Eddie slid his hands down my back, tracing the lines of my butt, and scooped it up and deposited it on the porch rail. I gladly parted my legs to let him in between, and moved my hands to his rear as he moved his hands back up to continue their massage.
“Eddie and a girl, sitting in a tree – K I S S I N G...” A young girls' voice carried over the yard, and Eddie and I abruptly broke it off and moved away. I pulled away too quickly, and Eddie grabbed at my arms to keep me from falling backwards. I slid off the rail and regained my feet, but kept hold of him.
Two sets of little feet pattered across the porch, and slammed the screen door open. “Grandma! Uncle Eddie was kissing a girl on the porch!”
I chuckled and rested my forehead against Eddie's chest, which rumbled in laughter. “Karrie and Chris. My niece and nephew.”
The crunch of gravel indicated a car pulling into the driveway. Eddie released me, and went out to greet his brother, standing up the kids' bikes from where they dropped them along the way. “Becca, you look radiant,” Eddie told his sister-in-law as he helped her out of the passenger's seat and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “When are you due?”
“Not for another three months. Tony thinks it might be twins.”
My eyes bugged out when I saw Tony lift a toddler out of the back seat. If Tony was any indication, it might just be another linebacker that Becca was having. Tony had the same height as the rest of his family, but where they were lanky, Tony was thick. Not fat, I noticed as he carried the little one around the car to her mother, just built like a bear.
Hugged like a bear too, I thought as he lifted me up off the ground. “So you're the woman who is finally getting my older brother to settle down. Good on you.”
“Tony, put her down,” Becca lightly chastised her husband, and gave me an one-armed hug when Tony released her. I greeted Becca with a hug, and tickled the toddler's stomach. The little girl giggled and tossed her arms around her mother's neck.
“Ooof. This is Izabel. Izzie, do you want to give your Uncle Eddie a kiss?” Izzie shook her head no, but looked over at him curiously.
“If you came to visit more often, she would remember you and not be scared of you,” Tony teased his brother.
“Afraid of me? Why would you be afraid of me?” Eddie gently teased the little one, tweaking her nose. Izzie squealed in delight, and stuck her arms out to move to him. He readily took the girl, tossing her in the air a few times before settling her in the crook of his arm.
I smiled, taking in the sight. He was good with kids, really, really good. I wanted that to be our child that he was snuggling with and playing with. Giving into temptation, I gave Eddie a kiss on the cheek and hugged them both.
“Hey, get your own kid, that one's ours.” I blushed at Tony's teasing comment, stepping away from them. Eddie laughed good-naturedly, and led the way inside to dinner.
Dinner with the Valenti-Kirby's was what I had always fantasized Christmas dinner was like with more than three people. Large amounts of home cooking – meat loaf, in this case – combined with lots of fun. Rolls weren't passed around the table, they were tossed. Five year old Chris was just as happy asking me for more milk as he was asking his parents. And the teasing going on around the table simply filled me with a sense of peace and welcoming.
“You're going to marry my Uncle Eddie?” Karrie, seven years old and full of spunk, asked.
I opened my mouth to say yes, but that wasn't what came out. “No, Karrie. I like you all, and I can't lie to you guys.” I looked around the table, avoiding Eddie's gaze. “I don't want to deceive you. We're already married. We eloped. We were just going through the motions for everyone else. I'm sorry.” The chair scraped against the tile floor as I stood up hurriedly, and ran out of the room.
Eddie banged out the front door after me. “Schroeder, baby, wait up.” I left the porch, and started running. His long legs caught up to me before I reached the garage, and he wrapped his arms around my waist to stop me. “Honey, where are you going?”
“I don't know, I'm just – oh God, they're watching through the window.” Karrie's curious face had appeared briefly at the window behind her seat, but someone pulled her away. I pulled out of Eddie's arms, ready to run again.
“No, in here,” he said, grabbing my arm firmly and going into the garage. He flipped the light on, revealing workbenches, stand saws, various pieces of unfinished furniture, and stacks of wood to finish the furniture with. I wandered over to one of the benches to look at the small whittled figures sitting on it.
“This is Dad's workshop,” Eddie said, unnecessarily. “I finally convinced him to retire a few years ago, and he's taken up making furniture. He sells it at a nearby shop.”
“You support their retirement? Financially, I mean?”
“Is there a problem with that? Dad is happier working with wood than he ever was with the insurance agency. And Mom is loving making quilts and helping take care of Tony's kids. I'm not going to just let my money sit in the bank and accumulate when I can help my family do what they want to do.”
“And Tony? And Becca?”
“I helped them with their house. Tony is the head coach at the local high school. He makes enough to support them, but I insisted on the house. I told him that he can save up the purchase price of the house and pay me back, but there was no way I was going to let him pay three times the amount of the house in interest for no reason. Becca works part time at the vet clinic so she can get out of the house some.” Eddie stared at me, playing with a carved knight. “Chris is showing some talent at playing chess, so Dad's started making him a set for Christmas.”
“At five?” I turned to look at him.
“He'll have it for years. He'll grow into it.”
