The Promise of Paradise

Chapter Fourteen


“Lucas, it’s perfect.” Ash wrapped her arms around Jen’s younger brother. “Thank you so, so much for coming up and helping out.”

“Aw, didn’t do much,” he said gruffly. The six-foot-seven giant turned three shades of red as Ash released him.

“Yeah, you did.” The porch still smelled of fresh paint, and all the loose boards had been fixed, along with the leaking toilet and the stuck window in Ash’s bedroom, which he definitely hadn’t had to do.

Lucas ran one hand over a head full of curly dark hair. “It’s a nice apartment.” He leaned against the railing and stared at the street. Always solemn, he seemed quieter than ever today. Broken hearts tended to do that, Ash supposed.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Hey, you’re gonna stay for the party, right?” She was almost positive Eddie had some single friends she could steer in Lucas’s direction.

“Naw, I gotta get back.” He pulled a baseball cap from his back pocket and stuck it on lopsidedly. “Mom an’ Dad are havin’ a barbeque later. Told ‘em I’d try to make it.” He grinned. “It’s always hit and miss with Dad and the grill. I’d rather see him keep his eyebrows tonight.”

She laughed. Such a good guy. She still couldn’t believe his girlfriend had cheated on him. In another life, Ash might have considered letting Jen set her up with Lucas, the way she’d been trying to since about the second week the two of them had lived together. Ridiculously tall, seriously built, and sweet down to the core – what woman in her right mind would cheat on someone like that?

Ash straightened the tables in both corners of the porch roof as Lucas planted a kiss goodbye on the top of her head. Guess you never really knew the thoughts in people’s heads. Secrets hid, lies grew, and sometimes the very people you thought you knew best were the ones burying their knives in your back. Or their hearts in someone else’s.

She shook away the thought. Not tonight. No sadness, and no regret. She glanced into the street below. A few cars already lined the curb in front of the house, and the sun hadn’t even begun to set. Apparently, thanks to Eddie, half of Paradise had been invited to their housewarming party.

A few minutes later, he poked his head through the window, looking out from the kitchen. “Ash? Everything good out here?”

“I think so.” She and Jen had spent most of the afternoon decorating. Now red, white, and blue lights twisted themselves around the porch railing. Flags perched in buckets of ice, while picnic benches and tables bowed under piles of food and soft drinks.

“Jen’s brother’s not staying?”

She shook her head.

Eddie rested both arms on the sill. “Seems like a nice guy.”

“He is.”

“You and he ever…” He didn’t finish the question, but she read the look on his face.

“Me and Lucas? God, no. He’s like – I mean, he’s Jen’s little brother.”

“So?”

“So nothing.” She propped one hand on a hip. “Are you jealous?”

“Nope. Just curious.”

She grabbed a handful of ice from the nearest cooler and tossed it in his direction. “Whatever.”

“I’m gonna run out and get the beer,” he said. He picked up a few slivers of ice, already melting, and palmed them. “Like it wet, huh?”

Ash turned away before the blush spread across her face. “You wish.” She wrestled with the cooler, trying to drag it to the other end of the porch, and ended up dumping half the ice onto her feet.

Behind her, Eddie laughed as he retreated from the window. “As I was saying.”

“Shut up,” she said, but she started to laugh herself.

Jen looked over from the far corner of the porch, where she was arranging napkins and silverware. “So when are the two of you going to stop playing this game?”

Ash gave up on the cooler and left it where it was. “What game?”

“Please. That guy has been up here five times today. He’s called you twice. Why don’t you just sleep with him and get it over with?” Jen dropped the last stack of napkins into place.

“God, Jen, everything does not always have to be about sex.”

Jen smirked. “Okay, fine. Don’t sleep with him. But why don’t you at least go out with him? See a movie or something. Spend a little time playing doctor after work. He’s seriously gorgeous. And single, right? What the hell are you waiting for?”

