***
“Wow, this is awesome!” Toby yelled as he ran into the hotel.
“Your room is upstairs at the end of the hall,” I told him.
But Toby was already off and running around like a maniac. It was the first time he’d ever been to Mexico. Puerto Vallarta was beautiful this time of year. It had always been one of my favorite vacation spots. It had been far too long since I’d been back there. The last time I was there I believed was the last vacation I took before I met Gina, before I had even considered settling down and I was still very much in my party boy ways.
I’d come a long way since then and I wanted Libby and Toby to see a part of the world that I used to love coming to. Even though it had taken me a bit of pleading and bribing to steer her away from Paris (it was winter) to somewhere warm and lovely, she eventually relented. But only because I promised that I would take her on a vacation across Europe next summer. We were planning it all out; it was going to be a huge trip. We would start in Barcelona, and then off to London, then Paris, and Amsterdam, Hamburg, and following it all up with a trip over to Rome. It was the exact order that my beautiful bride wanted to do the trip in and I did not have one single reason why we couldn’t do it that way. Well, I had lots of reasons, but none that really mattered enough to annoy Libby with. Since meeting her, I’d become much better at the art of compromise. It didn’t bother me at all. I would have given her the whole world if she’d asked for it.
Libby sat her suitcase down and then fell to the couch exhausted. I had to second her feelings. I was glad we had waited until the next day after the wedding to go on this trip. It was a fairly short trip, but there had been so much rough air on the way over that the flight had taken far longer and it had been pretty miserable. Apparently, you could get pretty tired trying to hold yourself in your seat on a long trip like that.
“So, what do you want to do first?” I asked.
Libby laughed. “I want to go to the master bathroom and take a big bubble bath in that Jacuzzi. Do you think that Toby will leave us alone long enough?”
I looked at Libby for a moment. We both wrinkled our noses and at the same time said, “Nah.”
Then we shared a good laugh.
“Did I ever tell you about the first time I came to Puerto Vallarta?” I asked her.
“Do I want to hear about this?” Libby asked.
“What? Do you think I would tell you some sick story of depravity?”
“Babe, you have told me so many of your sick stories from your younger years that I can’t believe I agreed to marry you sometimes.”
“Now, that hurts,” I said.
“You’ll get over it,” Libby replied. “Now, your story please…”
“Well, I was about twenty-four. Some friends told me that this was the best place to go if you didn’t want to be followed around by the paparazzi. Well, I shouldn’t have believed this, but I was young and gullible. Anyway, once we were down here we were partying every single night and just having a blast of a weekend. And then one night they convinced me to go skinny dipping in this lounge area of this rooftop bar. They said that the owner of the club let the very wealthy and the very famous basically do stuff like this after hours.”
“Wow, you were gullible,” Libby laughed.
“Yeah, you can see where this is all going,” I said. “Anyway, I hopped in the pool totally bare and then I noticed that no one else was actually hopping in after me. They were all pointing and taking pictures. Apparently I didn’t realize that this pool goes down inside the other bar below us, where it’s like a tank looking thing. Part of the ambience is that you can watch people swim there. And they all got a pretty good show.”
Libby was laughing her head off.
“It is not one of my finer moments, but if you go online you can still see pictures from it. Of course there were lots of paparazzi around. And it all wound up everywhere. So, that was part of the early days of building up my reputation. It’s no wonder you thought I was a bad seed.”
“I never really used that term,” Libby said. “But yeah. You gave me a lot of raw material to work with on why I should never go out with you.”
“But luckily you saw past all that and realized just how cool I actually am.”