Ron tried to cut past her anger and get her smiling again. “Maybe I thought I was giving you a reward for being so good about going to see them,” he suggested. “After all the trouble we had with them this summer, maybe I thought you deserved a little reminder of how I'm planning to show my gratitude.”
He leaned over to kiss her cheek but she didn't help him out by leaning toward him, and he had to give up in favor of safe driving. “No response, hey?” Ron grinned again. “Would it help if I told you I was hinting at the kind of motivation I want tomorrow to go visit your family?”
Kara sighed again. “Everything isn't about sex, Ron.”
His expression grew serious again. “I know, honey, but it is our anniversary and you are very beautiful. I can't help it if every time I see you I want to pull you down on the floor and run my hands over your body.” His lips twisted up again. He just couldn't help himself. “Not to mention my lips, my tongue and my...”
“You're impossible!” Kara spat.
“I do try,” he said. “I think you need a little
impossible
in your life.”
And what do you need from me?
Kara wondered. In an unwelcome flash, she remembered that Bobby had been cheating on her in the end. If Ron wanted sex this badly, was she giving him enough? Her mother insisted that it was
Kara's
fault that Bobby had strayed. That it was a woman's responsibility to keep a man's eye focused on the home by satisfying his desires—not that her mother seemed the
satisfying
type. And not that Kara could see her mother blaming herself if her father had ever strayed. No, she'd have murdered Daddy if he'd stepped out on her. Not that that mattered now. “I just want—”
“I know you like it!” Ron interrupted. “It's not just the way you come. It's the way we met last Christmas Eve. You love it when I pull you out of your shell. You're a very sexy,
very sensuous,
person, and your old boyfriends didn't understand that. They were so worried about themselves they never got around to satisfying
you
.”
Kara didn't know if anything that Ron had just said was true or not. She didn't feel sexy most of the time—well, she did when Ron stared at her and brushed up against her and ran his hands over her—
She vigorously shook her head to break that train of thought. The last thing she needed to do was let her body start responding to Ron so that he thought he had license to make love to her again right here in the front seat of his car. “There's a time and place for everything, Ron,” she explained. “And just before we go see your parents is not the right time for sex.”
“You know, a lot of what went wrong for my parents was that they stopped having sex,” Ron told her. “From what you've said, that went wrong for your parents, too. I know it had also been a problem for you and Bobby. I don't want that to be the problem that breaks us up.”
“Look,” Kara said. She made a herculean effort to soften her voice despite her anger. “I don't want us to break up. But it seems like all we do now is have sex and—”
“Well, we live together now, and that gives us a lot more opportunity,” Ron interrupted again. He made another turn. “Wait a minute. I want to show you something.”
Kara didn't want to be distracted right now. “Ron, this is important. Just because we live together doesn't mean we have to
fuck"
—she used the
f-word
even though she didn't like it to drive home to him how important this point was to her—"every chance we get.”
Ron didn't seem to be really listening to her. At least, he showed no sign of accepting her position. “Did you know that most couples who move in together have less sex than they did when they lived apart? I don't want that for us.”
Kara started to protest, but Ron didn't let her. He couldn't seem to stop interrupting her tonight and she didn't like it at all.
“The same thing happens again when they get married. This is important to me, Kara. I don't want to stop making love to you. I don't want us to fall in the rut of saying,
Oh, we're tired tonight
or
We're going to be late to your parents’ house. We live together now. We can always have sex later."
Ron abruptly pulled the car over to the curb and stuck it in park so he could give her his whole attention. “Later never comes, Kara! You know it and I know it! And I'm not going to have you leave me as you wanted to leave Bobby because we stop having sex because it's too available. We fucked every night we got together when we were just dating because we were desperate to take advantage of limited opportunities. I want you just as desperate to fuck me now when you can have me every night.”
Kara felt so conflicted. Ron rarely let her see his insecurities. It was easy to forget he had a vulnerable side. But at the same time, she
knew
she was right about this. “I'm not planning to leave you, Ron,” she told him, “but—”
“Fuck
but!"
