She bucked beneath him, seating him deeper inside, and all bets were off. He thrust deeply, her legs climbing higher up his flanks, clasping him tightly to her. She moved with him in breathless rhythm, meeting him thrust for thrust. Her eyes were half closed, her lips half open, and a sheen of sweat glazed her perfect, creamy skin. The sight of her like that, the severe, stiff Dr. Handelman caught on the very point of sexual gratification, almost sent him over the edge.
Grimly, he hung on, waiting to feel the clutch of her climax, to see the telltale flush of fulfillment that would spread over her breasts and throat and lips. . . . He dipped his head and stole a kiss across her mouth. She lifted her face, her mouth clinging hungrily to his. He rocked into her, faster, harder, deeper.
Abruptly, her head dropped back on the bed and her body bowed up as her beautiful mouth opened in a soundless cry, and he felt the muscles inside her contract to hold him in a delicious vise of completion. For long seconds, they held like that until a tiny sob broke from her throat and she collapsed beneath him.
Her eyes fluttered open. Her breath was ragged, but no more so than his. “Oh. Oh. Oh, my. That was intense.”
“Yeah.”
She shifted beneath him, and his body screamed at him to take up the rhythm again. Her eyes went wide as she felt him inside. “You haven’t . . . ?”
“Not yet.”
“Oh? Oh!” A smile blossomed on her face, untutored in guile or coquetry. “Then we can do it again?”
“Oh, yeah,” he breathed.
And they did.
And again after that for good measure.
Chapter 8
“I strongly maintain that unexpectedly introducing a stranger into a clan ritual is an idea bound to make all participants unnecessarily uncomfortable,” Edie said, casting a sidelong glance at Jim from the passenger seat of his car.
It had been ten days since their date and in the days that followed, Jim’s attentions had only grown more romantic and more . . . She blushed, thinking of how lovely it was to move in Jim’s arms, to feel him inside her, to wake up with his tender gaze on her, or to find him snoring beside her, his arms still around her. A man’s snore shouldn’t fill a woman with such profound contentment, but it did her.
Of course, she had known they would suit each other. He smelled good. When she’d told him this, he’d seemed to think it uproariously funny and then he’d kissed her some more. He took her to dinner and lunch, often with Chloe joining them. He stopped at her office each morning, bringing her a croissant and coffee. They talked about things she never would have believed could interest her and things she never would have suspected could have ever interested a man like Jim.
“I’m surprised you find me so interesting,” she’d told him a few days earlier. “Oh, I completely understand the sexual compatibility. You smell good.” He didn’t even blink. “But, well . . . it’s like the high school quarterback going out with the math team captain.”
“I wasn’t the quarterback; I was a wide receiver. But I was also the math team captain. ’Nuff said?” Then he kissed her again, right in front of Chloe, who, despite going very still and her eyes going very large, remained uncharacteristically mute.
“Your coming to Chloe’s birthday party is a great idea, and you’re not unexpected,” he told her now, turning the car off the main thoroughfare. “I told Susie you were coming. And besides, you were invited by the birthday girl herself.” He glanced into the rearview mirror at his daughter. “Right, Chloe?”
“Roger that, Daddy!” Chloe said snappily. “Invited and accepted!” Chloe had clearly been coached by her father.
“And finally, you promised,” Jim finished.
“I was under duress at the time,” she replied. Actually, she’d been under Jim, but she could hardly say that in front of Chloe. He had exercised not inconsiderable persuasive skills, and other skills she was learning to appreciate even more, in securing her promise to attend Chloe’s sixth birthday party with his family. It hadn’t seemed a matter for much concern at the time.
But now Edie was petrified.
Edie hadn’t been so scared since her first day at Princeton when she was twelve. Just like then, all she could think about was how different she was from those she’d be joining. Jim’s family represented a huge congregate of interrelated people—Jim had tossed off a casual estimate of fifty attendees—with mutual histories and shared experiences, familial affections and tribal loyalties.
She was an outsider.
