Chapter 17
ALEX
After explaining to Ryder that I’ll meet everyone at the Blue Bayou restaurant in an hour and realizing that he might not even notice I’m gone, I sidle on up to the most annoyed, judge-y hot glasses woman in the happiest place on earth.
“You need to take, like, eleven chill pills, Hermione,” the taller guy tells her. “We can go to Fantasyland after dinner. When the kids are gone.”
“The kids are never going to be gone from Disneyland, Franklin.” She shakes her head. “Maybe I should just meet you guys somewhere in like an hour.”
“I was just heading over to Fantasyland myself,” I say, stopping to stand right behind her.
When she turns around and sees me, at first there’s a flash of joy and relief. But now I know what conflicted longing looks like. I recognize it in her expression, plain as day.
And it just makes me want to grab her and kiss her even more.
“Hi,” she says and then clears her throat because she barely has a voice all of a sudden. “What are you doing here?”
“Heading over to Fantasyland, like I said.” I hold my hand out to the guy she called Franklin. “Hi. I’m Alex.”
Franklin takes my hand in both of his. “Please tell me you’re Alex the Hot Dad from Vomit Night.”
Emilia covers her face with her Disneyland schedule and mutters every word that’s not allowed in a Disney movie, and I think I hear her say “Fuck you, Ferris.”
“That is exactly who I am.”
“I’m Brody from Vomit Night,” the other guy says, offering his hand.
“Nice to meet you guys.”
Franklin tries to move the printout from Emilia’s face, but she slaps his hand away. “Well, Brody and I were just going to do Indiana Jones, so…we’ll meet you at Café Orleans in like an hour, yeah baby cakes?” He doesn’t wait for her to agree before pulling Brody away.
“Bye, Sexy Daddy,” Brody calls out with a wave.
I carefully slide the printout from between Emilia’s fingers and take a look at it while giving her a chance to gather her wits.
Just as I imagined, her list is color and time coded but with the added benefit of Disney stickers.
Her schedule appears to be arranged according to theme, rather than efficiency.
Interesting. And totally fucking wrong, but I’m not going to tell her so.
Peter Pan’s Flight is at the top of her list, and I’m on board with that.
“Shall we?” I gesture toward Main Street.
She pushes her loose hair behind both ears, nodding.
“You here with Ryder?”
“Yeah, I left him with a nice couple back in Frontierland. It’s cool. We’ll meet up at the tram later. You having a good time here so far?”
She wrinkles her nose and says without looking at me, “I’m starting to.” She nudges my arm with her elbow. “I was just thinking about you.”
“About me? The Hot Dad from Vomit Night?”
“That’s what Franklin calls you, not me.”
“How’ve you been?” It’s embarrassing how much I want to hear her say that she lost her phone three days ago.
“Okay. Catching up on grading and lesson plans. Doing this volunteer thing after school.”
“Yeah?”
“How are you? Where is Ryder, really?”
“He’s with my friends and their kids, in line for Pirates of the Caribbean. He’s having a good day.”
She smiles, seemingly very glad to hear that my son is having a good day, and fuck it warms my heart. “That’s good. He’s been doing really well in class lately.”
“So he tells me.”
A huge group of people in matching T-shirts and hats approaches us when we pass by the Partners statue, and Emilia squeezes up against me when people step around us.
I put my arm around her shoulder and pull her in even closer as we walk through the crowd.
The fresh-baked cookie smell of Main Street mingles with the scent of her shampoo, and I think I’m inhaling what I want my home to smell like for the rest of my life.
Before the crowd disperses, I squeeze her shoulder and let my hand slide down her back.
She keeps staring down at the pavement in front of us as we walk through Sleeping Beauty’s Castle into Fantasyland. “I think October is my favorite month here,” she says.
This makes me smile. “Yeah? Why’s that?”
“The air feels different. The sky’s different. I don’t know. It’s quieter. There’s a bittersweet quality or something. This city doesn’t seem as obnoxious right now.”
“Are you going to the Halloween parade in West Hollywood with your friends, by any chance?”
She laughs. “Um. No. I don’t think I’m ready to rage that hard, and I’d lose them in forty-five seconds anyway. Are you planning to attend?”
“Maybe after I take Ryder trick-or-treating. You dressing up for Halloween at school?”
“Why yes, I am. I have a couple of different costumes for next week, actually. Are you going to come for the school parade?”
“I actually have a meeting that I can’t get out of that morning.”
I like how disappointed she seems.
“Hey. Can I buy you an ice cream?” I ask as we pass an ice cream cart.
“I already had one of those Dole Whip things about an hour ago. You go ahead.”
“Nah. I just wanted to watch you eat a chocolate-covered frozen banana.”
“I don’t think you could handle it.”
“Yeah. Probably for the best.”
It feels like we’re on a kinda awkward first date. I like it. Even though I already know it won’t end the way most of my dates end. But it’s a start. I’m dying to hold hands with her, but there’s always a chance someone from school could be here.
The line for Peter Pan’s Flight is short, as always, and moving pretty quickly. One of several reasons why I chose this particular ride to go on with her. “You’ve been on this ride before, right?”
