Five
Basically, the adult events and the kid events were separate.
I understood it perfectly; you couldn’t really mix them.
So, while the grown-ups ate and drank and went hot-air ballooning and golfing and did yoga and hiked and sat under tents in the gardens, the children and the guardians of the children did completely separate activities.
Kola and Hannah loved the paddleboats. We went bike riding together.
I took them to the pool, and the waterslide was a huge hit.
I was lucky; we did the program at the YMCA every summer, and since Dane and Aja had a pool in the penthouse apartment they lived in—they had ditched the house in Oak Park after Robert was born—we always had a place to swim.
So, my kids didn’t need the floaties or the swim rings in assorted shapes and sizes.
The only other boy who kept up with mine was a little towheaded kid who was having the best time, swimming under six feet of water with Kola.
Hannah couldn’t go down quite that far, but she could swim under the water in the shallow end.
They both had their goggles on, and when Kola swam over to me, his friend followed.
“Pa, this is Theo.”
“Hi.” I smiled at him. He smiled back. “Are your folks out here, Theo?”
“My dad is. My mom is home with my stepdad and the new baby.”
“I see.”
“Theo.”
We all looked up, and the man who joined us looked a lot like his son, except taller, broader, and tanner.
He was very handsome, and I was certain that I was not the only one at the pool who noticed the fuzzy chest, long legs, and toned musculature.
He must have worked very hard at the gym for that kind of definition.
“Sorry.” He grimaced at me.
“Nothing to be sorry for,” I said, moving towels, my cell phone, and the video camera off the chair beside me. “Here, sit. I’ve got the shade here.”
“You sure?” The smile was shy and sweet.
“Please.”
He took a seat, and we all met—Kola; Hannah, who was in my lap, drinking a juice box and eating Parmesan-flavored Goldfish; and him and his son. It was nice to sit and talk, watch the kids, and drink ice tea.
His name was Milton Kage—who asked to be called Milt—and he was a professor of biology who lived in Houston. He and his wife had divorced two years ago after an eight-year marriage. Theo was six and had been the reason they stuck it out for as long as they had.
“He’s gorgeous,” I told Milt.
“Thank you. I think so. Yours are as well.”
I smiled at him.
“Is your wife busy doing some fun family-bonding thing?” he teased me.
“My husband,” I corrected. “I hope that doesn’t bother you.”
He took a breath. “No, actually. That was the reason for the divorce.”
I nodded. “Did you cheat?”
“I didn’t.” He grinned back. “She did with the man she married.”
I shrugged. “Sounds like it worked out for the best.”
“It did. I can’t find the man of my dreams, being married to a woman.”
“No.” I chuckled. “Not so much.”
He laughed, and the sound was good. When Kola and Theo were pruney, Milt asked me if we’d like to go to lunch with them. The cheering answered his question.
Lunch was nice. It was always good to go with other parents who got that sitting outside was better than sitting inside, that getting finger food was always best, and that if something spilled, it was not the end of the world.
We all went back to our rooms to shower and change and then met back downstairs for the Jeep tour guide.
It turned out we could all go together, and the kids had a great squealing time, bouncing all over the trail.
Going up and over rocks got us easily a foot up off our seats.
Our tour guide, Robbie, was funny and well informed about all the flora and fauna.
He was very cute and very gay, and recognizing another bottom when he saw one, he wanted nothing to do with me and did everything but put his hand in Milton’s lap.
As we were standing, looking out at the valley, I leaned close and told Milt that I would watch his kid for him if he wanted to ask the guy out for a drink.
“My folks are with us”—he grinned at me—“and I’d much rather have conversation than a fifteen-minute fuck in the room of the apartment he’s sharing with three roommates.”
“Hey, that was me.” I laughed.
“Yeah, me, too, but I shared a room, so I had to have sex in the back of my Explorer.”
Just imagining the fumbling made me dissolve into peals of laughter.
When we got back—Milt with Robbie’s number stuffed into the back pocket of his jeans—we stopped for water, then took the kids to the playground.
Milton wanted to know all about me, about Sam, and about how long we’d been together.
“A marshal? Are you screwing with me?”
“No. Why?”
“What is that, cop fantasy on crack?”
My eyes narrowed. “Oh, Milt, honey … are you a badge bunny?”
He spit out his water. “A what?”
I arched an eyebrow for his benefit. “Do cops make your balls ache?”
He nodded vigorously.
I put my head back and laughed like I hadn’t in days.
“Come on, Jory.” He chuckled, arm on the back of the bench we were sitting on. “The whole perfect V those guys have when they’re in their uniforms … I have this one who goes to my gym, and when he changes and comes out … God.”
