by Linda Seed
Delilah hesitated. “Oh, but … the boys …”
He knew what she was getting at, and he jumped on it before it could become an issue. “I remember what you said—they can’t know we’re dating. So we won’t kiss or hold hands or declare our undying love for each other in front of them. We’ll just be friends hanging out.”
“Just friends hanging out,” she repeated.
“Sure. Except that I’ll be imagining you naked.”
She giggled, and he knew he was in—at least for the date, if not for the naked part.
They started at the Main Street Grill for burgers, because burgers seemed kid-friendly. They sat out on the patio, because the evening was mild, and they shared a basket of fries as big as a hubcap.
As they ate, the boys excitedly told Quinn about everything that was going on in their lives—how Jesse had enjoyed a phone call with his best friend from home, how Gavin had done a video call with his grandmother, and how both of them were missing school to be in Cambria.
“Yours doesn’t matter, though,” Jesse told Gavin. “It’s only preschool. It’s not even school. I’m missing kindergarten.”
“Preschool is school,” Gavin said around a mouthful of burger. “It’s in the name, even.”
“Honey, don’t talk with your mouth full,” Delilah admonished him gently. “And yes, Jesse, preschool is school.”
“That’s kind of a shame, missing kindergarten,” Quinn remarked.
“Yeah, well,” Delilah said. “Jesse was going to have to change schools anyway. Now that the house is sold, and with the divorce, we’re not going to be staying in the same school district. In Connecticut they let you skip kindergarten with a waiver, so …”
“So you’re going to go straight into first grade?” Quinn asked Jesse. “Dude, that’s cool. Kindergarten’s kid stuff anyway, right?”
“I can already read,” Jesse said. “And I know my numbers and I can add and stuff. So I don’t need kindergarten.”
“He misses his friends, though. And his teacher.” Delilah’s eyes started to well up, and she blinked quickly so the boys wouldn’t see. Quinn saw, though. “And,” she went on, more brightly, “he won’t miss the whole rest of the school year. Once we get settled somewhere, he can do the last semester.”
“I don’t need to,” Jesse insisted. “I don’t. Mom—”
“You do need to.” Delilah rested her hand on Jesse’s head for a moment, then changed the subject. “Quinn, tell us more about Hospitality Night.”
Delilah hadn’t wanted to get into it about Jesse and Gavin’s schooling or how unsettled they were as a family, but it was hard to avoid the topic once the kids started talking about friends and family and school.
And now that Delilah and Quinn were dating—however covertly—it seemed like a delicate subject to talk about what the Ballard family might be doing next.
The topic of Hospitality Night was a handy diversion. The more Quinn talked about the Christmas cookies and cider, the carolers, and the events that were planned, the more excited the boys got.
“And, of course, we’ll have to swing by and see Santa,” Quinn said.
Gavin’s eyes widened. “Santa?”
Quinn waved a hand dismissively. “Are you kidding? Of course Santa’s going to be there. It wouldn’t be much of a celebration without him, would it?”
“Santa’s not real, dummy,” Jesse told Gavin.
“Of course he is,” Delilah said.
“If you don’t believe, you don’t receive,” Quinn said. “We’ll see who’s the dummy come Christmas morning.”
Jesse looked doubtful. “You mean I won’t get any presents if I don’t believe in Santa?” he asked Delilah.
“Well, you’ll get gifts from me, of course. And your grandparents and Aunt Roxanne have sent some things, so you’ll get those. But Santa …” She gave him a rueful look. “I’m afraid I can’t guarantee anything.”
Jesse spent the rest of the meal looking worried.
After dinner, they started walking along Main Street and visiting boutiques, most of which had tables of cookies and cupcakes along with carafes of coffee, cocoa, and hot apple cider.
The boys wanted to grab the first cookies they saw, but Delilah cautioned them. “You’re going to have to choose two cookies each, because I don’t want you two making yourselves sick. So, you’d better take your time and choose carefully.”
