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“The only way you can lose me is by leaving me.”
“You want…” She made a helpless gesture. “I thought you were with me because you felt sorry for me.”
“What? No. Sophia, I love you. I haven’t loved like this for years. I didn’t think I ever could again. I want to marry you and have a family with you. I want us to be forever. I don’t want us to be about this,” he said shaking the bag and throwing it on he back seat. “Damn Phil to Hell,” he muttered, and turned away.
She wanted to believe. She needed to. She reached out and cradled his cheek with her hand.
“It’s not about Phil anymore.” Half question, half affirmation.
“No.”
“Then yes, I want it to be permanent too. I want to be a family. Two, three… ten…”
Daniel began to laugh. “Fifty,” he said.
“I’m not sure I’d survive fifty,” she said, but she was grinning.
“Grandchildren. Great grandchildren. Everywhere we look, babies,” he said before he pulled her into his arms and kissed her.
There was a moment, just a split second, when the voice of her insecurity cleared its throat and said, “What is it he really wants?” Except it wasn’t her voice, not really. It was Phil’s. And Phil was dead and gone from her life. His voice needed to be silenced too.
He wants me, she thought. He loves me.
To which there was no reply, nor could there ever be to a truth so deep. It was love, not pity, or simple kindness. It was something they’d both earned. And it was something Sophia was determined to take joy in.
“Let’s go home,” she said. “We have work to do.” They’d have to make over the second, smaller bedroom as a nursery, she supposed. She hoped. It was time to break out the fan deck and choose colors again. Something warm and pretty. Yellow, perhaps. Good for a boy or a girl.
“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” she said as they drove along the lakefront towards home.
“The best,” Daniel agreed. “You feel up to painting when we get back?”
“Of course! Always.”
What she didn’t say, what he’d find out when they got there, was that before the painting, she had something else in mind. Something much more exciting.
She smiled and laid her hand on her still-flat belly.
THE END
The sun was just coming up as the last of the party-goers trailed off to their cabins on the Kallisto. Simon Katsaros, the Kallisto’s owner sprawled in his deck chair and watched the rising sun glint off the graceful Doric columns of the temple of Poseidon. The deep blue of the Aegean waters made him feel calmer, less likely to fly into bits after his confrontation with Marissa, his girlfriend.
Ex-girlfriend, he amended. He’d sent her off to the mainland with bandbox, birdcage, and parrot as his mother liked to say. Marissa had stood up in the launch, screaming at him in Italian the whole way. She nearly fell overboard at one point but that only made her scream more loudly.
“Philip, will you bring me another bottle of wine? I want to toast the sunrise.”
“Red or white, sir?” the steward asked.
“It doesn’t matter. And bring an extra for Poseidon.”
The steward nodded and went off in search of the wine and Simon slumped back into his chair and stared out at the water. Thank God it was quiet now on the Kallisto. The band had returned to the mainland around four that morning but the partying had gone on until Marissa’s hissy fit had brought it to a crashing halt by throwing a bowl of caviar all over the redhead — what was her name? Gretchen? — Simon had been kissing in the lifeboat. It wasn’t as if it meant anything, and he’d tried to explain that to Marissa. That’s when Gretchen got pissed off and locked herself in her cabin. What the hell was wrong with women anyway?
Philip returned with two bottles of wine. Simon carried them up to the helicopter pad where he waited for the chopper to return from dropping the band in Athens. He had a yen to see the temple again, though he’d been there many times. He loved and the temple there, and visited it on a regular basis. It was where he’d first kissed Marissa after an impromptu drive down the coast from Athens. He’d kissed her as the sun set, he remembered. Or was that some other girl? He’d taken a lot of them there and then to the hotel nearby. Women loved getting kissed at a temple. It made what followed seem like a religious experience. What Simon remembered most, though, were the brilliant streaks of color in the perfect blue sky.
The helicopter returned a little before seven and Simon got aboard and told the pilot he wanted to go to the temple.
“It won’t be open yet,” George said.
“It will for me.”
