A/N Hello! Back again - phew! It's been a mission getting this done. Hope you all enjoy!
Disclaimer: Not mine
SPOV
Christmas was getting closer and it was getting muggier by the day. We were all trapped inside by the rain. Well, I was going to Pak n Save any minute in a bid to buy more stuff for Christmas, but that left the other three trying to entertain themselves. And everyone was a little whingy.
"Remind me again" Eric said, walking into the kitchen where I was writing out my shopping list, "Why we don't have air-conditioning?" He stood there fanning the hem of his t-shirt trying to get a breeze going.
I laughed. "Eric no one has air-con here. We don't need it. Plus it's like hugely expensive. Open a window while we're in-between rain-showers."
Eric sighed. "I have opened windows. And I've put the fan on. And that de-humidifier is working it's ass off and is now making a funny noise. Did you realise I've emptied it already today, and it's nearly full again? But none of that shit works. It's still fucking humid."
"Well, it might be fine again…soon. The weather forecast said it was only showers tomorrow."
"It said it was only showers today and it was fucking torrential this morning. They never get it right in this fucking country." It was obviously not Eric's morning and he was in a mood. There wasn't a lot I could do about it. My ability to control the weather was pretty miniscule at best. Before I could think how to reply though, Amelia stomped into the kitchen.
"What's not right?" she asked.
"Um. The weather's lousy" I replied, trying to think of how best to phrase it.
"That is a fu...freaking understatement" Eric spat out.
"OK, well Leesha's bored, and I think you need to play with her" Amelia said to Eric, not really sympathetic to his problems with the weather.
"Where is she?" Eric asked, looking around as if he'd just noticed he didn't have his shadow.
"In the laundry. She was looking at the paint tins." Amelia had barely finished speaking before Eric was out of the kitchen and off to make sure Felicia wasn't attempting some re-decorating of her own.
We were, supposedly, re-doing the kitchen and the laundry. Eric had bizarrely got a bee in his bonnet and decided that the unfinished gib in the laundry needed to go, and we also needed to fix the bit that was leaking. So he got Calvin to come and look at it. I didn't mention Calvin had been responsible for the kind of off-hand job that had left me with the leak in the first place. He was cheap so I wasn't complaining. Although the first morning he showed up, unannounced, at 6.30am when Eric was in the shower sort of threw me for a loop. Sometimes it's nice to know these things ahead of time.
But somehow the laundry fix-up had morphed into doing the kitchen as well. And at the current point in time everything was half-done and it wasn't that long until Christmas. I was getting a bit anxious. Calvin was trying to do it in between his real job and he was fond of doing stuff like applying filler round door handles and saying to Eric "If you sand that back when it dries, I'll come back and do another coat tomorrow." This meant that Eric had had to learn how to sand stuff. Apparently it required a lot of swearing and muttering. I was a bit worried that Felicia was picking up a lot more than DIY skill by hanging around watching him.
She was fascinated by the whole process. She liked to sit and watch Uncle Calvin as well. We'd bought her a toy toolset for Christmas in the hope she'd stop wanting to play with the real things. Although from the sound of it she was currently trying to figure out how to open paint cans. Let's hope no one had left a screwdriver in there. The painters were coming next week, when, hopefully, everything else would be finished and then it would be all over. I was looking forward to having doors on the kitchen cupboards again.
Felicia probably wasn't because she'd been having a good poke around in there. I had to live with things like the cheese grater and the glasses and the glass jugs all up on the kitchen bench. It didn't leave me a lot of room to do anything.
"Are you OK?" I yelled in the general direction of the laundry, when Eric didn't come back.
"Yeah. She just wanted to stack them…ow! Watch out Leesh" Eric yelled back, partly at me, and partly at Felicia.
"OK. I'm going then. Bye!" I yelled, and then I grabbed my bag and started to walk out.
"Mum" Amelia said sadly. "Mum, can I come with you?"
"To the supermarket?" I asked. It wasn't that I didn't want to take my first-born, but well, it wasn't an easy place to entertain kids.
"Yeah. It's borin' here. There's nothing to do."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah. I can help you get stuff. Pleeease?" Amelia looked pitiful.
"Oh, OK then. You go and get your shoes on."
"Yay!" Amelia skipped off, no doubt to put on her sparkly ballet slippers that would be totally unsuitable in the rain, and I went to tell Eric I was taking one of his charges. He and Felicia were busy creating a pyramid out of paint cans on the laundry floor so I don't think he was too upset about being down to one kid. It was shaping up to be a very boring day at home.
