Ignited (Roman Holiday 5)

They finally had to stop when a man came down the steps and they needed to move out of the way. Standing opposite him, pressed up against the metal railing, Ashley covered her lips with her loose fist and shook her head slightly.

What? he mouthed, because she didn’t look sorry. Pink had climbed up the sides of her neck. The sun sinking behind the hillside lit the ends of her hair and made her eyes too clear and perfect a blue for him to look at.

Priest, she mouthed back, pointing with one finger. Then he saw the top of the collar above the man’s short-sleeved shirt and rolled his eyes, because there would be a priest. If Roman made out with Ashley in a ghost town—if he felt good and right and alive for the first time in as long as he could remember—it was inevitable that they would be interrupted by the only priest for miles around.

Sinner, he mouthed, but she didn’t understand him, and that was probably just as well. He didn’t want to remind her that he still technically had a girlfriend. He didn’t want to remind himself, either. He wanted to take her hand and lead her back down the steps, to town. Back out the main drag to the road, over its accordion surface.

So he did that.

He wanted to stop with her and admire the penises spray-painted on the asphalt, count them, find the largest and the smallest, indulge her silliness as the light began to fade, until she realized they’d better get back because if he sprained his ankle on the broken road, she’d have to leave him for the wolves.

Roman didn’t usually do what he wanted. But tonight, he did.

The world kept spinning.

He’d told Ashley who he was, where he’d come from, and she hadn’t taken back her hand. She’d let him kiss her, had clung to his neck and scraped blunt fingernails through the hair at his nape.

At the campground, while she visited the bathroom, he walked to the camp store and bought marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate. He’d banked the coals in the pit earlier and asked Michael to keep an eye on them. It didn’t take long for him to get the fire going again.

She didn’t eat marshmallows, it turned out—they had gelatin, or, as she put it, “ground-up horse hooves”—but she set graham cracker halves out on the flat rocks surrounding the campfire and let the chocolate get soft on top, and she criticized his marshmallow-toasting technique.

They ate s’mores and potato chips under a carpet of stars.

He wasn’t afraid.

He knew that tomorrow everything would become complicated again, but he kept reminding himself it wasn’t tomorrow yet, and this wasn’t complicated. It was a fire he’d built with his own hands, terrible food, Ashley’s warm thigh pressing against his, a kiss that tasted of graham crackers and salt licked from the corner of her mouth.

When it got late, then later, he kissed her again, and she leaned into him hard enough to knock him off the log he was sitting on and then came down with him, throwing her leg over his hip. He captured her knee and stopped her from taking it any further.

“I have to call Carmen.”

The firelight died in her eyes.

“Shit, no,” he said quickly. “That’s not what I meant. I have to call her and tell her we’re over. Before … you know.”

He bumped his hips up slightly. She closed her eyes and crushed his shirt in her fists. “Oh.”

“Was that a good oh, or was that Oh, I see?”

“Little of both.”

“Good.” He touched her neck where it was most flushed, hot under his fingers. “I don’t want to be that guy,” he said solemnly. “Any more than I already am.”

“I get it.” She dismounted and sat on her heels next to his legs. Roman rose, and right away, he wanted to kiss her again. She had the kind of mouth that a man could get lost in for hours. Wide, agile, open. She did things with her tongue and her teeth that he’d never thought of before. Things that made him curious how many tricks she knew that she could teach him.

“Maybe I better go to bed,” she said, dodging his hand as he reached for her. “Unless you meant to call her right now?”

“It’s late.” He looked at his watch. “It’s two.”

“Way too late.”

“Sorry.”

She smiled. “No. It’s probably better not to, you know. Think with our little brains. In the long run. This way, we can take some time to kind of … get our heads around today.”

“Right. Are we still here tomorrow, or—”

“No, I think we’d better keep moving. We’ll hit the road in the morning. Head for Ohio.”