“Your mom’s right, guys,” Quinn added. “Plus, last year, one of the shops did s’mores. You wouldn’t want to miss that because you’re already filled up on substandard grocery store cookies.”
Jesse and Gavin both perked up at the mention of s’mores, and they contented themselves with paper cups of hot cocoa for the time being as they walked from store to store looking at locally made crafts, Cambria souvenirs, paintings of the local coastline, and even a selection of plush sea creatures like sea lions and the occasional narwhal.
The mood was festive as Quinn called out to people he knew, making small talk and introducing them to the Ballards.
“This is Delilah, and this is Jesse and Gavin,” Quinn told one of the shopkeepers who’d greeted Quinn enthusiastically.
The shopkeeper was wearing a Santa hat, its tip flopping down around the man’s left shoulder. “You boys having a good time?” he asked.
“Yeah. This is really cool,” Jesse said, and Gavin nodded, his thumb in his mouth.
They listened to carolers, watched a group of people perform a choreographed dance in the street to the tune of “Jingle Bell Rock,” and had their pictures taken with Santa at the Cambria Historical Museum on Center Street. Then they found the s’mores station, and Delilah finally gave the okay for the boys to indulge.
A guy manning an outdoor gas grill browned two marshmallows, assembled the s’mores, and handed them to Jesse and Gavin. Within minutes, both of the boys were a mess of chocolate and marshmallow fluff.
Delilah wanted to maintain her emotional distance, wanted to keep the reality of her situation firmly in her mind. But before she knew it, she was caught up in the festivity of the event. She found herself smiling, and for a while, it was possible to think she was actually happy.
When Quinn stole a kiss while the boys were looking the other way, she didn’t try to stop him. She just savored it, not knowing when she might have something that simple and perfect again.
Quinn had never really understood why people had kids. Someone to take care of you in your old age? Sure, that made sense. Someone to carry on the genetic line? Okay, if you were into that sort of thing.
But hanging out with Jesse and Gavin made him see the point of it. The two of them were kind of a kick. Their excitement over Hospitality Night—and over Christmas itself—made the whole thing seem a lot more fun.
Hell, if he could have kids like these two, he wouldn’t mind a bit. It might even be pretty cool to be a father. One day. Eventually. If he met the right woman.
The thing was, he was starting to think he’d already met the right woman.
He told himself to slow his roll as they walked amid the crowd on Main Street, enjoying the holiday decorations and the overall sense of community fun.
Delilah had barely agreed to date him, and she was planning to move to the other side of the country after New Year’s. The thing to do was to have fun. Spend some enjoyable time with an intriguing woman, and not make more of it than it was.
That was all.
Hell, he didn’t want anyone messing up his lifestyle, anyway. He liked his lifestyle. He’d tailored it specifically to his own preferences. If you got serious about someone, you had to start considering their preferences, too. You had to compromise. And if there were kids involved? Well, he could only imagine that the kids’ needs crowded out everything else.
Who wanted that?
He thought about all of it as they went through their evening together. But all of his best intentions—all of the ways in which he cautioned himself—were overwhelmed by one simple fact.<
br />
Here, with Delilah and her boys, he felt happier than he had in some time. Maybe ever. He felt so happy that he could imagine, for one fleeting moment, that all of his problems had simply vanished in the wake of this perfect sense of contentment.
That was an illusion, of course.
But it was a pretty damned powerful one.
Chapter 19
Delilah found herself humming the next morning as she bustled around the kitchen making pancakes for the boys.
“Can we have chocolate chips in them?” Jesse wanted to know. He’d just come out of his room wearing pajama bottoms, his chest bare. His hair stuck up in all directions.
“We don’t have any chocolate chips,” she said. “But I can slice some bananas to go on top.”
“Okay.” His tone indicated that it was anything but okay, but that he would somehow try to muddle through the travails of breakfast.
