ROMANCING MO RYAN (19 page)

They arrived in Key West around three that afternoon.
 
It was a remarkably quick trip.
 
When she woke up (between the silence and the jazz she had long since fallen asleep), they were pulling into the driveway of one of those beautiful southern homes with the huge lawn and the exterior staircases.
 
They were in the Old Town section of Key West, where the big boys lived, at a big white house with a second floor balcony and an American flag flying full staff on the post.
 
Nikki halfway expected to see a confederacy flag on one of the windows.
 
But she didn’t.

“This is your childhood home?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he replied.
 
At first he just sat in the car staring up at that childhood home of his.
 
And then he looked at Nikki.
 
“Ready?” he said.

Nikki’s heart pounded.
 
Why did he look so concerned?
 
“Yes,” she replied.

Cars were parked everywhere, from the street, to the lawn, to the horseshoe driveway, every luxury make and model imaginable.
 
And as soon as Mo walked around and opened the passenger side door for Nikki, a crowd of people hurried from around the side of the house.
 

They were all calling Mo’s name and running to him, from small children to adults, men and women.
 
Mo, true to form, stood there and soaked it all in, smiling like the king they took him for, and they smothered him with hugs and kisses and double-grasped handshakes.
 
Nikki stepped out of the car slowly.
 
This was it.
 
She was going to meet the family.
 
She was going to finally find out if she could actually fit into a world like Mo’s.

She wanted to go and stand beside him, but the crowd made that impossible, so she lingered where she stood, waiting for him to remember that she existed too.
 
Which didn’t take long at all.
 

“Nikki, come here,” he said as his family continued to ask him a zillion questions and he continued to try and answer.
 
Nobody even looked her way when he called her name, and she was grateful, so she moved quickly near him.
 
When he saw her coming he had to reach through the crowd to take her hand.
 
He gently pulled her until she stood beside him.
 

“Everybody,” he said and the crowd finally quieted down.
 
“I want you to meet my beautiful lady love.
 
This is Nikki.”

At first Nikki didn’t know what to expect, as all of their blue/green/brown eyes stared at her.
 
But then they all said “Hello Nikki” in various groups of unison, quickly found her uninteresting, and then turned their attentions back to the man of the hour.
 

Although Mo was engrossed in his family, he placed Nikki’s hand in his and held onto it despite many of his female relatives anxious to hug their wonderful uncle or stand next to him. But he would not let Nikki’s hand go.
 
And as they made their way into the house, some of the younger girls even began talking with Nikki and telling her how much they liked her outfit, or her long, curled, jet-black hair.
 
And she began to relax.
 
By Mo making clear what she was to him, his
lady love
, as he called her, and by his refusal to let go of her hand, he had already set the tone.
 
If you love me, you’d better love her, his actions seemed to say.

They settled in the large livingroom, where there was so much in and out activity that Nikki could hardly keep up.
 
Mo was the head of this clan, no doubt about it, as he sat in a wingtip chair that flanked the sofa and held court with various family members.
 
His parents were not home yet, so all activity seemed to center around Mo.
  

Nikki sat on the sofa with some of his younger relatives and smiled and nodded and accepted tea from the Butler’s tray.
 
Two high school girls - teenagers – came to the house from wherever they had been and sat next to Nikki, believing, she supposed, that she was a teenager too.
 
She was a little upset at first, that they would think of her as being some teenager too, but they were nice girls and very hard to dislike, so she took their error in stride.

They were twin sisters, Wendy and Mindy, and both were pretty, petite, and smart.
 
In fact the first thing Nikki had noticed about Mo’s relatives was that all of them seemed pretty, petite, and smart.
 
Mo was easily the biggest one of them in the room.

Before too long, Mo was on the far side of the massive great room, seated at the large dining room table with other older members of his family: aunts and uncles and cousins his age.
 
Nikki and the girls, by contrast, remained in the livingroom area and were joined by more and more of Mo’s younger relatives.
 
One young boy in particular, a seventeen year old blonde-haired cutie named Jeremy, wasn’t wasting any time trying to come onto Nikki.
 
She was polite, because he was very sweet about it, but after a while he was beginning to get on her nerves.
    
So she started ignoring his
you’re so pretty
and
why don’t we go for a walk
remarks and began looking around.
 
And right away she noticed a trend.
 
There were exactly three groups in the house.
 
Mo’s group were the jet set, the older, more established types who were bankrolling the get together.
 
Then there were the middle group, the yuppies, who found the young set too young and the jet set too boring.
 

And then there was Nikki’s group, the young and the restless.
 
And she meant very young.
 
At twenty-five she was the oldest thing in this group.
 
For some reason they flocked to her and wouldn’t let her go.
 
They surrounded her on the couch, all very talkative, all full of jokes and fun.
 
And she enjoyed them too.
 
Soon she even forgot about Mo and just leaned back and laughed and let loose too.
 
She had forgotten what it felt like to be this young, where everything and everybody were a trip; where you didn’t want to hear anybody over the age of twenty-one tell you anything.
 
So she didn’t tell them anything.
 
She just leaned back and let them tell her.
 

When she bothered to look around again, Mo’s group were playing some card game and drinking beer, and the yuppies were making their way out of the door, going to visit this museum or that friend’s house or this art gallery.
 