Ron snapped. “I remember the deal we made! As long as I keep satisfying you, you'll stay.”
“The deal?” Kara asked. Abruptly she remembered the insane little bargain they had made in a hotel room last Christmas. She couldn't remember the precise details, but it basically said that as long as Ron kept making her come she'd stay with him. No, that wasn't it, was it? It was that once Ron
stopped making her come
she was free to look for someone else. It had only been a sweet little jest at the time. She had no idea that Ron had been taking it seriously all this time.
“Ron,” Kara asked. “Is that the reason you're always pushing to have sex with me? You think I'll leave if you don't?”
“What, no, of course not!” Ron protested. But she could see the doubt in his face, as if on some fundamental level he wasn't sure if his denials were true. “I love you, Kara! And I really do want you all the time...”
“But?” she asked.
Ron stuck the car back in gear and slid out onto the road again. The sky was gray with the promise of Detroit's first snow of the year. It hadn't started yet, but it certainly looked as if they'd have another white Christmas this year.
“But?” she repeated.
“But I don't want to lose you,” Ron mumbled.
Kara couldn't believe she'd heard him correctly. Could he really think she was that shallow? “What did you say?”
Ron took a deep breath before answering. “I said I don't want to lose you!”
Kara really couldn't believe she was hearing him correctly. Ron was a hot young man who'd just turned twenty-six. Women looked at him all the time. What did he have to be insecure about? Kara was forty-one by comparison. She was the one who had to worry about losing her younger man. Why didn't Ron understand that?
“Ron, I'm not trying to leave you,” she said. “I just think we could exercise a little discretion about when we drop our pants and do the nasty.”
Ron abruptly changed the topic of conversation. “You know we used to live down that street when I was a kid,” he said as he pointed past her toward a little residential street called
Hollow Lane
.
Kara turned to look despite her frustration with the sudden shift in subject. “I think you mentioned that once before,” she told him. “What does it have—”
“Anne says my parents were really happy then. I don't remember it that well, but there was a big hill behind the elementary school which Kitten always said had the best sledding in the world. Apparently my Dad used to sled down it with both girls sitting on his back.”
Kara just couldn't make the transition with him. She didn't understand why he had suddenly changed topics like this. “What does this have to do with whether or not I'd leave you?”
“There's the school,” Ron said, pointing again through the windshield as they approached it.
The sign out front read: Albert Einstein Elementary School. And it did indeed have a big hill behind the building—not a mountain, of course, but good sledding material just the same.
“They were happy here,” Ron said. “Don't you understand? Everything hadn't broken down yet. My mother hadn't started cheating. My Dad could still...” he trailed off without finishing the sentence.
Kara really couldn't believe Ron was saying these things. Comparing what they shared to what Howard and Hanna had had long ago seemed worse than pointless to her. If he were trying to distract her from her anger, it wasn't going to work. “Ron, what does all of this have to do with you making love to me when it was time to get in the car and go visiting?”
From the look on Ron's face, he was very disappointed that she'd failed to understand him.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
* * * *
Chapter Three
“It's about time you're here!” Hanna Miller announced when Ron pushed the front door open and ushered Kara inside.
“Sorry we're late, Mom,” Ron said. He let the door swing close behind him, blocking out the crisp winter air, and offered his mother a peck on the cheek. She was significantly shorter than her son, with midnight black hair which came from a bottle. Her skin was very smooth except for a little wrinkling around the eyes that the plastic surgeon's scalpel couldn't smooth away. “I stopped by to show Kara the old neighborhood and we lost track of the time.”
“Oh, is that what you were doing?” Kitten teased. “And here I thought you two were getting hot and steamy instead of coming over to spend Christmas Eve with us.”
Kara cringed while Ron's mother's eyes flashed with irritation at her daughter.
Ron, of course, was completely untroubled by the suggestion. “Well, that too, of course. Note the leaves in Kara's hair everyone and the grass stains on her coat and dress.”
