Zan can be sour at times, but she’s got a soft spot for sweet things.
“Hell, yes,” she moans, stealing another candle from my cake. “Yours is the best, Lizzy. I need a big sloppy piece of that caramel buttercream.”
“I’ll cut it for you,” I say, reaching for one of the plates room service left behind and cutting Zan a hefty chunk of my cake. “I’m good at sloppy. Especially when it comes to food.”
Sabrina breaks into peals of laughter. “Oh my God. Did you tell Zan that you set the royal kitchen on fire again?”
“No, she didn’t,” Zan says, grinning. “What was it this time? Boiling water?”
“No, that was the first time,” Sabrina says. “The second time it was a grilled cheese. The curtains caught fire. The poor cook had to air out the place for a week after.”
“I needed a midnight snack,” I grumble. “And I didn’t want to wake anyone. I was trying to be considerate.”
“Cooking classes,” Zan says, sagely. “Enroll yourself. That’s what I did. As soon as I got to boarding school, I made myself sign up for Mastering Culinary Basics instead of the advanced French class I wanted to take. Our parents did nothing to prepare us for the real world. It’s up to us to prepare ourselves.”
“Oh! That reminds me!” Sabrina leaps to her feet, circling the table to Andrew, who’s still filming the festivities on his phone to send to our parents later.
After all the repairs they’ve been supervising lately, Mom and Dad weren’t feeling up to a ski weekend, but they’re eager to watch the triple-birthday celebration footage later. Chamomile is going to hook up her laptop to the big screen in the no-longer-leaky armory. Andrew has been more than generous with my parents, ensuring our childhood home slowly returns to its former glory.
Or at least crumbles in on itself at a much slower pace.
Sabrina fishes in the pocket of Andrew’s gray slacks, summoning a happy sound from low in his throat that makes Zan gag again.
I slap her under the table as Sabrina, giggling like the lovesick newlywed she is, pulls out a zip drive, holding it up in the air with a gleam in her eye. “Taxes! We’re going to learn to do our own this year. If we start now, we should be done by Valentine’s Day.”
Zan snorts. “Ha ha. What’s really on there? Baby pictures or something?”
Sabrina’s lips turn down and her shoulders slump. “How did you know?”
“Dad told me you were ‘scannering in the attic’ for hours when you visited last month.” Zan shrugs. “I figured you were making a birthday montage.”
I clap my hands. “Oh, yes! We haven’t had one of those since our sweet sixteen! Oh, Sabrina, you’re amazing.” I tumble out of my chair and hurry across the room to fold her into my arms.
She grunts as I squeeze her tight. “Geez, you’ve gotten a lot stronger. Jeffrey, what are you doing to her in the gym every morning?”
I laugh as I let her go. “Interval training. Mostly.”
And sex.
Lots and lots of sex.
Oodles of making-up-for-lost-time sex. Sex in our bedroom, sex in the library, sex in the kitchen and the pantry and the attic and the storm shelter and the stables and the clubhouse in the woods where Jeffrey insisted on carrying me down the stairs because he refuses to let me anywhere near a deathly situation until we’re sure.
And now, the moment of truth is nearly here.
By tomorrow morning, the day after my twenty-sixth birthday, we’ll finally know I’m curse-free for life.
I can’t wait to celebrate with him tomorrow morning. I glance his way to see him fighting a grin, realize he’s thinking about all the sex, too, and laugh.
God, I love him.
His hands and his mouth and his magical penis and every part in between.
“So, let’s watch it,” Zan says, grabbing her plate and a fork and heading for the sofa in front of the big-screen television.
We haven’t watched much TV in the two days since we arrived—we’ve been too busy watching the snow fall outside our picture windows or soaking in the hot tub with glasses of champagne—but Sabrina has no trouble getting the zip drive plugged into the DVD player or whatever contraption is hidden in the cabinet beneath the set.
Soon, we’ve all claimed a slice of our favorite cake—caramel, dark chocolate, or carrot—and settled in to watch Sabrina, Zan, and I grow up in pictures. But this time, in addition to shots I’ve seen before, there are images from our summer trip with the Von Bergen boys, when we were all children.
“I hope you feel ashamed, Andrew.” Sabrina punches her husband lightly on the arm. “Look at yourself! You were two feet taller than Lizzy. She was so tiny. What kind of monster would put snakes in that sweet angel baby’s bed?”