Ravaged (5 page)

But she was
alive
, and he was drawn to her despite himself. His weakness to her strength. He didn’t know what to do about it. About her.

He didn’t want to feel compelled to make her feel better, or to get harder at the feel of her
body against him, which was softer than he’d expected. Warm everywhere, alive everywhere, breathing and human and so real, it hurt to touch her.

“Now you’ve got me,” she said. “What are you going to do with me?”

In that moment, he felt everything, just like she’d said. Everything in precarious balance—a broomstick in the palm of his hand, and on top of it a ball, and on top of the ball Heberto, Carmen, Ashley, Sunnyvale, Coral Cay.

His foster family—Patrick and Samantha—his past.

Carmen. His future.

Carmen.

“Nothing,” he said, and the word helped a bit, but not enough. Nothing he did seemed to put enough distance between them. “I’m not going to do anything with you except get you inside where you can’t get picked up and charged with public indecency.”

He tried to mean it. He started moving toward the shore. His soaked jeans made it almost impossible to walk, and he couldn’t shake Ashley off. He had to heave her up higher so he could push his legs through the water, which meant his fingers sank into her ass, his palms memorizing the breadth of her hips, the strength of her thighs wrapped around his waist.

It meant not thinking about her spread open and bare against his stomach, pink and wet, that sweet cunt a mystery he wouldn’t look at, wouldn’t think about, wouldn’t
feel
.

She took his face firmly between her hands and kissed him.

Roman tripped and fell, knocking his nose into something hard, her teeth or her skull. He managed to take most of the fall on his right knee and elbow, but she still said “Ow!” and scrambled away from him in the shallow water near the bank.

Then she started to laugh.

“Don’t laugh at me.”

“Why not? You’re hilarious.”

He grabbed her ankle.

“Hey!”

He pulled her back toward him, crawled over her, pinned her down in three inches of water, covered in muck, his knees on either side of her waist. She was naked and filthy and infuriatingly beautiful, and his nose fucking hurt. “Don’t laugh at me. I’m not hilarious. I’m not a fucking
joke
, I’m normal. Normal people don’t
do
this kind of shit.”

“And yet here you are.”

Ashley reached out a hand, dipped it into the mud, and smeared it all over his chest. She beamed at him. There was mud on her lip.

“I hate what you do to me,” he said.

“I know.”

“I hate
you
.”

She laughed. “I know. Poor Roman.”

She got more mud and dabbed a spot on each nipple. With a furrow of concentration between her eyebrows, she painted it down his stomach and filled his navel. She reached the button of his jeans and glanced at his face.

“Don’t you dare.”

“Kiss me, and I won’t.”

“No.”

“Kiss me, or I’ll paint my name on your stomach.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I
so
would.”

He could stop her. He could get out of the water, climb up the bank, walk back to the house.

He could, but he didn’t.

She didn’t paint her name on his stomach, either, because she’d never planned to do that. She did the worst best thing, instead. She unzipped him. Her hand found him hard and aching hot, and she took him in her filth-coated palm as her other hand shoved his jeans and briefs a few inches down his ass to give her better access.

“Jesus, Roman.”

She squeezed, and it hurt. The grit against his tender skin. The revelation that this fault line of his, this weakness, went so much deeper than he’d wanted to acknowledge.

Something wrong with you
.

He kissed her.

It was a nightmare.

The worst kind of nightmare, because it was so good, he couldn’t stop.

They rolled. Rolled again. Mud and rushes and water, flesh and tongues and lips and
teeth, sucking sounds, silica crunching between his molars when she stroked him harder and he had to clench his jaw. He cupped her breast, full and round in his hand, her nipples tight points that he sucked, twisted, bit. He didn’t know if they were fighting or fucking or what. It was all the same. Rage and pain and ecstasy all mixed together, and he hated the way they mixed, hated the sweet beauty of the ache in his cock, the urgency of his need to get inside her and make her arch up beneath him, make her come until her eyes crossed, make her smile.

The last one worst of all. That he wanted to make her smile.

That he’d wanted to break down that bathroom door and take her out of there, cheer her up, restore her to herself.