Ash tried not to smile, tried not to reveal that she’d let some of the same thoughts drift across her mind the last few weeks. “It’s not like that with me and Eddie. We’re just friends. Housemates. He’s not really my type, anyway,” she lied.

“Right.” Jen’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Good looking, good job, monster biceps, funny—not your type at all.”

“Anyway, I think he’s involved with someone,” Ash added.

“Who?”

“I don’t know. But he’s always got a girl down there.” Except when he’s up here with me, watching a ball game or having a beer or…Ash shook her head. Eddie West was Paradise’s playboy. Didn’t matter that he happened to be her housemate as well. He loved women, in any variety and any package, and the more the better, from what she’d observed. Just about everyone in town seemed to know it, and she’d be better off remembering that.

“Come on,” she said, ignoring Jen’s gaze. “Let’s start making the appetizers.”

* * *

By nine o’clock, nearly everyone had arrived, and most of the guests had moved out onto the roof. The party was in full swing, with classic rock pouring out of the speakers and laughter carrying up to the treetops. Ash looked around at the smiling faces: some regulars from the restaurant, a few of Eddie’s high school friends, and a couple of neighbors from around the corner.

Someone bumped her from behind, a burly man with a huge red beard. “Oops! Sorry, sweetheart. Great party, by the way.”

“Thanks.” Ash smiled at the crowd, so different from the people she’d grown up with, the snobby elite who threw cocktail parties and talked politics inside their gated communities. The conversations around her buzzed with baseball predictions and comments on the weather, news about the latest divorce and the shopping center scheduled to break ground next month. People cursed and laughed and wound their arms around each other; they tossed back shots of tequila and played cards in the corner.

It startled Ash to realize how comfortable she felt here after only a few weeks. How real people seemed when you peeled away layers of presumption, when you paid attention to each other for the things you cared about and not the things you had.

She pushed her way through the bodies clustered around the stereo and found a space near the porch railing. She knew only a fraction of the guests by name, but she didn’t really mind. She’d catch up with Eddie in a minute or two, see if they needed to make another run to the store for anything. But at the moment, she wanted a few minutes to breathe. July had snuck up on her when she wasn’t looking, and she knew that after the fireworks vanished, August would steal along in its place. Then September would round the corner, hand-in-hand with a life she wasn’t sure she wanted to meet.

“Ashton, please call home,” her mother had said on her voicemail last night. “We haven’t heard from you in weeks. Is everything okay? Please…”

She’d erased the message before her mother finished talking. What was she supposed to say? How could she begin to explain her decision? Funny how it became easier every day to pretend she belonged in Paradise, to pretend she came from a normal family and had no secrets to hide.

Ash turned up the stereo volume another notch and dug a cold beer from the bottom of the cooler. She stared across the street to the shadowed park that backed up to Helen’s house. It was quiet for a Saturday. Usually she and Eddie spied a few kids there on the weekends, sneaking joints, making out, talking loudly in that adolescent voice that cracked and wavered and flirted and bullied. She laughed at them, wondered about them. Sometimes she even envied them a little.

Everything is so exciting when you’re sixteen, so fresh and painful. Your skin aches with wanting, and every sunrise, every phone call, every heartbreak, cuts you a little deeper. As a grown-up, she’d almost forgotten how a mere breath of wind at the right moment could bring tears to her eyes.

Tonight, though, the swings hung unnaturally still, and only a stray cat wound its way through the legs of a picnic table before it disappeared behind Helen’s house. Ash wondered how many first kisses that park had seen, and how many goodbyes.

Someone leaned against the railing next to her. “Hi, stranger.” Eddie’s teeth were a wide white slash in the darkness. He glanced across the street. “Whatcha you looking at?”

“Nothing, really. Just the night, I guess.” His scars seemed less noticeable in the moonlight. Still, she wanted to know his secrets, even as she tried to ignore her own.

He finished his beer in a long, smooth gulp. “It’s a great one, isn’t it? Terrific party. Everyone’s having fun.”

