Hope Street (11 page)

Before bed, the children brought the gifts they’d bought for one another downstairs to the living room and arranged them under the tree. Ellie had explained to Peter a few years ago that while Santa brought most of the presents, people also gave gifts to their loved ones, because Christmas was all about giving. Peter had a tendency to give the sorts of gifts he would love to receive: packages of Gummi Bears for his sisters, baseball cards for his father and—usually because he’d run out of money—a crayon drawing in a Popsicle-stick frame for Ellie. She treasured his drawings and counted her blessings that he never gave her Gummi Bears.

“All right—bedtime,” Curt announced at around nine-thirty. He’d changed from his suit into a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, and he looked tired and comfortable and glowing with the serenity the holiday was supposed to bring.

The kids exerted themselves to shatter that peace. “It’s too early! We’re not babies! We can sleep late tomorrow!”

No one was going to sleep late tomorrow, not with Peter rampaging through the house, shrieking that Santa had once again consumed the cookies and left a ton of packages under the tree. “Santa doesn’t visit houses where the kids stay up late,” Curt warned, and all three reluctantly kissed him and Ellie good-night and trudged up the stairs.

An hour would pass before they were asleep, Ellie knew. She and Curt couldn’t arrange the presents under the tree until the children were in dreamland—especially Peter, since he still believed fervently in Santa, his classmate’s statement notwithstanding.

But that hour of settling-down time was fine with Ellie. It would probably take her close to an hour to assemble the gingerbread house.

“I’ll help,” Curt offered, rolling up his sleeves and surveying the pieces of gingerbread she’d cut using her templates. “What do you want me to do?”

“Shovel the snow from the driveway,” she joked, then shook her head. “Actually, I could use your help. If you can hold these two walls like this, at a right angle, I can glue them together with the frosting.”

“Are you sure we shouldn’t be using concrete?”

“Don’t get smart with me. Either you help or you clean the driveway.”

“Okay. Right angles.” He hovered over the table, his large
hands dwarfing the slabs of gingerbread. Ellie used a narrow spatula to seal the corner with icing. She managed to get some of the icing on Curt’s pinkie. He let go of the wall to lick it off, and the house nearly collapsed.

“No licking till we’re done.”

“You’re a slave driver.”

“You partied all afternoon. Now I get to boss you around.”

“Hmm.” He nudged the top of her head with his chin. “Are you going to discipline me with a velvet whip? Maybe use some fur-lined handcuffs?”

“If I handcuffed you, you wouldn’t be able to hold the walls up.
Right
angle, Curt,” she emphasized when he shifted the wall slightly. “Ninety degrees.”

“I forgot to bring my protractor,” he joked, but he adjusted the walls and Ellie was able to cement them with the icing.

More than an hour passed before they had the house standing reasonably solidly and decorated with candy canes, M&M’s, jelly beans and gumdrops—a few of which disappeared into Curt’s mouth instead of becoming part of the house’s decor. “It’ll do,” Ellie said wearily. The gingerbread houses she’d seen in magazine photographs looked a hell of a lot better than this one.

“Not done yet,” Curt interrupted, fishing a toothpick from the box on the table. He dipped it into a smear of frosting and dabbed it against the house’s front wall, above its white-icing door. Another dip and a dab, and another. When he was done, Ellie could see the faint white shape of two letters in the slightly bulging gingerbread that rose toward the peaked roof: “H. S.”

Hope Street. Just like the shingle he’d made for this house and attached to the front wall above the door. She remembered the day he’d emerged from his basement workshop carrying that
shingle, just a few weeks after they’d moved into the house, when she was eight and a half months pregnant with Katie and looked as if she’d swallowed a watermelon whole. Curt had hung the shingle, then taken her in his arms and said, “I promised you we’d always live on Hope Street. This house might be on Birch Lane, but we’re living on Hope Street, too.”

Now the gingerbread had officially been granted a Hope Street address. Suddenly, the crooked little structure seemed more beautiful to Ellie than any gingerbread house in any magazine.

She carried it on a foil-covered tray into the living room and set it on the coffee table next to the cookies Peter had left out for Santa. “Do you think we can do the presents?” Curt whispered.

