Untold Love: Chapter One

Chrissie cracked open a leaden eye and glared at the stream of sunlight filtering through the blinds in her bedroom.  Go away, she thought.  Morning cannot come this soon.  It should be a crime against the human race.  Sunday mornings were designed for sleeping in and being lazy.  Burying her head under a pillow, she willed her body to go back to sleep.  Sleep, sleep, sleep…blissful, dark, empty sleep.  She had nothing important to do today, so sleeping away the whole day sounded like a wonderful idea.  But her mind refused to listen.

Thirty, it sang out against her skull, knocking on that shell of bone to make sure she didn’t go back to dreamland.  Thirty years and a day.  Ha, ha. You’re getting old.

At least the worse was over, Chrissie mentally charged her thoughts.  

Yeah, tell that to her throbbing temples and dry mouth.  Damn tequila.  She should have never switched from wine to the hard stuff last night, but a woman only turned thirty once, and doggonnit, Chrissie Hill was turning thirty with style…along with a whole lot of alcohol and some badly-sung karaoke.  The karaoke was Dena’s fault, but Chrissie had to give her baby sister due respect on her partying flair.  They may have started the evening as two, sober, lone women, but by 1:00 a.m., Dena had a hot guy on each arm, and Chrissie spent a considerable ten minutes in a dark corner with a blond stranger who called himself Duke.  Neither sister left the bar with one of those guys, but they had fun with their admirers while it lasted.

Sleep, sleep, go back to sleep, Chrissie tried again.  Sleep would cure her headache and give her reason to avoid talking to her mother for a couple of hours.  She remained still, concentrating on sedating herself again.  Start with the toes...relax…up the legs…deep, even breath…stop clenching the eyelids…more breathing…wait for it…

Nothing.

Throwing back her covers with a huff and a pointed look at the sun, she sat up and rubbed her fists in her eyes.  Eww!  Eye crust.  Pass the thirty mark and your body started disintegrating one organ at a time.  Tomorrow morning, she’d have ear wax making her ears canals all sticky and gross.  Next thing she’d know...Wham!  Her whole body would be plagued with gout and dementia.  

Maybe she should schedule a manicure and facial for later this week...stave off the aging process with a good buffing and chemical peel.  And some new shoes.  Those Jessica Simpson peep toes she’d been eying for the past month kept calling her name...  “Chrissie...you know you want us...you know you love us...you know how great we’d look with that little red, ruffled number hiding in the back of your closet...just waiting for us...and we’re on sale...”

Chrissie straightened.  Really?  On sale?

She slapped her hands to her face.  Great...she’d drunk way too much tequila last night.  Now she was fantasizing about imaginary shoe sales.  Across the room, she got a peek at herself in her floor-length mirror.  And groaned.  She looked like hell.  Not bothering to change last night when she stumbled out of her sister’s car and into her house, she dropped down on top of her bed and prayed that her head would stop spinning soon.  

Not.

She barely made it to the bathroom in time to hug the porcelain throne and throw up all that tequila and then struggled back to bed just so she could pass out cold.  The perfect end to a disastrous first three decades of her life.  According to her mother, at least.  Chrissie worked from home as an interior decorator, mostly staging new homes for prospective buyers, and she pulled six figures a year, but did that matter to Dolly Hill?  Hell, no.  If a woman didn’t have a husband, fiancé, boyfriend, or even a male roommate, then that woman wasn’t living to her full potential.

“A lady is defined by the man she loves,” Dolly Hill declared once a week, every week, to Chrissie over the phone for the past ten years.  Chrissie’s favorite reply, “And a man is defined by his bowel movements,” only earned her a scathing remark about manners and “A lady doesn’t discuss bodily functions.”  And she told her mother at least a thousand times that it wasn’t as though Chrissie didn’t want a man in her life.  She’d love to have a dreamy, passionate man to kiss her cheek in the evenings after a long day at work and praise her exceptional coffee-making skills in the morning after a long night of limb-tangling lovemaking, but that man hadn’t dropped in her lap yet.

Then again, she hadn’t exactly been looking for him either.  