Amelia actually turned out to be a big help at Pak N Save. I sometimes forgot that she was nearly five now and wasn't quite the same toddler who just wanted to run off as soon as her feet touched the ground, she'd passed that mantle on to Felicia. She certainly griped a lot less than Eric did, and she didn't expect me to buy her coffee. A lollipop, yes, but at least they were just at the checkout and didn't require a special stop somewhere else in the mall.
Getting it all packed into the boot of the car everything got kind of soaked from the rain, including me, but at least it wasn't cold. And I didn't have time to think about how wet I was anyway, because on the drive home Amelia told me another long rambling story. Actually, it was the second part of the long, rambling story that she had started when we'd first left home. When you actually sat back and listened to her you realised that she had some imagination for a kid.
We got back and I let Amelia in the house along with a couple of bags of groceries. Eric came racing out of the house to help me unload the car. Guess he was feeling a bit housebound.
"How's Felicia?" I asked, as we dashed into the garage with the bags of frozen food.
"Fine. We'd been building a block tower, so I left her to it." he said. "She kept telling me home was borin' though."
"Huh. She obviously got the borin' thing off Amelia, who will by now have taken over that block tower for her princesses." I put the bags of shopping I was carrying down and lifted up the lid of the freezer. It was a big freezer and I had to use two hands.
"Yeah. Maybe the T-rex will have eaten them though." A while back I'd mentioned to Eric how much Felicia loved the dinosaurs at Amelia's pre-school. So when he'd found himself seeing a client who happened to be near a toyshop he'd wandered in, and come out with the biggest toy Tyrannosaurus Rex I'd even seen. It was very realistic, with an articulated jaw and everything. When I'd seen the price-tag I'd nearly freaked, $60 was a lot to spend on one dinosaur. Felicia loved it to pieces though. And he had bought Amelia something too; she'd been given a set of Disney princesses the same size as all her Polly Pockets.
But she really coveted that dinosaur. And didn't quite understand why being bigger and older didn't entitle her to have all the toys in the house. The cool ones, anyway.
Eric looked sideways at me. "The wet t-shirt is a good look, although it might be better without the bra."
"Yeah. Ha ha." I said, as Eric reached over and made a grab for me. I slapped his hands away. "Hands to yourself and help me get this stuff in the freezer before it defrosts." Eric sighed and started taking stuff out of the shopping bags and putting it away. He started frowning though when he realised just how many packets of mince he was pulling out.
"Really, Sookie? There's…what?" He reached into the freezer and started counting while I made a point of ignoring him. "12 kilos of minced beef, so that's…" I continued to ignore him while he translated kilos into something he could understand. "That's something like…more than 26 pounds anyway. How in the hell are we are going to eat that much minced beef?"
I shrugged. "It's useful. You can do lots with it. And you bought the bloody freezer."
"And it was on sale?"
"Well, yeah. Of course it was. You only stock up on these things when they're on sale. Anyway, we need to get inside so I can put the milk in the fridge before that goes off. Come on." I started out the door and got ready to run through the rain. Behind me I could hear Eric mutter something that sounded suspiciously like "I knew I was right buying the biggest goddamn freezer they had" but I ignored that as well.
Sure enough when we got inside there was a small turf war going on in the family room around the blocks. Eric went to referee and I dealt to the groceries. It was going to be that kind of afternoon.
After lunch, when Felicia had reluctantly agreed to have a nap, and Amelia was playing something involving the T-rex eating the princesses, and hoping no-one had noticed that she'd co-opted her sister's prized toy into her game, I sat down to read the paper in peace.
I got about five minutes and then the phone rang. And no one else seemed inclined to answer it so I stood up and walked into the kitchen.
"Christmas is ruined!" Judith said down the phone after I'd said hello. Oh good, I thought. I don't know why she always rings me when she has three perfectly good sisters she could complain to.
"I'm fed up with bloody Portia" she wailed. OK, then, well maybe two perfectly good sisters. "She's just determined to ruin it for me. Now she's not talking to Calvin because, I don't know, something about some shelves he put up that aren't quite right. Aargh. He says he didn't realise, but he bloody did it on purpose because she pisses him off, and now I'm the one getting it in the neck all the time about when he's coming back to fix it, and now Mum's in on the act and it's all 'why is he over doing work for Sookie and her lover and not your own sister?' And I had to say 'Mum they're actually paying him, Portia won't even offer him a drink'. I think she blames Calvin for that Charles taking off back to South Africa like that was his fault. So I'm caught between all three of them. And Portia's supposed to be doing Christmas because I said to them that I wasn't doing it this year because of Thomas, and of course Sarah is buggering off to Whangarei, although that's only if she manages to stay with Matt for more than about five minutes, did you hear he took off last month?"
