Roman Holiday: The Adventure Continues (16 page)

Eventually, Nana and Jamie emerged blinking from the building and asked about an early dinner before the last push of driving.

“I know a place,” Roman said.

He led them a few blocks to the contemporary art museum, where they climbed a glass
staircase to the rooftop sculpture garden. The restaurant was expensive but informal. After some negotiation, they were seated outside, Nana and Stanley sharing a couch and Roman and Ashley standing at a table while Carly and Jamie took turns talking with them and chasing Dora around the garden.

As they looked over their menus, Roman frowned and said, “I thought they’d have more vegetarian stuff.”

Ashley studied hers. “No, it’s fine. There’s a bunch here I can eat.”

She ordered risotto cakes and corn-and-tomato salad, both of which turned out to be amazing. She relished every bite, sipping white wine Roman had ordered and visually tracing the twists and turns of the sculpture visible from their table—a bright snare of metal and sunlight.

Over Jamie’s protests, Roman paid for the meal. He seemed pleased that Ashley had finished her food, more pleased when they stopped for frozen custard and she ordered two different flavors in a waffle cone because she couldn’t make up her mind between pistachio and Moose Tracks.

He made a pig-snuffling noise at her when she took the first bite. She offered him a taste, and when he leaned close she held the cone at just the right angle to smear cold custard all over his nose.

He laughed, so she had to kiss him, and he had to transfer the ice cream from his nose onto hers, at which point Stanley observed that sex made some people unbearable to be around. Nana chucked him on the shoulder, hard.

Roman gave Ashley a napkin, still grinning.

He held her hand on the walk to the Escalade. They were at the back of the group, meandering at Dora’s start-and-stop, investigate-everything toddler pace.

“How far from here is it?” she asked him, careful to keep her voice down. “Where you grew up.”

“Just over an hour.”

“Will we go past it, or …?”

“No, it’s to the west.”

“You came here to Madison a lot?”

“In high school. Once my sister, Samantha, could drive, we’d see artsy movies at the Orpheum down the street.”

“Do you miss her?”

He lifted his gaze from the sidewalk to meet Ashley’s eyes. “All the time.”

She thought about that. What he’d lost, or maybe what he’d given up.

He kissed the back of her hand.

When they got back into the car, he didn’t say anything for a hundred miles.

Forward
.

They found campsites at an unremarkable commercial campground near Green Bay at about eight o’clock. Dora had already cashed in her chips. Ashley set up the new tent, a shocking bright orange, and Roman laid out their stuff inside, inflating the air mattress with a small battery-operated blower and arranging their bags around the sides of it.

Ashley watched him through the screen as he zipped open the sleeping bags and laid one on top of the other. He picked up their pillows last and placed them side by side, then sat back on his heels and scanned the interior of the tent. Leaning way out, he rolled up one tent flap more evenly.

“Well?” he asked, without glancing her way. “Will it do?”

“It looks great.”

He turned. “You should come in and see.”

Ashley stepped out of her sandals, unzipped the flap, and backed into the tent, leaving her flip-flops on the nylon square she’d staked to the ground.

A welcome mat. She’d never seen a tent with a welcome mat before. And here Roman had bought them one.

She supposed it was silly that he’d done all this. Spent good money on a tent they might only use once. Made them a bed. Provided a welcome mat.

She sat on the air mattress. Tested the bounce.

When she lay down on her side, Roman did the same, testing the stability with an elbow before he gradually lowered his weight.

Their eyes met.

It didn’t feel silly.

It felt like a homecoming—the sort of homecoming where you worked all day until your eyes felt gritty and you needed a shower and food before you could even begin to unpack everything that had happened to you, and then you opened your door and found the person
behind it who would care.

The one person who would worry about your tired feet.

The person who would tell you to sit down and take a load off, hand you a beer, give you ten minutes before he even asked about your day.

When Roman scooted closer, studied her face, trailed blunt fingertips over her hairline, that’s what she felt. That she’d come home. To this feeling. This man.

“It’s comfy,” she said. Because she couldn’t say the rest of it.

