32. Cali
CALI
The drive up to the lake takes almost three hours. Hayden asks about fish for at least two of them.
"But what kind of fish?" he demands to know for the fifth time, hanging over the back of the seat and very much up into my personal space.
"Sit down and put your seatbelt on," I tell him. "Ronan will look it up when we get there."
"Actually, I already did," Ronan says from the driver's seat.
He's driving himself this time. No Paolo, no black car with tinted windows.
We're in an old Land Rover that predates my existence on this earth, but something about it feels rustic and homey.
I like it. "Largemouth bass. Some perch. A few catfish, if you're patient."
Hayden's eyes go huge. "Can we catch one?"
"We can try."
"Can we eat it?"
"If you catch it, we can eat it."
Isabella, buckled into her booster seat with Doctor Fuzz's shoebox on her lap, pipes up. "Doctor Fuzz doesn't eat fish. He eats leaves. I'm going to show him the water, though."
"He'll like the water," Ronan says. "I'll help you hold him up so he can see."
I look out the window so nobody sees my face do the thing it's doing. I don't know how much longer I'll be able to hide it, though. Soon, the whole world will be able to see what I've known privately for a while now:
I'm falling hard for Ronan Akov.
The house isn't what I expected. I don't know what I expected, to be fair. Something like the penthouse, I guess, lots of pristine glass and cold edges and nobody living in it.
But this is a real, proper house. Old and wooden, with a wide porch and a stone chimney, book-ended by a huge, grassy yard and a dock that stretches out over the water. There's a rope swing hanging off a big tree by the shore, exactly like he said.
Hayden is out of the car before it fully stops. Isabella is hot on his heels, clutching her shoebox. I get out slower and just stand there and look at it.
"You okay?" Ronan asks, coming around the front of the car.
"It's beautiful," I gush. "It's really, really beautiful."
We spend the first day outside. The kids don't want to be indoors for a single second, and honestly, neither do I.
Hayden and Ronan take the little rowboat out and come back an hour later with two fish and Hayden's whole face lit up like a birthday cake.
Isabella carries Doctor Fuzz down to the shore and holds the shoebox up so the caterpillar can see, narrating the whole time about how brave he is.
Ronan cleans the fish on the dock with a knife like he's done it a thousand times before.
Shoot, maybe he has—I realize I don't know much about him or his past yet, and I'm more curious than ever.
But I sit and watch silently as he shows Hayden how to do it, patient, letting him make a gory mess of the second one.
We eat the fish that night, fried in a pan on the old stove. It's the best fish I've ever had, and I tell Ronan so.
"It's the best fish you've ever had because your son caught it," he says with a laugh.
I smile and pat Hayden proudly. "That doesn't hurt."
His phone vibrates on the counter. He glances at it, frowns, and then flips it facedown.
"Do you need to get that?" I ask.
"No."
But it vibrates again half an hour later. He excuses himself and steps out onto the porch. I can see him through the window, one hand on the railing, talking in a low stream. When he comes back in, he's smiling like nothing happened.
"Work?" I say.
"Always. It can wait." He picks up a dish towel and starts drying the pan. "This weekend, it can all wait."
I decide to believe him. It's easy to do that here. The city feels a thousand miles away, and the man drying dishes in our—I mean, in his—kitchen is a man I'm falling in love with. I don't want to spend this weekend looking for cracks in the fairy tale.
That night, I read to Isabella. She falls asleep before I even finish. Hayden isn't far behind her, worn out as he is from the boat and the sun. I carefully extricate myself from between the two beds in the guest room, where the kids insisted on sleeping together because it's an adventure.
But just before I can tiptoe out of the door, I hear Isabella's voice pipe up in the darkness.
"Mommy?"
"Yeah, baby?"
She's quiet for a second. "I like it here."
"Me, too."
"Can we live here?"
I laugh softly. "We live in the city, remember?"
"But we could live here sometimes."
I bite my lip as my heart swells. Could we? I don't know. All I know is that I want it as bad as she does.
"Maybe sometimes," I say at last.
She's asleep before I finish saying it.
The next day is the same, only better. We swim off the dock in the afternoon, the water cold and clean, and Ronan does a running dive off the end that makes Hayden shriek with delight and immediately try to copy.
He carries Isabella on his shoulders in the shallow part while she plants her hands over his eyes and steers him like a horse.
He crashes them into the water on purpose, both of them coming up laughing.
I sit on the dock with my feet in the water and watch, and I think about how, not so long ago, I was standing in front of a mirror in a Phoenix hotel room, taking inventory of everything wrong with me.
There are no mirrors up here. I don't need one. I know exactly what I look like right now, sunburnt and wet-haired and grinning like an idiot.
It doesn't scare me.
Ronan's phone rings again in the afternoon, and again in the evening.
Twice, he steps away to answer it, and twice, he comes back and folds himself back into the day as if it's the only thing in the world.
I do notice. I'd be lying if I said I didn't. But I've decided this is the one place where I let it go.
After all, he always comes back.
We grill on the porch that evening—burgers, because Hayden requested burgers and Ronan said he'd make whatever the boy wants—and eat outside as the sun goes down over the water.
After dinner, the kids are wiped again. Two days of sun and water will do that.
I run a bath in the deep old tub upstairs, wash the lake out of their hair, and get them into pajamas.
