Page 84 of Into the Mountains
“What is?”
“The way that kid just latched onto my heart so quickly. I couldn’t imagine my life without Ethan.”
“He latches on to anyone very fast. Like a leech.”
My laugh isn’t pretty, but it is one nonetheless. “Did you just compare your kid to a leech?”
“In a loving way though,” he defends.
The restaurant he stops in front of is fancier than I expected. The lighting is soft and even though the building looks a bit older, its style is more refined, some people walking out in dresses, others walking in wearing slacks or flowy pants.
“No paintball?” I ask, referring to the last date we had that ended in the worst way possible.
He winces as if feeling the end of that date all over again. “I considered it, but we don’t have the best track record.”
“You were just afraid of losing,” I taunt. His eyebrows raise, surprised at my challenge.
Ushering me through the open front door, his hand comes to the small of my back and the warmth of it bleeds through the fabric of my dress. The hostess practically gleams as Eli walks up to her stand and gives her the name for our reservation.
“Wow, your sister is gorgeous,” she says and I’m so taken back by the fishing for information, I barely have time to register what Eli says next.
“My wife is extremely beautiful, thank you for noticing. I’m sure it made her night, even though I’m the one who she was waiting on when we were trying to leave the house. Just couldn’t get my hair to sit quite right.” He wraps an arm around my waist and makes the space between us disappear. “Isn’t that right, honey?”
I’m still so hung up on the fact that he called me his wife, all I can seem to do is stare up at him in complete awe. Or did I imagine it?
“Well, your wife has amazing taste.” No, I didn’t imagine it. I also don’t think I made up the disappointed tone the hostess now had when she spoke. She recovered quickly though and placed our menus at the table and walked back to her place.
When we are settled in our booth near the back of the restaurant, my brain seems to have finally caught up. “Wife?” I half-whisper.
He just shrugs as if calling me his wife was the most natural thing in the world. “It was the easiest way to get out of her trying to slip me her number and continue to disrespect you throughout the night.”
““No, thank you” wouldn’t have sufficed?”
He shakes his head. “Not with women like her. She saw what she wanted and didn’t care that my girlfriend was there to stop her because she wasn’t going to let the fact that I was unavailable change anything. To her, girlfriend still means available.”
“So, I’m your girlfriend now?”
Eli starts to fumble over his words and it’s actually endearing to see when he’s usually so composed. He’s the one who called me his wife a minute ago and here he is stumbling over calling me his girlfriend.
“I figured we’d at least get to that after dessert.”
“Your dessert or mine?” I tease. If the lighting weren’t soft, I would be able to see the tips of his ears go slightly red like they did when we were in the clinic office. The bedroom talk discovery is something neither of us balked at and have embraced. It’s fun to tease him outside of the bedroom and see just how far I can go with it.
“Well, I’ll be freaking damned,” a voice I’d know from just about anywhere, mostly on Tuesday nights, comes closer to our table, closely followed by another figure behind him.
“Frank?” Eli asks, even though we both know it’s obviously Frank.
“In the flesh.” Eli stands to shake his hand and Frank pulls him in for a bro hug which is weird because I don’t ever remember Frank being the affectionate type. When he pulls back, he gestures to the woman off to the side. She has short black hair that’s pulled back into a low bun with streaks of gray taking over. Her skin is tan and slightly wrinkled with aging spots along her forearms and I assume she’s around the same age as Frank.
“This is Bea,” he says proudly like a mother hen showing off her chicks. Eli reaches his hand out to her and she takes it, even though she seems hesitant at first. Whether she’s nervous to meet new people or not, but the looks of the radiant smile that hasn’t left her face, she is completely smitten with Frank. Which isn’t something I think I ever would have believed if I didn’t see it for myself.
“I’m Charlotte.” I stand offering my hand.
“Beatrice,” she says.
I furrow my brows and she catches on. “The old man over here always called me Bea to get under my skin back in the day and I guess old habits never die.” She shrugs. “Plus, I kind of like it now.”
Eli nudges me and I respond by rolling my eyes at him like a child annoyed with their overbearing mother.
