by Various
“I don’t even remember meeting him,” Rob replied, pulling the sheets up and over his waist. “He’s just so cool, you know? Is it weird for me to think that and be married to you?”
“No,” she repeated. “I mean, maybe it’s not usual to do stuff like this, but maybe it is. I don’t know. I only know what goes on in our bedroom, not in anybody else’s.”
He threw an arm around her. “That’s true. But is it bad for us, do you think?”
In a sleepy haze, she didn’t feel like she could come up with the best of all possible answers. “I think what it shows us is how strong we are. We can do all this stuff to help some guy we like and enjoy it and be totally honest about it. The weak couples are the ones who hide it from each other.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said in the dark. “It’s better to share.”
Kaz let out a snort of a snore and rolled toward them.
“He’s on my feet.”
“Mine too,” Rob laughed. “We’ve got our own human hot water bottle.”
Josie took a deep breath, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep without asking, “Have you ever done anything like that before? The hot tub, I mean.”
Rob didn’t say anything right away. She almost said, never mind, it’s none of my business, but she really wanted to know. Not because it mattered, only because… she was curious.
So she kept her mouth shut until he said, “I guess everybody has.”
She didn’t want to snap at him, but she’d rather a clear answer than an evasive one. “Does everybody include you?”
Again, she had to wait a while for a response. It seemed really bizarre that they could share experiences so easily, but he had such a hard time telling her about stuff that happened before they met. She wouldn’t be upset about it or anything.
Finally Rob said, in a bit of a huff, “You know, I feel really used right now.”
“Used how?”
They tried to turn and face one another, but their feet were caught under a Japanese guy, so they stared at the ceiling instead.
“I feel like you just want to get off on hearing some story about my youthful indiscretions,” Rob said. “Like, oooh guess what my freak show husband did when he was young? Those memories are private. I’m sorry.”
“You’re not ashamed, are you?” she asked.
He could have fucked every guy on the football team for all she cared. She would never judge him. Though, she couldn’t argue that she was fetishizing him. She liked the idea of her husband’s younger self giving out blowjobs all around campus. It was hot.
“Rob, honey, there’s no need to feel embarrassed or guilty or anything. There are as many sexualities as there are individuals. You know I’d never criticize you.”
“I know.”
When time passed and he didn’t say anything more, she let the issue drop. Really, everybody had memories they never disclosed to anyone. Josie had memories she didn’t even want to let herself remember, like the time her aunt walked in on her masturbating with a yellow zucchini.
God!
She cringed and sent that thought packing. She would never, never tell Rob about that. Ever. It wasn’t merely the event, but the sense of humiliation that went along with it. She wished she could strip that memory from her neurological make-up.
Maybe that’s how Rob felt about whatever it was he wasn’t telling her.
Time for sleep.
Chapter Six
When Froggy came rapping at the door early the next morning, Josie pulled her feet out from under Kaz’s dead weight. Climbing into the terry robe she’d left lying in a puddle beside the bed, she opened the door and picked up her boy.
“Mommy!” he cheered.
“Froggy!” she cheered back.
He laughed. “Kaz thinks he’s a doggie!”
Josie’s heart froze as she struggled to understand what he meant. Kaz was sleeping at the foot of their bed. Like a dog.
“Right,” Josie laughed. “Do you want to get dressed before or after breakfast?”
“Never!”
Rob shifted in bed, not conscious enough to know what was happening. As he rolled over, his feet launched sleeping Kaz clear off the end of the bed.
“Kaz!” she cried, setting Froggy down on the carpet. “Are you okay?”
Hopping to his hands and knees, he looked up with a combination of alarm and complete confusion. When he looked around a bit, he seemed to remember where he was, but Josie clarified, “You fell asleep at the foot of our bed, and then you fell on the floor.”
“Sorry,” he said, quickly rising to his feet. “I’ll go now.”
With a smirk, she said, “Your room’s upstairs.”
No way he’d remember that on his own.
“Thanks,” he replied, stepping between Josie and Froggy to head up to the attic.
Froggy held out his little hand and she took it. Before heading down to the kitchen, she glanced over at Rob. She felt like they’d had some sort of disagreement before they fell asleep, but couldn’t for the life of her remember what it was about. “Pancakes?”
“With strawberries!” Froggy replied as he hopped down the stairs.
Rob was the cook of the family, no doubt, but if there was one thing Josie could handle, it was pancakes.
Breakfast was a blast. Rob descended from on high to play his old Sesame Street Christmas LP. When Kaz came down, he joined him in acting the record out for the little one at the table. Froggy was over the moon. He jumped up to join them until Josie chuckled, “Come on, you three. Sit down and eat these pancakes I slaved over a hot stove to make for you.”
They sat like workhorses, but their faces lit up within a second of placing the fluffy-sweet goodness of her pancakes with pure Quebec maple syrup on their tongues.
