Ravaged (Roman Holiday 4)

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.

Carmen did.

“Roman?” she asked. “Are we done here?”

Arvind descended the stairs, whistling. “Good morning,” he said at the bottom.

“Good morning.”

He went into the kitchen.

“I guess … no. I’m not done,” Roman said.

Ashley appeared and set a cup of coffee on the end table beside him, then disappeared again. He heard a noise that might have been nothing or might have been Carmen, tapping her fingernails on a clipboard in his mind’s eye.

“Why is it okay?” he asked.

“What? Speak up.”

“I said I’m wondering why it’s okay. That I cheated on you.”

“It wouldn’t be okay if you had cheated on me, but we’re not exclusive, Roman. If you use a condom with this woman—and I have to assume you’ll always use a condom because you’re not a moron—you don’t even have to call to tell me about it if you don’t want to. Though I would be astonished if you didn’t. You’re honorable to a fault.”

Roman couldn’t speak. Words had become elusive, slippery. He reached for them, but he couldn’t find any that seemed like they might come close to expressing his confusion.

Finally, he managed, “So, you’re telling me … What are you telling me? We’re not in a relationship?”

“Of course we’re in a relationship, but we’ve never defined it as an exclusive relationship. We’re dating. If I had wanted to ensure you would never go out with another woman, or touch anyone but me, I’d have at least bothered to say so, don’t you think?”

Roman held the handset between his knees, away from his ear, and traced the pattern of the holes in the receiver with one finger.

Not exclusive? When had exclusivity become a thing you had to declare to the woman you’d been seeing for a year? The woman you were sleeping with? It wasn’t—this wasn’t how things worked. If Carmen believed—

An uncomfortable thought made him lift the phone back to his ear. “Carmen, have you …?” But he couldn’t say it. No matter what Carmen said, if he asked her, he’d be leveling an accusation, and he had no business accusing her of anything. “Never mind.”

“Not recently, Roman, no. But I hadn’t ruled out the possibility.” Her voice was crisp.

She was always crisp. She wore crisp clothes and put her hair up. She had an ice-blue blouse that made her skin look flawless as a satin sheet.

P

robably she wasn’t cold all the way through, any more than he was. But it went deep.

It had never chilled him before.

“So we’ve been dating each other for a year. I hadn’t been with anyone else, and you haven’t,” he said. “That suggests we’re exclusive.”

“Suggests?” She sounded distracted. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Roman. Whatever. Whatever you want, really. We were exclusive, if you say so. Now we’re not. Are you calling to beg my forgiveness or to break up with me?”

Roman’s mental gears ground to a halt again.

Why was he calling?

He hadn’t thought past confession. Now that he did, neither of the options she offered seemed to fit.

Carmen laughed. “Never mind. It’s clear you don’t have the first idea. I hope at least you made some progress with this woman. Is she feeling more pliable this morning?”