all weekend, I see?”
I immediately cringed. How foolish, how presumptuous to think I could stay here, that he didn’t have a million better things to do.
“No, I mean, I’m sure you have…”
Leo stopped my worries by pushing his still-hard cock further inside me. Moving gently he said, “Stay as long as you like.”
I turned to look at him, eye to eye. I ran my hand over the morning’s stubble, golden and tan and only slightly prickly. Instead of answering him, I kissed him.
When we finally untangled our bodies I was sticky with love and starving hungry from all the energy. Leo said I could take a shower while he went searching for food in the kitchen.
“To be honest, I have no idea what’s stocked here,” he said.
Before he went, I had to have him help me figure out the shower. There wasn’t just a knob to turn the water on. It was all digitized so that the temperature of the water could be set at whatever the user liked.
“It doesn’t have to be this complicated,” I said, standing naked in the shower big enough for ten people as he punched buttons on the keypad.
“I honestly only know how to do it for myself,” he said. “I just push this button and it’s set on the temperature I like.”
“So push it!”
“Screw it, then I’m getting in with you.”
“I win,” I cheered as he tossed his boxers and started the water. It was colder than I liked, but Leo’s arms around me, taking great care to lather every part of my body as the two of us grinned like fools made me feel warmer than I had in years.
And then Leo made me breakfast. Leo Armstrong made me breakfast. He found some eggs and turkey sausage that he cooked up with apple slices on the side and two steaming cups of the best coffee I’ve ever tasted. The sun was shining over the ocean, showing a new view than what I’d had last night—the sapphire blue water kicking up on the beach, locals taking morning strolls or walking their dogs.
“You know,” Leo said, breaking into my zoned-out daze. “We haven’t talked about the ending.”
…of our relationship, is what I heard at the end of his sentence, even though he hadn’t spoken it. I wasn’t prepared to think about anything but each moment I had with Leo, at least until Monday morning. Besides, I knew what he meant.
“The ending of the screenplay,” I said. We hadn’t made it all the way through the script last night so I actually didn’t know how the story ended. I pictured Vivienne, the nurse, setting up shop on the Gold Coast and her true love, Ian, teaching her how to surf.
“Come on,” Leo said, setting down his coffee mug. “I want to show you something.”
He led me across the smooth, shiny floors to an office on the other end of the house. From a shelf behind a desk he took a silver picture frame and showed it to me. It was a faded photo of a woman in a white halter swimsuit, grinning on a beach.
“Who is this?” I asked. “She’s beautiful.”
“That’s my grandmother,” he said, “on Bondi Beach in 1952.”
I looked up at him. “That’s in Australia.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Like your script.” He nodded. “Is this Vivienne?”
“Technically that’s Alice,” he said. “But Vivienne is a version of my grandmother.”
Putting it all together, I said, “So the story in the screenplay is about your grandmother? It’s a true story?”
“No, not entirely,” he said. “But all fiction has a bit of the writer’s truth in it. I didn’t want to do a straight re-telling of my family’s story.”
Yesterday we’d talked a lot about the characters—how Vivienne was a strong-willed woman, bold for the time she lived in. She was a nurse in the army and volunteered to go help soldiers during the Korean War. Her fiancé, Ronald, practically forbade her from going. And during her leave—her vacation while stationed in Korea—she and a couple of her girlfriends went to Australia where she met Ian, a dashing Aussie with a mega-watt smile. Leo and I talked about how Ian was everything Ronald was not—spontaneous, full of life, adventurous. Things that Vivienne wanted in her life but felt stifled by being a young woman in the 1950s. But we hadn’t gotten beyond that.
“Is she still alive?” I asked. “Your grandmother?”
“No,” he said. “She passed recently, actually.”
“What about your grandfather,” I said. “The Ian character?” I wondered where his photo was.
Leo shook