"Um, no…" I was probably out of the loop with a lot of the Compton gossip these days. Now Lorena wasn't ringing here at all hours of the day and night looking for Bill so he could sort out his sisters, I didn't get to hear these things as they happened.
"So anyway, he left and threatened to take the kids that were his, but he's back now. Caroline isn't coming home because work is too busy, so there won't be a Christmas. Because I'm not going to Portia's if she's going to be all shitty about everything. She and Mum can keep each other company on the day. We'll be happier by ourselves." Judith paused for breath and I guessed it was my turn to say something.
"Well, that could be nice. Just a family Christmas, with the four of you."
"Yeah, probably not. I'm kind of used to more people now. I don't know." She sighed. "It won't really feel like Christmas. Bloody Portia. She has to ruin EVERYTHING!" Judith sounded as though she was really upset. I guess all the after-pregnancy hormones were still running loose in her system. Or maybe it was just her.
"Um" I said, "Um…well, we've got Jason and Crystal coming up this year…"
"Have you?" Judith said, sniffing. "That'll be nice."
"Yeah. I guess. So I mean if you wanted…you could come here…" I trailed off. I hadn't really meant to invite her, I'd just felt put on the spot and wanted her to cheer up. Still, I thought, she'd probably say no.
"Really?" she asked. "Could we? Because that would be great. Jessie would love to come and hang out with her cousins."
"Yeah, of course you can. It'll be fine. I probably won't notice a couple more adults and a toddler. And it's not like I have to feed Thomas." That was something I thought.
"Oh, that's great. That's a weight off my mind. Now I can tell Portia where to shove her stupid Christmas lunch. As it was she expected us to hang around all morning waiting while she went to church. So you'll have to tell me what I can bring?"
"Um, yeah. I'll let you know. So how is Thomas doing?"
"Oh you know, he eats and sleeps and poos. He poos a lot. I'd forgotten what that was like. The novelty has worn off. But I like him anyway. When are you going to have another baby?"
Jeez, Judith, I thought. Way to put me on the spot. Somehow she'd decided I was family and it was fair game to ask me rather personal stuff. She liked to share as well. Bill nearly died when she confessed to having had a miscarriage with a previous boyfriend when she was about 24. He didn't like to think of his baby sister having any kind of contact with men. He'd barely tolerated Calvin.
"Um, I don't know…we haven't, um…" I wanted to say we hadn't discussed it, but I didn't feel right telling an outright lie. "Well, we just have to see what happens and stuff…"
"So you're definitely thinking of having three kids then? Because I'm wavering now. I always wanted four, but now I'm thinking three might be better."
"Oh, I haven't really given it a lot of thought…" I hadn't really. I thought that three might be quite enough kids really.
Thankfully Judith gave up trying to pin me down on how many more kids I was having and we had a chat about some other things before saying goodbye. I went to break the news about Christmas to Eric.
I found him staring at the wall in the bedroom. "What are you doing?" I asked.
"Oh. Nothing. Just thinking."
"Uh-huh. Well, anyway. That was Judith on the phone. Short version is that she's not talking to Portia because Portia's not talking to Calvin because of some shelves that went wonky, and Portia was doing Christmas for them all, which was going to be a bit tense, so Judith got upset and I said they could come here instead."
"That's the short version?" Eric asked, looking at me.
"Yeah, it is. I left out several sub-plots and digressions. So is that OK? Because I actually already invited them…"
"What? Oh yeah, that's fine. Will there be room?"
"Um. Probably as long as it doesn't rain and we can have the doors open to the deck. It's not too bad. Only another two adults and one toddler to feed." I wasn't really sure Eric was listening to me; he still seemed to be staring at the wall. He'd been looking at walls and cupboards and window frames a lot recently. I worried that one day I'd come home and find he'd asked Calvin to knock something down and I would be stuck with a tarpaulin where there should be an external wall as they'd decided to build an extra room. Or three.
Felicia wandered in, looking a bit sleepy and carrying Sockie. "Daddy" she said, wandering over to Eric. "Poos."
