by Vi Keeland
Ford’s voice stopped me as my hand hit the handle to the sliding glass door. “Wait,” he called. “What are you up to now?”
“Umm. I…uh…I was going to go for a walk,” I lied. “It took me almost four hours to get here with all the traffic. Figured my legs could use a good stretch.”
“Mind if I join you? I need to stop staring at this computer.”
“Uh. sure. That’d be great. I’m going to go change. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Changing turned into fixing my hair, brushing my teeth, and touching up my makeup. I was really disappointed in myself for putting in so much extra effort.
When I walked back out to the deck, I found Ford waiting at the bottom of my stairs with two glasses of wine. I had two beers in my hand. “Guess we both had the same idea.”
“Great minds. Do you want to leave one here or double-fist it for our walk?”
“Why don’t we sit for a few minutes before we start walking? I’m not sure I’m capable of maneuvering through the sand without spilling both.”
“Good idea.” We sat side by side on the third stair from the sand. I chose to drink the wine first, while Ford picked up the beer.
“Did you bring beer because you know I like it?” he asked.
I smiled. “Did you bring the wine because it’s what I drink?”
He smiled back. “Only because we don’t have any olive juice in the house. I’ll have to remedy that.”
Our legs brushed against each other, and arousal shot through me. Seriously, it was just a leg. What the hell was wrong with me? My libido had been dead for so long, and it had to pick a totally inopportune time to wake up? Nothing like a smidge of alcohol to put it back to sleep. I swallowed half my glass of wine and tried to be myself.
“You looked like you were stressed sitting in front of your laptop. Everything okay at work?”
“Nah, it wasn’t work. I was weeding through the mountains of women on Match.com who messaged me.”
The burn of jealousy crept through my body, making me feel warm.
“Oh. That’s nice.”
Ford bumped my shoulder with his. “Kidding. I haven’t been on Match since we started talking. You?”
I shook my head. Not wanting to analyze why either of us hadn’t gone back to the dating site, I moved our conversation along. “I must’ve misread concentration for stress.”
He shook his head. “You actually didn’t. I have some big decisions to make at work that are weighing on my mind.”
“You said you work in real estate, right?”
“Yeah. My family owned a commercial storage business, and my dad and I had started to move into temporary office space, too. The commercial storage side of things doesn’t do as well anymore, so we’d begun transitioning the buildings we own into something new. The storage facilities convert into pretty nice temporary office suites—high ceilings, exposed ductwork, and brick. We converted one before the accident, and it’s done really well. People love the idea of having a place to go work with everything available to them—receptionist, printers, Wi-Fi, furniture—but without the long-term lease commitment and expense. Most people only work from an office a few days a week, so sharing the cost and space with others works out.”
“Wow. That’s amazing. Were you a business major in college?”
He shook his head. “Architecture.”
“Well, I guess converting the space goes with that, then, right?”
“Yeah. My dad was the business side of things. I just saw the potential in the old buildings. It was something we were doing together.” He pushed around the sand with his foot and grew quiet.
“It must’ve been a lot to step into everything after your parents…”
He nodded. “My parents were smart about contingency planning, though. They had a trust in place so if anything happened to them, the stock in their corporation went to me and my sister, but their CFO became the president until I graduated college and turned twenty-one. Once I did those things, I had the option of becoming co-president, which I did. Then at twenty-five, I became the sole president.”
“So you’ve had help the last few years, but now you’re on your own?”
“Technically, yeah. But Devin, the CFO, is still there for me whenever I need him. We have a few more commercial storage buildings with leases coming due, so I’m struggling to decide whether to convert them into more temporary office space. Now would be the time. That’s the stress you read on my face while I was on my laptop.”
“I take it that’s not an easy decision.”
“It is and it isn’t. The storage business still makes a profit, but the office space is a much higher return on investment. One of the buildings that could be available to convert soon is the first one my parents bought twenty-five years ago. It was special to them, so it feels wrong to change things… They worked so hard to build what they had.”
I might not be a business mogul, but I knew adding emotion to any business decision made it so much harder. “Let me ask you something. If your father was still here, and he saw the numbers for the office space compared to the storage business, what would he do?”
Ford smiled. “He’d convert them all except for the building they started with. He’d keep that one for my mom.”
I shrugged. “Well, maybe that’s your answer, then.”
He thought about that for a minute and then nodded. “You know what? You’re right. I’m looking at it wrong. I should be honoring my father by doing what I think he would do, not by freezing his business in time.”
I bumped my shoulder to his playfully. “Boy, that was easy. Your job seems like a piece of cake.”
Ford chuckled and finished off his beer. He stood and offered his hand to help me up. “Come on. It’s your turn. We’ll solve all your problems during our walk.”
“What if I don’t have any problems?”
He smirked. “Oh, but you do. Your head and your body are at odds on a certain issue. That’s one we should discuss in detail.”
***
“So when do you get your results from the test you took?”
Ford and I had walked about forty-five minutes down the beach. Behind us, the sun was beginning to go down, and the sky lit up with gorgeous shades of orange and purple, so we turned around to head back and enjoy the view.
