Chapter 6
Chapter Six
ELIZABETH
Enjoy the Journey
It takes me less than a half hour to get ready, leaving me with too much empty time to be alone with my chaotic thoughts before Fallon picks me up for dinner.
Slipping on my canvas flats, I look at my reflection in the standing mirror. The blue wrap dress falls just below my knees, a single knot tied in the sash around my waist. It’s simple, nothing fancy. I hope I’m not underdressed for wherever he’s taking me.
Instead of spending the extra time left pacing the floor of my hotel room, I decide to head down to the lobby where they have a piano tucked into one of the alcoves opposite the reception desk. It’s an old Steingraeber & Sohne, and I’ve been dying to play it ever since I arrived.
Grabbing my small wrist purse, I’m halfway out the door when my phone rings.
“Hey, sweetheart,” I answer when I see Charlotte’s name and image flash on the screen.
“If you happen to come home and are missing one of your sons, I buried him in the sand for the crabs to eat.”
Foregoing the elevator, I walk to the end of the corridor and push open the exit door to the stairwell.
“What did Christopher do this time?”
Instead of a love-hate relationship, she and Christopher are more love-irritate. Typical sibling stuff. It’s quite funny most of the time—until Christopher goes too far and makes her cry. She’s not crying now, so things haven’t gone nuclear yet.
“I have a giant smiley face sunburned into my back.”
Christopher’s voice booms over the line, “You asked me to help put sunscreen on you!” I hear a thwack , then Christopher’s, “ Ow! ”
“You’re a turd.”
I fold my lips to stop my laughter from escaping. “Baby, it’ll fade. Think of it as a sun tattoo.”
A happy gasp. “Oh my gosh! I love that! I need to make a video.”
“Hey! Wait one second,” I say before I lose her to social media.
“Put her on speaker so I can talk to her,” Christopher says.
“You have your own phone. Use it.”
Stopping on the bottom step, I lean back against the railing and try to defuse World War III from starting.
“I loved the picture you sent. Wish I was there with you.”
“I wish I was in Italy with you ,” Charlotte replies.
“You wouldn’t see any of it because you’d be too busy sucking face with Grant— Ow! Stop throwing things at me!” Christopher yells.
“I know you both don’t want to be grounded when I come home.” That seems to put a stop to their impending blowup. “Where’s Marcus?”
“He and Uncle Julien went to gas up the jet skis,” Charlotte replies.
Christopher pipes up. “Love you, Mom. Miss you. Can’t wait for you to be back!”
A door closes.
“Did he leave?”
“The girl he’s been flirting with all week just showed up. In a bikini ,” Charlotte conspiratorially whispers.
I have a feeling that she’s standing at the large picture window that faces the beach with her nose pressed to the glass.
“Don’t spy on him. It’s rude.”
I know my words will fall on deaf ears, but I say it anyway.
She snorts. “He spies on me all the time. Every time Grant and I are kiss?—”
I pull the phone away from my ear so I don’t hear the rest of that sentence.
And what the hell, Julien? He and Elijah are supposed to be supervising, not letting our kids make out like horny teenagers—which they are.
“Hey, Mom?”
I know something’s up when her voice drops a few decibels.
“Yeah, sweetie?”
Her voice gets even quieter. “How old were you when you had sex for the first time?”
I start choking when I aspirate air into my lungs too quickly.
Ryder and I were always very open with our children about things.
Sex. Alcohol. Drugs. As parents, you hope what you say sinks in, and your children make responsible choices.
I’m glad that they trust me enough to tell me things that most teenagers wouldn’t tell their parents, but hearing my fifteen-year-old daughter basically announce without saying the words that she’s thinking about having sex… with Grant…
Dear god. I don’t know if I’m ready. She’s too young. She could be thirty years old and still be too young in my mind.
Trying to sound composed when I’m far from it, I reply, “Seventeen.”
“With Daddy?”
My chest constricts as scabs from old memories rip open. Me and Jayson. Elizabeth Ann. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about her. Mourn the loss of her.
“Do you mind if we table this until I get back? I was just heading out to dinner.”
I hear her sigh. “Yeah. Sure.”
“No yeah, sure . I promise we’ll sit down and talk when I come home. It’s difficult to have a heart-to-heart with me thousands of miles away on the other side of the world.”