“I hope it doesn’t deflate in the middle of the night.”

“We’d be fine if it did. Have you ever slept on the ground?”

A flicker of emotion in his eyes. “Yes.”

“Really? When?”

“In the Boy Scouts. I was really into survival stuff, and I thought … I went off by myself in the woods with a tarp and no food or water or anything. I got lost. They didn’t find me for a few days.”

Ashley sat up, chilled in an instant.

He’d said it so matter-of-factly, but there was nothing matter-of-fact about what Roman had just told her. “How many days is a few?”

“Four.”

“Oh, God, Roman.”

“It was a long time ago.”

But the strain around his mouth looked fresh, and he reached up and pulled her into his arms, sprawling her across his body.

“You poor thing,” she said.

His arms tightened. Ashley rolled onto her back, bringing him on top of her so she could pet his hair, stroke his shoulders, hold him close with her legs wrapped around his waist.

“You must have been so scared. And so lonely.”

He tucked his face against her neck. One of them was trembling. Both of them had been there, lost in the woods, alone in the world. Discarded, forgotten.

Small sparks of starlight up against the whole howling wilderness.

She held him, and he held her, and she closed her eyes and promised whatever gods or karmic forces had influence over her life, whatever fates controlled her destiny—the ghost of her
grandmother, the saints of Cuban Miami, anything with influence, all of them—that she would never let Roman be alone that way again.

If she could hold on to him, she would give him her constancy. Because if she were to be given just one thing, one wish granted in the whole of her life, Ashley wanted Roman Díaz.

She wanted this home to come to.

The fading daylight hit the tent at an oblique angle, setting the orange aflame. Ashley pushed her hands beneath Roman’s shirt and pressed her palms into his skin, moving them up over the map of this body that she hoped to travel again and again, to traverse every path, every road and byway of memory, every dark alley of his pain until she knew him inside and out, until she’d heard all his stories and she rolled her eyes at them,
Roman, don’t tell that one again, we’ve heard it a hundred times
. She wanted to get tired of him and tease him for being so predictable but never, ever be done with him.

She wanted to make love to this body for the rest of her life.

“Jesus,” she whispered. Because that was a thought she’d never had before.

This was a feeling she’d never felt before.

Huge, fathomless, selfless, beautiful, frightening, gorgeous, awesome.

Scary.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

It wouldn’t make sense if she tried to put it in words. Instead, she put it in her hands, framing his face as she lifted herself from the mattress to kiss him.

She put it in the desperate strength of her thighs, squeezing him tight, drawing him against her.

She put it in the stroke of her tongue and the lift of her pelvis, the stuttering panic of her breath, the raking of her fingernails as she tried to claw off his T-shirt and remove every barrier that kept his skin from covering hers, outside, inside, everywhere.

Roman laughed, uncertain. “Ashley?”

“Shh,” she said. The fire pit was twenty feet away, Nana and Stanley and Jamie and Carly gathered around it, talking and distracted but right
there
. They couldn’t see inside the tent because Ashley had put the rain fly up, but even so, this wasn’t exactly kosher.

She didn’t care. Ashley didn’t have a single flying fuck to give about what was kosher right now. “Get naked.”

“I should put the flaps down first, or—”

“I need you.”

She brought his face close again, kissed him with her heart and her need and her fear, and he got it. They spent a frantic minute wiggling around, pushing down shorts, kicking underwear off their feet, untangling themselves from shirts and bra and digging frantically in Roman’s bag for a condom, and then she was centered over him, sinking down his length, retreating and trying again because she wasn’t wet enough but she didn’t care. The condom was lubricated. She wanted this.

Ashley kept going, slowly drawing him inside her, draping herself over him, her breasts against the friction of his chest hair, her mouth trailing sloppy kisses over his neck, kissing his mouth, kissing his hair, needing him everywhere at once.

He was with her, holding her eyes every time she looked up. Cupping her cheek, cupping her breast, cupping her ass in both hands and seating himself deeper with a gasp.

“Shh,” she said again, rising, and swallowed his moan with a kiss as she came back to him.