“Your dad's good.” I ran a hand over a wooden rack. “What's this for?”
“It's a quilt rack. Mom makes about one a year, and Dad will normally toss a rack in with the sale.”
“For free? It's so ornate to be given away.” I traced the lines of the vines that detailed the sides.
Eddie chuckled. “I think her quilts are going for twelve hundred right now. It's hardly being given away.”
“Wow.” I sat down on Phil's workstool, the only seat I thought was safe.
“What's going on, Schroeder?” Eddie asked, patiently.
My eyes filled with tears. “I'm sorry. I didn't want to lie to them. I like them, and they deserve the truth. Well, as much truth as we can admit to.”
“I thought you didn't want to tell people we eloped? That they wouldn't believe it?” His voice was level, and didn't give away any emotions.
“You think I believe it? We may be having as much sex as newlyweds, but honestly, we are acting more like people who just met and got married. I didn't know what your parents did, for crying out loud. I didn't know how many nieces and nephews you had.”
“So being married for the same amount of time we supposedly have been dating makes not knowing better?”
“Oh crap.” I slid off of the stool and went to curl up in a ball on the floor. Eddie grabbed me before I sat in the sawdust, and took a seat on a bench that I hoped would hold our combined weight. “I screwed everything up again, didn't I?”
He kissed my forehead and held me close. “Baby, you didn't screw anything up. You didn't want to lie to them, and that's fine. I wasn't all that comfortable with it personally, but for you I would have done it. You didn't want anyone to know we were married yet. That's fine. I was going to support you in that, because that's my job as your husband.”
“To lie for me?”
“No, to support my wife.”
“To lie for me.”
“Schroeder. Will you listen to me? You thought people would believe that we were engaged better than that we were married. We couldn't tell them we went back in time and got married, and explain the lack of official documents. Being engaged worked fine. Eloping works fine too.” He rubbed my back, and I relaxed into him a bit. “Besides, now you don't
have to feel weird about sharing my bed with me. Now they know we are having sex.”
“Oh God.” I buried my head in his neck. “So now what? How do we climb ourselves out of the hole I've dug us?”
The bench creaked ominously, and Eddie quickly set me on my feet and stood up. “What do you mean?”
“Well, how do we get a marriage certificate? Bloody hell, how do we backdate a marriage certificate? We can't have our anniversary be on a different date than what's on paper.”
“Schroeder.”
“God, why do I keep doing this? I open my big mouth, lose it, and screw everything up.”
“Sweetheart.”
I paced, kicking scraps of wood around on the concrete. “I claim to want control over everything, when I can't even control my mouth. Damn it all!”
“Schroeder.” Eddie grabbed my head with his hands and made me look at him. “You want a marriage certificate dated on the right day? That's not a problem.”
“What, you know someone who can falsify documents?”
“No, I know someone who can travel back in time.”
“Damn it.” My heart wasn't in the curse this time. “I'm a moron. I forgot.”
He grinned. “You forgot the reason we got married in the rant about getting married?”
“I never claimed to be logical. Why the hell are you with me?” I looked at him tiredly.
He tilted my head up and kissed me. “Because I love you. Now concentrate. I don't know if we can do a specific date and location. May 20th, Las Vegas?”
“Wait, is that realistic? We were in New York.”
“And there's a waiting period in New York. You can't get married right away.”
“Preventing people from marrying three days after meeting?”
He chuckled. “No, it's New Jersey with the three day waiting period. New York is twenty-four hours.”
“And you know this how?” Suspicion laced my voice.
He looked abashed. “Fan mail. From The List. Several women were glad to offer ways to end my bachelorhood.”
I forced a smile on my face. “I want our marriage announced by the people who wrote The List. That's the only way we can get them to stop. So, with New York. We could work with that. We got engaged on Friday, married on Saturday?”
“Or we could have decided to get married, flew to Vegas, and flew back the next morning in time for you to catch your flight back.”
I looked at him, my heart pounding. “We're really going to do this? Get married again?”
“I'll marry you as many times as I need to. I love you, and want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
It wasn't quite a proposal, but I didn't get one the first time around, either. I kissed him. “Okay, let's go.” I held up my hand, and seconds later we were in Las Vegas.
We materialized in the middle of the Strip, and were cussed at by pedestrians having to suddenly walk around us.
“Wow,” I said, looking around, impressed.
“Have you been here before?”
“No, never.”
“It's an experience.” He grinned at me. “Where do you want to get married? Paris? Venice? Luxor? New York, New York?”
I scrunched my nose. “We just decided against New York, remember?” I looked up and down the strip. “How about Excalibur?”
“That's awful cheesy.”
“Says the man who got married during that time period,” I whispered to him. I needn't have bothered – the busy sidewalk was too loud for anyone to overhear.
He looked down at me. “That's a good point, sweetheart. It's actually appropriate. Shall we?” I took his offered arm, and we walked down to the large gray castle.
The concierge's desk had all the information we needed, and we made a reservation for the chapel for later in the evening. I grabbed a brochure of the available costumes for rent to look through while we went to get a marriage license.