She sounds less mopey when she replies, “Okay.”
“Give your brothers big kisses from me.”
“ Eww . No. Gross.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too, Mama.”
Stuffing my phone inside the outer pocket of my wristlet, I wearily sink to the bottom step and run my fingers through my hair.
“Our daughter wants to have sex,” I say out loud, talking to Ryder like I often do.
The weight of being both mother and father presses down on my shoulders as I do my best to navigate the turbulent lives of teenagers with all their mood swings, arguments, and monumental life choices.
In times like this, when I don’t know if I’m doing or saying the right thing, I long for Ryder’s calm wisdom and his knack for knowing when to be firm and when to let things slide.
On countless nights when the kids would fight or come home upset about something, I would sit alone at the kitchen table and stare at Ryder’s empty chair, wishing he were there to share the burden of parenthood. How can I be enough for three growing souls? They need their father.
The loneliness is sharpest during our children’s milestones I never imagined celebrating without Ryder by my side.
Birthdays, Christmases, Father’s Day, graduation, good grades, first kisses, first love.
Some days, I beg him for guidance, while on the hardest days, I curse him for leaving me alone in a world that makes no sense without him.
Ryder is supposed to be here, making me laugh when things get difficult. Helping me through the chaos. Sharing in the happiness and the tears of our children. But he’s not. I’m left with every decision, praying that I’m doing right by our kids and not screwing them up.
Pushing to my feet, I head into the lobby. The woman behind the reception desk smiles at me when I pass on my way to the alcove. I had asked the desk manager the other day if it would be all right if I played the piano sometime.
Nervous jitters skate up my arms when I glide my fingers across the ivory keys. I don’t play as often as I used to, mainly because my heart isn’t in it anymore. My interest in most things disappeared after I lost my muse.
Sliding the small bench out, I take a seat and position my feet over the pedals.
Flexing my fingers, I warm up with a simple scale before jumping right in to the song I wrote for Ryder.
The one I gave him at senior prom. Several people loitering in the hotel lobby gather around the piano as I play, intruding on my moment of solitude.
I ignore them, focusing only on the melody and not the stares of the strangers who are watching.
They can’t see my heart breaking as I play the song that I wrote for the man I love.
The final note fades, and my fingers still.
“That was beautiful.”
Jesus!
I think I jump about a foot off the piano bench. Thankfully, the people who had been listening to me play are nowhere to be seen.
I give Fallon an admonishing glower for scaring me. “You need a bell.”
He looks fantastic in a dark-blue shirt and charcoal-gray pleated trousers.
The colors set off the light blue of his eyes, making them appear to smolder under the lights.
With age, Fallon has gotten better looking, if that is even possible.
He still has his cocky head tilt and his sexy smirk that can be infuriating at times.
His hair is still the same dark blond, but it’s cut shorter—more businesslike, I guess.
Physically, his chest is broader, and he’s put on more muscle. It looks good on him.
I, on the other hand, am a mother of three and therefore have a mom’s body, faded stretch marks and all.
My hips are fuller, which also means that my ass is rounder.
I’m no longer the bean pole of my youth.
After having Christopher, my boobs never went back to my normal B-cup size and stayed as C-cups.
Ryder didn’t mind one bit. Luckily, I’ve kept in shape as I still go running with Julien and Elijah several mornings a week, or I’ll take long walks through the woods that surround our property.
Fallon takes a seat on the bench beside me. He also smells fantastic. I’m a sucker for men’s cologne. Every night before bed, I spritz Ryder’s Yves Saint Laurent on my pillowcases.
Fallon tinkles out a two-note vibrato. “Heard the music and knew it was you.”
I check the time on my Bulova strapped around my wrist. “You’re early.”
“Thought we could grab drinks before dinner.”
That reminds me. “Thank you for the latte.”
Fallon gets up, and with me still sitting on it, he turns the bench perpendicular to the Steingraeber and takes a seat behind me.
“What are you doing?”
I stiffen, more rigid than a plank of wood, when he circles his arms around my waist, the heat of his body against my back unsettling, but not in the way I expect.
“Getting a lesson.”
He rests his hands lightly on the keys and patiently waits for me to place mine on top of his.