Not only was she a stranger, but she was strange even by “stranger” standards. She didn’t fit into normal situations easily. She was shy, and the shier she felt, the stiffer her expression became until her face felt like a mask from which she was looking out from behind. Then, if she followed her usual pattern, she’d begin throwing out huge words and building walls between her and other people with her vocabulary.
She didn’t mean to. Where other people became tongue-tied and resorted to simple grunts when they were uncomfortable, she had the opposite response; she’d open her mouth and multisyllabic magniloquent words would pour out. She could feel them even now, crowding behind her teeth, waiting to escape.
She should just keep quiet.
“Just ’member to smile, Edie. Sometimes you forget to smile,” Chloe said.
Edie glanced up, startled, and found Chloe’s gaze meeting hers in the rearview mirror. Her small face was sympathetic.
“Okay. Thank you.” Smiling. Yes. That was good. Sometimes she forgot to smile. . . . Dear heavens, she was taking comportment lessons from a five-year-old. And she was grateful for them, too.
Too soon, they entered a tree-shaded neighborhood of 1940s ramblers and ranchers. Jim pulled alongside a curb behind a long line of cars on the side of the street. He got out and came around to her side to open the back door. Chloe popped out, reaching back inside to snag her DivaZ doll. Jim opened Edie’s door and held out his hand, one dark eyebrow cocked challengingly. “It’s just for an hour or so.”
“Why is this so important to you?” she blurted out unhappily.
“Because I want my family to meet you. I want you to meet them. That’s what you do when you are going out with someone.”
“I think that’s a very old-fashioned attitude,” she said, stalling.
“I’m an old-fashioned guy.”
He wasn’t going to relent. She set her hand ungraciously in his and he helped her out. “You look very nice,” he said reassuringly.
“Chloe picked it out,” she said, somewhat mollified, smoothing her hands down over the lilac-patterned cotton sundress. She and Chloe had gone shopping yesterday because she hadn’t had anything suitable for an outdoor picnic. She didn’t own any shorts, except bike shorts, and it was too hot for slacks. Jim had already seen her one pair of capris, and she was discovering she was just enough of a girl to want to dress up for her beau. Besides, she wanted to see the admiration in his gaze. And she had. He looked quite impressed as he took in the dipped neckline, the spaghetti straps, and cinched waist. Then his gaze fell to her feet and he became amused.
She frowned self-consciously. “I shouldn’t have worn tennis shoes, should I?” she asked. “But the only other shoes I have are dark brown or black.”
“They’re fine. Come on.”
He pulled her hand through his arm, took Chloe’s hand in the other, and led them down the sidewalk to a cream-colored rambler with a driveway stacked with cars. “Everyone’ll be out back,” he said, bypassing the front walk and escorting her along the side of the house.
A few feet from the corner, Chloe broke rank and ran ahead. “I’m here!” she hollered, rounding the corner of the house, her arms flung wide.
What sounded like a hundred people burst into laughter, clapping and hooting just as Edie and Jim rounded the corner.
It was worse than she imagined. The backyard was filled with people, crowded with people, stuffed with people: young, old, male, female, seated around tables, standing around o
pen coolers filled with ice and canned drinks, playing lawn games or tending a series of Weber grills that were sending up shimmering waves of heat. And all sixty or seventy pairs of eyes turned toward them as everyone there fell silent, leaving her in a vacuum, the air sucked from her lungs, her face rigid with immobility, her body frozen in place. It seemed to go on forever, though in reality it was probably less than a couple of seconds.
Then a tall woman with brightly dyed short red hair and Jim’s blue eyes came hurrying across the lawn and waving a long-handled spatula.
“I see the birthday girl is handling things with her usual modesty,” she said, her interested gaze latching onto Edie. “This is your friend?”
“Yup, this is Edie. Edie, this is my sister Susie.”
“How do you do?” Edie said, forgetting to smile.
“Fine, hon. Thanks for coming. I’ve heard a lot about you. Not from Jim”—she jabbed him in the side with her elbow—“but from Chloe. She thinks you hang the moon.”
