The next day after the conference sessions – we had a half day of meetings today – I hesitantly stood in front of Gwen’s door with an offering of flowers, working up the courage to knock, when the door opened abruptly.
Gwen seemed almost as surprised to see me standing there as I was that the door had opened suddenly.
“Oh, um, sorry.” I backed out of the way so I wasn’t blocking her, then remembered the flowers and tentatively offered them to her. “These are for you.”
She blinked, then turned around to lock her door, my heart sinking for a moment as I feared she’d reject my offering before she turned back around and took the flowers from me.
“Thank you. What for?”
I shrugged awkwardly and rubbed the back of my neck. “Just…um, to say hello again?” I wanted to bring something with me this time since I’d forgotten so badly the first time. “And to say thank you for dinner the other night,” I amended.
“Oh.” She smiled a bit, then started walking, pausing at the door of the courtyard when she realized I wasn’t following her. “I’m going down to the beach to bring Sterling his lunch.” She held up a bag. “You want to come?”
“If I’m not intruding.” I did want to come, but I felt so uncertain of my place with her and so afraid of making her uncomfortable that I didn’t know how to act around her.
She shrugged slightly and made a motion for me to follow her, so I fell into step with her. “Sterling won’t mind, he loves to talk about his work. He’ll probably give you a tour if you have time, but feel free to refuse – he can talk about the rehab center for hours if you let him.”
“It sounds like noble work,” I observed.
“It is.” Gwen sounded proud. “He’s helping sealife and trying to educate people about how to care for them better. I think part of the reason he chose this career was to connect to his dad better – Bruce was an orca shifter, he could swim out in the ocean and while Sterling can’t do that, he can keep alive some of his dad’s heritage and try to help the ocean that he cared about.” She took a moment to pause as we reached the edge of the beach, looking out at the ocean waves. “I think it’s hard for him sometimes, that he doesn’t have much from his dad. He looks more like my side of the family, apart from his eyes, and he’s like me with what he is, and now with his dad gone, he basically has no real connections to his merfolk heritage. Well, apart from Morgan’s family – Alex’s parent,” she explained. “Morgan was a good friend of Bruce’s, and between them and Alex, they’ve helped Sterling some with feeling like he still has some connection to his dad’s side of things.”
I thought about that for a bit. “I’m glad he has heritage on both sides of the family he can look up to,” I said at last. “And that he still does have connections to them. Jace doesn’t want anything to do with his witch heritage and techno vampires really have their own thing – no real connection to witches or vampires – so Milo doesn’t care, either, but with Elyse it’s a little harder for me. I know some about gryphons but not enough to really provide her any insight into what life as a member of a gryphon family would be like. But,” I added, “I did make it my goal for her to be as happy as I could help her be. Thanks to Milo, she can research gryphons if she’s interested, and I feel like part of my role as her parent is to make sure she has a safe place to live but that she is able to find out stuff like that if she wants. If she ever asks me to look into her history specifically, I will, of course. I think you’ve done that with Sterling, too – he seems happy and confident.” Very confident, enough so he was able to come and talk to a stranger about his relationship with his mom. “And he has the tools necessary to learn more about his dad’s heritage. You can’t change what he looks like or what he is, but you’ve given him a place to be safe and loved and he has the resources he needs.”
Gwen glanced up at me. “You’re a lot different than we were as kids,” she remarked out of the blue. “A lot more mature. I suppose being a parent helped with that?”
“Well, it has been a few decades, I’d hope I’d be more mature now.” I risked a smile, relieved when she returned it. “And probably yes. You have to grow a lot when you have an infant totally dependent on you.”
“True. Only you did that alone – I can’t imagine that,” she mused.
I shrugged. “Thankfully sleep is optional.” Technically. Sort of. Okay, not really. Dragons could go months, even years without sleeping, but eventually we would have to make it up, which would mean sleeping for days on end. However, being able to function on little to no sleep had been particularly helpful when I had a small child to look after by myself. “And it was worth it.”
“Hmm, yes,” Gwen agreed. “Sterling was definitely worth all the sleepless nights.”
We started to compare stories of our sons as small babies and how much they kept us up at night, but we reached the rehab center almost before I was ready and went inside to find Sterling.
Sterling was standing on a ladder by a pool, talking animatedly with a girl who looked a few years younger than him and had long, straight black hair. I was fairly certain she was a merfolk – probably Alex, his girlfriend?
Sterling waved at us when he spotted us. “Mom! Tony! Come here, come see this!”
We obediently came over – as if we weren’t already headed in their direction – to find a bunch of tiny baby sea turtles in the tank.
“We’re releasing them tonight,” the girl explained. “Some tourists disturbed the nest by accident and brought us the eggs rather than just telling us about them – rookie mistake – and we were going to just relocate them, but they hatched.”
“Oh, right. Tony, this is my girlfriend, Alex, Alex, this is Tony, an old friend of Mom’s,” Sterling confirmed my suspicion, but he was still focused on the tank.
“I should have brought Milo,” I murmured. “He’d probably love these.”
“Invite him!” Sterling offered. “Like Alex said, we’re releasing them tonight, so if he wants to see them, gotta be today. Actually, you guys want to come see them released? It’s pretty cool watching them all waddle off towards the ocean as fast as they can.” He smiled fondly at the baby turtles.
I texted Milo, who promptly responded that he definitely wanted to see the sea turtles released and he’d come to the rehab center ASAP.