“These are delicious,” Kaz applauded.
She shot him a Mona Lisa smile. They were straight from a box mix, but nobody needed to know that.
“Mommy makes good pancakes,” her son reiterated as Rob cut his up into little pieces.
“What does Daddy make?” Rob asked.
Reflecting intensely while he chewed a slice of banana, Froggy replied, “Good paintings.”
The grown-ups laughed. With him, not at him. Children had an incredible ability to devise unexpected responses to straightforward questions.
“What about you?” Kaz asked. “Are you good at painting too?”
“Yeah,” Froggy said. “But Daddy’s more better.”
Josie smiled at her husband across the table. As they listened with fond appreciation to the record on deck, Kaz asked, “Are you a Froggy like Kermit the Frog? Or like a different kind of frog?”
“Like a frog I catched at the lake,” he replied matter-of-factly, but always smiling.
“Ah.”
“Yes,” Rob cut in. “Froggy spent a week at the lake.”
“With cousin Ben,” Froggy interrupted.
“With cousin Ben,” Rob repeated, sliding his pancake around a pool. “He caught so many frogs that everybody started calling him Froggy.”
Josie stood to clear up some dishes. Better to get out of the house early and back home before the insanity of the Christmas Eve rush took over. “Kaz, we need to go out and buy our Christmas tree this morning.”
Froggy leapt on his chair, jumping up and down on the plush seat. “Christmas tree! Christmas tree! Christmas tree!”
Pulling down their son’s pyjama top, Rob said, “Sit on your bum and finish your breakfast.”
He smiled as he said it, and Josie could see the same excitement in both sets of eyes. In Kaz’s too. “You’re welcome to come along, if you’d like.”
“Thanks,” he said with a smile and a nod. As he finished his last sip of tea, a dark look set across his face. “Oh, but I have so much work to finish up before the end of the calendar year. Would you mind if my laptop and I just hung out in your family room for the day?”
Rob whipped his head around quickly, turning his gaze f
rom Froggy to Josie. She wasn’t clear what the alarm in his eyes meant to indicate.
“Yeah, of course you can work here,” Josie replied, giving Rob a questioning look.
“What, do you think he’s going to steal our silver?” she asked in the bedroom as they changed from pyjamas to tree-shopping attire. They didn’t really have time for a conversation. Froggy was already dressed, booted and mittened, and waiting impatiently by the front door. “I really don’t understand how you can trust a guy to sleep with us, but not trust him enough to spend the morning in our family room.”
Plunging his feet into wool socks, he asked, “What if he’s nosy? What if he snoops through our stuff?”
“What is there to find?” she countered. “A few silly pictures and a vibrator? Who cares?” She opened the door before he had his pants on, and he hopped around the room, struggling into them. “Come on, let’s go. Don’t worry so much about things.”
As she buckled Froggy into his car seat, she wondered why on earth she felt so irritated with Rob over nothing. It must have been remnants from the previous night, when she wanted so badly to know something and he refused to tell her. When was it ever a good idea to keep secrets? Especially secrets the other partner was aware of. Those ones could haunt even the best of relationships.
Chapter Seven
“I made lunch,” Kaz called out from the family room as they dragged the tree inside. Froggy held the top branch, convinced he was doing all the work. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind?” Josie cried, bringing up the rear. “Why would we mind? Help yourself to anything. You’re our guest.”
Rob kicked off his boots and dragged the tree to the front window, clenching his teeth. Kaz better not have gotten into his English fig and walnut jelly. “What did you make?”
“Oh darn!” Josie cried, setting down the tree trunk and slipping out of her snow boots. “I forgot to grab the skirt and base and all that from downstairs. I meant to get that out last night.”
As she darted for the basement door, Rob held up the tree with one gloved hand while he tried to unzip Froggy’s snowsuit with the other. When Kaz noticed the trouble he was having, he set his computer down and said, “I can give you a hand, if you want.”
Letting out a deep breath, Rob replied, “I guess you could help Froggy out of his boots and stuff.” As he watched the care Kaz took interacting with their sleepy son, Rob had to ask himself why he felt so irritated with the guy. “Thanks, dude. For helping out, I mean.”
“No problem, man.”
It wasn’t Kaz at all, was it? It was the fact that only hours into his stay, Josie was asking about something Rob didn’t ever want to discuss. Or maybe it was about Kaz, but only in the sense that the whole hot tub thing took him back to hurting Faisal in high school. He didn’t want to think about that.
Ever.
When Kaz peeled Froggy’s snowsuit down over his feet, his son’s precious little head fell like a wrecking ball against Kaz’s shoulder. Kaz chuckled as Josie’s soft footsteps mounted the basement stairs. “I think we’ve lost him.”
