by Ren Benton
Ivy froze as the shadow of matrimony passed over them once more.
Griff covered her lapse. “Give my congratulations to the happy couple.”
“Oh, they’ve had enough congratulations already. It’s all they ever talk about. We know, you’re engaged. Can we change the subject?” Rafferty shook his head as if to clear the chatter. “And you, particularly, shouldn’t get too excited about it. If this wedding bankrupts me, I won’t be able to afford you. Fourteen months away, and they’re already talking about buying a dress.”
A pained sound lodged in Ivy’s throat, no doubt a scathing remark about weddings trapped before it escaped.
Griff squeezed her hand in silent support.
She managed to say, “It can take a long time to find the right dress.”
“Humph. My wife married me in a dress she bought the morning of the wedding, and she’s still the most beautiful bride I’ve ever seen.”
“Bias couldn’t possibly be a factor.”
“Of course not.” Rafferty kissed the back of Ivy’s hand. “I’ve kept you two young people long enough. I’ll see you later this week, Griffin.”
“Enjoy your evening, Mr. Rafferty.”
“Get the bastani,” Ivy stage whispered as they stepped into the vacant elevator.
The research he’d done on Rafferty told him something new about Ivy. Those scholarships weren’t randomly awarded. The recipients had to meet exemplary standards in academics, industry, and community service. She’d been getting straight A’s, holding down a job, and feeding the homeless at the same age his biggest concern had been finding the liquor stores that didn’t card.
He placed her fine, upstanding ass where the view was prime. “Ninth floor, please.”
“Ah, it’s all clear to me now.” She pressed the button. “You said these pants ruined your surprise, but unless you’re planning to break into a room, this required premeditation.”
“I was going to take you to an Italian place down the street and sweeten you up with tiramisu before bringing you here for mauling.”
“But you arranged this part in advance.”
“When I’m given two days to prepare, I do all sorts of arranging.”
“Then what’s a girl’s incentive to not make you wait every time?”
“For another girl, the certainty I’d rather find someone more available than wait, but for you” — he stepped closer and pressed his lips to her bare shoulder — “you don’t have the patience to deprive yourself of what you want any longer than you have to.”
She scoffed. “I beg to differ. I am a master of self-deprivation. I can deprive myself for months, sometimes years.”
The elevator jerked to a halt, bumping her ass against him. He held her there to ease the pressure building in his groin. “One of us will be begging before we’re done tonight, and I bet it will be you.”
7
By seven o’clock Tuesday night, Ivy was begging to get out of her shoes. Camille’s bristly welcome mat looked like an excellent foot massager.
The lady of the house opened the door. At the sight of the grocery bag in Ivy’s hand rather than a homemade dessert, her expression turned woebegone. “Don’t you love me anymore?”
“I love you so much, I’m going to make you a pudding cake that will be fresh and hot after dinner.”
Camille flung her arms wide. “My bosom friend! Welcome to my home!”
Ivy kicked off her shoes in the foyer and sighed at the blissfully cool tile beneath her toes. One dinky serving of ice cream, and her feet got too fat for her shoes — as if she needed a lingering reminder indulgence never ended well. She’d swapped her five-mile run for an hour of boot camp cardio that morning to atone for her dietary sins, but it would take a month of such repentance to undo the damage wrought with a few licks of a spoon.
At least that damage could be repaired.
Camille squinted at her. “Something’s different about you.”
“Nothing’s different.” Therein was the problem. Boring Old Ivy had returned from last week’s brief exile stronger than ever, as if she’d used those hours to practice being a drag. She took her supplies to the kitchen. “Where’s Von?”
“He went to watch baseball somewhere people call all that standing around a sport.”
Crap. That meant an evening of unfiltered girl talk. After reporting the week in work, family, and entertainment, the discussion would turn to man news. A headline like After Years of Drought, Ivy Miller Gets Plowed Twice in One Week demanded attention, and it had a zinger of an ending.
She’d been relying on Von as her excuse to let the story get stale. She hadn’t yet come up with a funny spin that would eliminate her need for a box of tissues while telling it.
“I can see the difference in your face, and don’t tell me it’s your makeup.”
Ivy tucked her head into a cabinet in search of a casserole dish for the cake. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“And guilty as hell! What did you do?”
Her guilt was easy to discuss. “Holly called yesterday to ask me to take the kids.”
“Asked or told?”
They both knew the answer to that. “Don’t be pedantic. I told her no.”
Camille fell back against the counter, clutching her chest. “Years of praying have paid off, praise Jesus. Did you turn off the lights and pretend not to be home when she brought them anyway?”
“I went out.”
“Be still, my heart.” Her second hand joined the first’s efforts to contain that organ. “Ivy Miller did something without days of preparation.”
“Your heart is overreacting.” She filled a glass measuring cup with water and put it in the microwave to simmer. “I had a previous engagement, scheduled forty-eight hours in advance.”
“You tart!” Camille’s eyes lit with glee. “The enchilada called, didn’t he?”