They glanced toward the stairs. No sounds emerged from the kids’ rooms, no activity, no signs of life. Ellie nodded, and they tiptoed down to the basement and retrieved the gift-wrapped parcels from assorted hiding places. Katie’s gifts were all wrapped in red foil, Jessie’s in silver, Peter’s in green, Ellie’s in white and Curt’s in gold. Ellie had explained to the children, years ago, that Santa liked to sort the packages this way so he’d know who was getting what.

From under the tool bench Curt hoisted a large white parcel, squarish but not rectangular enough to be a box. “What’s that?” she asked.

“You’ll find out tomorrow,” he teased.

“Oh, come on—you can tell me!” She sounded as wheedling as the girls when they were angling for some new privilege.

“It’s a very big bracelet,” Curt said before tiptoeing up the stairs with a bulky pile of gifts.

After a few trips between the basement and the living room, all the presents were arrayed under the tree. Delicate white lights winked among the Scotch pine’s branches and glittered off
the tinsel garlands, giving the tree an elegantly icy appearance. The Frost tree should look frosty, Curt always said, so they limited their decorations to white and silver. If the tree were standing outside, it would be even more frosty, glazed with snow.

Curt switched off the living-room lights so only the tree illuminated the room. “Sit,” he murmured, nudging her toward the sofa before he vanished into the kitchen. He returned carrying two glasses of port. Then he lowered himself onto the sofa next to her and arched an arm around her.

He no longer smelled of perfume or punch. Only of Curt, a dark, heady, deliciously male scent that made her long to melt into him. She rested her head on his shoulder and wished she looked better. She still had on the baggy sweater and frayed jeans she’d donned once she’d gotten home from work, and her scent carried heavy undertones of flour and molasses and ginger. Not the most romantic fragrance in the world.

Curt didn’t seem to mind. “The house looks great,” he said.

Ellie took a sip of port, then shook her head. “My mother won’t think so. What do you want to bet she walks through the door tomorrow and tells me I should wash the kitchen floor?”

“I meant
that
house,” he said, gesturing toward her gingerbread creation. “But our house looks great, too. Your mother will be too busy fussing over the kids to notice the kitchen floor.”

“Oh, she’ll notice.” Ellie’s mother wouldn’t have cared about Ellie’s floor if Ellie had fulfilled her destiny and become a doctor. “If you were a doctor, I wouldn’t expect you to have time to scrub the floors,” her mother would say. “But you just work at that school. You’re home by the middle of the afternoon, and you can’t possibly be tired. If you haven’t got a demanding career, the least you could do is have a clean house.”

It was clean enough. And at age forty, Ellie was no longer des
perate for her mother’s approval. Maybe in another few years, she wouldn’t even mind the criticisms anymore.

Curt sipped some port, then lowered his glass to the table. “I think the kids’ll be pleased with their presents.”

“They ought to be.” Along with the usual books, CDs, games and stocking stuffers, they’d bought Katie some computer software that would enable her to edit videotapes—she’d pretty much taken over the family’s camcorder, and her current dream was to direct music videos. Jessie would be getting a Discman, which she’d been hinting about for months. Peter had written in his letter to Santa that he wanted a new baseball bat and glove, and those items now sat beneath the tree, awkwardly wrapped in green paper. “I know I’m eager to try on that very big bracelet,” Ellie added, gesturing toward the mysterious white package Curt had carried upstairs.

He chuckled softly and kissed the crown of her head. Then he eased her glass from her hand, placed it beside his and pulled her half onto his lap. “It’ll look gorgeous on you. You’ll have to model it for me—wearing just the bracelet and nothing else.”

“Do you think that’s what Santa had in mind when he got it for me?”

“Santa’s a dirty old man,” Curt warned before kissing her again—a deep, sensual kiss that stole Ellie’s breath. She turned toward him, reaching for his shoulders, and he slid a hand under her sweater and cupped her breast. “A very, very dirty old man.”

“We shouldn’t do this down here,” Ellie warned.

“The kids are asleep.”

“They could wake up.”

“They wouldn’t dare.” With that, he twisted out from under her, deposited her onto the sofa cushions and sprawled on top of her. “You know what the best thing about Christmas is?” he murmured as he pushed her sweater up, baring her midriff.
“Being married to you.” He punctuated this sentiment with a warm, wet kiss on her belly.