Oh God. Jargon. She knew what “hang the moon” meant but only because it was a relatively archaic term. As soon as anyone used more modern idioms, she’d be lost. She foresaw an afternoon filled with oblique references that would leave her even more ignorant of what was going on than usual. “I think she hangs the moon, too,” she answered weakly.
Sue smiled, apparently reading some of her discomfort in her expression. “Don’t worry, Edie. The Curran clan can be a bit overwhelming. Even to us Currans. Let me introduce you to the key players.”
Without a glance at Jim, Susie linked her arm through Edie’s and guided her from group to group, stopping every now and then to raise her voice at any one of a dozen teenage girls and boys who had Chloe on a blanket stretched between them and were tossing her into the air on it. “Not that high!”
Chloe was shrieking and giggling with pleasure. Edie couldn’t watch. Jim, she noticed, though seeming to be in a casual conversation with a group near where his daughter was being used as a human popcorn kernel, was keeping a close eye on the proceedings. He had one hand in his pocket and the other held a bottle of beer.
He looked so good—so male and healthy and adult. And handsome. And athletic. And relaxed. She loved how he held himself, his easygoing charm, his competence and warmth. She loved . . . him.
“You gotta love Jim, don’t you?” Susie said, echoing Edie’s thoughts so closely that it startled her.
“Yes,” she said eagerly and without thinking. “I do.”
Susie’s eyes widened for an instant, and a spot of red appeared high on her cheeks. “Wow. Jim said you didn’t have any filters, but you really don’t have any filters, do you?”
“I’m not sure what you mean by filters,” Edie replied uncomfortably.
“You think something, so you say it.”
“Oh no,” she said. “Not at all. I keep quite a bit of what I think to myself. I just . . . I thought . . . I thought you meant it,” she finished lamely. Now she was embarrassed. She could feel the heat surging up her neck.
“Hey. It’s okay. Just don’t say it to Melissa. She’s not your biggest fan.”
“I know.” She wasn’t thinking of Melissa. She was thinking about Jim and her love for him. It wasn’t something she could back up with detailed evidence, but she didn’t need to. As she’d said to Jim, whether or not she understood how something happened didn’t affect its efficacy. She loved Jim. It was just that simple.
“She’ll come around,” Susie was saying. “In fact, let’s go beard the lion in her den, shall we?”
Now Susie had Edie’s full attention.
“You don’t want to spend the afternoon avoiding her,” Susie said, reading Edie’s reluctance. “It would be awkward.”
“I’m used to awkward.”
“I’m not. Come on. Grow a spine. That means—”
“I understand. And you’re correct. If I am able to make the day more felicitous for you and others by interacting with a woman who not only demonstrates a lack of judgment in her opinions but also a certain puerile mentality in her unwillingness to change those opinions when confronted with substantial evidence that negates it, I will do so.”
“Yeah.” Susie patted her arm. “We’ll just keep that to ourselves, okay?”
“Okay.”
She steered Edie toward a circle of people sitting in plastic lawn chairs, idly poking at the embers in a fire ring. “Hey-ho. This is Jim’s friend, Edith Handelman. Edie, I’d like you to meet Tom and Mary Rayburn, Chloe’s grandparents, and her uncle, Todd Rayburn. His sixteen-year-old twins are part of the Chloe-toss you just witnessed. And you know Melissa.”
The grandparents, a robust, rawboned couple in their early seventies, were from Chloe’s mother’s side of the family, Edie realized. The husband was a tall, thickset bald man with Chloe’s wide mouth and snub nose. The group returned her interest, definitely curious but not unfriendly—except for one. Melissa’s flat regard clearly found her wanting.
She wasn’t wanting. She was . . .
“Dr. Handelman,” she heard herself murmur. She was building her protective walls, brick by brick, word by word. She felt her cheeks and lips stiffening into a rigorlike facade.
“Yeah. Don’t forget she’s a doctor,” Melissa said.
“May we call you Edith?” the bald man, Todd Rayburn, asked.
“Yes.” Smile, Edith. She smiled. Her face felt as if it might crack.
“Edie.” Chloe appeared beside her, tucking her small hand into hers and saying, “Her name is Edie. No one calls her Edith.” She sounded disgusted.