“Seventeen days.”
“That’s not too bad.”
“No, not at all. I did my student teaching with an older woman who said it took two months to get her results years ago.”
Ford smirked.
“What?”
“I was just thinking how you’re going to be that teacher—the one who gives all the high school boys wet dreams.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Ugh. Don’t even say that.”
“What? I totally would have been fantasizing about you if you were my teacher.” Ford chuckled. “In all seriousness, I think it’s cool you went back to school and got your degree—decided to become a teacher. Did you always want to be one?”
“Yeah. Ever since third grade, when I had Mrs. Moynihan. I loved to read, but I had a weird obsession with outer space at the time. Every Monday and Friday, we would go to the school library and pick out books to read during quiet time. All the other kids picked out books like Harold and the Purple Crayon, while I wanted to read books about Pluto and space asteroids. Some of my classmates had begun to make fun of me—calling me Valentina from Venus, so I switched to books similar to the other kids’, even though I didn’t really enjoy them. Anyway, Mrs. Moynihan noticed, and one day at the library she handed me a book she said she thought I’d like. The outside was a regular, popular kids book, but inside was a book about the solar system. She’d taken the paper cover off a book and put it on what I really wanted to read so I could read in private.”
“That’s awesome.”
“I kept changing out the covers until two weeks after we got back from Christmas break, when we had a guest speaker—a retired astronaut. He brought an old space
suit, and all the kids went crazy. The next week, they all started taking out books about astronauts on library days. Mrs. Moynihan was always special to me. I kept in touch with her for years. When I was in tenth grade, she died, and my mom took me to her wake. We walked over to Mr. Moynihan to give condolences, and he recognized my name. Turned out, the reason he remembered my name was because his wife had spent an entire Christmas break hand-writing letters to a hundred-and-fifty astronauts begging them to come speak at the school because she had a student who needed the others to see how cool space could be.”
“Wow. A hundred-and-fifty, hand-written letters. That’s dedication.”
I nodded. “What did you want to be when you were little?”
Ford grinned. “Well, it changed as I got older, but in kindergarten my teacher had us draw pictures of what we wanted to be. I drew Santa Claus.”
“You wanted to be Santa?”
“Don’t laugh. It’s a damn good job. You only work one night a year, you get to fly around on a sleigh pulled by kick-ass reindeers, and everyone leaves you cookies on the table when you stop by.”
“Uhhh, Santa works all year making the toys.”
He shrugged. “I thought the elves did all that.”
“What happened after you found out Santa wasn’t real?”
Ford abruptly stopped in place, and his eyes bulged. “Santa’s not real?”
The two of us cracked up. When we started walking again, Ford said, “You’re going to think I’m full of shit, but after I realized the Santa thing wasn’t going to work out, I wanted to be an astronaut.”
I shoved his arm. “You’re just saying that because I told you I was obsessed with space.”
Ford drew an X across his chest. “I swear. But it does make sense why our connection is so strong. We’re both space nerds at heart.”
He was teasing me, but he wasn’t wrong. Our connection was strong. Even before I knew his personality came attached to a gorgeous face and ridiculously hard body, I’d felt it, too. Ford made me laugh and feel good about myself.
I tamped down that thought and steered our conversation to safer territory. “So how did you wind up going to school for architecture if you were such a space nerd?”
“I was actually a dual applied science and architecture major in college the first two years. But dropped the science in my third.”
“What made you focus on architecture?”
He looked over at me, and it seemed like he was debating how to answer. Finally, he shrugged. “Life. I’d been living away in Boston at college, and after the accident, I wanted Annabella to stay in New York and finish school with her friends. We have a pretty small family—my dad was an only child, and my mom has one sister. My Aunt Margaret lives in Ohio and offered to take us both in, but we’d just lost our parents and experienced enough change to last a lifetime. So I moved back home, and Bella and I stayed together in our parents’ apartment while I finished my degree and started to work full time in the company. The change to one major just seemed more practical. I didn’t have as much free time to do the work for two difficult majors.”
Oh. Wow. I hadn’t thought about the logistics of them losing their parents—what had happened immediately after his parents died. Naturally, I’d assumed it had been a life-changing event—to lose both young parents unexpectedly in one day. But Ford had sacrificed so much for his little sister. He’d become a parent with a teenage daughter and an inherited business to run overnight. The choices he’d made were noble and mature.
I reached out and touched his arm. “Not every person would have given up what you did.”
“Trust me, I had my moments where I didn’t do the right thing. A few years back, my aunt had to step in and set me straight. One morning I walked into the office and sat at my desk, and it hit me that I was a forty-five-year-old man at twenty-two. I had a sixteen-year-old kid, lived in my parents’ house, and was even sitting in my father’s chair. I felt like my own life had disappeared, and I’d literally become my father.”
