Chapter Twenty-Four #2
Gathering her in his embrace, he kissed her hard on the lips. She pulled back to clarify. “I mean, Anna Leigh Waters is on the tour, so I would get to tutor the eighteen-year-old women’s pickleball champ. If that’s not incentive to do it, I don’t know what is.”
He kissed her again, a laugh on his lips.
She stepped back to study him, her fingers still entwined with his. “Would you be okay with it? If I worked on the tour? It would be a lot of time together.”
“Let me think about it,” he said, shifting his gaze to the side. “Traveling the country, making my living playing pickleball with the pros, and hanging out with Lulu Gardner? I think I could tolerate it. Depends what they’ll pay me.” He smirked, his eyes twinkling.
“You,” she said, shaking her head.
“I really think you should branch out to other pronouns.”
Growling, she reached out and pinched his nipple through his shirt.
“Ow!” he said. “Do it again.”
She narrowed her eyes but hugged him all the same.
Lulu sank into the comfort of holding someone special and being held with reciprocal affection. Embracing the moment, she allowed herself to settle into the optimism that was building in her bones.
The more she thought about it, the more she began to consider that tutoring on the tour would be possible.
If she still had a job when she landed back on US soil, and that was a very big if, Lulu would finish out her teaching year and start with the tour in the fall.
Zoe still had another year until she started school.
Tutoring for the PPA would give her the flexibility to schedule her own hours so she could have more time with her daughter.
And who knew, maybe Laverne and Rooster would want to come along.
It was an eye-opener and a privilege, she realized, to have the freedom of making her own decisions, one day at a time. Who would have known that this snag in her teaching career would lead her to such promise for the future?
Tyler spoke into her hair. “Just like old times. We could get out on the courts and play together.”
Pulling back to watch his reaction, she teased, “And off the courts?”
“Yep. I think I know some games we could play off the courts,” he said, his tone heavy with innuendo.
Lulu laughed. “Alright. But you better let me win.”
“I’ll make sure you win. Over and over. You’ll win like five times a night.”
“Wow. That’s a lot of hype. Hope you can live up to it.”
“If I can’t, I’ll have fun trying.”
Pickleball. Who knew the draw would be so magnetic?
Pickleball had clung to her like a sock in the dryer, and Lulu felt invigorated by the reawakening of her long-dormant passion for sports.
What an opportunity: getting back to her athletic roots; teaching in a vibrant, ever-changing classroom; traveling the country.
Lulu looked forward to being a new kind of role model for Zoe—a mom who wasn’t just one thing but was like an artichoke, layered, with the sweetest part at the center.
“I think it’s pretty likely that I’ll take that job,” she tossed off casually. Of course, her brain had already convinced her to do it.
There was that bright, beaming smile again, the one that made her feel like his face had been designed just to please her.
Tyler pointed at the purple tubes of light. “I better turn those out,” he said, moving toward the switchbox. And with a soft pop, the purple incandescent glow dimmed before ticking out. He made the circuit, flicking off each set around the courts.
She watched his easy strides and felt the smooth burn of pleasure in her chest. Hope lifted her doubts from the past, and confidence grounded her in the present.
As scary as it might be, she would enjoy this charge into the unpredicted future.
She shook her head, disbelieving, but her mind was already formulating a plan.
Because it wasn’t achievement that made Lulu happy.
It was the challenge of trying to reach success that thrilled her.
Tyler returned. He stood on the opposite side of the net and beckoned her closer.
She went to him, and when she was very, very near, he snaked his arms around her waist and pressed her close. “Did I mention I have another proposition for you? For later tonight.”
“Do you, now?” she asked.
“Mm-hmm. Mine feels so good that it’s one higher than everybody else’s. I call it”—he tugged her close and spoke low in her ear—“seventy.”
A rush of heat washed her cheeks. Lulu giggled so hard she snorted. “You are impossible.”
“On the contrary. As I think we’ve established, I’m very possible.” His eyes skated over her body, and she felt the thrill travel downward. Forget the steamy showers that consumed her daydreams last week. She did want steamy sex.
His lips twitched into a half smile, and she moved around the net to him. She heard the tick-tick-roll of the ball as it dropped from Tyler’s hand.
Around them, even without the ultraviolet lights, the neon setup hung onto its illuminated magic longer than expected.
Fluorescent glitter tape, the painted lines, and the glow-in-the-dark balls all held their colors and reflected against the darkness.
Lulu stared at the enchanted imprints of light, willing the vision to stay as long as it would.
Tyler’s hand brushed against hers, and she let their skin graze as their fingers intertwined.
They stood in awed silence, taking in the swirling magenta and greens that remained.
The view reminded Lulu of the aurora borealis, which she had witnessed wide-eyed only once before, not so long ago on a dreamlike Seattle midnight.
Slowly, ever so slowly, the color began to wash out, but where her eyes had feasted on the artificial vibrance, now Mother Nature’s patterns lit pinholes in the sky. Standing there looking up was not enough. She lay down on the court.
