Ravaged

Dear Readers,

I bet you’re really hating me right now. Because it’s
on
, you know? We’ve got giant apex predators, blackmail, sexual tension out the wazoo, guilt and idiocy and occasional bursts of insight—the best of everything, right?

And then I dropped you for a week. Don’t think I couldn’t feel your flaming eyes of death, attempting to burn me through the screen of your e-reader. But it won’t work! I am immune to your flame eyes. Mwahahaha!

Seriously, though. Last week’s episode was action-packed. Let’s review the high points.

When we left Roman and Ashley, they were sitting on a porch together in Georgia. How cozy! Except Ashley had just finished letting Roman know that she fully intended to rake him over the coals in the press and sue the pants off him (grounds: endangered Key deer habitat) unless he agreed to accompany her on a trip to visit all her best Sunnyvale buddies.

She calls it a Roman holiday. He calls it blackmail. Po-
tay
-to, po
-tah-
to, eh? Having been menaced by an alligator named Flossie and subjected to the auditory stimulation of Kirk and Mitzi’s sex marathon, Roman was weakened—and a chat with his girlfriend, Carmen (who,
whoa
, might have been a bit distracted by a large, furry creature by the name of Noah) sealed his fate: two weeks of motherfucking holiday. With Ashley.

She’s got fourteen days to change his mind about Sunnyvale and rescue the condos. If she fails, she’ll have to drop the Key deer thing and free Roman to build his destiny. If she succeeds … well, we’ll see.

Imagine me rubbing my palms together, grinning.

Knock back your drinks, gang. It only gets more interesting from here …

xoxo,

Ruthie

“Take the next exit,” Ashley said, gesturing toward the green interstate sign as they passed it by.

MIDWAY. EXIT 2 MILES.

“What for?” Roman asked.

“We need to go to Hinesville.”

“The sign doesn’t say Hinesville.”

“Take it anyway.”

He sounded suspicious, which was an improvement. At least he was speaking to her again.

The not-speaking-to-her phase, which had lasted for a few hours, had been a matter of irreconcilable differences. Of course Roman turned out to be the kind of person who liked to get started on his road trips bright and early. He’d had his Escalade packed and the Airstream hooked up by six a.m., but Ashley had seen no point in rushing through breakfast. With Grandma gone, she didn’t know when she’d make it to visit her friends at the Georgia commune again. She wanted to dawdle a little.

As if sensing this desire, the commune residents had made the most of the morning meal, lingering over their mimosas and breakfast casserole. Drink in hand, Kirk had climbed up on the porch railing and shared a rambling series of loosely connected thoughts about journeys and leave-taking, which naturally led others to make their own pronouncements—all while Roman sat inside his Cadillac and idled his way through a profligate amount of fuel.

He was on his cell phone the whole time, talking or tapping at the screen. Telling his people that he was going to be away for a while, she imagined.

When she clambered into the Cadillac around eight feeling cheerful and chatty, buzzed from a few too many mimosas, Roman had nothing to say but “Which way?”

And then, several miles later, “Which way?” again.

He’d sounded like one of those recorded assistance menus you got when you called for customer service. But Roman’s automated-menu voice was better than what she got after they hit the interstate, which was mile after mile of silence.

An uncomfortably expansive amount of silence. The mimosa high quickly wore off, and then there was only I-95—a broad, flat swath of pavement cut through a carpet of dark green trees. The sky a hazy blue. The soothing sound of tires on blacktop, and her restless spirit, unsoothed.

She wondered if he knew that the worst thing he could do to her was leave her alone with her thoughts.

“What’s in Hinesville?” he asked.

“Supplies.”

“We have everything we need.”

“Are you kidding? Not even close.” How many years had it been since she and Grandma took a trip in the Airstream? She would have been, what, seventeen that last summer? She had seven years’ worth of spring cleaning to do. “We have to get the trailer outfitted, which means cleaning supplies, pots and pans, bedrolls, food, toilet paper, a sun shelter, one of those red-and-white checked tablecloths for the picnic table, dish soap, clothesline and clothespins, maybe a bear box, matches—”

“A bear box?”

“If we camp in the Smokies. I mean, we can probably keep all the food and the toothpaste and whatnot in the trailer at night, but I figure if we want to go backpacking for a day or two, we might—”

“We’re not going
backpacking
, Ashley. I don’t go
backpacking
. You said we were taking a trip. Driving. In the Cadillac. You said nothing about
backpacking
.”

He pronounced the word a little differently each time, as though he couldn’t quite figure out how to make it sit in his mouth properly. For those few sentences, his voice perfectly matched his appearance—cultured and beautiful in his now-slightly-rumpled gray suit and the white dress shirt with a thick-and-thin red stripe he wore underneath.

