I groaned and rolled my eyes.
"Why do you need two beds, anyway? If you and Lisa are pretending to be engaged, wouldn't it make more sense to share a bed? Most couples cohabitate before marriage. It would probably make less sense if you didn't share a bed."
“It’s not that simple.”
“And also, I picked this room first. Rules are rules. You should have been faster.” He went back to organizing his clothes with the matter decided.
Shit. I was going to have to explain to Lisa why we were going to have to share a bed and not make it sound like I planned it this way.
I found her on the balcony sitting on the deck with CJ standing between her legs. He was pressing his face to the bars while pointing at the seagulls flying around the cliff.
Damn, this place was beautiful.
“Hey…”
“Wook!” CJ said while pointing through the bars. “Wook!”
“What is he saying?” I asked.
"He's saying ‘look.'" Lisa giggled.
I crouched down to his level. "What do you see, buddy?"
“Birts!” he squealed. “Birts!”
“I understood that one.” I chuckled and joined them on the floor of the deck.
“Hey, what’s up? Everything okay?” she asked.
I began and tousled my hair, “I kinda fucked up our sleeping arrangements.”
"What do you mean,kinda?”
I explained our current sleeping situation and how we got there.
“That was a rookie mistake.” She laughed when I told her about getting booted from the master bedroom.
"Let me talk to him," she said when I told her about RJ's rigid stance on the room switching. She pushed herself to her feet and dusted off her hands before kissing CJ on the head and walking inside.
“Lisa is about to learn the hard way that there’s no negotiating with Uncle RJ, isn’t she, buddy?”
Five minutes later, she poked her head onto the balcony. "Solved." She was grinning when I turned to look at her.
“What?” I spluttered. “He agreed to switch rooms?”
"No." She smiled. "You're going to sleep in the other twin, but you have to store all your stuff and shower in my and CJ's room, and he gets the first choice of the beds."
It wasn't ideal, but it was a workable solution, and I wanted to ask her how she managed to pull off this Herculean feat.
"I'm going to start unpacking, and you should go say thank you." She shot me a triumphant grin that pierced my heart and spread warmth to other places in my body before she turned to go inside.
We hada big family dinner at a restaurant called Brown Sugar, and everyone was exhausted by the time we got back to The Sterling. Aunt Patrice was staying in a one-bedroom apartment in the building next to ours. Adam and Kimberly were staying at Adam's place at the resort.
I showered in Lisa's room, played with CJ for a few minutes, then grabbed my laptop to get some work done. I wasn't planning on doing a lot of work while on vacation, but Smith was already pissed that I was leaving for two weeks, even though legally he couldn't stop me. I didn't want to give him an excuse to say that my performance was suffering. It wasn't. Because of Lisa, my work was better than it had been since before I got custody of CJ.
I was about a quarter of the way through the brief I was writing when my phone pinged.
Stringbean: Are you busy?