He liked her. Because he was weak, and she was alive, her aliveness so deeply rooted that no trauma could kill it, no pain pull it up by the roots and extinguish her. No one could ever hurt her as deeply as he would hurt every day, every minute, if he let himself.

And if he stayed with her, if he allowed her to get at him, get
into
him, she would make him feel it.

He couldn’t stand it.

But he couldn’t stop, either. He shook his hand in the water to clean it, found her clit with his thumb and stroked. Slicked up her wetness with two fingers over the hood, made her writhe, did it again, and then got distracted when she bit his neck. They were like that—biting teeth, stroking hands, leg over hip over back, pressing together and rolling and dripping on each other. Like mating animals that drew blood until it made them frenzied, fucked hard and made their pleasure audible with screams that sounded like death.

It should’ve been meaningless. Two adults rolling around in the mud, one of them naked, the other one getting there. It should have been seedy and sordid and dirty and wrong, and what messed him up worst of all—what made him thrust against her hip, dip his fingers deeper and search with his thumb for the stroke she liked, the pleasure she wanted—was that it wasn’t any of those things.

It felt good. It felt right.

Her feet pushed at his jeans, shoving them farther down his legs.

“Roman, please,” she said. “
Please
.”

“Please what?” He kissed the pulse point at her neck. Fisted his hand in her hair, dark yellow at the roots, dirty and tangled.

“Fuck me.”

“I can’t.”

“Roman, if you go all moral on me, I swear I’ll hurt you. Fuck me now. Regret it later. That’s the way this works.” She lapped her thumb over the head of his cock. “This. Inside me. Please.”

“No, Ash, I mean, I
can’t
. I can’t move my legs.”

Her eyes widened, her whole face taken over by a slowly spreading shock. “You’re paralyzed?”

“I’m not
paralyzed
, dumbshit, I’m stuck. My jeans. I’m stuck in my jeans. And I don’t have a condom.”

He rolled to the side, and she let go of him to look. Then she started laughing, a hysterical sound that murdered his arousal and broke some crucial piece of his resistance, because
God
, the way she laughed. He had no defense against it. “I can’t believe you just called me
dumbshit
,” she said. “This from the guy who’s stuck in his own pants.”

“You’re the one who shoved them down.”

“I thought—oh my God.” She was wheezing now, incapable of coherent speech. Tipped over from sexual excitement to hysterical mirth, and he loved that it was even possible for that to happen. He loved that she could feel those things side by side, because he couldn’t. He hadn’t thought he could. “I thought—you were—
crippled
. Because I—oh, make it stop.” She clutched her stomach, folded in half with laughter. “—I saw it in a movie once, and—”

“You saw it in a
movie
?”

That made her laugh even harder, and Roman couldn’t help it. He gave up.

There was absolutely no way for him to stop himself from feeling like this when she acted like that, and he didn’t even want to.

She’d thought he was paralyzed.

They were coated in mud, horny, confused, idiotic—and yet he’d seen more white around her eyes than he’d known she possessed, just because Ashley had once watched a movie where somebody got paralyzed during sex.

She was asinine.

Reckless, insensitive, optimistic, joyful, credulous, naive, sexy, funny.
God
, she was
funny
. Flopping onto his back, he dropped his wrist over his eyes and grinned at the stars.

Still wheezing, Ashley crawled over him, her hair dripping water onto his face.

“Look at you. You’re smiling.” She pushed his wrist out of the way and studied him, and for a few seconds that felt like years, he let her see what she did to him—the good part of what she did to him. The part he’d been hiding even from himself.

But under her guileless scrutiny, the smile started to feel wrong on his face—stiff and false—and he thought of a picture that Patrick had stuck on the refrigerator and forgotten about. The three of them at a water slide in the Wisconsin Dells, Patrick and Samantha smiling like a matched set, perfect, and Roman standing slightly apart. Too small, too brown, skinny like only a six-year-old boy could be. All his ribs showing. The grin so wide it split his face.

His birthday. That picture had been taken just a few months before someone told him what his
real
father had done, and Samantha found out, and everything that had made it possible for him to smile that way got broken.