She used a spatula to turn a batch of pancakes on the griddle. “Did you have fun last night?” she asked.
“Yeah!” Jesse perked up, the lack of chocolate chips forgotten. “The s’mores were really good. And it was cool going with Quinn. I didn’t think we would do that kind of stuff with him. I thought you didn’t even like him.”
Delilah looked at her son, surprised. “Of course I like him. Why did you think I didn’t?”
Jesse shrugged. “You always said we couldn’t call him or invite him anyplace. And whenever we did see him, it was like you didn’t want to.”
He was right. She had acted that way. But she couldn’t tell her son that she’d pretended not to like Quinn because she liked him too much—so much that she worried he would hurt her, hurt her boys, and tear open the old wounds that were barely starting to heal.
“Well, we didn’t know him very well,” she said. “That’s all. But now he’s getting to be a friend, isn’t he?”
Gavin came into the room, rubbing his eyes as he yawned and struggled to fully wake up. “Who’s our friend?”
“Quinn,” Jesse said, catching him up on the conversation.
“Oh. Yeah.” Gavin nodded his agreement.
Delilah slid some pancakes onto a plate, sliced some banana on top of them, then drizzled on a modest amount of maple syrup. She put the plate in front of Jesse, who scrambled up onto a barstool at the kitchen island to eat.
“What would you guys think if we spent more time with him?” Delilah asked, already knowing the answer.
“That would be so cool!” Jesse said, his mouth full of pancake.
Gavin nodded vigorously.
“We’re going back to Connecticut in less than a month,” she reminded them. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun with Quinn while we’re here.”
“We could go camping maybe,” Jesse said. “Or fishing. Quinn said he likes fishing.”
“Maybe,” Delilah agreed. She poured more batter onto the griddle to form Gavin’s pancakes. “I just don’t want you to be sad when we go home and we have to say goodbye to him.”
“We won’t be going home,” Jesse reminded her. “We don’t even have our house anymore. We’ll be going to Grandma’s.”
“Just until we can get our own place,” she said.
Gavin climbed up onto the barstool next to Jesse’s and waited for his pancakes, his thumb in his mouth.
“We could just stay here,” Jesse said.
Delilah froze. She didn’t want Jesse thinking that way—not when it meant reality was going to leave him disappointed.
“This house isn’t ours,” she said. “We just have it until the end of the month.”
“There are other houses in Cambria, Mom,” he said.
Time to change the subject—and fast. “So, what do you guys think you want to do today? Here, Gavin. Your pancakes are ready.”
“I just feel bad about the kids, that’s all,” Delilah’s mother said on the phone later that day as Delilah sat in an Adirondack chair on her back patio, watching the kids explore the tide pools just below the house. It was low tide, and the waves slapping into the rocks were small. After some argument, Jesse had convinced Delilah that if they were allowed to go down there alone, neither he nor Gavin was likely to be swept into the ocean.
“Why do you feel bad? The kids are fine.”
“Well, they’re all alone at Christmas.”
Delilah stifled a sigh. “They’re not alone. They have each other, and they have me.”
“You know what I mean. Why, you probably don’t even have a Christmas tree.”
It was true—she didn’t. That hadn’t seemed like something you could do in a vacation rental house. But why not? Of course they should have a Christmas tree.
“We’re getting one this weekend,” she said, deciding it on the fly.
“But what are you going to decorate it with, Delilah? All of your ornaments are in storage. And the kids’ stockings …”
“We’ll buy more ornaments. We’ll buy more stockings, Mom. I can do that, you know. I got a whopping settlement in the divorce.”
Jeanette made a scornful sound. “You say that like it’s a good thing.”
“The settlement? It is a good thing. Especially because Mitch didn’t leave me enough money to buy food before the court made him do it. He didn’t leave me enough to take care of his own children.”