This was how my dad first taught me to play the piano and is something I did with Fallon once upon a time when we sat at his sister Tati’s Steinway in Barcelona. My epic “Finding Elizabeth” trip around the world.
Slipping my hands over his feels somehow monumental, like a hurdle I didn’t realize I needed to jump.
The only people I have let touch me the last three years are my children.
I won’t even allow Julien to hug me anymore.
Any kind of physical touch or intimacy makes my skin crawl, so it’s profoundly confusing when Fallon’s doesn’t.
“I’m a little rusty at this,” I tell him as I gently press on his fingers.
He drops his chin onto my shoulder, his breath warm on my cheek, and tingles explode like dry kindling in a wildfire.
“Is this the song you wrote me?” he asks, and I smile because I was waiting for him to recognize the melody. Another great memory from our trip together.
“Yes.”
Suddenly, Fallon takes over, his hands flying across the piano keys too fast for me to keep up.
“You learned how to play?”
He shows off, making syncopation look easy. “Self-taught. YouTube is a wonderful thing.”
I eagerly join in, our hands fighting for keys as we play a massacred version of Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” that has me laughing hysterically.
Fallon’s arms suddenly band around me, tenderly hugging me to his chest. My instinct is to pull away from the comfort I find in his embrace, but god help me, I can’t do it.
“I missed the fuck out of you, Kitten.”
My emotions tangle themselves into knots, a cacophony of twisted, chaotic strings.
Fallon’s innocent touch rouses something deep inside me from its long slumber—a spark I haven’t felt in a long time because it’s been buried under grief and heartache.
I’ve spent years constructing impenetrable walls to protect the broken pieces of my heart, but the steel-reinforced defenses I built around it crack wide open, sending forth a flood of confusion, guilt, and longing.
Fallon is like sunlight seeping through the gaps in a storm-weathered house, and it terrifies me because he’s something I never saw coming.
I grab hold of his wrists, my fingers digging in, clutching tightly. I’ve missed him, too. I didn’t know how much until he showed up this morning.
“So, about those drinks,” I say, slipping out of his arms.
When I stand from the bench, my legs are unsteady, and I brace a hand on the rim of the piano.
Fallon checks me out with a long, lingering look.
“What?” I ask, suddenly feeling self-conscious.
I smooth a hand down the soft fabric of my dress.
Compared to the glamorous, sophisticated women walking through the hotel doors wearing expensive clothes, five-inch stilettos, their hair in elegant updos, and their bodies draped in glittery diamonds from their ears to their fingers, I must look like Cinderella before her fairy godmother appeared.
“You look gorgeous.”
My soft bark of laughter is filled with disbelieving self-deprecation. “You need glasses.”
He slowly rises, all six feet two inches of him, and my reflexive reaction is to take a step back, but my feet won’t work.
Fallon lifts a strand of my hair and lightly tugs on the end. “You have always been the most beautiful woman in the room,” he says and takes another step toward me, pressing intimately closer.
A cascade of goose bumps float across my skin, and I’m literally frozen in place, my body refusing the commands my brain is sending. For the first time in years, I long for a man’s touch.
A man who isn’t my husband.
I stumble backward, instantly putting a metaphorical ocean’s worth of distance between us and rebuilding those walls sky high. What the hell is wrong with me?
Fallon slips his hands into his trouser pockets, his face set in a facade of stone and completely unreadable.
“Come on. I’m starving.”
He offers me his bent elbow, and it takes me a second before I’m able to accept it.
Wanting things to go back to normal, needing them to, I ask, “Where are we going for dinner?”
“You’ll see,” he replies, enigmatic as always.
He guides me through the lobby and out the double glass doors. The evening breeze feels good on my suddenly overheated skin, and I breathe it in.
“No hint?”
He stops beside a sleek, matte-black McLaren, and I can’t stop my smile. This is so typical of Fallon.
“It’s the enjoyment of the journey, not the destination. Enjoy the journey, Elizabeth.”
I run my hand along the driver’s side door.
“If it’s in this car, then hell yes. Can I drive?” I ask as a joke, not thinking for a second that he’ll let me.
So color me shocked when he lifts the dihedral car door and walks around to the passenger side.
“You just going to stand there?” he says before ducking down and getting in.