Marie approached them, one of the albums open. “I found one,” she said. “That’s Daniel just after college,” she said, pointing at a picture of Daniel, shirtless, before he’d cut his hair for the academy.
“You look so young,” she said quietly, then looked at him, as if trying to find that boy in his face. “So innocent.”
He leaned over to murmur in her ear. “I wasn’t.”
She laughed.
“Time to open gifts,” he said.
They left the seats of honor for the kids and the kids’ parents. Tilda volunteered to track who gave what to whom, earning a grateful smile from Angie. Several hastily wrapped things came to them, a candle, an elaborate wrought iron tree with picture frames dangling from the branches. The twin hung on the wall, obscured by the Christmas tree, and held wedding pictures from Daniel’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. A second one hung in Angie’s house, with her wedding picture and a rotation of shots of Jessie’s and Little K’s school pictures in the frames. Inspired by the lack of pictures in her town house, he gave Tilda a framed picture of herself and her grandmother, one he’d hastily written to Nan to obtain. She went silent when she opened it. “You didn’t have any pictures up,” he said. “You said they got lost in a move and you hadn’t gotten around to replacing them. It’s a good start.”
She touched Nan’s face carefully, as if afraid to smear the glass. “When did you do this?”
“At the last possible minute. That’s why I had to run out last night.”
“Can I see?” Angie asked, her hand out.
“That’s my Nan,” Tilda said. “My grandmother. She lives in Cornwall, England.”
“I’ll get you copies of our side,” his mother said.
“It’s lovely,” Tilda said quietly. “Thank you.”
“I didn’t know you had one for me,” Daniel said with a nod at the photo family tree Tilda had opened a few minutes earlier.
“Of course I did,” his mother said. “I wasn’t giving up hope.”
T
ilda found it interesting that she wasn’t the center of attention. Yes, her impromptu, unexpected marriage came up frequently, but as Daniel explained, people hadn’t seen each other in a while and everyone was focused on the kids, so she found herself able to drift from group to group without garnering much attention. When she did touch down with a group, people asked the same questions.
W
hat do you do?
Where are you from?
How long have you lived in the US?
How long have you known Daniel?
How did you meet?
Will your family be upset about the elopement?
Everyone was too polite or yet too sober to phrase the question so bluntly, but that was the unspoken subtext. Wouldn’t her family want a wedding of any size, a chance to celebrate this transition in her life? She explained how her mother was teaching, her grandmother too frail to travel, and that no, not all weddings in England were as elaborate as Will and Kate’s. Alone for a second, she thought about Daniel’s gift. Nan had sent two pictures, one of her and Tilda when Tilda was seventeen, another when Tilda was about eight. A wild mop of curls and big eyes, elbows and knees, just her and Nan. Thank God for a chaotic family Christmas. No one asked too many questions.
She looked past the enormous Christmas tree and saw Jessie and Kiernan kicking a new soccer ball around in the driveway.
“Just need some fresh air,” she said to a group gathered around the fireplace. Impulsively, she opened the door and made her way down the steps. She wasn’t running. Or escaping. Just getting some air. Air was in short supply in that house right now.
“Hello,” she said to Jessie and Kiernan.
“You sound funny.”
“Shut up, Little K,” Jessie hissed.
“I likely do sound funny to you,” Tilda agreed.
Kiernan looked at her. “Do I sound funny to you?”
Only because he was missing his two front teeth, but Tilda didn’t say that. “Not really. I’ve lived here for quite some time, so I’m used to your accent. How long have you played soccer?” she asked Jessie, purposefully choosing to call it by its American name.
“Since I was three,” the girl said proudly. She kicked the ball up and began a quite accomplished game of keepy-uppy, managing nearly thirty seconds before she lost control of the ball.
“Well done,” Tilda said with a smile. “Can I have a go?”
“You play soccer?”
“Not for ages, but I did when I was in school.”
“My age?”
“Older than you. Your equivalent of high school.”
“Sure,” the girl said.
The girl flipped the ball into the air and Tilda tapped it up with her knee. She managed slightly less time than Jessie, not bad for ten years without touching a ball, and the rhythmic pace of her breathing calmed her.
“Nice,” Jessie said magnanimously. In an automatic move Tilda recognized from her own player days, Jessie twitched her ponytail free of her shirt, dropped the ball, and kicked it toward Tilda. Tilda dribbled it toward the makeshift goal and let Jessie steal it just before she reached it.
“Don’t let me take it,” Jessie said, mightily offended.
Tilda promptly stole it back. Taking advantage of Tilda’s boots, Jessie fought for the ball, then took off with it, heading for the opposite goal.
“Why did you marry Uncle Daniel?”
Focused on the ball, Tilda danced around Jessie, and the question. “Why do you think I did?”
