“One more CPR certified person in the house.”
I look at him. He looks mildly apologetic for that last addition.
Gloria is now grinning ear to ear and bouncing on her toes like the Filipino fairy godmother in my magical tale. “Great! Why doesn’t everyone go unpack, and we can all head down to the beach?”
Dom blows out a breath. “Let’s go unpack, Frankie.”
Frankie runs back out to the car.
“Where are we staying, Tita?”
Gloria’s smile inexplicably grows wider. “Francine is staying in the kids’ room upstairs. But it’s only kids’ beds in there.”
“Okay,” Dom says. “I don’t mind sharing a room with Frankie.”
“You’re way too tall for the beds. You’ll have to stay in the guest house.”
“Okay, now it’s getting weird,” Georgia mutters to Oliver.
I’m currently grappling with the fact that I may actually have magic, and my abilities have remained latent until this very moment.
“I’m not sleeping in an entirely separate building than Frankie,” Dom is saying, his face a perfect storm of alarm and outright panic. “We haven’t slept apart… ever.”
“It’s fine to leave her here, Domy,” Oliver contributes. “It’s not like you’re sending her to a sleep-away camp run by a Filipino gang way across the country.”
My eyebrows furrow at this. “Please say more.”
He ignores me and continues. “She’s staying what, two hundred feet away from you? In a house full of… four elementary school educators. All of whom are CPR certified. Also, the playroom is here, the toys are here?—”
“Four?” Dom cuts in.
“Huh?”
“I count five elementary school educators staying here, Ollie.”
“Oh. Well, Lina is staying in the guest house, too.”
My newly acquired magic seems to include the ability to freeze time, because Dominic becomes motionless as he looks at me at with a look of abject horror. I search his eyes, surprised when I also see a touch of interest hidden under there on his perfectly symmetrical face. That could just be me projecting, though.
“Very weird,” Georgia mutters.
Frankie zooms back into the room carrying a backpack and a tiny suitcase, both lavender glitter.
Gloria steps in now. “Frankie, bring your stuff upstairs. Your room is the one with all the bunk beds.”
She disappears in a poof of glitter.
“Domy, remember what we talked about,” Gloria continues. “You’re here torelax. You haven’t been on vacation since Frankie was born. We are all going to take care of her. Give yourself some space from her before either of you snaps.”
“Relaxing doesn’t mean taking my daughter away from me,” Dom growls, in an unexpected show of papa bear anger, the first break from gentle tranquility I’ve seen from him, and it goes straight to my nipples.
But then Gloria seems to grow at least five times her size. Or at least Dominic and Oliver, who are both well over six feet tall, seem to shrink under the force of her rage. “No one is taking your daughter away from you,hah?” she hisses, very quickly becoming the scary witch in my magical storyline. “You will leave her in this house with us, with your family, two hundred feet away from you, and you will relax in that guesthouse with this beautiful woman.”
I blink. Getting pimped out by an angry seventy-five-year-old Filipino woman was not on my bingo card for this week, but now doesn’t seem like the time to bring it up. Especially if I’m kind of up for it.
Disregard that last comment.
Everyone in the room is appropriately chastened, even if Dominic is technically the one getting yelled at.