The pavement felt cool against her back compared to the lingering warmth in the air. Overhead, no moon appeared, but the inky sky highlighted the brilliance of the soup of stars. If she blew on a spoonful, she knew they would swirl and dance.
Her hair stirred against her cheek and there was Tyler beside her, his head upside down to hers, their eyes aligned.
Her smile spread inside her chest, and it probably reached her lips, too.
Sense memory. Fifteen years and a good deal of life’s raw realities, and common sense still had some hold on her brain.
But at last, they were here for each other.
And a sparkling future did not seem so unrealistic now.
She was a sensible person. And still she believed it.
“I wish we hadn’t lost each other for so many years,” she said to the sky.
He boosted himself up on his elbow. His pupils were huge, their own magnetic field drawing her in with their force.
She could let herself go there; she wanted to tumble into those eyes, swim, drown.
Instead, she held herself grounded to the earth and pressed her spine into the pavement to remind herself to take it slowly, to be here and now.
“I wouldn’t want to go back, even if I could,” he said.
“ ’Cause we get to go forward, now. We earned it.
” Tyler blinked long and slow, composing his thoughts, and when he opened his eyes, he said, “You know how when you lose your phone and like you can’t remember where you put it, and you turned it off so you can’t even call it?
And you look everywhere for it and you’re all kind of panicky, and then suddenly, there it is on the counter by the coffeemaker, and you’re like so happy to see your phone and you think you’ll never take its existence for granted again? ”
Narrowing her lids, Lulu waiting for the point.
“This is nothing like that,” he said.
Laughing, she shook her head.
Serious now, he said, “I’m not that idiot anymore, you know? Well, I’m an idiot. But I’m not that idiot. I know how important you are to me. And I’m never going to leave you by the coffeemaker again.”
Lulu felt it descend on her, a nostalgia so powerful it took form and shape, so that the court around her became Bainbridge’s Strawberry Hill and she was transported.
Her body—this body that had given birth, had given up tennis, had given up on love—transformed itself.
Coiled inside her thirty-three-year-old self, eighteen-year-old Lulu came to life, reminding her of the profound friendship that had been the foundation of their real love.
And yes, it had been love, and she hoped it would be again.
It was like no time had passed, no time at all.
His nearness now flooded her system with simmering lust. She wanted him in every way it was possible for a woman to want a man.
But it was so much more than that. Part of her awakening came from Tyler, but it also came from within herself.
She felt it then, an opening to the possibilities of tomorrow.
The adrenaline kick of coming back onto the courts, tracking the ball, and letting the kinetic forces of her body and mind work together.
The thrill of learning something new after believing that once she began teaching, the learning part of her life was over.
The idea of hope, just hope, that she could give her daughter the example of a woman who was capable of shifting her life at any stage and reaching for something, and someone, simply because it would make her happier.
And don’t we all deserve to have as much happiness as we can gather?
The uncertainty of the future had always worried her, but now Lulu sighed happily as she looked up at the tapestry of stars.
She imagined lying on the runway so many years ago.
Viscerally, she remembered the surprise approach of the airplane flying low over the tarmac.
How its sudden appearance had terrified her and thrilled her and had given her one of the greatest adrenaline rushes of her lifetime.
There was something to be said for the intensity of opportunities that happen without warning when you leave yourself open to them.
“I want to come back here one day. To Costa Rica.”
“So come back. Maybe we could come back…together?”
Her lips lifted. “It’s so. So—”
“Perfect?”
“No,” she said, because there were still spiders and traffic jams. “But perfect is boring. I’m looking for something more…flawed.”
Grinning, he pointed at himself. She giggled, lifted her head, and pressed her lips briefly against his mouth. She wondered if she would look back on this moment as the stone that laid the groundwork for two of life’s greatest pleasures: sharing a little bed and sharing the big world.
They had to maneuver to align their bodies, but like jigsaw pieces, she found a way to fit herself on top of him. Lightly, she tangled her lips with his, but it was not enough. Nowhere near enough. This night, she wanted to be consumed. She wanted him here. Now.
So she rolled again and guided him until he hovered over her.
Trapping her gaze in his, he whispered, “Keep your eyes open. I want to look at you.”
She wanted that, too.
The years contracted to the space of the centimeters between them.
He let his body linger above hers, postponing the delicious heat between them before lowering himself slowly to meet her thighs, her pelvis, her chest, her lips.
Everywhere their bodies touched was just right.
The sweet spot, like the exact center on the pickleball paddle where the ball makes such a satisfying snap.
Tomorrow, she would plan out her next steps. But right here, right now, she let herself slide away.
She did not make a sound, as there was only the sky and the stars and the chirp of the cicadas and the earthy smell of the jungle and the cool pavement and the touch of skin on skin and the weight of Tyler Demming pressing into her and the view into his eyes as they moved in an effortless and freeing partnership—until her mind erupted in a flash of white.
“Pura vida,” she gasped, and her voice bounced off the courts into the net of stars.