Page 2 of Unwavering
By now I was resting my head on Sinclair’s chest so I could feel his deep voice rumble out. “I don’t know, how should I know? Faster, please. We have to go faster because our stupid bedroom is two floors and at least a thousand feet away so faster, right now—faster!”
“That’s not what you urged last night,” he teased.
“Really? You’re trying a ‘that’s what she said’ thing? Stick to 20thcentury humor, pal.”
“I suppose such things are...ah...better left to experts.” The ‘ah’ because I’d worked open some of the buttons on his deep blue Royal Oxford shirt and was licking the exposed skin. (This was Sinclair at his most casual: dress shirt, slacks, belt, socks—but no jacket or tie, the hedonist.) He set me carefully on my feet and leaned against the bannister to give me some wiggle room. So I did what any right-thinking horny vampire would do: pounced on him. If he was a sexy ocelot, I was a sensual bobcat!
“Too many buttons,” I whined.
“The three words I treasure most from your lips, darling.”
“I’ll give you three words,” I muttered, losing patience and jerking his shirt free of his pants.
“Thereyou are!”
I spun and beheld my friend Jessica holding the Ultimate Mood BreakersTM: her cute weird babies.
“What now?” I snapped.
“Excuseme?”
“Sorry. I meant ‘oh look who stopped by and brought us her weird cute babies without calling first’.”
“I haven’t called before coming over for fifteen years! Onyourinstructions, after the Miss Congeniality debacle.”
Ugh. Don’t remind me.Sullying that pageant was my worst act before I died. Or my finest, depending on where you land on the “are pageants great or terrible” spectrum.
“And they have names, y’know.” Jessica sounded the way she usually did when we got into it: exasperated-yet-fond. Or maybe it was the other way around. We’d been friends since junior high and she was one of those terrible women who didn’t age. She still had the same dark, perfect complexion, the same big beautiful eyes, the same perpetually surprised expression (she liked pulling her hair back—wayback—which made her eyebrows arch). And mere months after popping out the twins, she was back to her scrawny-skinny frame. So aggravating. “And you’d better not be calling them weird babies when they’re in high school, Betsy.”
She was in full Aggravated Mom mode (far more terrifying than Irritated Roommate mode), pacing back and forth (she only ever paced three feet forward and three feet back, so it was like watching a wind-up toy with a great manicure) with a beautiful bright-eyed baby on each hip watching us with interest. “Your mom asked me to swing by and grab some of BabyJon’s toys so he could play with the twins. And what thanks do I get, coming here out of my way?”
“No thanks?” I guessed (seemed safest).
“Nothanks!” Jessica was wearing her usual collection of comfortable faded clothing (long-sleeved red t-shirt, black jeans, sandals andargh, the state of her toenails!), all liberally decorated with baby formula. (How do you even get baby formula on your feet?) The good news was, the formula set off her dark skin in a really superb way. Except for the only four hours of sleep a night thing, motherhood had been great for my oldest and best friend.
“But don’t worry,” she was continuing, because even if she suspected I’d tuned her out, she figured Sinclair, at least, would be paying attention. Foolish woman! Sinclair was only thinking about my pants, specifically: how to divest me of them. “We won’t be here long, so you two horny toads can get back to humping on the stairs and good God, man!” Jessica had stopped in mid-pace. The babies were also goggling at Sinclair. “What happened to your shirt?”
Sinclair looked down and seemed surprised to behold that his shirt below the second button was shredded. He looked part man, part carwash mop. “To begin,” he said with convincing dignity, “the queen and I never ‘hump’. We—“
“Spare me the perv details.”
“It is,” he continued, a neat trick with the shreds of his shirt fluttering around his knees, “a special day for us.”
“Oh, because you’re about to do a hallway bang?” She giggled and one of the babies did, too. The other was focused on devouring its hand. Not part of the hand.The whole hand.I didn’t know if I should discourage or cheer. I also didn’t know which one was the boy or the girl since Jessica refused to slap a Hello My Name Is sticker on their tiny shirts. (Because she was an unreasonable harridan.) “You guys have a lot of special days.”
“Yep, it’s all special all the time around here so we’d better get back to it.”
“Nice to see you, Jessica!” Jessica yelled, because that was her idea of subtle.
“Well, it was.”
“We miss you around here, Jessica!”
“Well, we do.”
“Jerks.” This in a tone of restrained affection, and, formalities finished, she was bustling past us and up the stairs toward my brother/son’s room. (Long story short, my father and stepmother had a baby together. They’re gone now. The baby remains. We’re therealmodern family, what with brother/sons and zombies and vampires and puppies and the occasional ghost all under one roof.) Sinclair turned to follow (we had to; our room was up those same stairs) and I hopped on his back, because he’s super strong and I’m nimble like that.
But I forgot about physics. Sinclair clutched for the banister, missed, and we both tumbled backward and fell.