Ashley sat back on her heels and stroked her palm down his chest. “Aw. You ruined it,” she said.

Roman thought about Carmen. He would have to call and tell her, because even as he swore to himself that this would never happen again, he caught his eyes focusing on Ashley’s nipples and the white triangles of skin where she had no tan. He caught himself thinking about the way her ribcage had felt under his hands, and he knew he couldn’t be trusted. He couldn’t be sure he would always say no.

Sometimes he lied to people to get what he wanted, but he had never lied to Carmen. He’d never had to. He wouldn’t start now.

Roman sat halfway up, found the waistbands of his jeans and briefs, and tugged them upward. He kept pulling, straining against stiff denim as displaced water rushed down his thighs until he got the jeans on again and zipped.

He thought about telling Ashley that he always ruined it. Always.

But he decided it would be kinder if he just didn’t tell her anything.

He called Carmen at 6:30, as soon as he was reasonably certain Prachi and Arvind were awake and moving around in the master bedroom.

He used the landline in the living room, grateful that the Kapoors still owned such a thing. His own phone sat on a towel on the floor of the craft room, leaking brownish water and small pieces of grit every time he picked it up. One more reminder of his folly.

Roman didn’t need reminding. His wet jeans had rubbed a rash across his thighs on the walk back to the house.

He and Ashley had snuck back inside while it was still dark out. Afraid the noise of the shower would wake Prachi and Arvind, they’d opted to clean up at the sink in the downstairs bathroom, splashing water on their heads, necks, and arms and drying off with a hand towel.

He’d tried to apologize, but Ashley had waved him off and asked,
Are you going to tell her?

In the morning
.

Good luck with that
.

Carmen picked up on the fourth ring. “Who is this?”

“It’s Roman.”

“What happened to your phone?”

“It got wet.”

“That doesn’t sound like you. Have you gotten that woman under control yet?”

“No.”

A door opened upstairs, and Ashley descended a few steps and leaned over the banister. When she saw him on the phone, she made an
eep
shape with her mouth, covered it with her hand, and tiptoed the rest of the way down the steps.

“… even tell me we can’t do the demo Monday,” Carmen was saying. “The site’s ready. You’ve still got seventy-two hours, so I don’t want to hear any whining. Get it done.”

Ashley disappeared into the kitchen.

“That’s not why I called.”

“So why did you call?”

“I … got involved with her last night.”

A cabinet door closed. Then another. Ashley was looking for something.

“Her, meaning the palm tree girl?”

Carmen sounded different—her voice a bit higher than usual, with not-quite-surpressed emotion. Surprise? Hurt?

“Her, meaning Ashley. Yes.”

She cleared her throat. When she spoke again, she sounded like she always did. Assertive, demanding. Easy to interpret. “You kissed her, slept with her, what? Spell it out.”

The deafening whine coming from the coffee grinder in the kitchen drowned out all thought for a moment. Prachi appeared on the stairs. “Good morning, Roman.”

“Good morning.”

“Roman?” Carmen said. “I’m on tenterhooks here.”

But the irony in her tone announced that tenterhooks were for other people. Weak people. She disdained the very idea of nervous anticipation, while Roman felt like a pinned specimen, stared at, weak-stomached, and spiky.

He inhaled deeply, waiting for Prachi to start talking with Ashley in the kitchen before he spoke. “Third base. I guess.”

“Don’t guess. There’s no guesswork involved. First base is kissing. Second base is—”

“Third base.”

She exhaled a sigh. “Okay.”

Roman waited for her to say something more, but he heard nothing from her end but an increase in the volume of white noise. She’d turned the shower on. She would have just finished her workout, and she was multitasking this phone call, probably stepping naked on the scale beside the shower and noting her weight on the chart that hung from the wall, subtracting a few ounces for her cell phone.

One hundred and ten pounds. Always the same weight, within a pound or two, since he’d first seen the chart. Ashley would find that amusing. Why chart your weight when it never changed? She wouldn’t understand it because she didn’t understand the impulse to find small, concrete ways to bring the world under control.