I'm Glad About You(21)

He kissed her. He was fully dressed now but she was naked beneath him, and the one fast kiss was just hot enough to give him the beginnings of yet another boner. He was starting to like this girl enough to pay attention to the signals, though, and decided not to push it.

“I got to get out of here before this goes any further,” he informed her.

“Yeah, you do,” she agreed.

He stood, and picked up his shoes. “I can’t believe you called me an *,” he told her.

“You are an *,” she said, but with enough good nature, it sounded almost affectionate.





six





AS USUAL, Christmas was shaping up to be an excessive, loud, crowded food orgy at the Moores’ house. Years ago, Andrew, the third of the middle brothers, had taken to declaring, “More is Moore, less is Not Moore!” and while it wasn’t the wittiest thing anyone had ever heard, the truth of it was undeniable. Growing up, there were eight Moore siblings, plus Mom and Dad, which made the family ten. But as of this particular Christmas, there were now twenty-three—six spouses, seven small offspring—with Megan pregnant with twins and ready to pop any minute and bring on numbers twenty-four and twenty-five. She had taken her husband’s name, so there would not literally be two more Moores, but there definitely would be two more small people, who had been named “Twenty-Four and Twenty-Five” by the exuberant multitudes which regularly gathered at Rose’s house. Megan informed them all that she did not want her unborn children to be treated like a football score, but led by the sardonic Andrew, everyone ignored her wishes and chanted “Twenty-four, twenty-five” every time her swelling belly entered the kitchen or the dining room or the family room or any room where two or more of them had gathered.

Alison frankly found all this joviality tedious. Her brothers and sisters were nice enough individually but there was a pack mentality to these gatherings which left her annoyed and alienated. One person wanted ice cream, so eight people would drive to Graeter’s. Some niece or nephew needed new shoes, so half a dozen would end up at T.J.Maxx. Every meal was an endless affair which necessitated at least five people running around Rose’s kitchen, cooking the multiple gigantic casseroles necessary to feed the hordes. And the lying around in front of the television set! It seemed at times that all twenty-three of those Moores and subsets of Moores took the holidays to mean, somehow, that the television set should stay on all the time. People would drift in and out of the family room watching a nonstop stream of football games, cartoons, and Fox News shows until, after days of this, Alison finally asked, “Can we just turn that thing off for a while?” The six or seven television watchers who were in there all the time were so engrossed in what was on—some cartoon about Christmas—they didn’t even answer her. She went back into the kitchen and thought about complaining to Rose and Megan and Andrew and his wife, Stella, but they were engrossed in a conversation about the possibility of going to Skyline for chili later that afternoon, so Alison held her tongue. She knew that complaining about that stupid TV would just make her seem a crank and an ungrateful crank at that, because they all had made much of the fact that she had recently appeared on television. If she announced that she just wished they would turn the damn thing off, she would open herself to days of good-natured derision about being an intellectual snob who couldn’t support herself unless she was on television, which she thought she was too good to watch.

Alison’s private speculations about the ribbing she would take under the circumstances were not far off. In truth, the general consensus among the Moores was that Alison was bright but misguided, something of a problem child. She was the only one out of the whole brood who had ever expressed any interest in the arts, and it had marked her as odd and pretentious; she wanted to talk about Shakespeare and analyze movies all the time while they just wanted to relax and watch football and have a couple of beers. She had a famously fractious relationship with her father, who was no walk in the park for any of them, but why antagonize him like that? Plus she and Lianne, the oldest of the younger sisters, couldn’t stand each other, which constantly created problems at family gatherings. Alison was the source of so much contention that she had no traction in her family. The only siblings who connected with her were Jeff, her smarty-pants brother, but he wasn’t home this year—he was off doing research on APO-E and DNA repair at some Alzheimer’s lab in Heidelberg—and Megan, who was deep in the land that pregnant women went to when they were about to give birth. Alison felt more isolated and blue than ever.

In addition, just before coming to Cincinnati for the holidays she had received an email from Ginger which informed her that their third invisible roommate had decided to leave his tour as of the New Year and needed his room back. Ginger herself was doing some out-of-town tryout in San Francisco, so Alison could sleep in the other bedroom for a couple of weeks, but essentially Alison was going to have to go apartment hunting as of January 1. And she was broke again. Ryan needed her to do new fancy head shots, and he had insisted that she get her hair and makeup done for them. He also pushed her to expand her wardrobe into a more sophisticated and upscale style; there was plenty of work for pretty girls out there but you had to look like money. Looking like money, Alison discovered, cost money, and she had been forced to break her own rule about depleting the bank account and running up those credit cards. It was the worst time possible to be told to move out of that lousy sublet; while she might have the wherewithal to come up with a first month’s rent on a new place, she didn’t have a penny to put down as a security deposit. She was going to have to ask her parents for a loan.