Snack (10 page)

Snack yells through the door, concern in his voice. “Are you OK?”

“Uh, yeah, coming!” Saying that sort of makes me laugh. Because I
am
practically coming. All it took was a few glances and darkly intoned words from Snack to get me there. I think I’m in trouble. Potentially good trouble, but trouble.

I scoop Wookiee up and open the bathroom door. I’m almost afraid to make eye contact with Snack for fear I’ll combust before I get near him. Sort of tossing Wook onto the duvet, I slide in between the sheets, backside first, but not before sneaking a look at Snack. He’s visually tracking my every move. Once I’m in bed, I’m instantly pulled backward into Snack’s embrace.

“You’re cold.” Snack huffs into my hair near my ear.

“You’re not.” I gulp. He isn’t. Snack is warm, hot even. His arms hug around my waist and his hands move up and graze the bottom of my breasts. I arch my back at the sensation his touch evokes. My nipples peak and harden almost painfully. He cups my breasts in his large warm, hands. His thumbs scrape deliciously across my aroused nipples, causing even more swirling pooling desire in my core.

Reaching back I run my hand down the curve of Snack’s ass and across his upper thigh. Grasping it, I encourage him to throw it over my legs and in doing so am happily surprised to feel his hard erection at my lower back.

“Is this OK?” Snack’s breath is hot in my ear.

I want to say, “More than OK.” But I answer by spinning to face him and reaching up to hold his delectably scruffy jawline in my hands.

“You tell me. I don’t want to do anything that we’ll regret.”

“I know, I’ve been thinking the same thing, but I just want to feel something again. Something other than sadness. Is that OK?”

I open my mouth to answer but evidently my eyes have already given permission.

He kisses me. This is not sweet, delicate kissing. This is full-on desperate-to-feel desire. We hungrily devour each other’s lips and tongues. We nip and lick and bite as if we’d never tasted another human before. I remember kissing Snack in the past but not with this ferocity—this level of need. Our bodies imitate our mouths; we can’t get enough of the other. Snack’s hands are in my hair, then running down my arms, then on my breasts again. I push myself against his considerable hardness with slow, sliding thrusts. Snack ducks his head and sucks on my shoulder. I throw my head back to give him more access and, as I do, he leaves my collarbone, pushing the straps of my tank top down and revealing my chest, to bring his hot, wet mouth onto one of my nipples. Humming, he sucks it in deeply, rolling his tongue around it. My clit throbs in response and our slow thrusts accelerate to rhythmic rocking. The fabric of my boy shorts and his boxer briefs combine to amp up the level of friction. I slide my hand into his boxers and stroke the plush firmness of the head of his cock with my fingertips. Snack groans and pushes himself into my hand.

Through our haze of lust, Wookiee starts bounding around at the foot of the bed and barking frantically. Noise from downstairs becomes louder as we hear someone moving around in the café.

“Daddy!” A child yells up the stairs. Oh, crap! It’s Fifi! She opens the door and looks for her daddy. That means Aiden and probably Gil and Colette are down there, too. Never thought to lock the door.

Snack and I freeze. We are so busted. My hand on his junk. His mouth on my breast. We pull away, look at each other wide-eyed and begin laughing conspiratorially. Snack places a hand over my mouth and a snort escapes my nose.

Snack hollers from over his shoulder with a cajoling singsong voice. “Hey, Fifi, Daddy’s not dressed yet. Stay down there with Grandma. OK?”

“OK, Daddy!” she shouts and the door closes.

I sigh deeply and groan with frustration. If Fifi hadn’t interrupted, Snack would be deep inside me by now.

Snack obviously feels the same way. When I try to pull my hand off him he grabs it and growls. “This will be continued. You know what? I’m taking you out tonight. On a
real
date with no kids or parents for miles. Understood?”

I nod and smile. Then Snack kisses me with one of the light, sweet kisses we never got to earlier. Sadly, he rolls out of the bed and stands with his back at a three quarter angle to me He looks down at his cock and shakes his head. I agree, it’s a waste. He looks over his shoulder and blows me a kiss. I blow one back. Pulling on his jeans, thermal and sweater while walking around the room, he readies himself to start his day.

I’m in contrast, languishing half-naked in bed.

“Aren’t you getting up?”