The duration of the gloating would be considerably shortened if she admitted up front Camille had been right in her prediction. “Twice.”
“Praise—”
“Before you blame Jesus for my delinquency again, you should be aware that after last night, there is no chance I will ever hear from the enchilada again. That’s my punishment for abandoning four children.”
Camille got the hint this was not a cause for celebration. Her expression sobered. She handed Ivy a mixing spoon. “Make cake and tell me what happened.”
Ivy measured flour and sugar from Camille’s canisters and cocoa and baking powder taken from the grocery bag and mixed them in the casserole dish. “I spent so much time worrying Holly would dump the kids on my lawn or leave them with her creepy neighbor or take them wherever she was going that wasn’t safe for her to be, much less four little kids, I forgot how to pretend to be interesting.”
She told a man who said she looked dangerous that she took a dance class with senior citizens. That would have been a prime opportunity to invent a hilarious case of mistaken identity that led to a stint in a harem, where she learned figure eights and other tricks that would better entertain him with his pants off.
However, the senior center was foremost in her mind because during her third belly dancing class, a neighbor called to let her know the kids were sitting on her stoop in the rain. She’d dashed home to take care of them and never scheduled another evening commitment that might conflict with Holly’s erratic demands.
Until last night. “I hope you have milk.”
Camille retrieved a gallon from the fridge. “The big question: are the kids okay?”
Ivy stirred the milk into the dry ingredients. “They made it to school and daycare this morning, and their teachers didn’t report anything unusual.”
Had there been a problem, they would have called her — school records listed her as first contact because Holly didn’t want to be bothered. Initiating contact with the school led to questions. Is there a reason you thought they might not make it to school? Is everything all right at home?
Holly wasn’t as fond of CPS visits now that she was the target of their investigations.
As long as the kids were okay, there was nothing the school needed to know. What was there to tell? She feared something bad would happen, and it didn’t. The only harm had been to her peace of mind.
She told the staff there had been a misunderstanding about who was taking the kids to school and she was calling to confirm it had been resolved. They were familiar with Holly’s misunderstandings — about punctuality, paperwork, and payments due, among other things — and asked no further questions, at least of Ivy.
One of Blake’s classes had no doubt been interrupted by the intercom summoning him to the office, accompanied by the jeers of his classmates. He was no stranger to interrogation by guidance counselors, but he usually knew why. At least this time he could honestly say everything was fine and he had no idea what Crazy Aunt Ivy had made such a big deal about.
“The kids are fine.” Camille’s reasonable tone echoed the one in Ivy’s head. “So you can stop agonizing about what might have happened.”
She’d agonized for fourteen hours. The subsequent ten hours of relief were insufficient to neutralize the effects of sustained worry.
“Moving on. As long as a man is trying to get in your pants, you’re being plenty interesting.”
“This man has never had to try to get in my pants.” Ivy barked a laugh as she stirred together brown sugar and cocoa in a bowl. “Figuratively speaking, anyway. Did you know skintight faux leather pants warmed by contact with skin take on the properties of super glue?”
Camille paused while taking the bubbling water from the microwave. “Wait. You wore skintight faux leather pants?”
“If not for grim determination and half a box of cornstarch, I’d still be wearing them.”
Camille winced at the price of trying to look sexy. “The enchilada didn’t see that, I hope.”
“No.” But what Griff had seen was almost as bad.
She’d been primed for sex long before they reached the hotel room. When the door closed and she finally had him to herself, she didn’t waste time trying to make him beg for what she wanted, and for the short time it took to strip him naked, she succeeded in making him forget his silly, pleasure-delaying bet.
Shortly thereafter, however, pleasure was delayed by her pants’ refusal to budge below midthigh.
Griff was a good sport about it. Her escape options being restricted to a waddle worked to his advantage in the begging showdown. She wished she could claim they’d teased each other for hours before he fell to his knees pleading for mercy, but his mouth and hands were diabolical and he was too stubborn to comply with demands to play fair, so she did as any shrewd negotiator would do — let him have a meaningless little victory in the form of a few pleases in order to get everything she wanted.
That wasn’t impatience. It was strategy.
For a while, there hadn’t been a thought in her head about Holly or the kids or being responsible if something horrific befell them as a result of her giving in to her selfish urge to get fucked.
Urge satisfied, breath caught, and feeling restored to her extremities, she had all kinds of unoccupied mental pasture for those thoughts to stampede across. A particularly vivid vision involved explaining to her parents where she’d been while their grandchildren met a gruesome end. Well, Mom and Dad, I had the opportunity to prevent this tragedy but declined in favor of getting Griffin Dunleavy’s dick in me.
At that point, guilt and shame for her imagined wrongdoing had her fighting back tears. She blamed her sniffles on an allergy flare up. Griff stared at her as if debating the merits of critiquing that story’s shortcomings. Since messy emotions were not what a man wanted to clean up after fucking a woman over a chair in a hotel room, their one stop had reached the end of the line.
