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“For us, you mean?”
He nodded.
“Yes. I’ll be having dinner with them when they come to pick her up. But after—unless you want to come along.”
Once more he shook his head. “Have fun. Gotta go.”
And just like that, he was gone.
Friday night with Jamii meant non-stop chatter and homemade tacos, baking cookies and watching DVDs.
Jamii wanted to invite Christo.
Natalie blanched, imagining what he would say to that. “You don’t even know him!”
“Of course I know him,” Jamii said huffily. “He’s my friend. Me an’ him an’ Grandma go bowling together.”
“Bowling?” Natalie simply stared at her niece.
“Uh-huh. So I do know him. Sometimes I eat breakfast with him when Grandma fixes it. An’ he has good cereal. Cap’n Crackle.”
Natalie hadn’t noticed that when she’d been in his kitchen yesterday. But she began to realize that Jamii really did know him. Still he hadn’t accepted her invitation this morning.
Which meant what? It wasn’t too hard to figure out when she let herself think it through. Christo was fine relating to Jamii when she was with Laura. He liked Jamii and the relationship then, but not when it involved Natalie. Natalie, as the woman he took to bed, belonged in a different box in his life.
So she didn’t expect to see him until Sunday night.
She and Jamii went to the beach Saturday afternoon. They spread their towels out at the top of the rise of the sand where it was still damp from the highest tides, but where at this time of day the water never reached. Unlike the old Jamii who used to make a beeline for the water, this one lay face down on the sand and began to dig a tunnel and make a castle. Natalie left her to it, picking up a book and trying to read.
The stream of chatter didn’t let her get much read. But she kept her eyes on the pages, so she was unprepared for Jamii’s sudden yelp. “Christo!”
“Hey, Jamii. What’s up?”
Natalie’s gaze jerked up to see the man himself standing there with his surfboard under his arm, dripping his way up from the water.
“Wanna build a castle with me? I’m making a whole city with lotsa tunnels, but I need a longer arm.” She looked from his face to his arm hopefully.
“Jamii—” Natalie began to warn her off, not wanting her niece disappointed.
But to her surprise, Christo, after only a brief moment’s hesitation, stuck his board in the sand and dropped down beside her.
“I could do that.” He glanced at Natalie, but she couldn’t read anything in his expression besides simple friendliness. “Hey.”
“Er, hey.” What else, after all, was there to say?
It was the most bizarre afternoon Natalie could ever remember.
On the surface it looked perfectly straightforward and normal. Anyone seeing them would just think that they were a family—two parents and a child, enjoying a Saturday afternoon on the beach together.
Of course, they were anything but.
In fact, she kept expecting Christo to finish whatever bit he was doing, then get up and leave. He didn’t do “entanglements,” after all.
But he stayed on. He was totally engaged in working with Jamii, talking to her, listening to her, patiently showing her how to create stability in the walls they were making.
“You could help,” he said to Natalie once.
So she did. Some other children came by and wanted to help, too. Christo welcomed them all. He was like the Pied Piper to all of them. Jamii wasn’t the only one who would have followed him anywhere by the time they had finished.
Even Natalie went down to the water with him to wash off the sand, then came back and dropped down on the towel. “Don’t you want to rinse off?” she asked her niece.
Jamii just shook her head no.
“Suit yourself,” Natalie said, resigned to getting Jamii to take a shower when they got back to the apartment. She tried to focus once more on her book when a shadow fell across her lap.
Christo, still sand-covered, had come back and stood frowning down at them. He flicked Natalie a puzzled look, then turned his attention to Jamii.
“What’s up?”
“Nothin’.” She didn’t look at him, then, just started to dig again.
Once more Natalie thought he’d leave. Instead he dropped down to sit beside the little girl. “Why aren’t you coming?”
Jamii shrugged. “Don’t want to.” She turned her face away.
Christo frowned, then looked to Natalie for the answer. “What’s going on?” he asked her.
Natalie hesitated, then decided that Jamii’s fear wasn’t likely to go away until someone actually acknowledged it. So she told him what Dan had told her last night.
“Jamii went out in a boat with some friends. No one checked that her life preserver was on right. They hit some rough water and she tumbled out of the boat. The preserver came off and she nearly drowned.”
“I did not!” Jamii protested, mortified.
But Christo’s jaw tightened. “You could have,” he said fiercely. But then the look on his face gentled. “That’s rough.”
“I like it okay,” Jamii protested stubbornly. “I just don’t wanta go in right now.”
“I don’t blame you.”
He sat for a few more minutes in silence, his knees pulled up, his arms wrapped around them, as he sat and stared out at the water. The silence in him, the containment that accepted and absorbed the feelings of the other person reminded Natalie of how he’d been with the children in his office.
He’d had infinite patience with them. Now he showed the same patience to Jamii.
Natalie watched him warily, wondering what he would do.
He didn’t talk now. Not for a long time. He never looked at Jamii either. Or at her, for that matter. Then, quietly, he began to speak.
“When I was your age,” he said quietly, “I spent summers in Brazil at my grandmother’s. It was winter there, but it was still warm, and some of my friends and I built a tree house. It was way up high and it swayed in the wind, and we thought it was the coolest place in the world. We rigged a pulley between two trees and did the Tarzan thing swooping between them.” His mouth tipped at the corner and, from his expression, Natalie could see that he was remembering the time with fondness.