Rising and falling, she came back to him every time, and he wouldn’t let her go anyway. He never stopped holding her, hands at her hips, on her breasts, at her waist. Stroking her belly. Glancing over her clit, drawing her down to him again and again. Returning each kiss with fervor, with fever, the same desperate need she felt ricocheting back at her so she couldn’t tell who was needy and who needed. Who thirsted and who quenched.

They were the same in this. The same.

He rolled over on top, thrusting hard, pulling her knee up. She bit his earlobe. He sucked at her neck. They rolled again, coming off the air mattress. Roman shoved it aside, pushed her duffel bag into the wall of the tent so she’d have room to get her knees under her and ride him better, none of that soft bouncy cushioning when what she wanted was
this
, gravel under the nylon beneath her kneecaps, hard strokes that she could
feel
, she wanted to
feel
this, to be with Roman for every second of this frantic, quiet coupling because she
needed to
.

He pressed his thumb into her clit and she let it grind against her on every stroke, let the pressure take her someplace that was too raw and too ugly, not the orgasm she sought but the one he would give her, the one he’d make her take.

It came on, an explosive surprise, forcing her head back and his fingers over her mouth,
muffling the sound that tore out of her, his jaw so stern, his face cruel if you missed what was happening in his eyes, which was everything, acceptance and tenderness and Roman, the real Roman, all of him right there.

It came on, and it wrecked her, one long ceaseless spasm that felt so good, so fucking amazing that it pushed tears out of her eyes, pressed her heart into her throat, made her bite the tender crease of his palm as she rode it and rode it and rode it out, his cock surging up to meet her, his hand at her back, gentling her.

Ashley came down, gasping for breath.

Roman said, “Turn over.”

He set her on the edge of the air mattress, spread her knees wide, and pushed inside her from behind, one palm beside her head, the other between her shoulder blades, pressing down. He sighed or sobbed, she couldn’t tell, but it sounded good, like he was getting just what he needed as he fucked into her with four deep strokes, smooth and slow, and then he lost it.

His hand left her back, scooped beneath her belly, graceless and fumbling, and he moved that way, too, the orgasm stealing his finesse, yanking him into her again and again, fast and hard, rough and panting until he came, too, and stilled.

They collapsed like that, facedown on the mattress.

Ashley felt damp cloth beneath her cheek before she realized she was still crying.

She wasn’t sad. She was in love with Roman.

It was fucking terrifying.

But that was okay. She was okay. Better than okay. She could do this.

Propping herself up on her elbows, she swiped at her eyes and inhaled a sniffly breath.

She reached back, found Roman’s hip, and slapped it.

Forward
.

The green lawn at Cave Point sloped downhill toward a thin line of spindly trees. Through them and over their tops, Lake Michigan winked and sparkled, steel-blue water under a crisp blue sky.

They’d made it to Door County, Wisconsin, a thumb-shaped peninsula sticking out into the lake. Nana had called Esther yesterday to tell her they were on their way, and Esther had suggested that they get together at Cave Point for a picnic lunch, because her own house was too small to hold so many guests.

Ashley sat on the grass between Roman’s thighs, resting her hands on his knees. She felt as though they’d reached the edge of the world—out here on this narrow strip of land, the road butting up against the parking lot, the lawn kissing the edge of the asphalt and dropping away downhill to the trees and the cliff’s edge, the long descent to the water.

It made a scenic picnic spot, but on this brisk Thursday morning in early September, they had the place to themselves.

Esther folded open a red tablecloth and snapped it high in the air, letting the wind smooth out all the wrinkles and float it gently down to Stanley, who caught the end and helped secure it to the table with a bottle of ketchup on one side, a saltshaker on the other.

Dora held Jamie’s index fingers and jumped from one large, flat rock to the next, working her way down the line that divided the parking lot from the picnic area. Carly and Nana were off exploring somewhere.

Ashley sighed and tried to find a more comfortable spot to rest against Roman.

The man could stand to have a little more padding. He was hard muscle and sinew all over, which was nice to look at but uncomfortable to lean against. There was a reason people weren’t supposed to have one percent body fat.