“I liked visiting there,” she says with an almost wistful curve of her mouth. “It’s beautiful.”
I took her home with me in the summers. I have a house there on Shuswap Lake with a dock and beach access and we enjoyed long summer days on the water, in the water, beside the water. In the hot tub. In bed. What? Never mind that.
“Yeah,” I say. “I love it there.”
We finish up our meals and I pull out a credit card to pay, which Ayla tries to wave away but I won’t let her, which makes her give a little grumble of frustration. Which makes me grin. Then we head back to the cottage.
Fuck. I’m going to be spending the night in this cottage with her. There’s no reason for it to be weird and awkward. We were together for years. Except we’re not together any more and two strangers sharing a room is supposed to be weird. But we’re not strangers either. This is fucked up.
It wouldn’t be so awkward if I didn’t keep noticing little things about her: the sexy curve of her mouth when she smiles, the shape of her ass in the jeans she’s wearing, the drape of her sweater over her tits. Even the way she brushes her bangs off her eyes is sexy.
I’m not supposed to be attracted to my ex-wife.
I’m an asshole.
I can’t still be attracted to her. I can’t care about her like that. I couldn’t fix things for her and I let her down and I sure as hell don’t deserve love or anything from her.
I’ll just ignore the cute, hot things she does and pretend she’s my… sister.Eew.I can’t do that either.
I spy the fireplace and move over to turn it on. Flames spring to life.
Ayla is setting up her laptop on the small dining table. She glances over and sees the fire. “Oh, that’s nice. A fire is perfect.”
“Yeah.” I walk over to the table. “Anything I can help with?”
She opens her mouth and I know she’s going to say no, but after a beat, she says, “Maybe you could help pick out the music. I’ll need a few songs.”
I pull up the other chair next to her so I can see her screen. Unfortunately, that means I can smell her scent—the familiar one of rain. I don’t know what rain smells like, but the perfume is called “Rain something or other” and supposedly smells like “dew” and “amber” and “freesia”. I bought enough of it for her, and honest to fuck, just smelling it in the store gave me a stiffy.
I’m trying to will that away right now. Jesus.
“I have a bunch more photos to add,” she says, looking at the computer. “Everyone sent me pictures but there were a lot of photographs I had to scan. Look at these ones from when Nonna was a teenager. This was during the war.”
“Wow.” I study the old-fashioned images as Ayla clicks through them. I wouldn’t recognize hernonnaother than maybe the smile.
I watch Ayla add photos to the PowerPoint slide show: wedding photos from 1947, a young mother Nonna with babies. So many babies.
“She had seven children,” Ayla murmurs. “Amazing. And only four of them are still around. She outlived three children.”
And then we both go very still and quiet. I can feel Ayla’s pain at the memory that we, too, outlived our child.
As usual, it makes me angry. That should not have happened. It just shouldn’t have.
Unable to stop myself, I set my hand on her back and gently rub. Usually, whatever I try to say at times like this comes out wrong. So I say nothing.
The urge to pull her into my arms is overpowering. I was never able to offer much comfort with words, but I could always show her that I was there for her. That I cared for her. But I can’t do that anymore.
She takes a deep breath and lifts her head and resumes her work.
There are pictures of the family at the Jersey Shore. At drive-in movies. In front of what appears to be a castle.
“That’s the Gingerbread Castle, in Hamburg,” Ayla says, smiling. “It was a theme park, but it’s closed down now.”
More pictures show the kids in a miniature train, at a Wild West-style town, and at Palisades Amusement Park.
“It seems like they did a lot of adventuring,” I comment.
“Yes! And I love that.”
