Tess had changed into what looked like a 1950s pinup girl’s shirt that was formfitting, low necked, and showed off every single one of her curves. A colorful skirt flared out from a wide belt at the waist.
I just wanted to kiss her hard then take my time undoing her.
“Cupcakes are ready,” she said, making a sweeping gesture with her wine glass. There was a stack of cupcakes piled high on platters around the kitchen.
“Seems excessive.”
“I bake when I’m stressed,” she replied curtly.
“Why is everyone so stressed out at a cookout?” Carl mused, cutting off a slice of the toxic green-colored Jell-O that Enola placed on the counter.
“Let’s eat,” Tess said brightly. “Thanks for cooking, everyone!”
“What do you want on your burger?” I asked one of the younger girls.
“Everything,” she said solemnly.
“Even onions?” Tess teased.
The little girl nodded. “And Jell-O.”
The long kitchen counter groaned with food and from my siblings jostling around it. At least it wasn’t as bad as Christmas at Harrogate where there were close to a hundred of us all trying to eat at the same time.
I had tried very hard over the years to kick the habit of fighting with my brothers for food. Plus, Tess did not need to see us at our worst. I watched our sisters as I sipped my drink. Old habits died hard, and they hadn’t been long out of the cult.
“You can’t take two slices of cheese,” Mike exploded at Carl.
But it seemed like my brothers were, as usual, going to be the problem.
I downed the rest of my drink.
“We have plenty of cheese,” I promised. “There’s a whole other platter in the fridge.”
“Can you all please act like you weren’t raised in a cave?” Greg chided.
Liam stacked several cupcakes on his plate along with three hamburgers and mounds of potato salad and baked beans, slathering the whole mess in ketchup.
I poured myself another scotch.
Luna and Kiki followed his example, though not with quite so much food, and traipsed after him onto the terrace to eat.
Tess grabbed a plate and started fixing a burger for herself.
Damn, she looked great in that shirt. It scooped low in the back too.
I poured myself another scotch and walked up next to her. “You better try some pickles on that,” I said in her ear.
She jumped slightly then grinned up at me. “I already had your pickle in my mouth. I don’t know if I need it on my burger too.”
“You can’t not like pickles,” I said, spearing several and putting them on her burger on top of the cheese slice.
She frowned at them. “I’m not convinced.” Then she shot me a crafty look. “Maybe if it was a whole entire thick pickle?”
My drunk brain took a moment to catch on, and I couldn’t form a flirtatious retort before she had already finished at the buffet line and had gone outside to join the rest of my family.
Enola was telling my brothers, who listened in bemusement, about the recipe app.
“Everyone complains about recipes online with long backstories that no one has tested,” she was saying, “and you have to scroll and scroll until you reach the recipe, then the page will refresh, and the whole thing resets. Our app functions more like Pinterest for recipes, but there’s also a way for people to comment and link to their versions of the dish.”