She thought Jamii, her attention caught now, her gaze fastened on him, could see that, too.
“It was great. I loved it,” Christo went on. “But once when I was climbing up with some supplies, my hand slipped.”
Jamii sucked in a sharp breath. “What happened?”
“I fell.”
“A long way?”
He nodded. “Pretty far.”
“Were you…okay?”
“I broke my arm,” Christo said matter-of-factly. “Cracked a couple of ribs.” He shrugged lightly. “Nothing too terrible. They all healed in a couple of months. But I couldn’t go up in the tree again while I was healing. And then, when I had healed, I wouldn’t go.” He picked up a handful of sand and let it drizzle slowly out through his fingers. “I thought I’d fall.”
“But if you hung on—” Jamii protested.
“I know. But I didn’t think about that. I just kept remembering the falling. And I wouldn’t go up again, even though my friends did and I could see all the fun they were still having. They tried to get me to come up, but I said I wasn’t interested anymore.”
Jamii’s gaze narrowed, but she didn’t say anything.
“I wasn’t about to tell them I was scared.” His voice was low enough that Natalie had to strain to hear. She shouldn’t be eavesdropping, but she couldn’t help it. Her fingers tightened on her book and she kept her gaze on the words, but she wasn’t seeing them. She was totally focused on Christo.
So was Jamii, raptly. She chewed her lip. “And you never went up there again?”
“I wouldn’t have,” he admitted. “But one day when my friends weren’t there my grandmother said, ‘I’d like to see that tree house of yours.’ I told her no. I said, ‘It’s not that great.’ I said, ‘It’s too high up for you to get to.’ And she said, ‘It’s pretty high, but I want to see it. I think I can do it if you’ll go with me.’”
Jamii’s mouth was open. She stared at him. “Did you?”
“No. But then she went over to it and started up the ladder by herself. So—” he took a breath “—I went after her. I had to make sure she didn’t get hurt.” His mouth twisted in a small self-deprecating grin. “And I discovered I could do it again after all.”
“Which is what she wanted you to discover,” Jamii, no fool, finished for him.
Christo nodded. He sat back on the sand, bracing his body with his hands. “Yep. And she was right. I could. Just like you can go in the water again.” He looked at her now. “You know that, right?”
In the silence between them, Natalie heard a wave break, then another. Slowly, lips pursed, Jamii nodded. She hunched over her own upraised knees and wrapped her arms around them, too.
“Just like I knew it,” Christo agreed. “But sometimes it helps to have someone to go with who understands.”
“Like your grandma,” Jamii said in a small voice.
“Uh-huh. So—” he slanted her a glance “—if you wanted to try sticking a toe or two in, I’d go with you.”
Natalie held her breath.
Jamii squeezed her arms around her legs. She chewed her lip. She didn’t speak.
Neither did Christo. He just sat there, staring out at the horizon, completely unhurried, as if he had nothing better to do than wait for an eight-year-old girl to make up her mind.
“Could I ride on your shoulders?” Jamii asked him at last.
Christo flicked her a quick glance. “Down to the water? Sure, if you want.”
“And you wouldn’t drop me?”
“Never.”
“We wouldn’t go out far, right?”
“Just as far as you want.”
“And you’ll bring me back when I want?”
“I will.”
“Even if I change my mind?”
“Even if you change your mind.” He didn’t move. Only waited.
So did Jamii. Then, slowly she unfolded herself and stood up, then squared her small shoulders. She looked at the ocean, then back at Christo and gave one quick nod of her head. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
He stood up and held out a hand to Jamii, then swung her onto his shoulders. Then he looked back over his shoulder at Natalie and held out a hand to her as well.
She thought the hand was just to pull her to her feet. But when she was upright, he didn’t let go.
He didn’t do anything else. Didn’t brush his hand across her arm. Didn’t come close enough to touch her cheek with his lips. It was very circumspect.
And intimate. Because it was not simply sex. It was a connection outside of bed. The two of them together were a couple, walking hand in hand down the beach toward the pier.
While they walked through shin-high waves that broke and foamed around their ankles, he talked more to her than to Jamii. In fact, Jamii might as well not have been there at all.
The conversation was casual—about the weather, about the water. About ideas for more woodworking projects he had. It was for Jamii—Natalie knew that. And yet, as their fingers were laced and his thumb rubbed against the side of her hand, and neither of them glanced up at Jamii on his shoulders, Natalie couldn’t help believing it was about something else.
A wave surged against their knees, rocking them a little, and Natalie heard Jamii suck in a sharp breath. Christo kept right on talking without missing a beat. His fingers tightened on hers, but he never faltered, never misstepped.
Only when they reached the pier and turned to walk back the way they’d come did he actually address a comment to Jamii.
“Want to go back to your towel now or do you want to get your feet wet?”
There was a long pause—long enough for Natalie to imagine Jamii was going to opt for going back to the towel. She might have done so, at Jamii’s age.
But Jamii, bless her heart, was made of sterner stuff. And had Christo in her corner. “I guess I could stick my toes in.”
Christo smiled. He turned his head to look up at her. “Do you want me to put you down here or do you want to walk in?”
“Here. With you.”
He let go of Natalie’s hand to reach up and lift the little girl off his shoulders, but he didn’t set her on the ground. Instead he walked back to where the water was just beginning to lap against the shore, and he sat down on the sand, with Jamii on his lap. Natalie sat down beside them.