She nods. “Yes. But not since I was much younger. I loved it.” She pauses before continuing. “The last time I came here, I was with my ex-boyfriend, and he refused to go on the little kid rides.”
“Sounds like kind of a dick, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
She smiles. “I do not mind. But I mean, he wasn’t a dick, exactly. He just wasn’t into kid stuff.”
“Dicks are never into kid stuff. That’s why they’re dicks.”
“Hmm, true dat.” She waves her hand in front of my face. “Pretend I didn’t say that.”
“I’ll never forget it.”
By the time we get to the front of the queue and she focuses on the two-seater enchanted flying pirate ships, I watch her face and know that she’s realizing what I’ve known ever since we left Adventureland.
It’s just going to be the two of us, on a dark ride, for about two minutes.
And I’m gonna kiss her.
And I know when she smirks, reaches into her fanny pack, and brings out a tube of lip balm, that she wants me to.
I let her climb into the seat first. Even though I usually prefer to make my approach from the left when seated and making a move with the ladies, I will make this work from any angle.
When the safety bar is lowered above our laps, I glance over and see her rubbing her lips together a little nervously.
“Don’t be nervous. It’s not that scary of a ride.” I give her a little wink.
“It’s a little bit scarier when I’m sober.”
The vessel lurches forward, and we’re off to Never Never Land.
I rest my arm on the back of the seat, behind her neck. “There’s no turning back now.”
And there’s no time to waste. As soon as we’re in the dark, flying over early 20th Century London and being serenaded by the least sexy music ever, I lean in and touch my hand to her face to turn her toward me.
There’s no hesitation. Loud recorded voices all around us are singing, “You can fly! You can fly! You can fly!” but her tilted head, her parted lips, her whole body is a murmured whisper of fuck yes, Alex, yes.
I press my mouth to hers and kiss her slow and gentle at first. Her soft lips respond in perfect rhythm with mine.
There are hidden cameras all over the park, I know this, so I’ll keep it to PG-13 kissing.
But there are a million kinds of kisses I want to give her, and I’m not waiting until the end of the movie to get to them.
She tastes like cherry lip balm and pineapple and vanilla and my favorite month and the thing that’s been missing from my life all along.
I brush her hair out of the way to trail kisses down her neck, and the way her head falls back, the way she clutches at my jacket with one hand and the back of my neck with the other, it propels me with a sense of urgency even more than the ticking clock of this agonizingly short ride.
But I have to control myself.
“God, I want you,” I mutter as my mouth finds hers again.
But I can’t touch her the way I want to.
I can’t run my fingers through her hair, and I can’t grab her hips or pull her up onto my lap because of the fucking safety bar and the fucking hidden cameras.
So I grab on to the safety bar with one hand and the back of the seat with the other and I let my mouth and tongue tell her just a few of the many things that I plan to do to every other part of her with it one of these days.
I tell her with a long run-on sentence of languid swirls and delicate sucking and determined sweeping and penetration and very light tugging with my teeth.
I tell her with brief and to-the-point statements of my intention to ruin her for any other man, ever.
I don’t think I’ve been so aware of all the nerve endings in my lips since I was a teenager.
I fucking love kissing her, but she’s growing more frantic by the second.
And I’m realizing that Peter Pan has just rescued the Darlings from Captain Hook.
That means we’re about to be catapulted back into the light of day, so I do the opposite of what I want to do—I pull away from her.
It takes her a moment to realize I’m not kissing her anymore.
She turns away from me and drags her fingertip along the bottom of her lower lip.
I do the same with mine.
And I really fucking don’t want to stand up now, and I really wish I had a backpack to hold in front of myself.
But here we are at the happy ending of the Disney story, so off we get.
But without the getting-off part.
“You wanna go again?” I grunt out as I help her out of the pirate ship.
“Yes! But I can’t.”
And then she runs off.
She runs off, like a Disney princess from some other story.
And like every Disney prince who’s just kissed and been abandoned by a beautiful beguiling woman, I’m hiding wood and wondering where the fire is. Besides my pants. And hers, obviously.
When I get outside, I look around and I don’t see her anywhere.
I pull out my phone to send her a text: Are you vomiting?
In the couple of minutes that I’m waiting for a reply, I stroll toward the nearest restrooms.
EMILIA: Nope! I panicked. I’m sorry. I’m going to find Franklin and Brody. I can’t be around you. It’s too much. That can’t happen again.
EMILIA: I mean, I liked it. A lot. Thank you. You’re really good at that. Like really good. But it can’t happen again. Not until Ryder isn’t my student anymore. I’m sorry.
ME: Okay. Ryder’s getting homeschooled starting tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at eight tomorrow night.
EMILIA:
EMILIA: Enjoy the rest of your day, okay?
EMILIA: Alex?
ME: Yeah?
EMILIA: Are you mad?
ME: I’m not thrilled. But I wish you were easier to be mad at. And I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t feel ready for. It just seems to me that you’re pretty ready for it.
EMILIA:
And that’s it.
Back to the Blue Bayou I go.
A couple of very important parts of me are bluer than they were before I made the decision to talk to Emilia today.
But my heart still feels like it’s flying.