He drove her home. There were no children suffering from exposure on the lawn. She pulled herself together and kissed him goodbye like it was the last time she’d ever taste him, and then she let him go, releasing him back into the wild where he belonged.
While she sprinkled the topping over the cake batter and poured the hot water on top, she gave Camille an abridged version of the night that would fit in a fortune cookie.
Camille opened the oven so Ivy could focus on transferring the casserole dish without spilling its contents. “Tell him why you weren’t all there. Unless he’s some kind of monster, he’ll understand.”
“He’d understand why I was distracted. He wouldn’t understand why I’m boring him with this sob story on top of boring him last night.” Ivy set the oven timer for forty-five minutes. “Enchiladas don’t concern themselves with the trials and tribulations of oatmeal.”
Camille moved the mixing spoon and measuring cups to the dishwasher. “I’m adding this to the lengthy list of broken and lost things I blame on your sister.”
“She didn’t actually do anything, Cam.”
“She got in your head, and do not expect me to believe she didn’t do it on purpose. Need I remind you she called when you were two thousand miles away to bitch about how you screwed her over? Not calling when you’re close enough to be guilted into changing your mind is all part of her psychological warfare. She knows you worry when you’re not sure, so she guaranteed you would worry all night. If you’d called her, she wouldn’t have answered.”
Ivy busied herself wiping the counter.
“Silly me. When you called, she didn’t answer. Was she watching from the window and smirking triumphantly when you drove by her house?”
“Give me a little credit.” She scrubbed a cocoa-colored spot that was probably in the granite. “I could see from the corner her car was there and the lights were on, so I didn’t drive in front of the house.”
Camille did not cheer and give her a gold star. “I was really hoping he would be the one to wrest you from Holly’s grip, if for no other reason than I need a friend who understands what it’s like to have a fine man.”
She wasn’t destined to be twinsies with Camille or Jen. “Remind me to offer to babysit for Jen and Roger. Things seemed kind of tense last time I was there. They need some alone time.”
“When is it Ivy time? Saving their marriage is not your responsibility. If they want your help, let them ask.”
The last time someone asked her to babysit, she said no because Ivy Time made her selfish. If she volunteered, she would honor the commitment she’d made, even if a more tempting offer came up at the last minute.
Which was easy for her to say now that Griff wouldn’t be testing her dedication to duty.
Camille had visibly dimmed since answering the door — one more offense added to Ivy’s pile of guilt. “Now I’m too bummed to order pizza. Can we just do popcorn and pudding cake with our chick flick?”
“Depends which chick flick. Crimson Peak?”
“Too dreary to treat heartburn by enchilada, Tom Hiddleston’s ass notwithstanding.”
Ivy conceded that point. Circumstances called for something more lighthearted. “John Wick.”
“Now you’re talking.”
They ate popcorn and watched Keanu Reeves kill an excessive number of people to avenge his dog, paused to get the cake out of the oven, then watched Keanu Reeves kill another excessive number of people while they ate bowls of hot, gooey cake.
“You’re not oatmeal,” Camille announced as the body count reached its peak. “You’re pudding cake. When I met you, I thought, oh, cake, how nice. But once I dipped my spoon in you,
I discovered you have these hidden gooey depths.”
Ivy carefully balanced the goo-to-cake ratio on her spoon. “If I ever take out a personal ad, that will be it. Pudding cake seeking spoon to dip in my hidden gooey depths.”
“Your inbox will be exploding with pictures of spoons.”
“A girl can only dream.” Ivy waved the spoon in her hand at the TV. “What is this place supposed to be, anyway, an animal hospital? He stole somebody’s dog that needs medical attention.”
“I thought it was a lab.”
That was even worse. “So he took the one he wanted and left all those other dogs there to be tortured and killed?”
“Look, Miss Judgypants, Keanu had a rough day. He’s in no condition to heroically rescue a couple dozen dogs right this minute. Maybe his next career move is opening an animal sanctuary and he’ll be back for the rest of them in a hail of carefully placed bullets.”
That version of the dogs’ fate mollified Ivy somewhat. “That’s all right, then.”
Camille rested her head on Ivy’s shoulder. “You should have somebody to get you out of the burbs and make you have fun.”
“That’s what I have you for.”
“I don’t have a spoon. Spoons are fun.”
“Some more so than others.” Until recently, sex had been more pleasant than fun. A benefit of being in a relationship rather than the basis of one. A routine ending to an evening with a boyfriend, not an occasion to eagerly look forward to or recall in exquisite sensory detail for days afterward.
Griffin Dunleavy set a high bar for the next poor spoon.
“Ain’t that the truth?” Camille’s arm circled her waist in an embrace that would have been just a little better from a longer, thicker arm with a couple of scars on it. “There’s more to life than working and babysitting other people’s kids, Ives.”
So she’d heard a thousand times from people who weren’t responsible for holding a family together.
She trailed her sister by a year in school rather than the two commensurate with their age difference because Holly had to repeat a grade. Teachers shell-shocked after the previous year with the elder Miller girl regarded Ivy with suspicion by default.
