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“I have a surprise.”
They stepped onto the elevator and she pushed the third-floor button. The elevator was quiet, and when the door slid open to the open-air hallway, the resort feeling of the hotel came through, and Leon’s excitement for the adventure grew.
“This place is cool,” he said.
“Wait till you see the room. It’s a flashback for sure.”
She was right. The first surprise was the living room. She’d gotten a suite, not just a hotel room. Real rattan furniture with tropical-patterned bark-cloth-covered cushions filled the space. Everything, even the artwork and the pottery, was from a different era.
“I love this place. It’s old Hollywood,” he said, looking around. Then he noticed the second door. “Did you get a two-bedroom suite?”
“I did,” she answered, a slowly widening grin on her face. “See what I mean? Illegal.”
They were standing side by side, taking in the place.
“Definitely illegal,” he whispered, bending over to kiss her. She yielded to him, feeling his soft lips and a touch of picky beard. “I might not want to leave.”
“We can stay as long as the bottles hold out.”
“I’ll go out and buy more formula if I have to.”
Violet let out a screech, interrupting their kiss; it was lunchtime.
“Ha! We know who is running the show,” Ava said. “I’ll feed her if you want to unpack her bottles.”
“They’re on ice packs,” he said. “I’ll heat one up, and we can sit on the balcony while she eats.”
“I’ll order lunch,” she said, getting out her phone. “What do you want?”
Being together was easy and natural, as usual. While waiting for lunch to be delivered, they sat on the balcony and watched the tide go out.
“This is a perfect beach day,” Leon said. “Thank you for doing the room. It was generous of you.”
“I wanted to be alone with you, away from prying eyes. No one knows we’re here. It feels so clandestine.”
“This kid is out cold. I’m going to put her down,” he said.
They placed her in the middle of the bed on her blanket and surrounded her with pillows. Lunch arrived, and they ate it outside, laughing, the sound of the seagulls and the surf giving their location away.
“Tell me about you,” Leon said. “Where’d you go to high school and college? What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I think I’m where I’m going to be,” she said, laughing. “I wanted to be a wife and a mother. I never had big career aspirations. I went to college though, because not going wasn’t a choice my parents gave me. I went and graduated and got a job in an office like all the other journalism students did, making close to minimum wage and being bored to tears. But I met my husband there.
“Alex was a great guy. He was probably looking for a babysitter for his kids, but I didn’t care. Eventually, he did love me. The ex-wife wasn’t a horrible person; she just didn’t have the resources he did after their divorce. That’s how the children ended up with him. In the four years we were married, she didn’t go out of her way to see the girls that often.
“So when he was killed, it really was stunning and unexpected that she went to court to get them back. I didn’t have any legal rights to them. And they loved her and wanted to be with her, which really hurt. So that’s how I got to this point in my life. Almost forty, alone and no kids.”
She looked at him intently. “How depressing. Sorry.”
“I want to know,” he said. “I care. It sucks that she took the kids away from you.”
“It’s really fine. I wouldn’t have looked for a nanny job if I still had the girls, so Violet wouldn’t be in my life. That worked out well, I think.”
“I’m pretty lucky, then. You made it really easy for me to transition from an immature kid living at home with mommy and daddy to a father. Thank you.”
They tapped coffee cups and took a sip.
“I guess this means we’re seeing each other?” she asked. “I feel like I need to address that.”
