Chained (Roman Holiday 1)

Because he didn’t understand her at all, he thought it would take nothing more than the passage of time to break her.

Ashley didn’t break. She bent. People who bent were nearly impossible to defeat.

The trick was to stay flexible. She had to pee, but she had no access to a bathroom, no privacy, and no use of her hands. The only solution that offered even a modicum of dignity required her to unlock herself—not easy to achieve, but just possible.

Ashley waited until she was sure Noah was distracted by his phone. She spent five minutes fiddling behind her back with swollen fingers and stiff wrists until she’d managed to fish out the key and release the padlock. Then she’d peed in the mulch like a sad little animal. Trembling all over, sick to her stomach, with black spots floating at the edges of her vision, she locked herself back up.

Victory.

Of course, the key sank into her butt crack, but that was a comparatively comfortable place for it to be.

Later, the ants arrived. A few of them found a pathway into her bikini bottoms, and she learned that she had been wrong to think she could no longer feel her butt. Wrong to assume she’d completely lost sensation in her labia.

She felt the ants. She felt them everywhere—their itchy, filthy little feet an outrage that made her violently wiggle, hoping to drive them out, squish them, or at least make their stay in her crotch so inhospitable that they’d be driven out in alarm.

She must have looked like she was having a seizure because Noah came to check on her, asking what was wrong. When she told him, he repositioned her umbrella, which she recognized as the only thing he could think of to do, since he could hardly scratch her crotch for her.

The day wore on. Roman didn’t come back. The temperature climbed toward 90 before the rain knocked it down a few degrees. The parasol funneled water directly onto her head. Rain dripped off the tip of her nose and wet her lips, gluing her hair to her neck and washing away the ant feeling.

Ashley fell asleep with her toes twitching, dreaming of spiders crawling up her legs. She woke up unrefreshed, unsure whether seconds or minutes had passed.

She heard Roman and Noah in the parking lot, a low murmur of sound from which individual words emerged to drift inside her ears. Quiet … water … bathroom … sandwich.

She would kill for a sandwich.

Noah’s truck drove off, and Roman strolled over with a white paper sack in one hand and a lawn chair in the other. The bag smelled like meat—sweet, spicy barbecue squashed inside a yeasty roll—and the fact that Ashley had been a vegetarian since shortly after her twelfth birthday did absolutely nothing to diminish the appeal of that aroma.

Even Roman couldn’t compete, appeal-wise. He wore dark blue jeans and a short-sleeved red button-up shirt, his version of casual so straitlaced that she was surprised not to find creases ironed into his jeans. She wondered if he owned a pair of shorts. If he even had legs under there, and a pair of Jockeys with all the bits and bobbles beneath.

Of course, she’d seen the general size and shape of the bits, if not the bobbles, when he hunkered in front of her this morning, and so far she hadn’t completely succeeded in repressing the memory.

Nor had she forgotten the way he smelled, close up.

He cleared his throat.

She was staring at his crotch.

Son of a bitch. It was his fault. The scent of barbecue-slathered pork had deranged her.

He opened the lawn chair, sat down, and dug into the bag. Two sandwiches. After lining them up on top of the flattened paper bag on his thigh, he ate them right in front of her, one after another.

The last time she’d had a barbecue tempeh sandwich, she’d managed to get it in her hair, but Roman didn’t even drip on his pants. His hair was as precise as the rest of him: a quarter of an inch long all over, black, shining, with a clean, straight edge at the nape of his neck. She bet he got it cut every week.

Even his fingers were unaffected by the mess, though he carefully wiped them on a clean napkin after he’d finished.

Ashley gave up. She hated him.

Hated him, hated him, hated him.

When he offered her a bottle of water, she turned her face away.

He loped back to his hideous grinning deathmobile, and she resumed her project of staring into space, which she alternated with catnapping until one part of her body or another went numb and the pins-and-needles sensation of oxygen-deprived tissue woke her up.

The sun set. The interior of Roman’s car glowed an eerie white-blue. It took her a while to figure out that he was reading, and whatever device he was using had a light. He sat with his head bent, his face in profile. Unmoving. Unaffected.

She wondered if he would sleep.

She wondered how she would last the night.