Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride. Brian SweanyЧитать онлайн книгу.
a sticky, cola-stained floor of a movie theater is not what I had in mind for tonight. I tell myself it’s all for the cause.
Laura walks by and gives me a peck on the check. “You’re such a cutie.”
Hopefully somewhere down the road, “the cause” involves a little more than a peck on the cheek and being cute.
Chapter five
Laura hands me an oversized red-and-pink cardboard heart stuffed with chocolates. “They’re coconut-filled,” she says. “Your favorite, right?”
“Yeah, right.” I think about all those Halloweens waiting for Jeanine to empty her treat basket and hand over her discarded Almond Joy and Mounds bars. Have I already told Laura that story? Fuck, what haven’t I told her?
We sit on Laura’s front porch, the two dozen red roses on her dresser visible through her bedroom window. I had them delivered by a local florist, courtesy of the Fitzpatrick Olds-Cadillac-Subaru expense account. Laura told me the roses were the most beautiful flowers anyone had ever given her. I told her I paid for them with my own money and then ended with the exclamatory flourish, “Two dozen roses for two months of being in love.”
Yes, I said it. Fucking goddamn right I said it.
The Valentine’s Day dance was last night. Laura and I were on the dance floor. I floated the word out there for public consumption sometime during Aerosmith’s “Angel.” She floated the word back at me during Patrick Swayze’s “She’s Like the Wind.” We said it together during George Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set on You.”
The chasm separating the act of being in love and the act of making love is filled with the nervous sweat and rendered tears of my many unconsummated relationships. I’m a junior, of course, turning seventeen in April. Laura is a senior, and turned eighteen right before we started dating. Up until now, we have acted under the tacit assumption that neither of us are virgins. More to the point, I know she isn’t a virgin, and she has bought into my bullshit sexual history.
Laura puts her head in my lap. She reaches up and runs her hand through my hair. “You were such a gentleman last night.”
We ended up in Laura’s basement after the dance, both of us a little tipsy on purple passion—a noxious mix of grape soda and Everclear. I got her naked on the old couch. Loose change kept rattling inside the clothes dryer behind our heads. She gave me a hickey and a hand job. I buried my face in her bare chest, squeezed her nipples until they turned red, and fingered her until she came. A lesser girl would come right out and say, “Why didn’t you fuck me last night?” But for whatever reason, Laura seems intent on mistaking my awkwardness for chivalry.
“What’s all that?” I nod at the stack of letters in her other hand.
“These?” Laura throws the letters aside. “Nothing but junk mail. Ever since we booked a room down in Panama City, I’m guessing my name got on a ton of spring break mailing lists. I sift through a half dozen of these things every day.”
“Spring break?”
“Hell yeah! Senior year, rite of passage, the last hurrah.”
Senior spring break has been looming on the horizon. With Laura being a senior and me a junior, it’s the one thing that has scared me more than anything else in our relationship. She will go to Florida my girlfriend, and she will come back single. That is just how the world works.
“This is news to me.” I reach over and grab one of the letters. I pull out and unfold a full color poster of sunburned frat boys with bulges in their pants ogling drunken bikini-clad girls.
Laura scoots right up next to me and takes my hand in hers. She kisses me on the cheek. I want to say, “I love you,” or, “don’t go,” or something, but anything comprehensible or appropriate defers to an internal reel of Laura climbing out of a pool Phoebe Cates-like in a red-string bikini to The Cars’ “Moving in Stereo.”
“Hank?” Laura grabs my chin with her hand, pulling me around until we were facing one another. “You okay?”
If okay means watching my girlfriend’s bare breasts burst out of her bikini top while Benjamin Orr serenades her, I’m fine. I nod but don’t say anything.
I’ve never been jealous. Is this what it feels like? Is this what love feels like? Panic. Mistrust. Paranoia. Life gives you every reason to be happy, and you’re all, “Fuck it, bring on the misery.”
I stand, taking Laura in my arms. I reach around and grab her ass, pulling her hard into me. I kiss her, my tongue pushing into her mouth, prying open her teeth. It’s an obvious kiss, at least to me. More desperate than passionate.
Whitesnake is in my head as I kiss her. And why wouldn’t Whitesnake be in my head? For one, their ’79 album Lovehunter is graced by the greatest piece of cover art in rock history—a naked, bare-assed Amazonian warrior princess astride a giant snake. For another, it is both a blessing and a curse of my generation that we set our lives to a constant soundtrack of suspect music and even more suspect decisions, the pitiful made indescribable by David Coverdale’s cautionary serenade that I should have known better, than to let you go aloooone.
I just now realize that Whitesnake is a euphemism for penis.
Chapter SIX
Mom lost another baby again. Her doctor told her that the first trimester was the most critical time for the viability of the fetus, but he made the mistake of counting on my mom’s uterus. She almost made it to six months this time, three months longer than the first miscarriage.
My father was better this time around. He has been an absolute rock, if I’m being honest. Yesterday, Uncle Mitch called to tell him the annulment with Aunt Ophelia was final and that he was relocating to the West Coast. Dad seemed more angry than sad. I was more resentful than grateful that he didn’t want to talk about it.
Chapter seven
Laura squeezes my shoulder. “How’s your mom doing?”
“Good.”
“Really?”
“Almost too good. Mom and Dad say they’re trying again as soon as they get the okay from the doctor.”
“Wow.”
“I know—crazy, right?”
“I was thinking more like courageous.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Cut her some slack, Hank. She’s just a mom who wants to be a mom again.”
“I guess.” I hand Laura her bottle of Sea Breeze. “Is this the last of them?”
“I think so,” Laura answers.
I’ve spent most of our last night together before spring break helping Laura pack. For the last hour, we’ve emptied and washed a large assortment of shampoo, mouthwash, and hair gel bottles, which we then refilled with an even greater assortment of alcohols in the clear family: schnapps, vodka, gin. The Sea Breeze bottle is filled with tequila, its amber color passing for the skin astringent. Laura’s suitcase comprises these dozen or so bottles, two pairs of frayed jean shorts, three pairs of underwear, three T-shirts, and a white bikini. She modeled the bikini top for me earlier, her large breasts overwhelming the white cups. At least it isn’t red.
The opening chords of “Moving in Stereo” ring again in my ears. “This all you taking, honey?”
Laura bats her eyes. She softens her smoky lilt down to a feminine and sexy tone. “I was thinking about packing just my bikini and the booze.”
I don’t see the humor in this, and Laura notices. “Come here, sweetie,” she says, her hand extended towards mine.
I step cautiously toward her. She grabs my hand and pulls me into her. She