Her exasperation with the gingerbread house went forgotten. The children’s prebedtime rambunctiousness faded from her mind. Her parents’ impending visit, the now-refrigerated turkey she’d have to dress and roast tomorrow, the early-morning wakeup Peter would subject them to with his exuberant yelling…Her mind emptied of everything but Curt, his weight, his warm hands moving over her skin, his hips pressing into hers. His stubble scratched her cheeks and throat as he kissed her, and she wondered if she’d have beard burns marking her skin tomorrow. Not that she cared. In fact, they might distract her mother from the fact that the kitchen floor wasn’t spotless.

Ellie and Curt had been together for twenty years, married for seventeen. They’d done their share of experimentation—although, joking aside, neither of them had a taste for velvet whips or fur-lined handcuffs. But Curt still excited her. He touched her as if each time was an entirely new experience, as if each brush of his fingers or his lips or his tongue represented a unique discovery. His body was as lean and hard as it had been the first time she’d seen it one twilit morning in his apartment on Hope Street. He’d thrilled her then. He thrilled her now.

“I love you.” She sighed as he eased her slacks down her legs. “Oh, Curt…”

“We got this right, didn’t we.” He slid his hand between her thighs, found her wet and trembling. “The love part.”

She didn’t want to come without him, but he was too deft, he knew her too well. A few strokes and she was gone, gasping into the hollow of his throat as her body throbbed with pleasure.

“I love when you come,” he whispered, and his words made her come again.

“Take off your pants,” she moaned.

“I’m getting there.” He worked his fly with one hand, his other remaining where it was, teasing her, keeping her tense and painfully aroused. He wiggled his hips and she shoved his jeans in the general direction of his ankles, then guided him to her, took him, held him deep inside.

His movements were familiar, so sweet and strong. She loved the hardness of his buttocks against her palms, the caress of his breath against her brow. She loved the rhythm of his strokes, the depth of them, the way he and she possessed each other, trusted each other, anticipated each other’s needs and satisfied them. Ellie knew digging her thumbs into the small of his back made him wild. Curt knew tweaking her nipples sent flames of sensation through her. She knew when he was nearing his peak; he knew when she was nearing hers.

Yes, they’d gotten this right.
So right,
she thought as her body convulsed around him, as he groaned and took her in a fierce final surge.

Eventually they wound down, their bodies sinking into the upholstery, Curt’s mouth grazing hers with a lazy kiss. “Merry Christmas, Ellie,” he murmured.

“Forget the very big bracelet,” she murmured back. “I just got my favorite gift.”

T
HE VERY BIG BRACELET
turned out to be a padded bleacher seat—and Ellie was as delighted as she would have been by jewelry. She already had more than enough trinkets—bracelets, pendants, a diamond eternity ring Curt had given her in honor of their tenth anniversary, which she wore every day along with her wedding band.

A bleacher seat would keep her bottom from going numb
during the countless hours she sat watching her kids play baseball, softball and basketball. Sometimes, the comfort of a woman’s butt was more important than the glitter of diamonds.

Peter squealed and bellowed over his gifts, single-handedly maintaining a noise level high enough to rouse any neighbors foolish enough to leave their windows open. The girls used to behave the way he did on Christmas morning, but now that they were tweeners they were too cool to scream. Instead, they resorted to muted gasps and murmurs of “Awesome!” and “Yes!” as they unwrapped CDs by Destiny’s Child and Matchbox Twenty, books from the Sweet Valley High and Baby-sitters Club series, enameled butterfly-shaped earrings for Jessie and ladybug earrings for Katie. All three children oohed and aahed over the gingerbread house, and Curt modestly downplayed his contributions and insisted that Ellie had created the thing by herself. Personally, she thought his having inscribed the house with “H. S.” was the most important decoration, but if Curt wanted to give her all the credit, she wasn’t foolish enough to argue.

She observed the happy mayhem for a few minutes, thanked Jessie for the tortoiseshell barrette, Katie for the stacking coasters with impressionist paintings reproduced on them and Peter for this year’s Popsicle-stick-framed crayon masterpiece, and then holed up in the kitchen to dress the turkey. After a bit more revelry in the living room, Curt and the children joined her, Curt wearing the handwoven wool sweater Ellie had found at a craft fair in October and impulsively bought to give him for Christmas. The slashes of color—green and gold and a rusty brown—were reflected in his hazel eyes. The pattern and texture were kind of artsy for Curt’s taste, but he didn’t have to wear it to court. Just when he was around Ellie.