Chrissie had a steady boyfriend, Joe, three years ago, and she thought they might even get married one day.  He moved in with her, and they lived considerably well together for a few months.  Chrissie ignored his bad habit of leaving his socks all over the house, and Joe chose not to comment on the swelling mountain of cosmetics that breeded in the bathroom.  But then she came home after a torturous day of moving around heavy furniture in a display home for a new sub-division on the outskirts of town to find him gone.  Not out for the night with his buddies, which he also had a habit of doing, just gone.  Not a tube sock left in the house.  He up and disappeared, moved off to Germany or somewhere over in that part of the world, and she never heard from or saw him again.  Now his mother lived two houses down from her and Chrissie saw that nosy, old bag every Thursday morning when she put the trash out on the curb.

So, at the age of thirty and a day, Chrissie Hill lived alone in a three bedroom house with a tomcat named Stinker and a ficus plant that was steadily seeing its last days.  Stinker noticed her semi-awakened state and came over for his morning petting.  Chrissie smiled at the little hairball and bent over to run her fingers down his back.  He purred and arched and swatted at her hand…just like every other morning before she started getting old.

Life goes on with only a tempermental cat to welcome the mornings with her.  Just don’t tell her mother that.

Chrissie sighed and stood up.  Life goes on.  She stumbled out of her bedroom and into the hallway, bracing her unsteady steps with a hand on the wall.  The hardwood floors were cool on her bare feet, and she silently thanked God for the absence of tube socks in her way.  Tripping while battling a hang-over would not be ideal.  

Rounding the corner to her open living room, she took a second to adjust her blurry vision and appreciate the comfy feel of the room.  Soft green walls accented the off-white upholstery of the couch and loveseat and gave the dark wood end tables a homier feel.  Precisely aligned picture frames covered one wall, all black and white photos of old homes, and a burnt-umber credenza by the front windows showcased an arrangement of colorful daisies, other than a round ottoman and a simple floral rug that anchored the room which completed her décor.  Beyond the living room sat her dining area, which bordered her open, 1940’s style kitchen with its crisp white cabinets, bright red appliances and more of that soft green to break up the harsh lines of the red and white.  

Not really a minimalist in personality, Chrissie compensated by keeping her decor not overly-crowded with doo-dads and eye catchers.  Keep it simple.  That’s her motto when decorating, even if her customers continued to holler for more, more, more, cram every inch of space with something.

And she pointedly thought that if she had a man in her life, he’d want to ruin this immaculate room with a giant television, and then they’d get into a huge argument about it, especially when she tells him that she has a perfectly good basement that he can dump all his manly equipment in and leave the rest of the house like it is, and then he’d complain that the basement was dark and damp and musty, and she’d say Too bad, and then he’d try to compromise by wanting to put a television in the bedroom, but Chrissie had enough trouble shutting off her brain at night without the extra stimulation, so she’d tell him that he can’t and that the small tv in her kitchen was perfect for her because she can watch the news in the morning while she drank her coffee and play re-runs of “Courage the Cowardly Dog” whenever she felt like it.

A man would never understand why all the food can labels in the pantry had to be facing forward and in alphabetical order so she did not have to waste time searching for what she wanted, or why she felt the need to change out the throw pillows on her sofa every other week depending on her mood, or the only time -- and she meant The Only Time -- a person was allowed to jump on the furniture was when there’s a spider crawling on the floor.

Men just wouldn’t understand all of that, and Chrissie really didn’t feel like training one that could possibly understand, and of course, searching out a good man who’d already had all those basic foundations of understanding was just too exhausting.  And who’s to say that if she did find a man who was just like her and just as meticulous about how he dressed and lived...then she’d lose half her closet space to single-breasted suit jackets and point-collar dress shirts, and her dry-cleaning bill would triple.  And that just won’t do.

Chrissie Hill was a single gal, and she liked it that way.

She noticed a pile of sheets and blankets on the couch as she appreciated not only the room but the absence of a male presence in that room, and didn’t recall how they got there.  Did she wash the linens yesterday…on her birthday?  Probably.  That sounded like her.  Of course, not ironing and folding them into crisp white, impeccable squares of fabric and then storing them in the hall closet did not sound like her at all.  She pursed her lips and promised to get to that after a cup of coffee.

