Ash clocks me and Leo, and tears the earphones out to bounce up.
“Where have you been? Did you really sleep all that time?” he shrieks, clutching at my knees. Leo lingers at my side, clutching a glass of water; he eyes her with something between suspicion and curiosity. “You said I wasn’t allowed to sleep with a dolly. How come you are?”
Leo nearly spits out her water. Ethan raises his eyebrows, purses his lips, and swiftly looks away.
I’m about to tell Ash to mind his mouth—he’s being deliberately rude—but then I remember who I’d sound like. Jesus. A rock turns in my belly, heavy and rough.
Leo folds a table down from the back of a chair, and places her water on it. Then she kneels down so she’s eye level with Ash. “I’m not a dolly. But we can play if you want.”
He bobs up and down on his bare feet. “Uh…I don’t really play with girls.”
“Ash.” Ethan calls from his seat. “Be nice, please.”
He peers at Leo from under his mop of dark blond hair. “You know how to play Release the Kraken?”
She cocks her head. “I don’t think we had that one in England.”
“Ethan can show you!” Excitement bubbles from that invisible place all kids have—the place that shuts down the moment you ask them to brush their teeth, but goes batshit at anything Disney. “Ethan! Show the girl the Kraken!”
I walk around and sit down in the empty seat between Gwen and Ethan. “Tell me Kraken isn’t a metaphor.”
“No metaphor.” Ethan chews on his lip, blushing awkwardly. “It’s a noisy game though. We’ll go play in my cabin.”
Ash grabs Leo’s hand to tug her along, and she treats me to another of her smiles. This one is calmer. Softer. I know she’s longed for an introduction to Ash; she’s probably been planning baking sessions and story book choices for months.
Honestly? I’ve never seriously considered introducing Ash and Leo. Our lives work just fine the way they are…or were. Ash is a little too desperate for a maternal figure in his life, and since Leo and I are hardly about to go prancing down an aisle any time soon, letting him get attached is a bad idea. In fact letting him get attached to a woman is a bad idea, full stop. Show me a man who isn’t somehow fucked up by his mother, and I’ll show you a politically correct little hipster boy who retweets Kanye West for irony and has considered being vegan for at least nineteen seconds. And no, you don’t want to date that guy, because when you get down to it, he thinks he’s cleverer than you.
Now I find myself in circumstances where it’s unavoidable to keep Ash and Leo apart. As if things weren’t complicated enough.
“Behave yourselves,” I call after them. Then I turn to Gwen. “Get some rest. You look tired.”
“I’m fine,” she mutters.
“I’ll rephrase: you look like someone pissed in your eye.”
“You’re known for your tact, aren’t you?”
I shrug. “I tell it like it is. Keeps things simple.”
A beat.
Somewhere behind us, blotted down by walls, Ethan bellows, “Release the Kraken!” A barrage of shrieks ensues.
“Maybe now isn’t the best time to sleep after all,” I observe.
She hunches down in her chair, suddenly looking very small. “Maybe.”
I guess the last thing you want to hear is the sound of a happy kid playing when you’ve just broken up with the love of your life. On the phone tap, the guy sounded like an over-entitled douche anyway, but hey, Gwen’s halfway through her thirties and needs to get a move on if she wants to spawn. Can you hear that noise, grasshoppers? That sucking screech of a creak? It’s the sound of Cleopatrassistant’s ovaries shriveling just a little more with every second in my employ. And if you think it’s loud for us, imagine how loud it is for her.