While we were waiting for him to arrive, Sterling did end up giving me a tour of the place – as Gwen thought he would – and got off on a tangent about oil spills, ranting angrily about careless companies as we walked through a part of the center where a few animals were still being cleaned from some recent incident, apparently.
Milo arrived towards the end of Sterling’s rant and looked at me in confusion.
“He’s talking about…washing birds?” Milo looked at Sterling doubtfully, who was no longer paying attention to us and just continuing his spiel to his girlfriend, who was nodding and patting his shoulder reassuringly.
“Oil spill,” I explained.
“Ah. That makes more sense than just randomly giving birds baths.” Milo walked up to Sterling and poked his shoulder, interrupting his rant. “Sea turtles?” He demanded. “Also, do you have an octopus? Those are like my favorite animal, they’re so cool.”
Sterling lit up and started to lead the way back to the sea turtle tank. “Yeah, they are! We don’t have one right now, but we did for a while, and it used to sneak out of its tank and wander around to steal fish from other tanks and then get back in its tank by morning. It confused us for the longest time until we got a security camera and saw what was going on and then we felt bad about it eating our other patients, so now we have an escape-proof octopus tank. In theory. We have yet to actually test it.”
Milo and Sterling started enthusing about octopi in general and how much they loved them, Alex eventually joining in and explaining that she ran into some all the time down in the ocean, but no, she was not borrowing some just so the boys could play with it.
I noticed that Gwen got quiet during the group chat, but she didn’t seem uncomfortable. Actually, she seemed pretty happy, watching Sterling. She seemed to enjoy the fact that he was talking about his passion and had people he was comfortable talking with. I could understand that, as a parent – it was nice to know my kids had good friends and to just listen to whatever they were passionate about. Even if I didn’t always understand it myself.
Milo and I ended up going back to the hotel a while later to have dinner – I thought about asking Gwen but just wasn’t sure how that would go so I ended up saying nothing – but returned close to dark so we could join them for the release of the sea turtle babies.
The kids seemed particularly excited about the sea turtles, Alex telling Milo all about them and Milo, for once, not explaining that he could find out all the information online in minutes. Maybe he was just appreciating learning from an oceanid’s perspective or maybe he was so into the sea turtles he forgot about his phone for a while. Either way, I was enjoying watching the way his eyes filled with wonder and how excited Alex and Sterling seemed to be – Sterling was taking pictures and videos to send to his cousin while Alex was literally cheering the baby sea turtles along while they made their trek to the ocean.
Gwen was quieter, as was I, but she seemed to be enjoying herself. Or at least I thought so, but it was harder to guess her feelings now than it had been when we were kids.
I tried to come up with a topic of conversation that didn’t have to do with the past – which was uncomfortable – or our kids – because even though I loved my kids, that couldn’t be the only thing I could talk about with her, right?
Gwen beat me to it. “Tomorrow’s the last day of your conference, right? Are you staying in town for a bit or headed straight back?”
From her tone, I couldn’t pick up whether she had a preference either way. “The plan is to drive back tomorrow night. We only took off enough school days for Milo to come through tomorrow. He wouldn’t mind if we took off more, though – traditional schooling isn’t really a good fit for techno vampires – but I’m kind of worried about how Jace and Elyse are feeding themselves without me, so it’s probably best to keep the schedule.”
“Hmm,” was her only response, which didn’t give me any clues as to whether she felt relieved or disappointed that I’d be leaving so soon.
“If you’re ever in Port Fylin, you’re welcome to stop by,” I offered. “Elyse would enjoy talking to you.”
Gwen made a wry face. “Why, because I’m a unicorn?”
“Well, actually, she probably would enjoy that, but no. Elyse likes talking to people who’ve seen more to the world. She doesn’t like leaving our house much so most of her interactions are online, but getting new people’s input is a potential source of inspiration for her.” Despite my best intentions, I was back to talking about my kids. Bother. “She’d probably start writing sea-themed poems if she spoke with Sterling or Alex for any length of time.”
“What about you?” Gwen asked pointedly.
I was kind of confused at the question. “I’m not really good with poetry. I don’t guess I’ve ever tried to write some, but I don’t even understand everything Elyse writes, so I really doubt I could put together something that would be good.”
“No, no,” Gwen laughed a little, “I mean would you like it if I stopped by? You said Elyse would, but what about you?”
“Oh! Of course,” I answered immediately. “I’d love to have you show up, as long as it’s not for official purposes,” I attempted to tease. Then I changed my mind. “Actually, if you ever do have need of me for official purposes, please feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to help any way I can.”
Gwen sighed. “You’re being too polite, Tony,” she told me bluntly. “I get that you’re worried about saying the wrong thing after what happened back then, but right now I know more about your kids than I know about you currently. I actually know more about you just because you adopted them than anything else. Are you really that afraid of offending me that you’re always going to just be polite and respectful?”
I took a moment to answer. “I’m not worried about offending you so much as hurting you.” To be honest, I tried to think through everything I said to her to avoid any potential misunderstandings. I was being a lot more reserved than I would be with most people, just because I was so scared of screwing this up. “Besides, I was never really the life of the party.”
“No, but you weren’t a wallflower, either. Once you knew what you wanted, you’d go out confidently and get it – regardless of what anyone else said on the subject.” Her gray eyes were studying me closely.
I wasn’t exactly confident with her, though. My regular self never exactly applied to her – especially now.
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