“Crap, did you check the date?” I asked as we finally arrived back at the hotel after an hour wait for the license. For as easy as TV and the movies made marriage in Vegas appear easy, it wasn't.
“Little late now, huh? And yes, I did. Did you decide what we're wearing, since our jeans are not appropriate enough for you?” His eyes danced with humor.
“They don't have what we wore,” I complained.
“We were married as commoners, in a mass wedding. That doesn't really fit with what they are trying to do here.”
“Still,” I grumbled. “Probably the Lady Waiting in Burgundy for me and the Red Knight for you. They are the least cheesy looking.”
“Not the most historically accurate?”
“Hey, if I'm going to dress up and I get to choose my outfit, I'm going with something I look good in.”
“You look good in anything, babe. And nothing,” he added, waggling his eyebrows.
The ceremony was simple and sweet, rather like the first one. Two guests waiting for the next wedding volunteered to be witnesses, and the minister exchanged our vows in mere minutes. Posing for the photos took the rest of our alloted half an hour, and Eddie's money got us the copyright for the photos so we could make copies ourselves. We sent the cd via mail to Eddie's apartment. He said that since he had been out of town so often recently, it could be already sitting in his mailbox and he didn't know it. I tried to wrap my brain around that concept, but quickly gave up.
We returned to the present, and I gave Eddie a long kiss. “There was something we forgot to do.”
“Mmm, what was that?” He laid a series of kisses along my jawline.
“Spend the night in a hotel room.” My eyes flashed wickedly.
He brushed off a workbench, lowered my jeans, and lifted me onto it. “We'll have to remedy that now, won't we?”
The flush of emotions from getting married again so quickly and the thrill of discovery heightened our desire, and it didn't take long to consummate our modern marriage.
“They are probably wondering about us,” I panted as soon as I gathered enough air. He agreed, and helped me down and adjusted his clothing.
When we returned to the dinner table, his mom got up to get our plates out of the oven, where she had placed them to keep the food warm. I was touched; my parents had just let the food get cold when one or the other had left the table.
“Welcome to the family, Aunt Schroeder,” Chris piped up, and the ice was broken.
“Eddie, can I see you upstairs for a few minutes?” I waited at the door of the living room after I finished helping his mom with the dishes, interrupting him in the middle of a game of Clue with his eldest niece and nephew.
“Sure. Tony, take over for me, will you?” The big man replaced his big brother.
Eddie followed me up the stairs, and drummed my butt as he went.
“Damnit, don't,” I hissed, jumping up the stairs to avoid him. “I'll be in the bedroom in a sec.”
I rummaged through the upstairs bathroom, finally finding what I needed, and went into Eddie's bedroom. He was sitting on the edge of the king sized bed waiting for me, and I handed him the tweezers and rubbing alcohol and locked the door behind me. I wasted no time in stripping off my jeans and panties.
“Um, Schroeder?”
“I got splinters, damn you.” I laid myself over his knees, butt angled up. “What is your deal with wood and sharp objects? I'm the one having hay poking into various parts of my anatomy. Was having bark embedded in my back enough? Nooo, you have to put me on a workbench that you knew was covered in wood,” I ranted. I turned to look at him. “Will you get this over with already?”
Eddie put his head back and laughed. “Sorry, babe, wasn't expecting this.”
“That makes two of us,” I grumbled. “Ow!” I wiggled as Eddie extracted a splinter.
“Stay still. How many do you have?”
“I don't know. Ow! At least two.” I bit my lip as Eddie continued to find and remove splinters. “You know, this was not how I was dreaming going over your knee again.”
“Quit wiggling, already. And you were dreaming about this?”
“Well it hurts, damn it. And yes, but not like this.” I squirmed again as Eddie ran his fingers across both cheeks, trying to find any splinters left. He sighed and clamped his left arm around my waist, securing me to him. “Oh, don't tell me this is turning you on?” I asked exasperated, feeling him rock hard next to me.
“You throw your naked ass across my lap and start squirming, and don't expect me to react? Be realistic. I don't feel any more splinters, do you?”
I shook my head, and he helped me stand back up. I reached for our bags so I could get some clothes without splinters in them, but Eddie grabbed my wrist and pulled me back to me. “Where are you going? We're not done here.”
I looked pointedly down at his erection. “Not with your family downstairs.”
“So let's go.” He already had my left hand in his, and grabbed the ring. “Our house in London.” My thoughts flashed to the furnished cottage, and Eddie took advantage of my automatically thinking of it when he mentioned it to do the same, and pushed the ring back on my finger.
The world shifted, and I barely had time to notice that we were back in London at our townhome before Eddie, now seated on the wool stuffed mattress that cost as much as the house, pulled me back over his lap.
“Eddie! What the hell are we doing here?”
Eddie had the good grace to sound abashed. “I kinda wanted you.”
“I thought you had said that guys could restrain themselves. We weren't going to travel more than once a day, remember?” He rubbed his hand in circles on my back, starting to massage my tense muscles. “Eddie.”
“We're here, we might as well take advantage of it.”
“Of me, you mean?” He flipped me over and gathered my nakedness in his arms, and looked deeply into my eyes.
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