“You should ask him out.” I waggled my eyebrows at him.
“And if he shoots me?” He gestured at his son. “Then you’ve got a fatherless kid there.”
“You’ve never smiled at him?”
“No, I just ogle from afar.”
“Gutless.”
“Cautious.” He smiled at me. “Jesus, how old are you?”
“Me?”
“Yeah.”
“Thirty-two. Why?”
He shook his head. “You look maybe twenty-five.”
“Good genes,” I teased him.
“You’re hysterical.”
“Seriously though,” I sighed. “The cop, he’s hot, huh?”
“You would drool.”
I doubted that. I only drooled over one man.
“Oh God, Jory, he’s so gorgeous.”
“And really, you’ve never checked him out and let him see you?”
“Yeah, I have.”
“And?”
“And I don’t know. I mean, we’re talking a tall blond god with blue-green eyes and a body that just …”
“Tell me.”
He looked at me. “The deal is, I’m verse, right? So, it’s either …”
“What? Spit it out.”
“It’s either big, gorgeous mountains of men or guys like you.”
“Oh, I see.”
“You have to know that you’re just gorgeous. That boy today had nothing on you.”
“Thank you,” I said softly. “But, Milt, you shouldn’t be having any trouble yourself.”
His smile curled his lips. “So I’ve been told.”
I bumped him with my shoulder.
“You sure you don’t wanna be the guy I pick up tonight?”
“Too late,” I teased him. “Already friends.”
“Friends are good too.” He smiled.
“Yes, they are.”
At dinner, the rule was that you could not sit with your spouse, but anyone else was fair game.
Married people, any kind of couples, were supposed to scatter.
So, since Sam had not come back to the room by the time we were supposed to go to dinner, I took Hannah and Kola with me to join Milt.
His mother, Denise, was lovely, so charming, and she thought my kids were amazing.
Since I agreed wholeheartedly, we got along famously.
Milt was entertaining the table with tales of the exam he had given his classes right before he came on the trip. Listening to him talk about some of the answers he had gotten was hysterical.
“Did you know that birds have fur?”
“They did not write that.” I defended the obviously clueless underclassmen he taught.
“As God as my witness.” He grinned. “I had this one answer to a question on convergence—”
“Explain to Jory what that is,” Denise interrupted her son.
“Mom, I’m sure Jory is well aware of what convergence is,” he said as he looked at me.
“I’m not though,” I told him. “Please explain.”
He smiled at me. “Convergence is when distantly related species have similar forms because they live in the same environment.”
“Oh, okay, so you were looking for examples of this.”
“Yes.”
“And you were what, unclear?”
“No, I was crystal clear. I told them that they didn’t have to use the examples I had given in class, that they could come up with their own.”
“Come up with or make up?”
“See, yeah, right there.” He spread his hands to illustrate the fact that he just didn’t get it. “That’s what happened. I said come up, and they heard go wild with ridiculous examples.”
“Did you get unicorns for an answer?” I teased him.
“No, but I did get fish and mermaids.”
I started chuckling.
“This is college, you understand.” He sounded pained. “I mean, come on.”
“That makes no sense.” Kola was frowning.
“No, it doesn’t.” Milt smiled over at Kola. “What would you have said?”
He thought for a minute. “Dolphins and sharks.”
His face broke into a wide smile. “You see, that’s a great answer, Kola. What made you think of that?”
“Well, they both have the same kind of bodies.”
“Very good.” His eyes lit up as he leaned on the table. “What’s an example of an amphibian?”
“A frog.”
Milt looked at me. “On the test I just gave, I got bat to that question.”
“Oh, you did not.” I laughed at him.
“And did you know that Procter & Gamble discovered the DNA molecule?”
“I thought it was Abercrombie & Fitch.” I baited him.
“Oh, you’re hysterical,” he said, smiling, before his face slowly started to change.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t—there’s a guy coming over here, and he looks upset, and he’s really … big.”
I turned and saw Sam moving through the sea of tables.
He looked dangerous, and the way his clothes clung to him made him seem like a mountain of hard muscle.
His stare, currently focused on me, could and did frighten people who didn’t know him, as it looked cold and dead.
But I knew better. I knew the intensity of the gaze was just him zeroed in on one particular thing.
Hannah’s greeting, high-pitched and excited, always tempered the impression he made on strangers. How scary could he be if he knelt to receive the little girl who hopped off her chair to run to him? And they had their Dirty Dancing ritual—he lifted her, and she did the airplane pose.