Chapter 19 Sam
SAM
But of course, I don’t want to let go of Ash.
And I didn’t all night. We got to spoon through it all and that’s how I wake up, with him tucked right in my arms the way I’ve come to like, the heat be damned.
And when I kiss him—morning breath and awful dry lips also be damned—he’s responsive, ardent, arms around my neck like we aren’t both gross as hell.
Or at least I am. Him? He’s perfect.
And I don’t even have to give him up. Not yet. He’s gonna stay with me. I almost want to pinch myself and make sure I didn’t dream all that shit up, invent it in my head to cope with the fact that we might be over today. I didn’t, right? That conversation last night was real.
I don’t quite wanna get up but soon he’s nudging—actually, I don’t think he’s hungover at all—and cajoling me to get my ass out of bed. “C’mon,” he says. “We’ve gotta get ready. Check out’s in an hour.”
I fling an arm over my eyes before the room starts spinning. “Five more minutes?”
“You said that ten minutes ago.” He takes my arm away and I squint up at him. “We can shower together. Save time.”
“Save time, huh. That’s the reason?”
He smiles. He’s positively radiant this morning and the extra color looks good on his freckled cheeks. Even all messy and disheveled he’s so fuckin’ pretty, like the laws of reality simply don’t apply to him. He could be covered in mud and garbage and still be a ten. “One of them.”
“Whose idea was it to party last night, anyway?” I sit up, mopping my hair out of my face. “Shit. I still need to kill Brett for putting his little dick on you.”
“Kill him later. Come on.”
I catch Ash’s hand before he can slide off the bed. “Excited?” I ask him. “Miami today. Finally.”
“Oh, yeah. Mostly because I’ll be getting the official Sam tour.”
My heart feels like it’s going to burst from my chest and take flight. He meant all that last night. Fuck yes. “Damn right.”
He stands up. “I’m getting in the shower. If you don’t join me in the next five minutes, I’m gonna come drag you in.”
“I’ll be there. I just need a minute to wake up. Oh, maybe I could order some room service?” Some greasy bacon and potatoes is definitely what the doctor ordered for this gnarly hangover.
“They serve breakfast til ten-thirty,” he points out. “We can just grab that on our way out.”
“Alright, fine.”
He disappears into the bathroom and the shower kicks on.
After a moment I disentangle myself from the bedclothes and drag myself out of bed, head fuzzy and throbbing and my mouth tasting like landfill.
God, I don’t know why I got so fucked up last night knowing I still had a decent chunk of driving left.
I fumble through my bag for some painkillers, but I can’t find any, not even in the dumb little first aid kit.
No aspirin or anything. My head is positively pounding by the time I’m done ripping through it all and now I think I might actually throw up.
Keep it together, Rivero. Not your first hangover.
No, but this one’s pretty damn bad. The weed and alcohol was not a wise combination, I guess. Is twenty-five too old to keep fucking around? Don’t guys keep partying into their thirties? I’m not sure when the cutoff is.
I spy Ash’s bag is sitting on one of the chairs. “Hey, Ash,” I call, “do you have any aspirin or something?”
No answer. He can’t hear me over the sound of the shower, I guess.
But, whatever, I figure he won’t mind if I go through it really quick for a painkiller.
My head is threatening to annihilate me and I’m not sure I can endure the heat of a shower without puking.
Pretty sure he won’t appreciate that very much.
Would be a great way to inaugurate us being kinda-sorta-live-in-boyfriends, throwing up on his feet.
Without a second thought I wobble over and unzip the bag, reaching inside. But it’s so crammed to the brim with stuff that I quickly give up trying sort through it and instead turn it over and dump its contents onto the floor.
And out spills money.
A fucking lot of it.
Thousands—actual, literal thousands, the vast majority of it banded together, like how a bank would.
I know from doing bank runs for my dad sometimes.
Each band reads “$1,000.” So many fucking bundles, more than I can count in my mounting panic.
One band’s been broken and it lies there on the hotel carpet like a shed carapace. That money must be in Ash’s wallet.
And mine. The money he’s been giving me to spend.
“What the fuck?” I say.
This is way more fucking money than any weed dealer would have. He would have to be a whole entire drug lord. Jesus fucking Christ, this can’t be real. He can’t be—can he?
The bullet wound. The caginess. The running.
I sit back on my heels and drag a hand down my face. This cannot be happening. No. He can’t secretly be—something super awful. A big time criminal. Can he?
Why the fuck does he have thousands of fucking dollars in cash? Why was he shot?
