Floating Staircase(15)
When Jodie came home later that evening, she found me on the living room sofa writing in a string-bound notebook.
“How’d it go at the college?”
“Compared to the professorate in North London, these guys are like extras from The Andy Griffith Show.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“I’m exaggerating but not much. The head of the department wore a goddamn bolo tie.”
“What about the credits?”
She leaned over the arm of the sofa and pressed her cold nose against my temple. “I’m happy to report that they all transferred over. I’m a happy girl tonight, Mr. Glasgow. You better take advantage of me while you can.”
I closed the notebook and kissed her. “Sounds like a plan.”
“You working on something?”
“Just jotting down some notes.”
“Finally beat the writer’s block?”
I shrugged, noncommittal. “Don’t jinx me.”
She straightened up and tugged off her coat. “Did you get to those boxes in the basement?”
“Of course.” I thought of the watery footprints again. A chill raced down my spine.
Jodie leaned her head on my shoulder and ran one hand up the length of my neck and into my hair. “You smell good.”
I turned and kissed her. She eased onto the sofa and pulled me down on top of her. Out of nowhere I was overcome by an animal lust I hadn’t felt since the days before our wedding. I was certain Jodie felt it, too, and a moment later, we were making love on the couch, my jeans dangling from one ankle as I wrestled Jodie’s blouse, which was only partially unbuttoned, over her head. The whole thing lasted only three or four minutes, but the ferocity and passion made up for the duration.
When we were done, I rolled onto my side as Jodie sat up. She put her blouse on, then leaned down and rested her head against my chest. Our labored respiration was in perfect syncopation.
“That was something,” I said after a few moments of silence.
“Hmmm.” She sounded far away and close to sleep.
“Hey,” I said, squeezing one of her shoulders, “falling asleep afterwards is my job.”
“Sorry. I’m just exhausted. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
I thought about my midnight jaunt to the lake and grinned. “Oh yeah?”
“I kept having a strange dream.”
“What dream was that?”
“There was someone in our room. Someone just standing there at the foot of the bed watching us sleep. It was so real I kept waking up. I must have dreamt it four or five times.”
I felt a cold sweat break out along my body. While I remembered going to the lake last night, I’d forgotten—until now—the reason I’d woken up in the first place: the sensation that someone else was in the bedroom with us. I’d even gotten out of bed and stood in the upstairs hallway looking down over the landing, momentarily certain I could see a crouching visitor lurking in one darkened corner of the foyer.
“Hey.” Jodie rubbed my chest. She craned her neck so she could look at me. “You’re sweating like a champ.”
I squeezed her shoulder again and kissed the top of her head. “You wore me out, lady.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The party at Adam and Beth’s came as a much-needed reprieve from all the work Jodie and I had been doing on the new house throughout the first week. Most of the fixes had been cosmetic—painting walls, repairing broken tiling, fixing the electrical outlets that dangled like loose teeth from the walls—and we ended our first week at 111 Waterview Court dappled in dried paint and with blisters on our fingers.
Jodie fell back into the swing of her graduate program and picked up a teaching internship at the college during winter semester three days a week. Ideally, her absence should have afforded me the perfect opportunity to get some writing done . . . yet truth be told, the writing had stopped coming to me months ago. Admittedly, my writing notebooks were currently overflowing with drawings of cartoon animals humping each other in a vast assortment of acrobatic positions.
Holly Dreher, my editor at Rooms of Glass Books, had started leaving exasperated messages on my cell phone asking about the rest of the chapters I’d promised her. Though I hadn’t checked my e-mail in several days, I was pretty sure my in-box would be filled with her pushy, overanxious messages as well. I still had two months before the official deadline, but at the rate I was going, I was beginning to consider photocopying pages from the latest Stephen King novel and FedExing them to her.
People started to filter into Adam’s house around a quarter to six. The Goldings were the first to arrive. A furtive little couple, they came bundled in woolen earth tones and proffering a small Crock-Pot covered with a tinfoil tent, then spent an unusual amount of time hovering over the small Vinotemp carriage that, this early in the evening, was equipped only with a stack of leftover Christmas napkins and a small plastic vial of toothpicks.
Ten minutes later, a few more couples filed in. Adam selected an Elvis Presley Christmas CD for the stereo, and with the addition of each newcomer, something akin to a party took shape.
“For the most part, everyone here in the neighborhood is tolerable,” Adam said, preparing drinks for his guests. We were alone for the time being in the kitchen. “Of course, as with any town, there are a few individuals that’ll make your skin crawl.” He cut a lime into half-moon wedges and added, “Gary Sanduski, for example. He gets talking about his car dealership, you’ll want to drive a cocktail fork through your brain.”