Melissa’s cold expression thawed. “Hey, it’s the birthday girl! How’s it feel to be six years old?”
“A lot older,” Chloe said seriously. “Did you get me a present?”
“Of course I got you a present. But you’re going to have to wait to open it with the rest of that tower over there.” She nodded toward a card table stacked high with brightly wrapped gifts.
The sight of it nonplussed Edie—so much for one small girl.
“Edie didn’t get me a present,” Chloe said matter-of-factly. “She says she thinks the mom oughta get all the presents on a kid’s birthday on accounta she was the one who had all the calk-ee-um sucked from her bones when the baby was inside her.”
“Calcium,” Edie corrected faintly. Everyone regarded her in faint shock. “I only meant that since a child has no say in whether or not he’s conceived, let alone born, and the mother’s decision to bear children in spite of the myriad and overwhelming challenges presented to the individual, the society, and the planet at large could be seen as either an act of supreme courage or rampant lunacy, in my opinion it is the mother—not the child—who should be celebrated or condemned, depending on ethical beliefs.”
No one spoke. They just stared at her. Finally, Melissa wriggled straighter in her chair and announced, “Well, we’re all very glad Chloe is here.”
“Oh, I am, too,” Edie said. “I lo . . .” She recalled Susie’s discomfort with her earlier disclosure. She wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. “I am, too.”
“Her mother wanted Chloe above all things,” Melissa continued. “Even life itself. You do know about Stephanie, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes. Jim has told me quite a bit about her.”
Melissa affected not to have heard. “She was an amazing woman. A free spirit. A bon vivant. Everyone loved her. Everyone,” Melissa said, and gave Jim’s in-laws a damp-eyed look of solicitude. They smiled back, looking none too comfortable to Edie’s admittedly untutored eye. “She was Jim’s soul mate.”
“Oh.” She couldn’t think of anything to say that she could be certain would be appropriate. Chloe sidled closer to her.
“Come and sit on Aunt Melissa’s lap, Chlo-Schmo” Melissa said, holding her arms open.
Chloe looked around at her cousins hooting and hollering, dodging a boy of about fifteen who was darting at them with outstretched arms. Every time he touched one of them, they f
roze in place.
“I wanna play freeze tag!” Chloe declared, and disappeared.
Susie smiled after her as her cousins welcomed her into the game. “You can see why she’s a little spoiled,” she told Chloe. “Her cousins treat her like a pet.”
“It’s because she’s the youngest,” Chloe’s grandmother said. “Steph was the youngest, too.”
“Did Steph have issues with temper tantrums, too?” Edie asked curiously.
“Temper tantrums?” Melissa echoed in an odd voice.
“Yes,” Edie replied, frowning in confusion as Susie laid a hand lightly on her wrist. “Chloe has temper tantrums sometimes. They are quite spectacular. So I was wondering if it was the result of being overindulged or a genetic predisposition or perhaps a combination of both.”
Melissa flushed. Todd looked away uncomfortably, and the grandparents stared at her, as if seeing her for the first time.
“Steph was a saint,” Melissa declared. “Everyone loved her. She never—”
“Stephanie,” Chloe’s grandfather interrupted, “had a temper like a spanked cat.”
All eyes in their little group swung toward Stephanie’s father, who was staring off in the distance, a soft expression on his face. He began to chuckle. “Oh, she had it under control most times, and I suspect Chloe’ll learn to dunk the fuse, but man, when it got away from her . . . watch out!”
Todd, Jim’s brother-in-law, nodded, grinning broadly. “And you didn’t even see the half of it. The things that girl subjected me to, it’s amazing I lived to tell the tale. I remember once when she was about fifteen and I was twelve. She came home from a date with some kid, and I was hiding on the front porch. When the guy leaned over to kiss her good night, I jumped out in a Halloween mask. The poor guy fainted dead away, and Steph chased me through the neighborhood with a broom for a half hour. By the time she gave up and went home, the kid was long gone. I kept my bedroom door locked for a month after that.”
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