Love Knows No Age [Elvis]

Chapter 6 - Doing the Laundry

Thanks everyone for sticking with the story! Yeah, if you haven't already figured it out, this is a cheesy romance story. We all like to read those now and then, right? Plus, I've always been a fan of age gap romances. I figure this story will have not as many chapters as my other stories, probably less than twenty, or even fifteen. We'll see.

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The roast was still there. That was odd. Did he not help himself to the leftovers after he came home? Maybe he came back really late and was too tired to eat anything. On Thursdays, he tried to be back for dinner, even if he left right after, but sometimes, he was just too busy. He was still gone when I went to bed before nine.

I checked my watch. It was a little after six. He could be up, or if he had a late morning, he could be up in an hour. Best to put out something that he could just grab it and go.

Having a good idea of what I wanted to make, I got out the needed ingredients: flour, baking powder, sugar, salt... everything needed to make those homemade muffins, but this time, chocolate chips would be added. Elvis was a sucker for chocolate, even if he never said so. Like a kid, his eyes would light up when he could have chocolate. They would also light up when he could have peanut butter and banana whatever. I would cut up a banana and put out peanut butter. I had seen him spread the peanut butter over the top of the muffin and then dot the top with banana slices. He was an odd boy, but that was what made him endearing. I loved that his favorite color was pink and his favorite food was fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Sometimes he added bacon.

The minutes passed as I put together the ingredients, having Elvis in mind. Sandra would go nuts if she knew what was going on between Elvis and me. She hadn't called, and I hadn't called her since we talked on the phone last. She would be interested to know about Earnest, too, the man who was flirting with me after bringing in Elvis's televisions sets. Knowing my daughter, she would call the whole thing a love triangle. That was what it was, even though nothing really romantic happened between me and both of those men... like a kiss.

I slid the muffin pan with twelve muffin holes filled with batter into the oven and set the little timer on the counter near the stove. Once the oven door was shut, I leaned against the counter with my hip, and I thought of Elvis's lips and imaged them in my mind. I had noticed it before, but I always dismissed it. They were rather... luscious and... scrumptious.

"Oh my heavens," I exasperated and put both hands on my warming cheeks, and not because the kitchen was a little warm from the hot oven. "Stop thinking about that."

I took a yellow banana from the bunch on the counter across from the oven, peeled it, and started cutting it up into little circles. Without my consent, my mind sent me another image of Elvis's lips, including when they were pretty darn close to mine the other night. Would I have let him kiss me?

Probably.

I shook my head, trying not to think about it. I finished the bananas and picked up the little circles and put them in a bowl then got out a jar of peanut butter. I put them both on the counter next to the stove so they could be there after the muffins were done.

The timer still had thirty minutes, and Elvis didn't seem to be up yet, or he was just in his room getting ready. I could go and do some laundry. There were bed sheets that needed to be hung up on the line in the backyard - the sheets were too big to be put in the small dryer. I also had other sheets out there on the line that needed to be taken down. I would get the wet sheets and come back to the kitchen and check on the muffins.

Leaving the baking muffins that were just beginning to make the kitchen smell a bit like chocolate chip cookies, I went to the laundry room down the addition on the first floor, an addition that the owners before Elvis added. The laundry room was as big as my living room in my old house, the house that Randall kept after our divorce. I fell in love with the mansion not for the kitchen, since it was rather small, but for the giant laundry room. It wasn't big enough to hang a line and let the sheets dry that way, so I chose the backyard. I had other small things hanging on laundry racks in the laundry room, though, like dresses and whatnot, things I didn't want to put in the dryer. Nobody came into the room but me so I could hang up dresses and under things to my heart's content. Elvis and Vernon already told me before, when Elvis first purchased Graceland and I became the housekeeper, that the laundry room was mine and they would never enter it. I loved that. It was one of the things that sold me when I was deciding to move into the house.