Chapter 25 Akemi
Akemi
Throughout her travels that year, Akemi had been counting down the days until she saw Lorenzo again. They spoke daily on the phone and sent video messages when they missed a call. She felt a fizzy excitement with each new message and a deep sense of peace every time they were on the phone together.
But once she was home in Pualena, her feelings began to shift.
As she spent her days with her mother and sisters, she wondered how this new man could possibly fit into their dynamic.
And when her baby kicked and turned in her belly, she wondered how coparenting with Lorenzo before they had ever even lived together would change the dynamic between the two of them.
Maybe it was just her hormones and her fears about the impending birth that were putting her in a strange frame of mind… but whatever it was, it was hard to shake.
Akemi met Lorenzo right there in her parents’ house. She had given herself more time at home following her dad’s first heart attack, and Lorenzo was there as a boarder.
It had been a strange and quiet season at home; for the first time in her life, there were no foster kids in the house. And to have some money coming in while Kimo recuperated, her parents had rented out one of the bedrooms.
Lorenzo had lived there for three months in order to be near his daughter.
Rory lived in Pualena, and Lorenzo hadn’t learned of her existence until she was already five years old.
He had immediately rushed to the island to meet her…
and in the days and hours that Rory spent with her mother, Lorenzo and Akemi had struck up an easy friendship.
When that friendship turned into something more, Akemi had tried to dismiss it as yet another travel romance. In her two decades of travel, no one had ever stuck with her for long.
And yet despite her assumptions, despite that constant waiting for the axe to drop, there had been something different between her and Lorenzo from the beginning.
At first, she had dismissed it as Italian charm. They were nothing but a bunch of Romeos, the lot of them; she had spent enough time in Italy to know how easily they doled out praise and promises… and how quickly they lost interest.
But Lorenzo was steady. His interest and invitations, his words of support never faltered – even when they were away from each other for months at a time.
She was cautiously optimistic about this relationship – if nothing else, she had seen that he was capable of being a supportive and peaceful coparent – but deep down, she was terrified.
How was this going to work?
It didn’t help that she was the size of a blimp.
The bigger her belly grew, the more her fear and exhaustion eclipsed her hope. So by the time Lorenzo finally arrived in Pualena, her anticipation had morphed into something anxious and unpleasant.
When Lorenzo showed up on their lanai and she went out to greet him, he stopped and stared slack-jawed at her belly. She couldn’t blame him; she had literally doubled in size since they’d met.
But still… it made her feel more like a tourist attraction than a romantic prospect.
“Aloha,” she greeted him in a sour tone.
“Ma che bella,” he said reverently. “Amore, you are so beautiful.”
“I look like an elephant.”
“But what a beautiful elephant.”
She snorted and held open the screen door. “Come on in.”
“Here’s your room,” she said, walking to the downstairs bedroom that Anne had set aside for their Italian guest.
“Yes, this was my room before.” He looked at her. “Do you have a different room?”
“Yeah. I’m upstairs.”
He nodded, his expression thoughtful.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“No, thank you. I was very hungry, so I stopped in Hilo on the way here. At the place where we used to go, the one with the breadfruit burgers, do you remember?”
“Of course.”
He reached into his backpack and then handed her a slightly squashed paper bag along with a bottle of sugarcane juice.
“Oh,” she said, surprised. “Thank you.”
“Prego.” He carried his bags into the room and then came back out.
“You are well?” he asked, glancing again at her belly.
“Well enough.” She lowered herself onto the sofa. “Ready to not be pregnant anymore.”
“Is he a boy, do you think?” He joined her on the couch. “Or a girl? Vito or Bruna?”
Akemi snorted again. He was teasing her with two names that she had already vetoed during their long back-and-forth texts about possibilities.
“Neither,” she said.
“Lucia,” he suggested. That was one of their maybes.
“Lilo Kalama,” she volleyed.
“Giovanni Lazzeri,” he countered.
“Definitely not.”
“Giovanni is an excellent name.”
“It’s too Italian.”
“He is half Italian.”
“So the name should be half Italian too,” she countered. “Only half.”
“Perhaps when we see our baby, the name will come to us.”
“Our baby,” she echoed.
Even with the child in question rolling onto her bladder ten times a day, the prospect of a baby still didn’t quite feel real. She looked into Lorenzo’s eyes.
“How are we going to do this, Ren?”
“One stage at a time,” he said in his slow, careful English.
His command of the language had improved so much since he first arrived in Pualena.
“What is best for a newborn is not best for a child. Parenting evolves. We will get to know our child as a person, and we will figure things out as we go.”
“I sure hope so.”
“Speaking of children…” He glanced at his watch. “I’m picking Rory up from school today.”
“Aren’t you exhausted?”
“Yes,” he admitted, “but I want to see her.”
“Okay.”
“Would you like to come?”
“No, that’s okay.” Running into Rory and her mother in Tuscany had been awkward enough; she wasn’t going to horn in on Lorenzo’s time with his daughter. Not yet, anyway.
“Then I will see you later.” He stood and then paused, like he wasn’t sure how to say goodbye. Their baby had taken over her body, and the easy familiarity that they had shared just a few months before felt like a distant memory now.
“Help me up, would you? I feel like a beached whale.”
He hauled her up off of the sofa, and she gave him an awkward one-armed hug, keeping her enormous belly out to one side.
Then she stood by the front window and watched him walk out through the drizzling rain to find his daughter.
Would he show the same dedication to their child?
Or would their baby always come second to his principessa?