“Good.” Ash leaned over the railing again, chin propped on one hand. The humidity had finally broken, and now the temperature hovered at a perfect seventy-five degrees. On the breezes that passed through every few minutes, the perfume of Helen’s gardenias floated up to them. She took a long breath and drank it all in, wishing she could bottle the night and make it last.

The song on the stereo changed, and Eddie nudged her. “Wanna dance?”

“Here?”

“Why not here?”

Ash hesitated. She didn’t need to take center stage with Paradise’s favorite son and have someone in the crowd start to wonder why her face looked familiar. Plus, she wasn’t sure she trusted herself to put one hand in Eddie’s and pretend it didn’t take her breath away.

“Ash?” The edge of a tattoo peeked out of a shirtsleeve, and she studied the familiar lines that crossed Eddie’s face. She’d memorized them by now, the hairline ones, the thicker one, the patterns they made across his cheeks.

“Okay.”

Eddie took her hand. Their fingers met and twisted together, as if they’d done so a hundred times before. She stumbled a little and then found her rhythm, following him as they shuffled in a slow, tight circle. He spun her under his arm, and strong fingers moved across the small of her back. They guided her away and then back to him. They pressed into her palm, burning her skin a little.

The music bled into her veins as they danced around the roof, and for a few minutes, Ashton Kirk forgot everything. She forgot her father’s arrest, her mother’s plaintive messages, her sister’s harsh words. She forgot all her sad feelings, her confusion about Colin. It was just she and Eddie and some silly song. Nothing else mattered, except being in Paradise with someone who wouldn’t judge her or expect anything from her. In that instant, she wanted to stay twenty-six, laughing and dancing on rooftops, forever.

The song ended too soon, and they drifted to an awkward stop. Eddie looked down, and Ash glanced away, suddenly self-conscious of her hand in his, of their shoulders brushing in the shadows.

“I should check on the food,” she said after a minute.

“Okay.” But he didn’t drop her hand. “Thanks for the dance.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” It was all she could manage. Ash slipped back inside to find a corner in which to calm her heart and splash some water on her burning cheeks.

* * *

“Hey, check this out.” The voice came from the living room, and when Ash peeked inside, she saw a small knot of people gathered around her television set. The news banner scrolling across the bottom of the screen read, “Kirk Charges Dropped. Two Men Charged in Political Framing of Massachusetts Senator.”

Ash dropped the trashcan she held, and beer bottles spilled everywhere. A few people turned toward her, startled, but she didn’t care. Pushing through the crowd, she reached for the remote and turned up the volume.

“In a stunning turn of events,” the news anchor reported, “all charges originally filed against Senator Randolph Kirk have been dropped. Earlier today, two men came forward and confessed to being hired by a prominent member of the Republican Party to plant cocaine in the senator’s vehicle. They also…”

Voices rose, clamoring at the revelation, and Ash lost the rest of the anchor’s sentence. By the time she wormed her way close enough to hear, the news had switched over to a segment about a local dog trainer.

“Would never have guessed…

“Told you he was innocent…

“Betcha it turns out to be one of those religious fanatics from…”

Fragments of conversation rose and fell around her, but Ash couldn’t make out any of them. In fact, she couldn’t follow a single thought beyond the ones racing inside her own head. Her stomach felt as though it might erupt. She reached blindly for a place to sit.

Innocent.

After all this time, her father was innocent. All those weeks, he’d insisted that someone had set him up. He was right. And no one believed him. His own family didn’t believe him. Ash shook her head. Unshed tears burned in her eyes. Is that why Colin had called last night? Did he already know? She blew out a long breath. Everything had suddenly become more complicated.

“Hey, you okay?” Jen said close to her ear.

Ash jumped, startled. “Did you see it?” One hand waved toward the television screen. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Did you hear what they said? My father’s innocent. Someone set him up.”

Her friend stared at her for a long minute. “Yeah, I heard. Now what are you going to do?”