Muffins, on the other hand, were my pals.Mix everything in a bowl, pour into paper-lined muffin tins, bake.Very easy.
Over the years, I’d made the standard blueberry muffins, corn muffins and bran muffins.With the taste of success, I’d grown bolder.Among my repertoire were apple-nut, zucchini and wheat germ, cottage cheese and chive, even ones heavily laced with dried fruit and rum.
Today I decided on cranberry-pumpkin.I had a bag of fresh cranberries in the fridge and several cans of pumpkin on the shelf.The other ingredients were all staples.So I went to work.
Two dozen muffins were in the oven baking when ten o’clock rolled around.
Wiping my hands on the dishtowel, I went upstairs.I tried knocking first.After all, Peter was a new acquaintance.I couldn’t just barge into his room, assuming familiarity simply because he’d been in a dead sleep earlier.
I discovered to my chagrin, after repeating the ritual of knocking, then calling his name, then timidly opening the door, that he was still in a dead sleep, sprawled much as he’d been at nine.
“Peter?”I waited, then raised my voice.“Peter.”I waited, then shouted, “Peter!”
He shifted.“Hmmm.”
“It’s ten.You said to wake you at ten.”
He neither moved, nor made a sound.
“Peter.”
Nothing.
I couldn’t help but wonder whether he always slept this soundly, or whether he was doing it to annoy me.If the latter was so, it worked.Taking the few steps necessary to reach his bedside, I shook his shoulder.“Peter!It’s ten!”
I snatched my hand back.Annoyed or not, I was affected by the firmness of his shoulder and the warmth of his skin.
He shifted, inhaled a deep breath, stretched.
I thought I’d die when the covers slipped to reveal twin dimples at the top of his buttocks.
I bit down hard on my lower lip to give myself something to think about, but the pain I caused wasn’t half as interesting as those dimples, or the virile plane stretching above them, or the finer, paler skin under his arm, or the sprinkling of freckles across his shoulders.
Move,I told myself, but I couldn’t budge.I’d never seen anything that had as debilitating an effect on my knees as the body spread before me.
“Ten o’clock,” I sang out in a high, shaky voice.“Get up, Peter.It’s ten o’clock.”
He turned his head on the pillow, opened an eye and did his best to focus, without much success.I was ready to put money on the fact that he didn’t know who in the devil I was—and I felt more than a little peeved, even hurt by that—when he said my name.It wasn’t much more than a tired moan, but it was my name.
“Jill.”
“Got it in one,” I said in that same, higher-than-normal voice.
He barely moved his lips.“What time is it?”
“Ten.”
Moaning, he turned his head away.“I should have been up at nine.”
“I woke you then, but you told me to come back at ten.”
“I’m so tired.”
I hadn’t considered that.I’d been too preoccupied with my nervous energy to think about why Peter was having such trouble waking up, and it wasn’t as though the nervous energy was gone.But it had changed.As I stood there, unable to move from his bedside, it had become something softer and sweeter, something that I wanted to call exciting.
“What were you going to do this morning?”I asked.I was feeling the beginnings of compassion for the man.He seemed so zonked.
“Walk around,” he mumbled.“Check out the local police.”