“My mom says maybe you’re knocked up.”
To keep from laughing, Tilda concentrated on blocking Jessie’s progress. “I am not knocked up.”
“What’s knocked up?”
“Ask your mother.”
“I wasn’t supposed to hear her say that.”
“Best not to eavesdrop,” Tilda said.
“What’s eavesdrop?”
“Listening to conversations you shouldn’t.”
“In all the movies the prince comes and saves the princess and they get married and she wears a big white dress and then it’s over. Mom says her wedding was the best day of her life. I don’t want my life to be over. Did you wear a white dress?”
“No,” Tilda said.
“I don’t want a big dress and a party. Boys smell, and I play soccer better than most of them. They don’t listen to the coach, and they’re all focused on scoring, not teamwork.”
“Bad news, Jessie,” Tilda said. “They still smell when they get older. But they will get better at soccer.”
Jessie shrugged. “I’ll be the best, though.”
“An excellent goal.”
Jessie beamed. “Will you come see me play in the spring? I’m in the elite league.”
She wasn’t going to make promises she might not be able to keep to this sprite of a girl who reminded her of herself. “I’m going to be traveling a lot in the spring, but I’ll try,” Tilda said.
—
Daniel stood with his parents, Angie, Uncle Ralph, and Marie at the front windows overlooking the driveway. Jessie and Tilda had wrestled the net from the back of the Tahoe, and were using the open garage as one goal and the net at the end of the driveway as the other.
“You didn’t know she played soccer,” Angie said without looking at him.
His sister could read minds. “I did not,” Daniel said.
Silence. Angie finally said what he knew everyone was thinking. “Is she pregnant?”
“No.”
“She’s a beautiful girl,” his mother said. “What does she do?”
“She owns West Village Stationery, but she’s in talks with a British company about a global deal.”
“So she’s a successful businesswoman. She’s smart, and look how good she is with Jessie.”
The outlier in a family of girly girls. Daniel wasn’t sure whom she was trying to convince, herself, or everyone else. “I love her,” he said to no one in particular, and to everyone in general. “I love her, and I married her.”
“And that’s all he has to say about that,” Angie said in a singsong voice.
Daniel snorted.
—
Tilda’s skin seemed to vibrate as they climbed the stairs to the second floor. Daniel flipped on lights in various bedrooms. “Angie’s room. It used to be mine until I got caught climbing out the window,” he said, nodding at the branches of the big maple tapping at the glass. “Now it’s the girls’ sleepover room.” He walked down the hall and flipped on another light. “The boys’ sleepover room.”
Tilda peeked her head inside. Two single beds made up with cartoon character sheets were pushed against opposite walls and covered in dark blue comforters. The bookshelves were old but carefully painted and held worn books ranging from the Hardy Boys to Harry Potter. Tilda walked inside and looked at the trophies and medals.
“Is this the room you were moved to?”
He shook his head. “I got moved to the back of the house, where there’s a two-story drop to the patio. It’s the guest room now, quieter for people who are staying a few days. But that’s my furniture from childhood, and some of my awards.”
“You were on the track team?”
“Cross-country, too. I wasn’t much for team sports, but I liked to run.”
She continued through the ribbons, medals, and trophies hanging from decorative bulletin boards, then looked around the room again. Likely it wasn’t all that different from when Daniel was a boy, simple, comfortable components of childhood. Character sheets. Books designed to appeal to boys, games in case books were boring. A poster of a baseball player shared wall space with a poster of the solar system, and another one of the Milky Way with a yellow arrow labeled
You Are Here
pointing to an indeterminate star at one of the ends of the spiral. Daniel belonged here, in this room, in this house, in this suburb, in this family, and while most people were too polite to say it out loud, the subtext running under the entire day was that Tilda wasn’t what anyone expected Daniel to bring home as his bride.
She’d visited enough friends’ homes to know that Daniel’s room held fairly typical trappings of a middle-class suburban upbringing, but her friends weren’t her husband. Her friends never came to Cornwall with her, as Daniel would in a couple of days.
The odd sense of unreality, similar to jet lag, made her sway on her feet.
“Are you tired?”
“A little,” she said.
“Long day. Lots of people to meet.”
“Everyone was very nice.”
“You’ll get to know them,” he said.
The idea seemed incomprehensible, but it was late, very late. After the noise of the train, then a house overflowing with people, the late-night silence vibrated against her eardrums. “Well,” she said brightly. “Do you want SpongeBob sheets or Star Wars sheets?”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “We’re in the guest room.”