Coffee.  Yes.  Caffeine.  Strong, sweet, and semi-hot.  Her stomach rolled for a second.  Hmm, maybe she should skip the sweet part this morning.  Standing in front of the coffee maker for ten minutes, dozing for half of them, while the dark liquid slowly dripped into the glass pot, she tried to remember what all happened last night, but much of it escaped her.  There was the karaoke and the guys that poked around because of Dena’s flirting -- and of course, the tequila -- but nothing really exciting.  Kind of like the rest of her life.  Some Dena-induced adventure sprinkled into her world of peace, but pretty much mundane and punctilious during the rest of it.  A sparkle of light caught her eye as she reached for a mug.

Chrissie stopped.  Blinked and focused.  Twisted her hand around.  And blinked again.  There on her left-hand, ring finger sat a ring...a crystal clear rock of some kind fused with a silverish wedding band, and if it’d been a real diamond and real platinum, Yvonne Trump would turn green with envy.  What the hell?  She touched it.  Yup, it was real.  Only, how did she get it?  She stared at it – maybe hoping it would speak to her – and the only conclusion she came up with was that her sister put it there sometime last night as a practical joke.

Ha, ha.  Poor, single Chrissie.  Let’s put a wedding  ring on her finger and see what happens…

Oh, Dena was going to pay for this one.  Chrissie twitched her nose.  She arched her fingers in the sunlight.  It sure was a pretty ring...something she’d pick out herself, and that irritated her.  Dena knew her weak spots too well.  She twitched her nose again and snatched out the cream and sugar , heavily ladling her coffee with both.  Who cared how her stomach complained?  Right now, Chrissie needed sugar and fat…and maybe some chocolate.  Stupid sister…doing something like this.  How childish and asinine could a twenty-six year old get?  Chrissie snatched two ice cubes from the freezer since she’d never liked her coffee boiling hot, kicking the freezer door shut with her heel, and headed back into the living room to tackle that mound of bedclothes on her couch.  If she was lucky, her sister was under all those sheets and she could dump her coffee on her.  

Dena, the pride and shame of the Hill family.  Beautiful to the point of seeming unnatural, Dena’s dark auburn ringlets and watery blue eyes --the same eyes Chrissie inherited, but didn’t look quite as lovely on the older Hill sister -- turned more male heads than humanly possible for one barely-grown woman, and her outgoing personality drew them in.  In contrast, Chrissie’s temperament had been known to come out of her rear end sometimes, though she never meant to act so anal about things.  Her credit cards stayed under the optimum twenty-five percent, and she’d not bounced a single check since her first year in college.  Her home was always clean, her laundry always done, and her car always full of gas.

Dena, who was fresh out of grad school and not in any hurry to find a job, couldn’t lay claim to any of those joys.  

Just as Chrissie circled to the front of the couch, silently cursing her sister, the sheets moved.  Dena.  Chrissie raised her foot and nudged the mound with her toes.  “Wake up, you jerk,” she said.  “Did you really think after what you did last night, I’d let you sleep on my couch?”  She kicked her sister again.

“Ow!” a grumbly voice said from under the covers.  

“And I’ll kick you again if you don’t get up,” Chrissie told Dena…but then a hand stretched up from under the checked quilt…a very male hand with a broad palm and long, square-tipped fingers, sprinkled on the back with dark, course hair.  Chrissie’s foot hovered over the nearest, covered lump as her eyes bugged out.  Another hand followed, and then plopped down to uncover a face…

That’s a – that’s a – that’s a – that’s a…  That’s a…man…on my couch!

Chrissie’s body froze, tethering dangerously on one bare foot.  The man stretched and yawned and sat up, running those long fingers through rumbled hair, and he smiled sleepily at her, a sexy, little boyish dimple flashing in his cheek, and said, “Good morning, sweetheart.  Is that coffee I smell?”

Survival mode kicked in.  Chrissie screamed and threw her coffee mug at him.

*****