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We both settled in after he shut off the light, but a minute later, I whispered, “It’s so quiet. This is what I imagine it would sound like on the moon.”
He chuckled and said, “I’ve never given a single thought as to what the moon must sound like.”
“Abnormally quiet, I’m guessing. Like this. It’s freakish. I think I can hear the blood flowing through my veins.”
“I can help. There’s something I use when I can’t fall sleep.”
He pulled a small remote from the nightstand’s drawer, and when he pushed a button the room was filled with the sound of a rushing river. “That’s just going to make me want to pee,” I said.
He pushed the button again, and the water was replaced with the sound of a crackling campfire. I muttered, “Oh, great. Now I can fall asleep and dream about being burned at the stake, like a witch.”
“Let’s try the next one.”
The next sound was a bunch of crickets, and I exclaimed, “Gross! It sounds like a bug infestation.”
Aleksei chuckled and said, “I had no idea you were so high-maintenance.”
“Me? No. I’m extremely easy-going.”
“Clearly.”
“I am! These sound effects are just wackadoodle.”
“There are other channels. Apparently nature sounds aren’t the way to go.”
The sound of a heartbeat started to play, which made me ask, “Did you turn it to the Edgar Allan Poe channel?”
“Oops, I think that one’s meant for babies.”
“That’s so mean! Why would you do that to a baby?”
“It’s meant to simulate being in the womb.”
“So the poor kid can sit around dreading the moment when it’s squeezed through a fleshy tube again? That’s messed up.”
The room went silent again. “Your mind is a very strange place. I had no idea.” He returned the remote to the drawer and said, “Come here.” When I curled up in his arms, he asked, “How about a bedtime story instead?”
“Yes, please.”
“I don’t actually know any by heart, but I’ll improvise.”
He then proceeded to tell me a story, half in Russian and half in English, about emerging markets in South America. I was grinning as I drifted off to sleep.
10
Aleksei
Over the next month, Timothy and I established a regular pattern. We got together on his night off and spent every Sunday together. The other five days a week, I came to the restaurant for dinner. That meant I saw him every day, and it was always something I looked forward to.
I’d originally assumed I’d end our arrangement after about a month, but that absolutely didn’t happen. Why would I end something that made me happier than I’d ever been? Instead, I asked him if we could leave it open-ended, and he agreed. He had plans to make some major life changes when he turned thirty in December, including traveling the world, so that would probably become a natural ending point.
Not that I wanted this to end…
But I tried not to think about that. It was only September. We had time, and I made every effort to live in the moment.
I also used this new-found happiness as motivation to make some life changes. Most of them were tiny, like buying patio furniture for my house, because Timothy liked to be outside. Others were huge—for me, anyway—like starting to allow my senior staff to work with a few of my larger clients.
I’d put off the latter for far too long. It was a control thing—I didn’t want to trust anyone but myself with these big investors. But my staff had proven themselves over the years, and I knew they could handle it.
Because of that, I was starting to free up some of my time. I’d gone from the fourteen-hour days I used to work to twelve, and to half-days on Saturdays. I still worked six days a week, but it was progress.
I was thinking about where else I could cut back when Maureen strolled into my office. She was dressed all in red, down to the frames of her glasses, and she took a seat across the desk from me and asked, “So, who’s the cute brunet?”
I tried to play dumb. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, please! The guy you look for every afternoon at four-thirty. It’s pretty obvious who it is, since there’s only one person smiling, waving, and blowing kisses at the building at that time of day.”
I’d confessed to Timothy that I usually kept an eye out for him when he was on his way to work, and ever since, he’d been making a point of waving to me before he went into the restaurant. Apparently my assistant had been watching too, from one of the other office windows.
“Just let it go, Maureen.”
“Okay, but he looks young. How badly are you robbing the cradle?”
“He’s thirty.” He was three months shy of that, but close enough.
“Oh. Well, good. If you’d told me he was twenty, I’d know your midlife crisis was careening wildly out of control.”