When he finished speaking he gave Kitten a hug. His sister had dark hair and a round face which didn't quite match those of the rest of her family. It looked to Kara as if she'd put on quite a bit of weight since her father's revelations this past summer, even more than she'd accumulated by Thanksgiving. The pain and anger that was an ever increasing part of the woman's life weren't apparent just now, but experience told Kara they would be found lingering just below the surface.
“Oh, is that what's in her hair?” Kitten teased.
If Kara's anger had faded at all since her fight with Ron in the car, it roared back to full force now.
Hanna beat her to the punch, however. “I hardly think this is the proper conversation for Christmas!”
Her mother's comment only made Kitten laugh harder. “Jeez, Mom, get a grip! Your little Ronnie-pooh might delay coming over to have some fun, but Kara's a lot more proper than that. Not that I think they were going through the old neighborhood. Look at Kara. She's all pissed at Ron. Come on, spill the beans, you two. What are you fighting about?”
“Fighting?” Hanna asked.
It didn't surprise Kara that Ron's mother looked hopeful, but it did disappoint her. Still, some things were not going to change, and if she wanted to keep her sort of mother-in-law (what was the proper term for your boyfriend's mom?) out of her business, she was going to have to support Ron's lie. “We really did visit your old neighborhood,” she said. “Ron saw the street sign as we drove past and wanted to stop.”
“Really?” Kitten asked as if she were genuinely surprised. “Ron was pretty young when we moved from there. I wouldn't have thought he'd remember it.”
“I remember all sorts of things, Kitten,” Ron said.
Kitten obviously sensed that something was up. “Where did we use to go sledding?” she quizzed Kara.
Kara hated being put on the spot, but at least Kitten had asked something she knew the answer to. “There was a big hill behind the elementary school. Is that what you're talking about?”
Kitten smiled reflexively, as if simply thinking about sliding down that hill on her father's back made her feel all toasty warm inside. “Those were good times,” she remembered. She cocked a thumb at Ron. “Before he came along and ruined things.”
She still had half a teasing smile on her face, but the emotion beneath the jokes was all too real, Kara knew. Kitten had learned four months ago that she was adopted and she had not taken the news well.
Based on Ron's frown, Kara figured he was getting pretty tired of being blamed by his sister for all of her family problems.
“So what were you fighting about?” Hanna asked.
This time it was Kara's turn to frown. If asked, Ron's mother would insist she had impeccable manners, but Kara didn't think she knew the first thing about polite behavior.
“We weren't fighting,” Kara insisted at the same moment that Ron opened his big mouth. “I wanted to blow you all off today and have mad sex with Kara all night to celebrate our anniversary.”
Hanna might have fought with Kara over her denial, but Ron's outrageous (and almost true) statement diverted her attention. “Really, Ron, your jokes are in poor taste on a normal day. It's Christmas Eve. Can't you stop being crude even for one evening.”
Ron just laughed and escorted Kara past his mother and sister. “Are we the last one's to get here? Where is everybody?”
“They're watching TV with your father,” Hanna told him.
“Hey, Kara,” Kitten said. “I forgot that today was your anniversary. You and Ron got snowed in at that airport in...” Her voice trailed off as she tried to remember where Ron had been traveling.
“Newark,” Kara called back over her shoulder.
“That's right,” Kitten remembered. “We had the big Christmas snow last year. Do you think we'll get another one? The weather forecasters sound hopeful.”
“I hope so!” Ron called back.
He leaned closer to Kara, wrapping his arm around her shoulder as he whispered in her ear. “I like making love to you in the snow.”
Kara shivered.
* * * *
Chapter Four
Ron's family had gathered in the rec room around the television. It was not, as Kara would have anticipated, some sort of sporting event on the screen. She didn't follow sports closely herself, but she was certain a game had to be on somewhere, and the men in Ron's family were all big fans. Instead, Emmy, the littlest grandchild, appeared to have won the battle for the television because there were animated characters running about trying to save Christmas.