Why wouldn’t he tell me anything?
Utterly sick, I sort through the rest of his stuff.
Clothes, which I toss aside in a pile. A stack of postcards held together with a rubber band, a few having come loose when I dumped it out.
His wallet, which contains cash, some condoms, and a state ID from Rhode Island that confirms what I already know: Ashton Harper, born 1974.
He isn’t smiling in his picture. He looks hard, blonde hair lank and stringy.
He didn’t lie about that, at least. His age, or where he’s from.
“Sam?”
My head snaps up. Ash is standing there, soaking wet, hair clinging to his face and water running rivulets down his body. The bathroom door is open, steam billowing out. The shower is still running. The fan’s whirring.
He stares at the mess on the floor. By the time his gaze finally drags up to mine, his face has shuttered completely. There’s no emotion there, nothing behind his blue eyes at all. He folds his arms over himself, clutching his upper arms.
“Why?” he asks. His voice is as neutral as the rest of him. Careful.
And I’m—I don’t know. I’m freaking out. I think I might cry or vomit or scream. Or all three. “Why do you have all this fucking money?” I say, and I don’t sound neutral at all. My voice is tinged with something close to hysteria. “Why the fuck do you—”
“I want my clothes.”
Wordlessly I thrust the pile at him and he takes it.
Turns away from me to pull on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt (a wound I will evaluate later, poke at like a bruise) before he faces me again.
Part of me expects him to launch himself at all the cash lying on the floor, but he doesn’t.
He’s watching me like he’s waiting for something.
“This isn’t weed money,” I say. “I’m not stupid. Don’t treat me like I am.”
“I know you aren’t, Sam.”
He’s shutting down on me, I know, and it’s making me more desperate, feel even more crazy.
I stand up. “Just tell me the truth for once. No more lies. No more—doing that thing you do. Deflecting. Just tell me. The money, the bullet wound, why you’re running.
All of it. I need to know now. I can’t pretend I didn’t see this, Ash. ”
He turns his head again. “The shower—”
“Fuck the shower!” I explode. “Talk. To. Me.”
He goes still like a prey animal and now I’m the asshole.
I’m the bad guy. I’m the person he’s just fucking lied to this entire time and shit, I’ve fallen for both him and whatever story it is that he sold me.
My heart’s fracturing in real time. I clap my hands over my face and fight the urge to scream.
I hear him pad back into the bathroom and the shower shuts off. The bathroom door clicks shut. Now it’s silent, except for the hum of the air conditioner and the muted roar of waves from down below.
“Please tell me the truth,” I whisper into the darkness of my hands.
“Okay,” Ash says, and I lift my head to look at him. He’s hugging himself again, gaze averted. His shirt collar’s already dark and damp from his hair. “But you’re going to hate me. Just like I said you would.”
“Try me.”
“I stole it.”
Stole thousands and thousands of dollars. I don’t even know how to react. “How much did you steal, exactly?”
“Twenty thousand dollars.”
Oh holy shit. He could buy half a fucking condo in Miami Beach for that. And here I am offering him a place to stay? “You stole twenty thousand dollars,” I repeat, hoping he will correct me, tell me I heard entirely wrong. He doesn’t. “From…where?”
“I—Sam, it’s—”
“Don’t,” I say. There’s an edge of tears in my voice, audible, and I don’t even care. Let him think I’m a bitch. “Don’t lie. Just say it.”
He meets my gaze again, unflinching this time, and those normally warm, beautiful eyes of his have gone totally icy. “I’m a hustler,” he tells me. “I fuck men for money. I’ve been doing it since I was seventeen.”
It’s like I’m standing on multiple rugs and someone keeps pulling them out from under me, one by one. I just keep toppling over like I’m in a shitty episode of The Three Stooges. It’s that sensation of falling, gut somersaulting in the air. “You’re a whore?” I say in disbelief.
And the moment the epithet leaves my mouth I regret it, because he flinches. His head jerks and his shoulders go up around his ears. I want to take it back but it’s too late. I’m watching the light in his eyes die by degrees until they go cold altogether.
“Yeah,” he says flatly. “I’m a whore. I’ve fucked hundreds of men. I don’t know, I’ve lost count.”
I don’t know what to say. I’m mostly thinking of how it makes sense.
All the things he’s said about his past experiences, how he doesn’t date but he hooks up, repeat offenders.
How he’s good at a lot of things. How he seems so awkward in the context of any kind of relationship at all.
Fucking hell, I feel like the most obtuse dipshit on the planet. “Ash...”