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The wind whipped as I crossed the dunes with my mug of coffee, one bagel fuller, and my hair up in a bun. Lucas clocked me almost immediately.
“Ava!” Lucas shouted, dropping his plastic mold and his pail and booking it across the soft sand. Adrian stayed put, in a black woolen jacket and his pajama bottoms from last night. “We found ten shark teeth! Come see. Dad has them.”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me along with him. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” I laughed, trying to keep my coffee somewhat stable so I didn’t lose most of it.
“Dad thinks one of them is a great white tooth, but I don’t think so,” Lucas said.
“Really?”
Adrian sat up from his leaned-back position, wiping his sand-covered hand on his pajama bottoms before fishing through his pockets. “It’s definitely a great white.”
He pulled a tooth the size of my palm out from his pocket and held it out in my direction.
“Ava will know for sure,” Lucas chirped, and God, he was so cute. Just because I knew what an osprey looked like didn’t mean I had any clue about sharks or shark teeth, but he certainly thought I was some sort of expert.
I passed Adrian my mug of coffee in exchange for the tooth, sitting down beside him in the sand. I turned it over in my palm, inspecting it,uhming andahhing. Plucking Adrian’s reading glasses from the neck of his shirt, I put them on, pretending as if they helped me see it better when, in reality, the just turned everything into a blur.
“I can confidently say, without a single doubt, and in my expert opinion…” I tried to keep a straight face as I said it, even as Lucas leaned in further and further with an adorable intrigue that made his face look almost identical to Adrian’s. “…that I have no idea what this is, and you should trust your father.”
Adrian’s head tipped back as he laughed, the morning sun catching him at every good angle and casting shadows on the hollows under his cheekbones and jawline. It was almost infuriating how good he looked first thing in the morning, and I couldn’t help but watch him, watch the way his chest rose and fell with every little sharp intake of breath between chuckles.
Until Lucas came up behind him and practically put Adrian in a headlock with his attempt at a wrestling hug. “Just google it, Dad,” he bleated.
Adrian tipped forward as he held his son’s forearms in place beneath his chin, lifting his feet off the ground behind him and taking his weight. “Nah, I think we should trust Ava’s gut on this one.”
————
Lucas raced ahead of us as we crossed the top of the dune, his short legs carrying him faster than I could even imagine in a beeline for the massive house. It left us alone for the second time, and as much as I felt the urge to cave to what I’d wanted last night, it was a little easier to fight it in the light of day when Lucas could turn around or watch us through the massive bay windows.
Adrian walked quietly to my left, watching as his son slid easily into the house. Even with the stress of his life, even with the current situation, he looked so…calm. It was as if being out here meant he could breathe easily for a little while.
“Can I ask you a question?” I asked, tucking a loose strand of hair back into my bun to keep it from blowing in my face. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
His head turned to me, but his eyes lingered on the door of the house until it shut. “Of course.”
“It’s fairly obvious that the reason you’re looking for a match is because you want a second parent for Lucas,” I said. In the sliding glass door of the kitchen, Lucas cupped his hands and smushed his face up against the glass, watching us for a second before taking off somewhere else. “But wouldn’t it be better for you to find someone that you want to love as well? I don’t want to overstep a boundary here, and believe me, I understand that it’s not at all my place to tell you what’s good for your son…but wouldn’t it be better for him to see a functional, happy relationship?”
Adrian’s mouth formed a hard line and his feet halted, putting me a few paces ahead of him before I could react and bring myself to stop.
“I’m sorry?—”
“I know that would be better for him, Ava,” he sighed. Behind him, a puffy, thick cloud slid along the blue of the sky, covering the sun. He took a deep breath in, letting it out slowly through his nose. “If I’m being completely honest, I would prefer that he saw a loving relationship. I’m not sure he even knows what one looks like at this point. Jan died when he was six, and we were on the rocks for a couple of years before that.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. He hadn’t mentioned her to me up until now, and although I knew the small summary Dad had told me over dinner last month, I wasn’t sure if I should make that known or keep my mouth shut. Iwantedto offer my sympathies. But there wasn’t a single part of me that knew if he would accept that with open arms.
His eyes met mine in a flash of blue as the wind battered us, sending his untamed hair flying. “I shouldn’t, but can I vent to you for a moment?”
I blinked. I wasn’t expecting that. “Of course.”
“I don’t know how much David told you or if he told you anything,” he started, taking the smallest step toward me and bridging the gap. I still couldn’t reach him if I wanted to, but it felt like an inkling of trust that neither of us should be giving each other. “But what happened with Jan…it wrecked me. I was blindsided by it completely. There were signs, of course, that she was cheating I mean, but I was so wrapped up in my work and Lucas that I didn’t think anything of it. She had morerehearsalsthan normal, or so I was made to believe. But she was with someone else the whole time.”
Rehearsals.Oh, fuck. Little tidbits of memories from when I was a teenager filtered in—going to a musical back in Boston with my parents and Adrian, getting to go on the stage after it was finished. That was why he had said no Broadway castmembers.And I’d fought with him to try to get a reason out of him.
“I…I’m so sorry, I completely forgot she was an actress?—”
A breathy, half-hearted chuckle left his lips. “It’s okay. You were, what, fifteen? I doubt you were even paying much attention to us back then. You had your own things going on.”
I swallowed. I couldn’t tell him how wrong he was, not if my fucking life depended on it. I’d take that stupid teenage obsession to my grave.
