess I’m using all my energy to keep myself together, and it’s not leaving enough to be intense in rehearsals.”

Lauren looked at her for longer than Ashley liked. “Man trouble,” she said with a nod. “Is this going to be something you can resolve by the time filming starts? Because I’ve got to be honest with you. As a woman, I sympathize. But I’m not at work as a woman, I’m here as a director. And as a director, I’m a little pissed off. I know you see this role as a chance. That’s one of the reasons I wanted you for the part—I wanted to you to bring that desperation for change to the role you’re playing. But this movie is a chance for me, too. Every movie is a chance. You want to be a serious actor; I want to keep directing the movies I want to direct. And that only happens if I’m successful. I need everyone on board to be giving me their best effort, and right now, I am getting something less than I expected from you.”

Ashley nodded and fought not to cry. She couldn’t argue. Lauren was right. This movie was important to a lot of people, and Ashley was letting all of them down. She needed to pull herself together or get the hell out of the way so someone else could come in and take over.

“We’ve got the weekend off,” Lauren said, her voice gentler now. “I need you to take that time to pull yourself together and sort out whatever the hell is getting in the way of you being the banshee that you were in auditions. I want that fierce woman back, and I want this movie to be the vehicle that breaks her out of the supporting female roles she’s been stuck in. I want this movie to be the first of many great performances for the adult version of Ashley Carlsen.”
Lauren sat back in her chair and took another sip of her tea. “But that won’t happen if you can’t pull yourself together. And I won’t let you drag this movie down. I
can’t
let you.”