“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.
CHAPTER FOUR
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.