I understood some of how he felt. Getting pregnant at seventeen meant the abrupt end of my youth in a lot of ways. “I get it. I vividly remember being home one Friday night when I was twenty. My husband was sleeping on the couch at eight thirty, and I had a two-year-old sleeping in the other room. I flicked on the TV, put my feet up, and started to watch Family Feud. My mom used to watch it all the time, but with a different guy hosting the show. I looked down, realized I was in my pajamas at eight thirty on a Friday night, and it hit me that I’d turned into my mother.”
Ford looked over at me. “What did you do?”
“I got dressed in clothes that no longer felt right to wear, put the baby monitor next to my sleeping husband, and went out with Eve.”
I smiled, remembering that weekend. I’d stayed out for almost two days, but in the end, Eve had to practically carry me home because I was drunk and crying so hard because I missed my son.
“I partied for two days, then was in bed sick for three. But I definitely wondered if I’d made the right choices a few times.”
“Yeah, I did something similar—except my rampage lasted almost a year. I’d started to screw up at work, was bringing women home while I lived with my little sister, and I blew through a boatload of money from my parents’ life insurance. My aunt finally called me on it. She told me to get over myself, because while being my father might not be what I’d planned, I should be honored to stand in the man’s shoes at all.” He nodded. “She was right. Plus, Mrs. Peabody called me about fifteen minutes after my aunt finished reading me the riot act and told me to get my head out of my ass.”
My brows drew together. “Mrs. Peabody? The woman you mentioned that has premonitions or something, right?”
“Yeah. She sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night with these strong feelings. She’s had them since she was a kid. But that day, she called me right after my aunt left and said she had a feeling something bad was going to happen to me.” He chuckled. “Then she told me to sober up and pull my head out of my ass. Right before she hung up on me.”
“Who is she?”
“It’s a long story, but I dialed her by accident a few years ago. At least, I think it’s an accident. She doesn’t. One night, back when I was in a shitty place, I’d been attempting to drunk dial some woman I’d met. I dialed wrong and reached Mrs. Peabody. We started talking, and I rambled on and told her my life story. She said she’d been up late, expecting a call because of a dream she had that a stranger needed her help.”
“Oh, wow. That’s crazy.”
He laughed. “Yeah. That’s the tip of the iceberg with Mrs. Peabody. She’s seventy-six and lives in an assisted living facility out in Wyoming.”
“And you kept in touch with this woman after that?”
“I still keep in touch with her. It’s been about three years now. The day after my drunk dial, I woke up and vaguely remembered talking to someone. So I looked through my missed calls and dialed the last number. Mrs. Peabody answered, and we got to talking again. She had just left the podiatrist’s office and found out she needed to have her toe amputated the next day. She’s diabetic and has circulation issues. Anyway, we talked for a while, and I wasn’t sure if she was crazy, clairvoyant, lonely, or just eccentric. I’m still not entirely sure. But she sounded nervous about the surgery, and it was obvious she just needed to talk. So we spent a few hours on the phone again, only that time, she did most of the talking. I figured I owed her one. After that, I reverse-searched her telephone number and got an address to send some flowers for her recovery.” He shrugged. “We’ve been talking a few times a month ever since.”
“That’s a little bizarre, yet also oddly sweet. Though I do believe some people have special gifts like that.”
“Oh yeah?” He smirked. “Then I feel inclined to tell you Mrs. Peabody called this morning and said if my neighbor didn’t sleep with me, something bad might happen to me.”
I squinted. “You’re so full
of shit.”
He chuckled. “Okay…but if I break a leg tomorrow, that’s all on you.”
We stopped as we reached my house and stood at the bottom of the stairs. We had to have walked five or six miles, yet I could have kept walking for another five talking to him—it was just so easy to do.
“For what it’s worth, you should be proud of how you’ve handled things since the accident—especially your sister. You might not have done everything perfectly, but she seems like a regular nineteen-year-old who’s pretty well adjusted.”
“Yeah. I had a lot of help, and it wasn’t always pretty. But I wound up in the right place, even taking a different path than I’d expected.”
Modesty was another quality I found attractive in a man. Why couldn’t Ford be an egomaniac?
“Even though I’m divorced and starting over at thirty-seven, I wouldn’t change a thing either.”
“You see? We’re not as different as you think.”
Maybe not in values, but an entire generation gap stretched between us. “Oh yeah? Who’s your favorite musician?”
“I listen to everything. But I’m into Jack Johnson right now.”
“Never heard of him. My favorite band growing up was The Backstreet Boys.”
Ford shrugged. “That’s not a difference. That’s an opportunity to share new things with each other.”
“I don’t have an Instagram or SnapFace.”
“You mean SnapChat.”
“Whatever. I just proved my own point. I don’t even know what social media is called anymore. Are you on Facebook?”
“No.”
“Let me guess, because Facebook is for old people?”
“No. Because we don’t know my mother’s passwords, and when I had an account, it kept sending me reminders of stuff with her tagged after the accident.”
Shit. Now I felt awful. “Sorry. I didn’t realize.”
It had grown dark, and Ford and I lingered at the bottom of my stairs for a while longer, but eventually it felt like I needed to call it a night. I thanked him for joining me on my walk.
“Hey!” he yelled up as I reached the top step. “Have dinner with me tonight?”