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“The offer isn’t limited to talking about what happened just now.”
I forced a smile. “Thanks. But I think I’m okay.”
Beck put his hands on his hips. “What do you want to do? You want to go back to the hotel?”
I shook my head. “Let’s go get drunk at some hole-in-the-wall local place.”
A smile spread across Beck’s face. “Now you’re talking…”
CHAPTER 12
Beck
“WE SHOULD PROBABLYset some ground rules before I get drunk.” Nora hiccupped and covered her mouth.
I arched a brow. “Before?”
She shrugged. “Whatever. Drunker? Is that a word? It sounds funny. Druuunkerrrrrrr. Drunk-her. Wait, if you drink more after you’re already drunk, are you drunk-him?”
I chuckled. Nora and I had found a local bar, though it wasn’t a hole-in-the-wall like she’d requested. Actually, there weren’t even any walls. About a mile down the road from where we’d stopped, there had been a painted wooden sign for a beach bar. I followed it down a bumpy dirt road until we arrived at a place that was little more than a metal awning covering a local guy with a dozen bottles of liquor. He had a bunch of old beach chairs set up on the sand and played music from what looked like a thirty-year-old boombox. It was perfect. I’d had one drink to Nora’s two, and since she was half the size of me, she was feeling no pain right about now.
“What rules did you want to set, Drunker?”
She hiccupped again and waved her pointer in my face. “No hanky panky. Sometimes when I get tipsy, I get horny.”
“I thought we’d already established that wasn’t my style. I didn’t take you up on your invitation the night we met because I thought you’d had too much to drink. And I didn’t know you were my grandmother’s partner in crime back then.”
Nora sucked her Bahama Mama through a straw. “It’s not you I’m worried about.”
“Are you saying you don’t think you can control yourself around me, Eleanor?”
She frowned. “Eleanor. How could he not remember a child named Eleanor?”
“It’s his loss, sweetheart.”
“Thank you for saying that.” She looked out to the ocean. “I don’t understand how something could feel like it was missing when I had so much love in my life from William.”
“I think it’s probably normal to be curious, to want to know who you came from.”
I didn’t say it, but I was curious to know where she’d come from too. For some fucked-up reason, I wanted to meet the stepfather she spoke so highly of. That wasn’t normal for me. Ever since my divorce, if I went out with a woman a few times and she mentionedmeeting her parents, I ran for the hills. Yet I was the one thinking it now.
Nora shook her head. “I didn’t tell him. William, I mean. He doesn’t know I joined 23andMe and found my father—I mean, my sperm donor. I wouldn’t want him to feel like he wasn’t enough. Because he was. He was such a good dad.”
“Then he doesn’t have to know. But it sounds like he’s the type of person who would understand, anyway.”
She sighed. “Do you get to spend a lot of time with your daughter?”
“Her mother and I split custody. So Maddie stays with me three nights one week and four the next.”
“Wow. So you do baths and dinner and all that domestic stuff?”
“I have a sitter who picks her up from school in the afternoon, and she also handles dinner prep most weeknights. But I cook when I have Maddie on the weekends.”
Nora smiled. “Tell me about her. Does she take dance classes and wear a tutu? Have her father’s attitude?”
“Maddie marches to the beat of her own drum. She’s not into dance as much as earning Girl Scout badges.”
“Oh, she’s a Girl Scout?”
