Big Daddy Sinatra: There Was a Ruthless Man(10)
“But what can you do?” Charles added regrettably. “He’s a grown man now. He came to me mildly, told me what he needed to do, so I didn’t object.”
Jenay smiled. “Mildly? Why would you say he came to you mildly?”
“My sons know the deal. They come to me right, or not at all. He came to me respectfully, I guest would be the better word.” Charles had a flashback, of his children as little children again, and they were running away from him. He kept trying to catch them, but they kept running away. They kept telling him they had to go.
Then he dismissed such thoughts as unproductive, and looked, once again, at the woman across from him. “That’s my excuse for being here,” he said to her. “What’s your excuse? Classy broad like you?” Jenay smiled. “You’re with the bride’s party then?”
“Neither party,” Jenay said. “I’m Staff. Well, sort of. My job is to make sure there are no problems or delays or any disagreements. And since there hasn’t been any, I guess I’m doing my job. I guess I’m passing the test.”
“So you work here at this hotel then?”
“I’m actually a student at the Boston Hospitality Institute.”
“The Boston what?”
She smiled. “The Boston Hospitality Institute. BHI. I’m studying hotel management. I’m finishing up my internship. I’m interning at this hotel. This reception is my mid-term exam.”
“You’re an intern?”
“That’s right.”
Charles couldn’t relate to that on any level. “Aren’t you a little old to be somebody’s intern?”
Jenay smiled. Raw truth indeed!
But Charles saw something else in her eyes, beyond her smile. Something that told him he had hurt her. And, for some reason, that disturbed him mightily. “I didn’t mean to be cruel,” he suddenly said. “Please forgive me. I thought you could take it.”
“You weren’t being cruel at all,” Jenay reassured him. “ And I can take it! You were only stating the obvious. I’m not exactly twenty-two or twenty-three anymore.”
“More like thirty-two or thirty-three?”
“Thirty-two, yes,” she said. Then she smiled. “Most men wouldn’t have the nerve to suggest an age like that. They’d be too afraid they would get it wrong. On the too old side of wrong.”
“I know. My sons are always telling me I’m too blunt, I’m too hard, I need to calibrate.”
“To lie, in other words,” Jenay said.
“Exactly,” Charles said with a smile. He liked this girl. “I told them what they can do with their calibration.”
Jenay laughed. Charles looked down, at her thighs. They almost opened when she laughed. He could hardly wait to taste what was between them. And he decided right then and there: he was going to taste her. “As I’m sure you’ve already surmised,” he went on, “I embarrass my children to no end.”
“That’s the nature of parenthood,” Jenay agreed. “They can take you, or leave you. How many children do you have?”
“That I know of?”
Jenay laughed. “Yes, that you know of.”
“Four sons. Stair-steps, except for my oldest. But the good news,” he said with a smile, “is that all of them are grown and gone. Except for Anthony, he’s my twenty-year-old. He dropped out of college and thinks he’s going to travel the world, on my dime, with some Christian missionary group. He’ll be back in school next term.”
“College is important to you.”
“Very. I didn’t get to go, but my sons will. That is, if they don’t do like Donald did and throw a curve, in the form of a pregnant girlfriend, in the plan. So what about you? You have any kids?”
“No, none of my own.”
Charles didn’t understand.
Jenay didn’t plan to discuss anything with him when she first sat down, but his candor seemed to awaken hers. “While I was married,” she said, “I had two stepchildren that I loved dearly. They were one and three years old when I first married their father, and just a joy to know. I was a stay-at-home mom until they got in school. Stay-at-home stepmom, that is. Then I worked as a cashier at a grocery store while my husband went to law school.”
“So you’re no longer married and no longer a stay-at-home mom?”
“Or a mom at all,” she said. “Part of the divorce settlement: I’m to stay away from his children.”
Charles frowned. “Why?”
Jenay hesitated. It was three years ago but it was still raw with her. “He felt, my ex-husband that is, that his children loved me more than they should have. He felt I would be disruptive to his relationship with his children, and since he had every intention of marrying his mistress as soon as the ink dried on the divorce decree, he felt I would be disruptive to his new bride’s relationship with his children as well. And the judge agreed.”