When she got to the top of the stairs, Josie cried, “Sorry! This thing was buried under…”
“Shhh,” they both hissed. “Froggy’s asleep.”
“Oh,” she said, covering her lips with her fingertips. She chuckled as she caught sight of her boy asleep standing up. “I’ll put him down for a nap,” she whispered, setting down her huge box of Christmas paraphernalia and scooping the kid into her arms.
When she’d cleared the stairs, Kaz opened the box and pulled out the tree stand. “What the hell is this thing?”
“That’s what I put the tree in,” Rob replied, pointing in front of the bay window where the base needed to go. “Haven’t you ever had a Christmas tree?”
Kaz placed the base on the carpet and then grabbed the tree trunk. “Not a real one. We never really celebrated Christmas when I was a kid. I always wanted to. You know, every December I’d watch all the same Christmas specials on TV that everyone else was watching and I’d be like, why don’t I get a turkey and a tree and a whole bunch of presents? I was so jealous of all the normal families.”
“Maybe that’s why Josie invited you,” Rob proposed. “We’re a little disorganized with the tree this year, but we’re actually really big on Christmas.”
“Yeah, I think that’s why she did invite me,” he agreed. “A combination of kindness and pity. But, hey, I’ll take a real family Christmas. Shelly and I tried to celebrate when we were together, but… I don’t know, man. Nothing with us was ever really good. She never seemed like she was happy with me, and I always felt like I was letting her down.”
“Shelley was your girlfriend?”
“Yeah, for way longer than she should have been.”
When Kaz placed the tree trunk into the base, Rob pushed it upright and the top two feet dragged across the white ceiling so it looked almost like an upside-down L.
“I told her this one was too tall,” Rob chuckled, staring at the pine tree kneeling on the ceiling. “Do you want to turn all those wing nuts for me?”
After securing the tree to the base, Kaz stood up, looked up, and laughed his ass off. “What are you going to do about that? Want to snip the tip?”
Rob laughed. This guy was awesome! “No, let’s leave it for Josie to see. Proves I was right.”
“Size matters, man. Even a Christmas tree can be too big.” A puzzled look came over him, and he looked around. “Hey, what the hell happened to Josie, anyway?”
“If she went to put Froggy down, ten-to-one odds she fell asleep right beside him.”
“Should we wake her for lunch?” Kaz asked, heading to the kitchen like it was his very own foxhole.
“Nah, let her sleep,” Rob said with a wave. “She’s been working so hard lately, she needs some time to decompress.”
Kaz came back out of the kitchen with two plates in hand. “Voilà! Sandwiches and salad. The sleepy-heads will have to get theirs later.”
“You made lunch for us, you mean?” Rob asked, in awe of the professionally garnished plate in front of him.
“Of course,” Kaz replied, heading back into the kitchen only to emerge with two glasses of cranberry juice. “You think I’d just whip up something for myself? I’m not that antisocial.”
When Rob opened his sandwich to see what was inside, the first thing that caught his eye was the generous dollop of fig and walnut jelly spread across his chicken breast.
Why cry over spilled figs? Life is too short.
He closed the bun and sunk his teeth into the most delicious sandwich ever prepared in his kitchen. “Dude, am I ever glad you’re here. This is awesome.”
“It’s not just a matter of having the right ingredients,” Kaz replied. “You have to know how to put them together, you know?”
Yeah.
Chapter Eight
Kaz took his computer to the attic bedroom, sublimely satisfied. He’d done everything he’d seen in every TV special. He decorated a tree alongside a bright-eyed child while two proud parents looked on. He helped Rob prepare a candlelit dinner and drank some ridiculously disgusting eggnog… but, hey, everybody else seemed to like it.
After dinner, he and Josie straightened up the kitchen. Rob and Froggy hung everybody’s Christmas stockings on the mantle, then set out milk and cookies for the fat man and carrots for his reindeer. Froggy picked out the perfect cartoon Christmas movie to watch.
After apple cider, pecan pie, and Charlie Brown Christmas, Kaz picked up the laptop and headed upstairs. Though Josie, Rob, and even little Froggy all seemed really receptive to his being there, he didn’t want to intrude too much. He wasn’t familiar with the details of their traditions. Maybe they’d want to do something as a family that didn’t involve them.
Even alone in his attic room, Christmas Eve actually meant something to him because he knew he was in a house of love. He could feel it the minute he walked through the door. He could feel it in the w
ay Rob and Josie invited him into their hot tub and into their bed. Those two had so much love to share, it spilled over the edges of their relationship. He was just lucky to be in a position to get hit with some of the warm excess.
It’s not like he anticipated a repeat performance of the previous night, but if they surprised him with something even half as nice, he’d be a happy camper. He meant to stay up like a child waiting for hooves on the rooftop. After dressing into his silk pyjamas, he tried to get some work done. Even with the lights on, he didn’t manage to stay awake for long.