"What?" Eric caught a whiff of the smell. "Oh." Yeah, there were times it wasn't that great being the favoured parent. He picked Felicia up, carefully as she was only wearing a nappy, and carried her off to change her. I sat on the bed and thought that it was probably time to start toilet training and wondered where I'd stashed that potty.
EPOV
I decided that if we were going to go ahead with this baby thing then we really needed a bigger house. Well first it had started with the realisation that we needed a bigger bed. But no matter how many times I measured the bedroom I couldn't figure out how to fit a bigger bed in there. Which meant we needed a bigger room, but if we made that room bigger we had to steal the space from somewhere else. And there wasn't anywhere that could afford to be smaller. As it was, the previous round of renovations had created the world's smallest ensuite bathroom and left the laundry in what was basically a cupboard.
Add to that the fact that if we had another baby we needed a whole other bedroom and this house was going to be too small. It had to go. But I knew, from watching all those stupid house renovation programs that Sookie liked, programs I hadn't even fucking known they made before I met her, that you couldn't sell a house if it still had unfinished and unpainted drywall in the laundry, not to mention the leak by the door that appeared if the rain fell in a particular direction. And then the idea to get the laundry finished off had somehow merged into the idea of tidying up the kitchen which hadn't been touched since the previous owners had lived here.
I'd asked Calvin to start the work for us, I hadn't realised though that he'd expect me to fucking help him out with it. I knew fuck all about shit like sanding. It was so fucking boring and Sookie just laughed and told me the job was far too small to get someone in. I felt sure there'd be someone who'd be willing to do it for me, but I gritted my teeth and got it done. At least the painters were booked to arrive next week so I didn't have to face that again. I just hoped that Calvin's part of the work was going to be finished in time for them to paint. It was all a bit…stressful really. And Sookie fretting about whether it was going to be ready for Christmas didn't help.
From the sound of it Christmas was getting bigger by the minute. I hadn't told her that Calvin had been angling for an invitation for a while, he'd been muttering about what a drag it was having to spend the day with Lorena and the psychotically religious sister going at it, and how he'd much rather spend the day with friends, relaxing and having a good time.
There'd been a lot of pointed looks at me every time he said friends.
I wasn't sure if I was supposed to invite him and I'd meant to ask Sookie, but it slipped my mind with all the other things I had to worry about. It sounded as though Judith had stepped in and figured it out anyway, so I was out of the loop.
Now all I needed was Calvin to finish the work, the rain to fucking stop and the humidity to disappear so I could stop emptying that noisy fucking dehumidifier. It wasn't too much to ask, surely?
About 3 o'clock the rain finally started to clear and the weather looked promising. Calvin arrive not long afterwards with the door handles he'd promised to bring for the new kitchen cupboard doors, which were currently in the shed and not in the kitchen. I think it was that which was stressing Sookie out the most. Felicia had a nasty habit of poking around in anything she could find and there'd been a few occasions where she'd been found trying to run off with a wine glass or a china eggcup.
"So I hear we're coming here for Christmas, yah?" Calvin said as he sat down his toolbox and took out the handles.
"Yeah, Sookie said something about Judith falling out with…her sister…" Fuck, I couldn't remember the names of the other ones.
"Yah, Portia's a total bitch sometimes. She's been unhappy ever since I put up those shelves in her living room. She just takes it for granted that I'll do this stuff for her because we're family." I figured I wasn't included in that statement as I was actually paying him. He screwed a handle onto the first door. "That looks OK, doesn't it?"
"Yeah" I agreed. It did look better than what had been there before.
"OK, well, if I leave you the rest to put on, then I'll come back tomorrow and hang the doors in place. I just have to get to the supermarket because I promised Judith I'd pick up some nappies for Thomas. Fuck, he poos like a trooper."
"Oh. OK." Yeah, I wasn't paying him a lot and this was why. I was the one that got stuck being his assistant.
Calvin said goodbye and headed back to his truck and I tried to figure out how to get the door handles into the correct position.
About an hour later I'd nearly finished and Sookie came to see how I was getting on.
"They look good" she said, sitting on the floor of the shed next to me.
"Yeah. Do you think that one's straight?" I'd been looking at it for a while and wasn't sure.
"Yep, I think so." She cocked her head to the side. "Yeah, definitely straight. How many more have you got to do?" she looked around.
"Just the one. I didn't realise that Calvin was going to fucking leave them all for me to do." I picked up the last doorhandle and put it in place. Sookie watched me screw it on. "All done" I said. "Thank fuck."
