AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Two hours is not that far,” Will said, thinking out loud.
I sat up, looking at him.
“You did say it was only for a few months, while she was on maternity leave?”
I thought about it. “We could see each other weekends, she said there was someone who could stand in for me for at least one day each week. But I thought you didn’t want me to leave the city?”
Will pulled me back into his arms.
“The thing is, you’re young and I don’t want you to feel like you’re missing out on things. I am serious about you, about our relationship and once you move in, it will be harder to do things like this.”
“It will also give Zoë time to adjust, get used to the idea that I am your girlfriend,” I said.
I liked the idea, although a part of me was nervous about going away. Will had reacted so vehemently earlier in the evening, it was hard to believe that the suggestion had come from him.
As if reading my thoughts, he said, “I have to tell you about the day I had.” He shook his head. “When I heard you wanted to leave, something snapped, and I thought I was losing you. But maybe leaving the job isn’t such a bad idea. I don’t want you working for me, after all, I want you to be working under me,” he said, in a low, husky voice. He slid over me, trapping me underneath his body. His face hovered above mine and I could not see his face clearly in the darkness. I felt his body moving along mine, his leg nudging my legs apart.
“I have no problem with that,” I whispered, my tongue darting out to meet his.
Chapter 26
Will
A few years after my father left us, we went to visit him down in Florida.
He was fatter, his hair was longer, and he was undeniably happier than he had been with us. This was not easy for us to see. Simone took it harder than I did, spending the week we were supposed to connect with our father, connecting with his next-door neighbor, who had a mobile food truck and didn’t mind Simone hanging out with him while he drove to town for work. Eventually he did try to stick his hand down her top and she slapped him and that was the end of those outings, but by then our week was up and we were headed home anyway.
I’d had a more productive time.
My father took me out fishing, by which he meant drinking on a boat. We threw out lines and he’d disappear to get beers and we’d sit all day in the sun, getting horribly sunburnt; at least I did.
He talked about all sorts of things, imparting his idea of wisdom and fatherly lessons and such. Maybe he felt like he needed to catch up on all the missing years when he’d been off drinking and cavorting with other women and thought to teach me all he could in a few days. Not that there was much to tell. It involved getting regular prostate exams and flossing my teeth.
There was also the bit about choosing whether I wanted to have a crazy or a boring wife. Because apparently, women came only in these two categories.
“There’s different kinds of crazy and there’s different kinds of boring,” he said. “Your mother, I’m afraid, she was the boring kind. All about the rules. Picking up the clothes, taking out the trash, no looking at other women, blah-blah-blah. Boring. Now the crazies can be a little on the fun side or they can be freakin’ lunatics. But you’re kept on your toes, you see?”
I didn’t really.
But as Nikki and I drove to New Haven a few days later, I wondered if my father had been right after all. A man couldn’t be wrong about everything. Stood to reason he got a few things right in his life?
Because I did seem to have a type, and it fell in the crazy department. Jade was proper crazy, perhaps even certifiably so, but Nikki was the cooky, slightly offbeat kind of crazy. I mean, who takes the word of a fortune teller at a school fair so seriously that she bases her studies and even her career on that? When I pointed out to Nikki that the fortune teller could have been making up all she said, she had conceded that it was a possibility.
More likely than possible, I thought.
I didn’t want to point out the statistical likelihood of her guessing correctly about the friend getting pregnant. Didn’t every year in high school produce a few pregnancies? And with some of these girls it was hardly a surprise, right?
I didn’t want to give her too hard a time about it. After all, I didn’t want to complain about the forces that brought us together, whatever they were. Even with her funny ideas, Nikki was the best thing that had ever happened to me. She brought so much joy to my life and was able to turn an ordinary evening out into a night of laughter and memories that would make me smile when I thought of it later. I already knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her but I had to be careful about how I shared this news with her. I also needed to sort out Jade’s part in our lives.
We met the owners of Mountain Dream Inn and found Allie and Jonas Jones to be a charming couple. Poor Allie was seven months pregnant, and it was immediately obvious why she needed to take off work.
The woman was huge. There was no other way to put it. She waddled instead of walked and every time she had to get out of a chair, she looked like she needed a forklift. Her brow was constantly beaded with sweat from the effort of pretending she could still function like a normal human being.
Jonas took us on a tour of the property and the grounds, and I could tell that Nikki was smitten with the place.
“This was our passion project,” Jonas said. “To come to the country and have a quieter life. I used to be an accountant in the city, a financial controller. It was hell. You barely finished one client’s file and the next one landed on your desk. If you finished one earlier than expected, it only meant you could start sooner on the next one.”
He shook his head. “Allie was a project manager at the firm I worked at. We met in the lift, fell in love, and started dreaming of getting out of the rat race. This is it.”
