Dust Eva Everson (story reading txt) 📖

arms around me. “Warm me up,” he said. “Dad and I were out back taking care of something for Mom.”

I placed my palms flat against his cheeks as if it would help, inwardly sighing at the sight of the filigree, white gold wedding ring wrapped around my finger. “I can’t believe it’s really after ten,” I said. “Why’d you let me sleep so long?”

He rubbed his nose over mine several times before answering. “Mom insisted you needed the sleep and to leave you alone.”

His mom. Whatever tension I’d felt before the wedding seemed to have dissipated, leaving me to chalk it up to something personal. Private. Not yet my problem. Or perhaps, I had reasoned, she was as distraught over our moving as my parents had been. Or, at the very least, my mother.

I grinned. “Then why are you in here?”

He nuzzled my neck, kissed the hollow of my throat. “I couldn’t bear another minute away from you.” A playful growl came from the depth of him and he pretended to gnaw at me until I forced myself out from under him.

“Go away, you,” I said. “I need to get up and get ready.” I dropped my feet to the floor, shifted my gown again, then stood. “And I don’t care what your mother said. She must think I’m absolutely spoiled rotten.”

Westley propped up on his elbow and crossed his ankles as a smile spread catlike across his face. “Not absolutely.”

I shook my head at him. “Wes . . .”

“Ali.”

I held my breath for a moment, then released it. “I’m going to shower now.”

“You do that. And brush your teeth,” he added, a full grin breaking through. “You have morning breath.”

I threw my hand over my mouth. “You’re horrible,” I mumbled, feigning horror as I giggled around my fingers.

Westley bounded from the bed to stand beside it. “Not as horrible as your breath …” He threw the bed linens back, then jerked them toward the head of the bed—his attempt at making the bed—before glancing my way. “I’m kidding you. Stop looking like a little girl whose best friend left her for the new girl at school.”

My brow rose. “Really? I mean, I know my breath is … but it’s not horrible, is it?”

He straightened before leaning against the wall and crossing his arms. “The only thing horrible right now is that we aren’t already in our own home, because if we were …” He started toward me.

“What would you do?” I taunted, although my arm stretched out in protest, my hand forming a solid “stop.”

“You know what I’d do.” He waved his hand toward the bathroom, teasing. “Go. Take a shower. Brush your teeth and your hair and dab a little bit of makeup on and, for heaven’s sake, try to make it to the kitchen by lunch.”

I shook my head slowly, mesmerized by him. His easy manner. His way with me. Sometimes I felt like his wife. Other times like his child. How could that be …

“I hate you,” I said, the words even. Skilled, as if I’d practiced them.

“I love you, too. Now … go.”

My mother had never insisted I help her when it came to cooking meals. Instead, she insisted my role started after the meal with the cleanup. Something I had down to a science. So after a hearty lunch of homemade vegetable soup and grilled homemade pimento cheese sandwiches, I took over kitchen duties by washing and drying the dishes and wiping down the countertops while Westley and his father continued working in the back, and Mrs. Houser—who insisted I call her “Mom”—laid down for “a quick nap.”

I took my time, occasionally glancing out the window to the graying and brown grass of a winter’s lawn. A lonely, wire clothesline stretched under naked pecan branches and between two unpainted T-shaped posts. Toward the back of the property Dr. Houser’s—Dad’s—shop stood with the double doors open, as though unaware that a chill remained in the air. I smiled, knowing that just past them, my husband and his father worked on a project together. What, they hadn’t said. Or wouldn’t say. But instinct told me that it had to do with me … and Christmas.

After placing the final dish in the cabinet, I wiped my hands on the red dishtowel before hanging it over the oven’s handle, then stood in the middle of the kitchen with my hands on my hips, wondering what to do next. The house was eerily quiet, and a sense of nostalgia ran over me, tickling me. I stepped past the opened swinging door between the kitchen and the den where a fat Christmas tree in the corner had replaced an overstuffed chair for the holidays. I looked at it for a moment, noting the perfectly wrapped gifts for the rest of Westley’s family who were expected before dinner—Heather, Paul, and DiAnn, namely. The large multicolored bulbs sent rays of Christmas lights to gleam off handed-down ornaments and the deep green of the live and richly scented branches.

No fake trees for this family.

I dropped onto the sofa and stared at the lifeless screen of the console television, remembering the day two months earlier when I’d been in this same spot, watching Match Game. I closed my eyes, thinking back to Westley walking in from the outside. Him taking off his shirt—something I’d grown accustomed to in the past week—and kissing me until I’d nearly lost my mind. Something else I’d grown accustomed to. Still, my cheeks flamed at the memory of his father walking in and I opened my eyes again, picturing Westley smiling at me. Teasing me. Joshing with his father and then walking down the hallway, his shirt clutched loosely in his hand … an envelope jutting from his pocket.

I stood. Funny I should remember that right at that moment. Funny and yet, somehow, telling. But I shook it off, figuring that the silence of the house and the memory had collided to confuse a young bride.

I started back toward the