She heard the bitterness in her voice and told herself to suppress it. The kids might hear, even over the sound of the surf. And she’d vowed never to trash Mitch in front of his sons. And anyway, she didn’t need her mother to hear her anger, her hurt.
“Well, divorces hurt everyone, Delilah. Especially the kids. That’s why I keep thinking that if you and Mitch could just get counseling—”
“He lives in Paris. With his new girlfriend. That’s going to make the logistics of counseling kind of complicated, Mother.”
“Oh, honey …”
Delilah didn’t want to talk about the divorce. She didn’t want to talk about Mitch or her financial settlement, and she absolutely did not want to talk about any scenario involving her getting back together with her ex. Instead, she shifted to the original topic—Christmas.
“You know, the boys are having a good time in Cambria. There’s this local event called Hospitality Night.…” She told her mother about it—about Santa and the s’mores and all of the fun the kids had. The one thing she didn’t mention was Quinn. Her mother definitely didn’t need to know she was seeing someone.
“That does sound like fun,” Jeanette admitted. “Are the boys handy? I’d love for them to tell me about it.”
So Delilah called out to the boys, and they scrambled up from the rocks below and onto the patio via the small stairway that led to the beach.
She handed her phone to Jesse, then listened with growing horror as he told his grandmother all about Quinn.
Delilah made frantic hand gestures, trying to communicate with her son that this topic was off-limits. Either he didn’t notice or didn’t catch the gist of what she was trying to tell him, because he went on and on about their new friend and how he’d escorted them through town on Hospitality Night.
After Jesse, Gavin talked to his grandmother a bit, mostly responding to her inquiries in single syllables. Then he handed the phone to Delilah.
“Well, Mom, I’d better get going,” Delilah tried as the boys ran back down the stairs to the tide pools. “I promised the boys we’d—”
“Who exactly is this Quinn person?” Jeanette asked in frosty tones.
Delilah tried to make her voice casual. “Oh … he’s just a friend. Someone we met here.” She waved a hand airily as though her mother might hear the gesture and conclude there was nothing to dissect.
“A man.”
“Well, yes, he is a man, Mom.”
“Delilah! You’re seeing someone so soon? And you’re bringing him into those boys’ lives? I never imagined you’d—”
“It’s nothing, Mom.”
“It certainly isn’t nothing, Delilah, if you’re bri
nging a new boyfriend around your sons so soon after what they’ve been through. And how are you supposed to work on things with Mitch if you’re—”
“I’m not! I’m not going to work on things with Mitch!” She said it in the kind of whisper-yell you used when you wanted to be emphatic but you didn’t want the whole world to hear your business. “Mitch left me for another woman and moved to Paris! He was with her since long before that. Why shouldn’t I have someone? Why shouldn’t I have a little fun? A little pleasure?”
“Your pleasure has to come second to your children’s well-being.” Delilah could practically see her mother’s expression, pained and stern.
“I know that. I’ve always known that. It’s Mitch who didn’t.” She took a breath and composed herself. “Now, I really do have to go. Bye, Mom. I love you.” And she hung up before her mother could say another word.
It didn’t take long for Jeanette to report the news to Roxanne, who called Delilah to follow up.
“It sounds like you and the hottie are having fun,” Roxanne said.
By now, Delilah and the boys were back in the house, the kids in front of a TV show and Delilah in the kitchen putting together their afternoon snack.
“Mom told you.”
“Of course she did. She’s outraged. She wanted me to call and talk you down.”
“Is that what you’re doing?” Delilah asked. “Calling to talk me down?”
“Oh, hell no. I’m calling to say good for you. Seriously, Dee. I hope you milk this fling for all it’s worth. You deserve it.”
“Well … thanks.”
Except, something about that made Delilah uneasy. Not something—one specific thing. The word fling.
Was that what this was? Was it just a fling?
The word didn’t seem to fit, somehow. But then again, neither did the word relationship.
But why did she have to define it, especially when it was so new? So fresh?