The room was furnished in sage and a pale yellow, very comfortable, very soothing, and overlooked the back yard. Daniel switched on the lamp on the nightstand and lowered the blinds. Someone had brought their overnight bags up and left them on an old mariner’s trunk. Above the trunk hung a wooden placard with the phrase
Home is where your story begins
painted in quaint letters over a drooping tree and a New England–style house fronting a split-rail fence. The sign made Tilda smile when she recognized the foundation of such a key component of Daniel’s character. Daniel was all about stories, the stories money told, the stories people told. Real-life stories were complicated, full of twists and turns, sleight-of-hand, red herrings. He loved nothing more than slowly, carefully teasing apart the separate strands until he understood the whole story.
“Bathroom’s through there,” he said, tipping his head toward a door she’d mistaken for a closet.
Hurriedly she pulled her nightgown and toiletries case from her bag and ducked into the bathroom. She washed her face, brushed her teeth, and emerged to find Daniel in bed, reading, one hand tucked behind his head and the covers at his waist. He glanced up at her, then back at his book, then did a very gratifying double take.
“Happy Christmas,” she said in a low voice.
“Uh,” he said.
She smiled at his inarticulate response, then turned in a slow circle. Rather than her usual functional satin set she wore a camisole made of sheer gold lace and matching cheeky panties. “I found these at a gorgeous shop in the Fashion District called Irresistible. We should go back together sometime. The dressing rooms are enormous, with mirrors
everywhere
, and the owner seems to mind not at all. She’s French. Very Continental.”
Daniel seemed not to hear her, adding credence to the argument that men’s focus narrowed when presented with a pretty, nearly naked woman. “That’s for me?”
“They’re for us,” she said, and knelt on the bed. The box spring squawked under her weight. “Rather selfish of me, perhaps.”
“Not at all,” he said, and reached for her hand to draw her close. His thumb found her wedding ring, still unfamiliar on her finger. “It’s a little loose,” he commented.
“It’s fine,” she said. “It won’t slip over my knuckle.”
He gave her a little smile, then lifted her fingers to his lips. The gesture never failed to surprise her, so old-fashioned and courtly and completely Daniel. “Warm,” he said, but blew on her fingertips anyway.
His tongue traced the sensitive edges of her fingers, licked each of the tips. He let her press gently against his lower lip, feeling the give that would disappear as they fucked, as friction and pressure swelled his lips with blood, all the while holding her gaze. The heat simmering in his eyes covered a complex tapestry of emotion. Some she could identify, laughter, the sheer pleasure of a day with family. Others were unfamiliar, harder to discern.
Slow steps made their way up the stairs and down the hall. Tilda tried to tug her hand free from Daniel’s grip, but he tightened his fingers. “They won’t come in,” he said in a low voice.
The hall light flicked off, then the door to the master suite closed. The silence felt all encompassing as Tilda leaned forward to kiss Daniel. “We shouldn’t,” she whispered.
She felt his smile form under her mouth. “You just have to be quiet.”
He used his body to tip her onto her back and tuck her under him, a move her animal brain responded to from deep inside, that of the powerful male covering the smaller female. The box spring squeaked again as they shifted into the middle of the bed. “We can’t,” she said even as she arched her hips against his erection.
“Shh,” he said, and kissed her.
The wind picked up, scraping the bare branches against the window. Cocooned in the sheets and blankets, she held Daniel’s shoulders while he kissed her, slow and deep, as noiselessly as possible, a rub of lips, tongue sliding against hers before he licked and nipped his way along her jaw to her ear. She wasn’t used to being quiet, expected it to be a turn-off, but found instead that restricting herself from moving, from moaning, heightened her sense of touch and taste and smell. The scent of sweat bloomed between them, dissipating in the cool room. He took her earlobe between his teeth and bit down slowly, increasing the touch until it became pressure, then a sweet, hot pain that rolled along her nerves to her nipples and clit. She whimpered, turned her head to the side. He relented, kissed the hollow under her jaw, then her neck, palming her forehead and tipping her head back to expose her whole throat to his mouth. She ground her head against the pillow until he fisted his hand in her hair and held her still. Demanding heat pooled between her thighs.
Without releasing her hair, moving at a snail’s pace, he shifted down, licking at her nipple through the delicate lace. She reached down to pull it up but the mattress creaked and he wouldn’t lift, keeping the fabric trapped between their stomachs. “Stay still,” he murmured.
His voice hung in the air. Her nipples were tender and achingly sensitive by the time he lifted his head. They tightened harder in the cooling air. She wanted to pinch them herself but the creaky bed kept her immobilized, Daniel a heavy presence between her thighs. Even lifting to press her mound into his body set off another jarring set of noises.
“This is not amusing,” she hissed in a stage whisper.
“No,” he replied. Keeping his weight braced on one arm he trailed his fingers along her hip and began to edge up the camisole. “It’s hot.” He made a
tut-tut-tut
noise. “You’re wearing panties.”