That would have seemed to have been the group Nikki would naturally hook up with, but the young people had commandeered her so decisively, making her the focal point of their group, that the others didn’t even bother to invite her along.
 
Even Mo found it humorous the way the young people took over Nikki.

But everything changed when the music started.
 
Jeremy came downstairs with a boom box and Mindy and Wendy popped in some CDs, first some Justin Bieber
and then some serious Nikki Manaj and Nelly, and they started getting down, dancing and acting the fool and having themselves seemingly the time of their lives.
 
Jeremy dragged Nikki onto the dance floor, and at first she felt pretty foolish dancing with all those teenagers, but that feeling didn’t last long because she was having too much fun.
 

It wasn’t long before everybody else stood back and gave them room, and they tore it up.
 
Some of the jet setters even came over to watch them bump and grind and dance until they were stooped down together, and then moving back up together.
 
Dancing with the Stars
had nothing on them.
 
And Nikki knew she looked good.
 
Every man in the room had their eyes on her.
 

The only problem was, she had forgotten about Mo.
 
And when she finally realized that she wasn’t in some nightclub somewhere but was in the family home of a man who was about to become a justice on the state supreme court, a man who she just knew wouldn’t appreciate her display one bit, she sat down.
 
She didn’t look his way, but she could feel his stare.
 

Jeremy tried to pull her back up, and some of the other guys, but she wouldn’t bulge.
 
She leaned back and pretended that she had to catch her breath.
 
When they gave up and went back to the dance floor, she took what she thought would be a very casual glance Mo’s way.
 
And there he was, sitting at the dining room table supposedly playing cards, sitting at the head of that table, a cigar between his fingers, staring at her.

If looks could kill, she would have been dead.

But she quickly looked away as if she didn’t see him.
 
He was a tight ass, not her.
 
And she wasn’t going to start being one either.
 
He didn’t like to dance.
  
That was his deal, that was his thing.
 
She was no dancing machine, either, but she was trying to enjoy herself.
 
This was the kind of fun she hadn’t had since she graduated college.
 
Now she was trying to milk it up.
 
But she also knew she had to be careful.
 
She wasn’t just a lone wolf anymore.
 
Now, she had to constantly remind herself, she represented Mo too.
 
She was his lady love.
 
And just the thought of that made her smile.

 
“What are you smiling about?” Mindy asked as she and Wendy came over.
 
The dancing was winding down and Jeremy and his boom box started heading outside.

“I’m just smiling,” Nikki replied.

“Look at Aunt Miriam,” Wendy said.
 
“She’s going to talk Uncle Mo to death.”

Nikki looked into the dining room.
 
Aunt Miriam, a woman who appeared to be in her late fifties, with sandy red hair and a pretty face, was sitting beside Mo talking nonstop.
 
Mo was playing cards and listening to her, but it didn’t take a genius to see that he would rather she shut the hell up.

“And you can tell Uncle Mo is bored to tears,” Mindy said and they giggled.
 
Then she looked at Nikki.
 
“You’re one of his interns or something.
 
Right?”

His intern?
 
Where did that come from?
 
“No.”

“You aren’t one of his law clerks?”

“No.
 
I’m a reporter.”

This interested both girls.
 
“Really?”
 
Wendy asked.

“That’s how your uncle and I met,” Nikki went on.
 
“At a journalist conference about two-and-a-half years ago.”

“Wow.
 
But he never mentioned you.
 
You’re his girlfriend?”
 

 
“Nonsense,” Mindy quickly said before Nikki could reply for herself.
 
“Uncle Mo is something like forty years old.
 
He’s ancient.
 
That would be absurd.
 
And can you imagine what Desiree would say?”

“Oh yes,” Wendy said and giggled.
 
“Desiree wouldn’t like that.”

“
Thank
-you,” Mindy said.
 

Although Nikki didn’t respond to the twins, she heard them loud and clear.
 
She didn’t know who this Desiree was, but she was certain she was soon to find out.

“Anyway,” Mindy said as she stood up, Wendy standing too.
 
“Let’s go to the club and see what Mike and Skip are up to.”

“Sounds good to me,” Wendy said.

“You’ll come too,” Mindy looked at Nikki and said.

Nikki couldn’t even imagine herself going over to some country club to see what some dude named Skip was up to.
 
She passed.

“Sure?” the sweet one, Wendy, asked.

“Positive,” Nikki said with a sweet little smile of my own, and they left.

She leaned back and crossed her legs.
 
The young people were all gone by now and Mo, after a long while, moved away from the talkative Aunt Miriam and started hanging with a small group of men.
 
Everybody, it seemed, were cordoned off into small groups.
 
Everybody, it seemed, but Nikki.

She watched Mo operate, as he carried on various conversations with different people, and she was amazed at how adapt he was at ignoring her.
 
She was sitting on a couch alone, totally alien to the people and her surroundings, but he was so engrossed in conversations that he hadn’t even noticed.
 
She wanted to talk to him about a lot of things, particularly who was this Desiree woman, but he hadn’t even looked in her direction.
 
And the older females in the room were horrible.
 
The exact opposite of the young people.
 
Only they’d stare at her until she looked at them, and then they’d roll their eyes or shake their heads or look her up and down as if there was something about her they just didn’t like.
 
She could only pray Mo’s parents didn’t share their taste.