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He pronounced the word a little differently each time, as though he couldn’t quite figure out how to make it sit in his mouth properly. For those few sentences, his voice perfectly matched his appearance—cultured and beautiful in his now-slightly-rumpled gray suit and the white dress shirt with a thick-and-thin red stripe he wore underneath.
“A little backpacking won’t hurt you. Neither will some camping.”
“I don’t camp,” he said flatly.
“You do now. What did you think, we were going to stay at hotels? That defeats the whole point of having the trailer.”
“I thought the point of the trailer was to be a boil on my ass.”
“Well, that, too. But mostly it’s to sleep in.”
“Not happening.”
“Oh, relax. I’m not talking about tonight anyway. The Airstream’s too much of a mess until I get it cleaned up. We can stay at Prachi and Arvind’s tonight.”
Roman’s jaw tightened, and he didn’t answer.
Half a mile passed. Ashley thought about the phrase boil on my ass and smiled.
Sometimes he could be such a curmudgeon.
He’d put a tie on this morning, God bless him—the Roman equivale
nt of suiting up for battle. It was dark red, and she alternated between wanting to choke him with it and wanting to test the texture of his platinum tie clasp with her fingertip. To loosen the perfect half-Windsor at his throat, unbutton his shirt at the collar, run her hand down his pec to find out how much chest hair he had and discover the texture of it.
Roman slid loose fists around the steering wheel in an unconscious caress, and she wondered if he knew he did that. Stroked his car when he was unhappy, or thinking hard. He had such a thing for his car. She could easily imagine him prone across the backseat, suit pants unzipped, shirttails flapping, jerking off to the new-car smell of it, the supple leather and the unmarked carpet.
All this perfection, his. Unmarred, utterly possessed.
She thought of the therapist she’d been forced to visit before her father sent her to live with her grandmother. A beige office and a man with a bland face who’d refused to engage with her anger, and who’d encouraged her to think about control—who had power over Ashley, why she wanted it back, how her behavior was designed to make that happen.
She’d stomped out of that office in a rage and refused to go back, but she’d never forgotten the therapist’s viewpoint.
Who had taken all the control away from Roman when he was younger, to make him so covetous of it now? And why did she keep falling into the habit of flaunting her control over him when she knew how much he disliked being jerked by his puppet strings?
Good questions, but she couldn’t bring herself to dwell on them long enough to come up with answers.
“Hinesville is only about a twenty-minute detour,” she said. She meant it as an apology. “We’re near the military base, and there’s a great army surplus store in town. There’s three, actually, but the one I like best is all old and random, like a flea market. You never know what you’re going to find there.”
They passed another sign. Half a mile to the exit.
“I want to know where we’re going,” Roman said.
“I just told you. Hinesville.”
He looked over at her, no hint of humor in his expression, and she realized she’d done it again. Baited him just to get a better look at his face. Just to hear him speak and maybe, if she was lucky, to put some heat into his voice.
Since she’d resolved yesterday to take a different tack with Roman—to try to be kind, even though he continued to despise her—she gave him a little more of what he needed. “We’re going to North Carolina. A little town near Chapel Hill called Chatham Village. The plan is to get outfitted in Hinesville, grab some lunch, then drive straight through the rest of the way. We should be in Chatham by dinnertime. Okay?”
The exit came into view.
Roman didn’t answer, but he signaled the turn and steered them off the interstate, into the world beyond.
The army surplus store smelled like mothballs and treated canvas, motor oil and cartridge grease.
Though Roman didn’t know if cartridge grease existed anymore. Maybe it had gone out with the India Mutiny—sepoy soldiers, Hindus and Muslims, tearing their cartridges open with their teeth, then learning they’d been greased with pork fat.
When his high school history teacher told that story, Roman had wondered how such a small thing could set off a war, but now he got it. The sepoys had been colonized, undervalued. Simmering with a thousand unvoiced resentments.