Sookie laughed. "Yeah, but you're probably getting the hang of by now, aren't you?"
"Yeah, I guess. But I'd rather not be."
I stood up and helped Sookie get up and we walked back inside. Everything was wet and glistening from the rain and the sun was doing it's best to come through the clouds. "How are the kids?" I asked.
"Bit stir-crazy. Felicia's been trying to go through the cupboards again."
"Well, we'll have doors soon" we walked in through the door.
"Yeah" Sookie said. "We will. Thank you for this."
Dinner was a bit chaotic, having been cooped up all day the kids were working up to being really fucking annoying and neither of them seemed inclined to just sit and eat nicely, or be nice to each other. Bathtime was even worse. There was a fuck of a lot of splashing and giggling. But at least they seemed to be friendly with each other again.
By the time they were in bed I was exhausted. I sat on the couch in the living room and rested my head against the back. The humidity had drained me off all energy and the stress of the work Calvin was doing, well, that just added to it really. I just wanted it to be done. And I just wanted it to be nice. For Sookie.
Sookie walked into the room. "Are you OK?" she asked.
"Yeah. I'm fine."
"Because you've been kind of off all day. First you were grumpy…now you're just, I don't know. Really quiet."
I ran my hand across my face. "I think it's the weather. It's so fucking humid. It's just not right."
Sookie frowned. "Are you sure that's all it is?" she asked.
"Yeah. I guess it's that, and the work Calvin's doing. I wish that was kind of over with. Fuck. I think I bit off more than I can chew with that."
"Nah, it'll be alright. He promised me he wouldn't leave any leaks this time."
I turned to look at Sookie "That was him?"
"Yeah, he did the laundry last time. But he's probably more scared of you than he was of me or Bill, so you know, I think we're safe!" She laughed, but I didn't. "Oh, go on!" she said. "You know it's true." I shrugged. I wasn't really intending to threaten Calvin into doing a good job. I just wanted him to do a good job first time."It's OK, Eric. It'll be fine. No one will have to get their fingers broken. Trust me."
"Yeah, I guess."
"And anyway, it's just a house. Don't stress."
"I know. It's just…well I had a plan…" I had lots of plans.
"Yeah, I suspected as much. I half-expected to come home one day and find you and Calvin building another room on somewhere."
I shook my head. "I ran the numbers. It doesn't work out adding that much capital value onto this house."
Sookie narrowed her eyes at me. "Hmm. One of these days I'd like to not be the last to know about some of this stuff. In the meantime, come and have a shower. It'll make you feel better, less sticky." She stood up and I allowed her to pull me off the couch.
She led me into the bathroom. I tried not to think about what needed doing to this room as well. The door to the cupboard was a bit wonky and the shower pressure wasn't that great. That needed a plumber though. Probably wouldn't get one this side of Christmas. Unless Calvin knew one.
Sookie peeled my t-shirt off me; it was pretty much stuck to my back. I allowed her take off the rest of my clothes and then watched her take her own off before running the shower. She stepped in first, and I followed, careful not to knock that stupid shelf on my way in. It still got me, occasionally.
"Just relax, Eric. For God's sake, just relax" Sookie said. It wasn't easy, but Sookie hands washing me helped. And then her mouth on my cock helped a fucking lot. And then I felt a whole other kind of tension, just before I came in her mouth. "Oh, fuck Sookie" I said. She ran her tongue around me a couple more times, before releasing me and standing up. "Feeling better?" she asked.
"Yeah. Yeah I am" I said. I did. It was stupid really, worrying about the house, and getting it ready for a baby that didn't even exist yet. But I just…I just wanted to show Sookie that I could do it. That I could take care of her.
Sookie turned off the water and stepped out of the shower. "I should dry myself, but honestly, I think air-drying might work better" she said holding out her arms and twirling around a bit.
I grabbed her around the waist and lifted her up from behind. "Oooh" she squealed, and then she laughed as I carried her through to the bedroom. I threw her on the bed then lay down next to her. She didn't even complain about the bed getting wet.
"You're feeling better then" she said. I wasn't sure if it was a question. She was looking at my face really closely. I was feeling better. I always did when it was just Sookie and I. Even in the tiny shower in the miniscule bathroom it was still great. She always knew how to make it OK.
"Yeah" I said. "But now I want to see how great I can make you feel."
A/N What we call gib board is drywall (I'm pretty sure), basically the board used to create the internal walls which you then plaster and paint.
Thanks for reading! And Merry Christmas!