Ronan does the dishes downstairs. I can hear the clink and run of water, him humming under his breath.
It's such an ordinary sound that it makes my chest ache.
Hayden is once again out cold before I even get the light snuffed out. But tonight, Isabella is being fussy. She demands that Ronan come in to say goodnight to the caterpillar.
I stick my head into the hall. "Ronan. You're being summoned."
He comes up the stairs, dish towel still over his shoulder, and leans into the room. He crouches by the nightstand and looks at the shoebox with the utmost seriousness.
"Goodnight, Doctor Fuzz," he says. "Thank you for coming to the lake."
Isabella beams. Then she reaches up and grabs his sleeve.
"Mr. Ronan."
"Yes?"
"I wish you would stay forever."
I'm standing in the doorway, so I see how her words freeze him in place. "Forever?" he asks carefully.
"Forever," she confirms. "You make the good pancakes and you know about Doctor Fuzz and you're not scary even though you're big."
"I'm not scary?"
"No. You're nice." She yawns hugely. "You should just stay with us forever."
Ronan is dumbfounded for a moment. When he speaks, his voice is rough. "That sounds like a very good deal, Isabella."
"So you'll do it?"
"I'll do my best," he says. "I promise you that."
She seems satisfied with this. She's asleep within a minute, one hand still resting on the edge of the shoebox.
Ronan stands. He looks down at her for a while, then at Hayden in the other bed, and then he turns and finds me in the doorway. Whatever's on his face must be on mine, too, because his eyes catch and hold without either of us speaking a word.
I take his hand and lead him out of the room. I pull the door most of the way shut.
In the hall, in the dark, I put my arms around his neck.
"You okay?" I ask him.
"No," he says, and laughs low. "Not even a little."
"The good kind of not-okay?"
He presses his forehead to mine. "I didn't know there was a good kind. Until recently."
My heart is so full it hurts. I've spent months waiting for the floor to drop out, for the thing that would prove this was all too good to be true.
And it just never comes. He just keeps showing up—cleaning fish and grilling burgers and saying goodnight to a caterpillar in a shoebox and telling my daughter he'll do his best to stay forever.
"Come to bed," I say.
He follows me down the hall to the room at the end, the one with the window that looks out over the black water. There's moonlight on the lake.
He kisses me slow, hands on my hips, rocking me slowly back and forth like we're dancing. He undresses me by the window, the lake light on my skin, and he doesn't ask if I want the lights off, because he knows I don't anymore.
"Look at you," he murmurs against my throat. "I can't believe you're here."
"That makes two of us."
"I've never brought anyone here." He pulls back and looks at me, his eyes dark and serious. "Not once. Nobody's ever been in this house but me."
He lays me down on the bed and kisses every part of me, the parts I used to hate and don't anymore, and he whispers the same prayers he's whispered over me every night since we first went to bed.
Our clothes disappear somehow. I'm not paying enough attention to know who takes off what or where it goes. I'm mostly just focused on the velvety feel of his strong body moving over mine.
When he finally enters me, he holds himself there for a moment, just looking.
"Calista Meadows," he says. "I love you."
I stop breathing. He's never said it. I haven't, either. We've circled it for weeks, all these things that aren't quite the three most important words. But now, they've been spoken.
"Say it again," I beg in a whisper.
"I love you." He presses his forehead to mine. "I've loved you since before I knew your name. I just didn't have a word for it until now."
My eyes flood. "I love you, too, Ronan Akov."
He kisses me, and though it's more than gentle, it's all straining with all the things that it contains. We start to move together in the moonlight with the lake breathing outside the window.
It's different from every other time. There's nowhere to hide and nothing to prove and nothing to survive. It's just us, face to face, his hand cradling the back of my head, my leg hitched over his hip, and every stroke says the thing he already said out loud.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
There's no condom this time, nor would I want there to be.
I want nothing between us as I say it back with my whole body.
I hold his eyes when he orders me to, and I fall apart around him.
He comes, too, his face buried in my neck, my name and kotyonok and more words I don't know all tangled together against my skin.
When it's done, he opens the window so the summer breeze and the orchestra of cicadas can come drifting in. Owls hoot, a few of them, and I giggle.
"What's so funny?" he asks.
"A parliament," I murmur.
"What?"
"A group of owls. It's called a parliament. Hayden taught me that."
He laughs. "Your son knows everything."
"He sure likes to think he does."
We're silent for a while. His hand moves up and down my spine.
"I meant it," he says into the dark. "What I said."
"Which part?"
"All of it. But I meant the part to Isabella, too. I'll do my best to stay."
I close my eyes. "You don't have to promise a six-year-old forever, Ronan."
"I know I don't have to." His arm tightens around me. "That's not why I did it."
I don't have anything to say to that. It's too big and too good and I'm too full of it. So I put my head back down on his chest, right over his heart, and I think, This is the thing I was fighting for. Not the winning. Not the revenge.
This. Right here.
His phone hums from somewhere across the room. He doesn't move to get it.
"You're not going to look?" I ask.
"No," he says. "Not tonight. Nothing out there matters more than this."
I believe him, because he's never once given me a reason not to. I let the buzzing fade back beneath the sounds of the crickets and the owls and the water lapping at the shore. With that music in my ears, I fall asleep in his arms.
Happiness looks like this.