“No, I’m not. I’m too frustrated.” I whine. Then before I can check myself I add, “It’s too bad those toothbrushes in there aren’t electric.”

Snack laughs. “No! No toothbrush.” Snack crawls back over and kisses me slowly and sweetly. “And stay away from the shower massage, too. Just hold on to all of that until tonight. I’ll make it worth the wait, I promise.”

“OK, no toothbrush.” I draw an X across my chest with my finger. “I promise, too.”

Snack leaps off the bed. I toss a pillow at him, which he catches with one hand and hurls back at me. I grab it, hold it over my mouth, and yell all my sexual frustration into it. When I emerge from my scream fest, I spy Snack holding Wookiee and heading downstairs.

“Just get up, get dressed, and come down for breakfast.”

I moan again.

“I’ll know what you’re doing if I have to wait longer than five minutes for you to come down. Don’t think I don’t. No. Shower. Massage.”

“OK, OK.”

I mentally calculate how many hours I have to wait until our “date.”

Charlotte died three days after homecoming.

I’m new to this. All of this. Overwhelming infatuation. Unexpected death. I don’t think at age eighteen these are supposed to be feelings I’m comfortable with. Really, when you get right down to it, are you supposed to be comfortable falling in love? I mean the first part of that phrase is falling—and falling sucks. And death—I hope nobody ever becomes comfortable with that. My Mimi talked about funerals she’d attended and death all the time. Maybe you do get comfortable. Or maybe it gets easier to talk about and your throat doesn’t swell up and you don’t choke on your words anymore.

Charlotte died three days after homecoming.

When my dad and Colette took him to see Charlotte, Snack was allowed into the ICU at the Children’s Hospital. He told me she was unrecognizable, swollen, hair shaved off, tubes going in and out of her body and one down her throat connected to a breathing machine. He said he talked to her and held her hand, but he knew she wasn’t really there. He couldn’t feel her there. When he left the room, he vomited in a trashcan outside. He was most surprised that Charlotte’s parents came out and hugged him. After he failed to take care of her and get her home safely, they were comforting him. Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter told him they knew how willful Charlotte was. They also knew she and Snack had broken up and she was getting a ride home with Adam. By some miracle, she’d called to tell them right before she left the dance. It was little consolation, but Snack said it made him feel less guilty. He could only imagine how Adam was doing.

Quietly, with no announcement or warning, Charlotte’s family decided to withdraw life support after the doctors told her the brain scan was not reassuring and she probably had no chance of regaining any sort of life. She would be on a ventilator the rest of her life. She would be fed with a tube the rest of her life. She wouldn’t walk or tell them she loved them ever again. So they did the least selfish thing parents could do. They let her go.

Adam didn’t return to school for the end of his senior year. He had months of rehab and homeschooling and still wasn’t sure if he’d be in any shape to start college in the fall. Snack and I visited him a couple of times. We never mentioned Charlotte. Neither did he.

If Snack and I were tight before, we were inseparable after Charlotte’s death. It was probably more like hiding out. We turned into each other and shut the rest of the world out.

Charlotte’s funeral was a week to the day after homecoming. Adam couldn’t go because he was still in the hospital. I heard Charlotte’s family went to see him to tell him she died. I couldn’t even imagine his anguish. When my overly active brain started to fabricate a movie of what is was probably like, I mentally shoved it away. It was hard enough watching Snack struggle right in front of me.

Snack and I, without ever having a discussion, never touch each other in front of anyone—at school, in public, especially at Charlotte’s funeral. That is really hard. I want nothing more than to hold his hand. It has to wait until we get into the car. Then I hold his hand for an hour and tell him repeatedly that what happened to Charlotte and Adam isn’t his fault. He finally points to his head and says, “This knows”—he holds his free over his heart—“but this doesn’t.”

I take his hand, the one on his chest, and kiss the palm. “I don’t know anything about death, but I know about loss.” My mother, my sick lost-to-me mother had been in my thoughts during the past week, a lot. “It’s going to get better. It’s never going to be the same, but it will get better.” Then I lean over and kiss his chest, right over his heart.

Snack reaches up and runs his hands through my hair and then down to my cheek. He tilts my face up to look at me. “All I want to do right now is go home and lie on the couch in the family room with you. And kiss you. It might be wrong, but it’s all I want.”