“A little backpacking won’t hurt you. Neither will some camping.”

“I don’t camp,” he said flatly.

“You do now. What did you think, we were going to stay at hotels? That defeats the whole point of having the trailer.”

“I thought the point of the trailer was to be a boil on my ass.”

“Well, that, too. But mostly it’s to sleep in.”

“Not happening.”

“Oh, relax. I’m not talking about tonight anyway. The Airstream’s too much of a mess until I get it cleaned up. We can stay at Prachi and Arvind’s tonight.”

Roman’s jaw tightened, and he didn’t answer.

Half a mile passed. Ashley thought about the phrase
boil on my ass
and smiled.

Sometimes he could be such a curmudgeon.

He’d put a tie on this morning, God bless him—the Roman equivalent of suiting up for battle. It was dark red, and she alternated between wanting to choke him with it and wanting to test the texture of his platinum tie clasp with her fingertip. To loosen the perfect half-Windsor at his throat, unbutton his shirt at the collar, run her hand down his pec to find out how much chest hair he had and discover the texture of it.

Roman slid loose fists around the steering wheel in an unconscious caress, and she wondered if he knew he did that. Stroked his car when he was unhappy, or thinking hard. He had such a
thing
for his car. She could easily imagine him prone across the backseat, suit pants unzipped, shirttails flapping, jerking off to the new-car smell of it, the supple leather and the unmarked carpet.

All this perfection, his. Unmarred, utterly possessed.

She thought of the therapist she’d been forced to visit before her father sent her to live with her grandmother. A beige office and a man with a bland face who’d refused to engage with her anger, and who’d encouraged her to think about control—who had power over Ashley, why she wanted it back, how her behavior was designed to make that happen.

She’d stomped out of that office in a rage and refused to go back, but she’d never forgotten the therapist’s viewpoint.

Who had taken all the control away from Roman when he was younger, to make him so covetous of it now? And why did she keep falling into the habit of flaunting her control over him when she knew how much he disliked being jerked by his puppet strings?

Good questions, but she couldn’t bring herself to dwell on them long enough to come up with answers.

“Hinesville is only about a twenty-minute detour,” she said. She meant it as an apology. “We’re near the military base, and there’s a great army surplus store in town. There’s three, actually, but the one I like best is all old and random, like a flea market. You never know what
you’re going to find there.”

They passed another sign. Half a mile to the exit.

“I want to know where we’re going,” Roman said.

“I just told you. Hinesville.”

He looked over at her, no hint of humor in his expression, and she realized she’d done it again. Baited him just to get a better look at his face. Just to hear him speak and maybe, if she was lucky, to put some heat into his voice.

Since she’d resolved yesterday to take a different tack with Roman—to try to be kind, even though he continued to despise her—she gave him a little more of what he needed. “We’re going to North Carolina. A little town near Chapel Hill called Chatham Village. The plan is to get outfitted in Hinesville, grab some lunch, then drive straight through the rest of the way. We should be in Chatham by dinnertime. Okay?”

The exit came into view.

Roman didn’t answer, but he signaled the turn and steered them off the interstate, into the world beyond.

The army surplus store smelled like mothballs and treated canvas, motor oil and cartridge grease.

Though Roman didn’t know if cartridge grease existed anymore. Maybe it had gone out with the India Mutiny—sepoy soldiers, Hindus and Muslims, tearing their cartridges open with their teeth, then learning they’d been greased with pork fat.

When his high school history teacher told that story, Roman had wondered how such a small thing could set off a war, but now he got it. The sepoys had been colonized, undervalued. Simmering with a thousand unvoiced resentments.

Anything might have set them off.

Ashley held up a dark green fatigue jacket that said “Anderson” over one breast pocket and made a show of measuring the fit against his chest. “You’re going to need some normal clothes,” she said. “How do you feel about green?”

You’ve colonized me. Don’t ask me how I feel
.

He kept the thought to himself. With Ashley, he found that things went most smoothly
when he voiced about one percent of his thoughts.

“Do you have a list?” he asked. A vain hope—she was meandering purposelessly through the store, picking up reams of onionskin typing paper and ancient combat boots creased with the shapes of strange men’s feet.

“In my head.”

Roman lifted a stapled pamphlet from the top of a pile on one gunmetal-gray shelf. “Army Field Manual FM 21-20: Physical Readiness Training.” The cover featured line drawings of soldiers in fatigue pants, combat boots, and T-shirts. One was doing a sit-up, another jogging into the distance. He flipped through the pages and then dropped the book into Ashley’s cart.