It wasn’t fair for him to be nice to her. To have been nice to her from the very outset, in his own way, providing an umbrella and water and protection. Providing his car and his time and his company.
It wasn’t fair that she liked him, a little bit.
A lot. Sometimes, a lot.
It was completely, deeply unfair that she wanted to press herself against his naked body and find out how warm he was. How hot he could make her. Find out if he knew how to fuck, if he was any good at it, if he could make her forget for an hour or two that she was lost and she didn’t know how to get home and she wanted to cry. All the time.
The only thing he’d done was come outside without socks on.
It wasn’t fair.
“I can’t sleep.”
“I know.”
She dissected a pod and laid the pieces in separate piles. Pods on the left. Seeds on the right. “You act like you care,” she said.
She picked up a seedpod and twirled it in her hand, because she wanted to find the words f
or him. She wanted him to hear what was the matter with him, why she was right and he was wrong, no matter what happened and no matter who took his side.
“You make people like you,” she said. “I bet my grandma liked you a lot. I bet you talked to her about all kinds of things she found interesting, and she thought you were really great with people. But you’re not. You only see people as a means to get what you want. As if nobody’s feelings matter but yours. You’re selfish.”
“That’s the way the world is.”
“No, it’s not.” She turned sideways, her back to him, and lifted her feet onto the bench so that her knees guarded the seed pile. “It’s too hot out here.”
Too hot out here. Too cold inside.
Too turbulent, too lonely, too churned up.
She looked down at the rescued seeds and dispersed them with one sweep of her hand, scattering them on the ground. Because what did she think she was rescuing them from anyway? They were seeds. She had no special powers. She’d never been the kind of person anybody saw as a savior.
Fun, sweet, up-for-it Ashley. Good for a beach party or a summer fling. Good for a tourguide job, a quick lay, a limbo contest. Good at mixing cocktails, good at poker.
Bad at life.
Roman sat down on the front step.
“Were you ever young?” she asked. “Did you ever do crazy things, stupid things? Or were you just born like you are?”
He reached up behind him to toy with the brass doorknob. “I was young.”
“But never wild, I bet. You never took shrooms and then drank half a bottle of Southern Comfort while you waited for them to work, then got hit with it all at once, waaaay too high, and ended up puking up a Shamrock Shake and little bits of dried mushroom all over somebody’s bathroom floor.”
“No.”
“How come?”
“I had other things on my mind.”
She tried to imagine what those things might have been, but she drew a blank, and that made her even angrier. It made her blood pound in her temples that he’d never been wild. That he hadn’t had a childhood, a troubled adolescence, and that nothing seemed to trouble him at all.
He was a cipher. She wanted to crack his code. Trouble the hell out of him.
She wanted to run her hands all over his perfect torso and lick his neck and bite his ear and pinch him hard until she found somewhere soft to kiss. Touch him everywhere, all over, even where he didn’t think she should. Especially there. Stroke his flanks, stroke his cock and be good at it—be so much better at it than he gave her credit for, so that his mouth fell open and his jaw went soft, he panted, he groaned, he came against her stomach.
She wanted to get away from herself.