“I don’t think it’s wrong, Snack, but maybe because that’s all I want to do, too.”

This was our answer to the sadness and guilt about being together in the wake of the tragedy of Charlotte’s death. Turn to each other.

At first we kept our relationship quiet. Not an easy feat after Snack loudly announced to the student body at homecoming that I was his girl, but it didn’t seem right to flaunt our burgeoning relationship in front of the world. The death of Charlotte Carpenter belonged to the whole school and the whole town of Downers Grove. A beautiful, brilliant girl—gone. It wouldn’t be out of the cycle of town chatter for quite a while. Certainly, not this school year. As editor of the yearbook, I immediately got the staff working on a tribute to Charlotte as a late addition. It didn’t escape me how hypocritical that was. She was dead. I was the one alive and dating her ex-boyfriend. I was reaping the rewards of this awful tragedy. Although, no one ever said it aloud, I was thinking it, so logically the rest of the world was, too.

I must correct myself: No one ever said it aloud except Lorna D’Innocenzio. Funny name for the least innocent girl I knew. Lorna had been a pain in my ass since second grade. She made fun of me. Teased me. Routinely called me “Fugly Mouse.” She did anything and everything to get Snack’s attention at the bus stop when we were kids. She even went so far as to flash her naked boobs at him—once she had them, which was pretty early, like fifth grade or something. She was a really pretty girl with a really ugly soul. I knew it then. It was solidified when she cornered me in the first floor girls’ bathroom.

“Fugly, you must be completely fucking stupid. And heartless. Really? Do you really think Snackenberg is for you? He was Charlotte’s. They were perfect and gorgeous together. Then you come along and break them up, and she’s suddenly dead! It’s a little weird, you know. Nobody. I mean NO-BO-DY is going to accept you two being together.”

By this time, her sneering ugly-beautiful face is right up in mine. Any closer and we’d be kissing. I have no defense, physically or verbally. She’s only saying things I’ve already said to myself.

The only thing that saves me is the bang of the girl’s bathroom door hitting the wall.

I’ve never been happy to see cheerleaders in my life, but when a herd of them barrel into the bathroom, Lorna backs away from me, moves over to a mirror, and pretends like she’s fixing her hair. I take the opportunity to slide against the wall past the cheerleaders.

One of them, Megan, who’s always been nice to me, catches my attention before I creep out. “Minnie, you OK?” I didn’t even know she knew my name.

“Yes.” I sniffle, not looking at her. As I exit, I hear a swell of noise. Loud yelling. Something like “D’Innocenzio, you bitch” or something like that. I’ll forever be grateful to Megan for defending me like that.

Staring at the floor in the hallway and processing what just happened, a tear falls from my eye and splashes on the linoleum. When I finally look up and down the hall, all I see is Snack, standing at his locker and staring at me intently. The hallway is full of between-class traffic, but it all falls away when I see him. We might as well be the only two people in the school.

He kicks his locker shut when I approach him. Without words, he pulls me into his arms right up against his chest. I guess the not touching in public charade is over. Snack asks me what happened, and I blubber the goings on that just occurred in the bathroom with Lorna and Megan.

Snack tips my head up and fixes me with his Siberian Husky eyes. “Forget her! Never mind anything Lorna said. Nobody knows what’s happening with two people except those two people. She doesn’t know anything about Charlotte and me or you and me for that matter.” I swallow back my tears and nod. We walk with Snack’s arm around me, cupping my hip. Snack just announced, again, to the whole school that we’re a couple.

Snack and I spend every possible moment together. Days at school. Evenings in his downstairs family room or at my house. I suspect my dad
really
might give us trouble about being alone in my room without the door open. I prefer the nights at Snack’s house. Colette and Mr. Snackenberg at the shop. The whole house to ourselves.

I don’t know how I got my dad to agree to let me hang out over at Snack’s unsupervised. Maybe it was because he didn’t want me moping around, thinking about Charlotte and Adam, and the residual guilt that went, sadly, along with being with Snack. Or maybe it’s because I flat out told him Snack and I weren’t having sex and wouldn’t be having sex until we were twenty-three because that’s when we would be well out of college, and we couldn’t fuck up our lives, of course.